Challenge completed!

 

I DID IT!!!!!!!


30 days as a vegetarian.

Please continue to read my blogs on my official to do list blog

To Do List Blog

Thank you and goodnight.

1 day to go...

Tim telling porky pies: This month has flown by, it seems like only yesterday I started this challenge and I haven't even thought about meat.

Tim telling the truth: I cannot believe I have lasted this long. It's been blummin ages!!! Not a day goes by without me thinking about a bacon sarnie. Infact everyday that goes past, the bacon sandwich seems to be getting bigger and bigger!

I have got to the point where I want to scream everytime I open the fridge to make my lunch for work only to find a block of cheese. If I ever see another cheese sandwich again then feel free to kill me. I think I have eaten about 15 cheese sandwiches this month just because there is nothing else to eat for my packed lunches. I guess it's my own fault really so I shouldn't complain but I am a moany git so who cares.

My dinner tonight was pretty nice though. That's one thing I have been good at this month and that's making yummy food. Tonight I had herb and garlic tortellini with a mixed vegetables sauce and amazing tear and share garlic bread.

Yummy!!

I just hope I don't blow the whole challenge tomorrow by accidently eating a horse without thinking about it!

Not long now...

Fed up of cheese.

Fed up of eggs.

Fed up of stupid veg.

I want a burger and I want one now.

Manflu

Since doing this challenge I have had a cold (aka Manflu the most deadliest illness known to man) on three seperate occasions. I am not sure if this is a coincidence or whether I am just lacking in the vitamin department.

Throughout the night I kept waking up, coughing, feeling my throat becoming severely sore and in the end I decided I couldn't sleep and just got up and watched TV. I decided to risk going to work but after walking to the end of my road, I ended up coming home and jumped back into bed.



Meh.

Bloody gravy

Chips without gravy is like Table without Chairs, Yin without Yang, Mork without Mindy. It's just not right!

I keep forgetting that I can't have gravy. I've nearly been caught out three times now. I have even waited in the queue for the gravy before looking like a wally and telling everyone I don't actually want it.


Hi. My name is Tim.

I am in the queue for the gravy....

 ...BUT I don't want any.

 










Can anyone point out the idiot in the queue??

Home straight

On Monday I will have completed 20 days of my challenge which means the finish line will be in sight but before that I have a couple of big obstacles in front of me this weekend.

Today I will be going to the football to watch my home town team Southampton play Colchester and will be surrounded by over 20,000 football fans who have the reputation to be heavy beer drinking, meat eating wannabe hooligans, which means they probably enjoy skinning animals in their spare time and hate vegetarians more than they hate Maradona. I could be wrong though because before I became a vegetarian for a month I was also a meat eating football fan who didn't skin animals and I wasn't a wannabe hooligan but for now I will remain cautious and assume the worst. Oh and I doubt anyone would be more hated than Maradona (aka the football cheat) who punched the ball into the net against England in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico and then goes and scores the greatest goal in World Cup history in the same game.

I will then be going to *spit* Portsmouth (rival city to Southampton) for my girlfriends birthday meal with her parents. I think we will be going to a restaurant called Chiquito's which is a Mexican restaurant so I am assuming there will be plenty of choice for veggies such as bean burgers, veggie fajitas etc. I hope I see some huge sombreros available to buy so I can cross of item #158 (Buy a giant Sombrero). I can't think of many other places to buy giant sombreros.

Tomorrow I will be going out to another restaurant for my girlfriends actual birthday. We're thinking of going to Puccini's which is an Italian restaurant down the road from my house. I've never been in there before but it looks pretty classy, considering the area it's located in, and also if someone is celebrating their birthday then they can get a free meal.

 

 What I wanted

 

  

What I had

 


Sunday was a tough. Infact probably the hardest day so far.

Seeing everyone eat and enjoy a roast beef Sunday lunch, one my my favourite ever meals, whilst I ate vegetarian bean spew was very difficult. I was so tempted to eat the left over meat, I must admit I came very close to defeat but somehow I held on. I think I even went to bed dreaming of beef which was quite strange.

It's been over 2 weeks now since I started the task and it has been going well so far. I have had a few close calls but usually I have found something pretty nice to eat. I still think about bacon everyday but I think the one thing I have missed the most has been fish which I am quite surprised about because I don't often have it.

