How to be a vegan in 47 days

Yesterday began another season of fasting for Greek Orthodoxites, which means forty-seven days of trying to figure out what the hell to eat in our little Greek American household. I have written before about my attempts to support my Greek Orthodox husband in his quest for faith by fasting on Fridays. Since then, we have managed to sometimes fast on Wednesdays as well, and we managed two weeks of fasting during the forty day period before Christmas. The priest was not surprised that my husband had succumbed to the temptation of “the meat”, but the reality is that he succumbed more to the temptation of cheese and chocolate.

For these longer fasting periods I’ve had to get creative, since there are maybe five vegetables in the known universe that my husband and I will both eat. Greece, ironically, does not have a plethora of vegan products available readily like they do in America. We have to hunt for whatever we can find, which has so far boiled down to soy milk and soy meat product. If we can find soy cheese, it will be a windfall. I’m lukewarm to soy milk, but it can be used as a milk substitute in some recipes so that works. The soy meat product is by far one of the weirdest edible substances I have ever met. In the bag it looks like cereal, once cooked it resembles something a dog would throw up and then eat again. Still, we managed to make vegan chili with it relatively successfully, so it’ll do. It certainly expands our eating choices, as we can make soy burgers and tacos and such with it. I tell you, you really gotta love your husband to agree to eat dog vomit for seven weeks, but I don’t really have a good reason not to, so there you go.

Will we make it until April 8^th? God only knows. We are certainly going to try. Since I’m almost assuredly going to hell anyway, it doesn’t matter if I break the fast. But I know it is important to my husband, so I’ll do my best to help him stick with it, cheese and chocolate be damned.