Linda McCartney Sausages

Oh how I missed sausage sarnies but thanks to my new best friend Linda I have managed to eat a veggie sausage sandwich and I am pleased I bought two boxes! They tasted nice.

I must admit that I had heard a lot of positive opinions on Linda's sausages because quite a few people have recommended them because they claim they taste like actual pork sausages so when I saw a pack of 6 in Sainsbury's for £1 I felt like it was a good opportunity to see if they were really all that.

I tried Quorn sausages the other week so I had something to compare them with and I was pleased that they tasted a lot better than them. I must admit that I didn't find them as nice as the pork sausages I buy from the butchers but they were a lot better than some of the cheap brand sausages you get in supermarkets or if you buy them from a greasy spoon cafe. They tasted pretty nice too and I imagine they are a lot healthier too, although saying that, I don't actually know what's in them.

Would I buy them in the future when I finish this task? At the moment I am saying I would definitely consider it but I am wondering whether this is because I am relying on them to get me through the next few weeks. Another part of me doesn't see the point because I only buy really nice sausages anyway and would never buy any cheap disgusting ones. I think I will spend the next few weeks looking up recipes to see what else I can make them with and see whether they are also nice in other dishes.

The best thing about being a vegetarian so far has been experimenting with different foods. They aren't always successful but it's fun. Cooking should always be fun.

I officially love this...

All I can say is yum....



















....and thank god i've got another 3 left!

I've become obsessed!

I cannot stop looking at labels.

I feel like I am playing a mega long game of Where's Wally but trying to find the magic V sign and I get really frustrated when I cannot find it. I then scan the ingredients to find out whether I can eat it or not. When I spot rennet in something that looks vegetarian and yummy, I want to scream!

Yesterday was a good day at work for food. They regularly have vegetarian options and they had a veggie burger, which I usually have anyway, so that was very nice and much tastier than the veggie burger I had at the American Diner. I am also eating a bit more fruit as a snack. Tonight I have going to have a Linda McCartney Vegetarian Pie which I have heard good things about. Looking forward to it! Yummy!

Nothing to eat!!!

I get home after spending the weekend in Gosport and there is nothing in the house to eat except MEAT!

An opened packet of bacon, apple and pork sausages, steak in the freezer, cod in the freezer...everything but stuff I can eat. No cheese, no fruit, no vegetables, no salad....nada...nowt.....NOTHING! I did buy a few vegetarian things, including quorn sausages, but I left them at my girlfriends house so I guess that doesn't help me at all.

So tonight all I have eaten for my dinner is two slices of fried bread. It's only fried so it could taste a bit better because it's actually stale two days out of date loaf.

Back to work after a nice few days off. Not really looking forward to breakfast at work. The temptation for a bacon bap will be huge but I will have to try and find something different for a change. Not really sure what though because everything is either expensive and full of yummy stuff I am not allowed. Thankfully lunch at work is pretty good. They have a canteen which caters for vegetarians and they also have quite a big selection of things I can have.

Thankfully after work I will be heading to Sainsbury's for a weekly shop and hopefully I won't be writing anymore moany messages about not eating anything decent.

Meh...I'm still hungry. Might munch on an ice cube or something.

yummy!

If this was a facebook status, I would write the following:


Tim is full of cheese, tomato, sweetcorn, spinach and pepper pizza & warm cookie dough with ice cream.

Fritatta

Day 3 - September 3rd

Before leaving Wales I stuffed myself silly at breakfast due to the long train journey so I had jam on toast, two croissants and a couple of cups of amazing coffee.

The previous day I was given a free sample Shrewsbury Biscuit so decided to have that as a snack on the train home along with some grapes.

To celebrate England's 4-0 victory in the opening game of the European Championship qualifiers, my lovely mother made me a Fritatta. I think she felt guilty because as soon as she saw me, she asked if I wanted some Salmon. She then remembered my challenge as soon as she saw my face drop.

The spaghetti was my contribution because its yummy.

Opening few days

I have returned from the beautiful country of Wales. I have now annihilated my previous record of one day without eating meat. I am three days into my challenge and I am pleased to say that I have avoided any kind of meat despite already facing a few problems along the way.

Problem - I keep forgetting that I can't eat meat.

The day before the challenge, I packed a lunch for the train journey and decided to buy a few extra items suitable for vegetarians just incase there wasn't anything I could eat for breakfast the following morning. What I didn't know was that I nearly blew my challenge before I had even started.

I might not have gone to university but I am proud to say that I have a degree in common sense however now I am having doubts that I might be a common sense fraud because if I offered the piece of vegetarian food I bought to a real vegetarian then they would have made mince quorn meat outta me.

Note to meat eaters pretending to be vegetarians. The majority of Scotch Eggs contain sausage meat. Avoid!

I was having a lot of problems remembering that I had to avoid meat when it really mattered. Most of the day it would always be on my mind but when it came down to eating food, I seemed to forget to look at the packet to see if it was suitable. At one point I was half way through a packet of steak crisps before realising. I remember reading about certain crisps which contained rennet (some kinda enzyme from a cow's stomach I think - must google this!) so I need to be extra careful. 

I know that I will probably get caught out eating some products. I found out today that Nutella wasn't suitable for vegetarians because it contains whey powder. I don't even know what whey powder is. If I do eat something that isn't suitable then I guess it's important to keep going and enjoy learning more about the vegetarian lifestyle and not beat myself up over it. 

Here is what I had

Day 1 - September 1st

I decided to head to breakfast and play it safe and just keep it simple. I found out that everything there was vegetarian so I had a nice croissant, some jam on toast. We then spent the day at St Fagan's, which is an open air museum about Welsh life. As you can see from the photo, the place is pretty stunning.

I had a gorgeous cheesy bap as well as my fright with steak crisps. For dinner we went to Zizzi's Italian Restaurant yards away from the castle in the centre of Cardiff. I had a lot of options in there to choose from and decided on the garlic bread with cheese as a starter and then the Risotto Verde (green beans, courgette, spinach), which was delicious.

Day 2 - September 2nd

The breakfast at the hotel was pretty simple and the same everyday. I decided to have some cornflakes for a change. I never have breakfast before work due to the early starts but i've decided that I will eat more cereal because it's blummin' tasty! I tend to eat bacon sarnies from the work shop but obviously this will have to change. Might work out cheaper too!

We had lunch at the top of Pwll Mawr: Amgueddfa Lofaol Genedlaethol in Blaenavon. This was an old coal mine which offer tours underground to show what life was like as a coal miner in Wales. 

We got to wear miners hard hat and had to carry an old fashioned light with a 5kg battery attached to us. Unfortunately I don't have a picture because anything with a dry cell battery i.e. camera battery, mobile phone were forbidden in the coal mine. Very interesting place, highly recommend it. It was quite cold underground so a nice chip butty in the canteen was a perfect way to warm up. I had to avoid the amazing looking lasagne though!

For dinner we went to Eddies Diner. There was about two items on the menu for vegetarians and about a billion things for non-vegetarians. I decided to have the vegetarian Burger which looked dull and tasted pretty nasty. Must admit that it wasn't an ideal place for vegetarians to visit but it's our tradition to visit an American diner on holiday if we find one.

My girlfriend had an amazing looking double bacon cheese burger which made me drool.

Already in three days I have learnt quite a lot. I already appreciate how difficult it can be for vegetarians to find some decent food when going out for the day. I can also understand what it's like eating with non-vegetarians. At one point I felt bad for not going into certain restaurants because there wasn't anything I could eat and felt that I was being a pain but on the other hand I felt appreciated because we went somewhere which was perfect for me. It's also easy to eat something that might seem like it's suitable for vegetarians but it might have some extract in it which will make it a certain no no. When you're cooking for yourself, you can check the ingredients. When you are being cooked for, you just have to put a lot of trust into other people.

Oh and the best thing about Wales? The Welsh cakes! Yummy!!

Here we go...

In a few hours time I will be having a mini holiday to Cardiff, Wales. Already I face the problem of restaurant food and whether they have a good selection of food for vegetarians.

If I am honest, I have rarely, if ever, been to a restaurant and thought about whether they provide for vegetarians or not so I am hoping there is a big selection of food. Years ago my friends have told me that they would struggle to find anything but a salad. I hope this is not the case now because I hate salad!

Today is my last day of meat so I will certainly be making the most of it.

For breakfast I had an amazing bacon sandwich. Normally it takes me about a minute to scoff it down however today it took about 10 minutes. I savored every last bite. I even considered bringing it back up again but then I remembered that I wasn't a regurgitating bird and I was infact a 27 year old man.

For the train journey I have a corned beef bap with a tomato in (gotta ease myself into this veggie lark!). Considering the last time I attempted becoming a vegetarian, which ended after a few hours due to eating a corned beef sandwich, I felt like I needed to face the demons .....and also it means I definately won't be having one tomorrow eitther.

Tonight we might go to Gourmet Burger Kitchen in Cardiff Bay. I've always wanted to go there and I ended up finding a 2 meals for £10 voucher online so that will be a good way to end the month.

All I know is that for breakfast on September 1st, I will have to walk past the cooked breakfast and go for the boring continental stuff like bread and jam. No Sausages, no bacon, no black pudding....ahhh....

Wish me luck. I won't be able to get on here to report how I am doing until the end of the week.

Bring it on...

I spent most of today looking on the Internet for help and then I finally I found it. A massive smile appeared on my face and I became a very happy bunny. It all seemed so much easier and all the pressure was lifted off my shoulders. After reading a lot of advice, I am proud to say that I have finally completed Angry Birds ipod game. Woo Hoo!

I am also getting more excited about becoming a temporary vegetarian. I spent a good amount of time to look through some food magazines and I came up with a lot of valuable ideas which has made me feel a lot more prepared for the task ahead.

A few examples of the types of food I found are:

• Braised Asparagus with Slow Cook Egg, Cep Puree and Truffle

• Confit of Beetroot with Biscotti, Roquefort, Horseradish Cream and Spiced Lentil Dressing

• Artichoke Royal with Spring Vegetables, Perigord Truffle and Mushroom Veloute

I found those on The Ritz menu and to be honest, I don't really know what most of it is or even if it tastes nice so I think I will stick to the classics like shredded wheat, poached egg on toast, vegetable stir-fry, pizza plus a lot more fruit.

Already I feel like this will be a positive change because I have found a lot of food that I like but have just forgotten about over the years. I know it will be hard whilst I am tackling the task but I feel a lot more confident whilst preparing to tackle my challenge.

Give me a few days and I am sure that will change and I'll become a moany so and so!

Not very prepared...

With two meat days left until I become a professional temporary vegetarian, I must say that I have made the most of it.

Saturday
Breakfast - Bacon sandwich
Lunch - Chicken Tikka Wrap
Tea - Chicken M-something curry with keema naan

Sunday
Breakfast - Squared sausage sandwich
Lunch - Ham and egg bun
Tea - A Sunday pork roast with extra crackling

Even today I started off with a sausage sandwich. To be honest though, I am actually starting to panic about what I can eat. A lot of friends have said that it's all about meat replacement. Have the same meal but literally just replace the meat with something non-meaty. This sounds easy until I remind myself that I am not a fan of vegetables, mushrooms, onions, salad and the awful tasting Quorn...the list goes on and on. The only things I like are the things that make you fart a lot. I really don't want to have the nickname farty pants!

Today is a beautiful bank holiday in the South Coast of England. The sun is out, the birds are chirping, kids will be playing on the beach with ice creams around their faces and friends and family will be having their last bbq's of the summer. I, however, have a very important task of finding recipes and ideas which will help me with my challenge.

I shall report back later...

Who, what, where, how, when and why???

I am currently working my way through a to do list which has 196 tasks.

I am here to complete #46.

WHO?
My name is Tim and I am a man who likes meat.

WHAT?
I plan to become a vegetarian for a month and will write my experiences here.

WHERE?
Everywhere! My house, work, restaurants, bbq's....everywhere!

HOW?
I will attempt to pre-plan my daily meals, seek valuable advice from official vegetarian people , do a lot of research and try my hardest not to eat any meat at all. More importantly  I will study the back of food packets for the magical V sign.

WHEN
I have decided to start on September 1st and the last day will be September 30th. A meat-free month!

WHY
For those that have not read my blog I am currently working my way through 196 items which make up my 'to do list'.

I rarely have a meal which doesn't contain meat and I cannot remember a day where I have gone the whole day without eating anything meaty. I have tried becoming a vegetarian for a week before and on day one I failed miserably. Within hours of starting, I had just finished scoffing a corned beef sandwich. Pathetic isn't it.

I must admit that when I put this on my to do list, it wasn't because I don't want to eat animals or anything like that. It was literally because I ballsed it up when I tried previously. However after speaking to a few friends about this, I am actually starting to believe that it could be beneficial to my health as well as many other positive effects on my life. I guess we will see.