When I Almost Gave Up

Plus a (My) Kids' Choice Award Recipe

About four months into my WFPB plunge, I almost gave up. It wasn’t the food that did me in. “How could you never have steak again?” people would ask me. Yes, the aroma of a ribeye on the grill still smelled good to me, but after all I’d learned about the effects of meat on my body, it was a pretty easy pass.

And let’s be honest, I’m an animal lover. Before giving up meat, my heart literally ached inside my chest every time I passed a livestock trailer on the highway with the innocent pink snouts of the pigs they carried poking through the steel bars of their cages. Hadn’t I read Charlotte’s Web as a child and wept along with Wilbur at the possibility of his demise?!? I know that’s not a convincing argument for a lot of people, but it was for me. When I began eating WFPB, I could drive by farms with a clear conscious, and I was willing to give up the steaks and bacon in my life in order to do that.

And it wasn’t just the “no-meat” side of things that I loved. I started eating food that tasted better and was more satisfying than I’d ever had in my entire life. Growing up, when my mom jumped onto the newest fad diet wagon, the “healthy” food she kept around the kitchen was the absolute worst: non-fat cottage cheese with crushed pineapple which illicited my gag reflex the one and only time I tried it; canned fruit cocktail eerily suspended in a pink sugar-free jello atmosphere trying to pass itself off as dessert; and frozen Weight Watchers meals that smelled like the stale air of a hospital cafeteria while they cooked in the microwave.

With my exploration into the WFPB diet, my experience with “healthy” eating was looking and tasting vastly different. At the grocery store, my cart looked like Mr. McGregor’s garden: vibrant and lush with piles of fruits, veggies, and fresh herbs. I was trying out ingredients I’d never even heard of let alone cooked with. And the result? My taste buds felt enlivened by all the flavors and textures these new recipes offered me. And instead of getting the sleepies after every meal, I felt energized. My body felt lighter, my moods started to level out, and for the first time in my whole life, (this may be TMI for some of you but it’s got to be said) my menstrual cycle got regular. Good changes were happening inside and outside of me.

So why did I almost give it all up?

For those first four months, I attempted to adopt the WFPB eating while trying to keep everything the same for my family. I didn’t want to impose my diet on them (see #1 from my Swimming Tips), so I attempted to cook two meals every night for dinner: a WFPB one for me and a meat/dairy one for them. By month four I was completely burnt out. I couldn’t keep that pace up while also trying to homeschool our children, keep our house from being condemned, and maintain the small shred of sanity I was managing to hold onto. After talking things over with my husband, I made a decision: I would no longer cook differently for my family than I did for myself.

This wasn’t a Ninety-Five Theses moment where I nailed my grievances to the door of the kitchen. I sat down and explained to my kids why the meals I would be serving at dinnertime would be different. They even watched some of the documentaries that I shared last week, and we talked about the topics they brought up. At the end of it all, we agreed as a family that our kitchen would primarily be a WFPB space. That did not mean that they couldn’t ever eat hamburgers or ice cream or hard-boiled eggs. If they wanted me to have those items available, I would. But I handed over all meat-cooking to my husband, and he gladly accepted the role. And when we were outside our home, they were free to eat whatever they wanted.

One of our favorite stories comes from an Easter a couple years after we transitioned to a WFPB kitchen. We were having lunch at my uncle’s house, and his huge dining room table was arrayed with a buffet of sweet potato casserole, salad, roasted veggies, and hot rolls, as well as copious amounts of steak and ham. As my husband got up to fill a plate for our youngest son, my sweet little boy called out across the table in the loudest voice he could muster, “Just get meat, Dad!” The whole family erupted in laughter.

So, that’s been the MO in our family for the past 6 ½ years. Meat shows up less and less in our kitchen. About every month or two, my husband will come home with a pound of bacon and fry it up on a Saturday morning for all the meat-eaters in our house, but that number has dwindled over the years. Our two older daughters are now vegetarian like me, and a few of the other kiddos occasionally threaten to join us. But I think what keeps everyone satisfied is that this WFPB way of eating has proven itself. We’ve found recipes that our family now loves as much as they once loved homemade chicken noodle soup, crab cakes, and beefy lasagna. And over the upcoming weeks and months, I can’t wait to share those recipes with you.

But for today, I will share our latest obsession. We are a pancake kind of family. And I knew that if our kids agreed to having a WFPB kitchen in our house, there had to be a convincing pancake somewhere in its midst. Thankfully, we’ve found several options that we love. If you are looking for a traditional recipe, you won’t find one much better than Isa Moskowitz’s Puffy Pillow Pancakes. But if you want something with a little citrusy flavor mixed in, check out the recipe below!

(My) Kids’ Choice Award Lemon Poppyseed Pancakes

In a large mixing bowl, combine:

2 ½ c. unsweetened plant milk (any variety will do)

Zest and juice of two lemons (don’t stress about the size or shape of the lemons you should use. Just grab what you’ve got in your produce drawer and get zesting.)

2 tbsp. flaxseed meal (for any novices out there, this is flaxseed that’s been ground up)

½ c. applesauce

1/3 c. pure maple syrup (keep Aunt Jemima in the cupboard—don’t try and sneak her in here)

2 tsp. vanilla

In a separate, smaller bowl, mix together:

3 c. wholewheat pastry flour (I know this isn’t an easy ingredient to find so if you don’t have a Whole Foods close by or don’t feel like succumbing to The Man by ordering it from Amazon, you can use all-purpose flour here—you sacrifice some fiber and nutrients with that substitution, but really, life’s too short to lose your sanity in search of a bag of flour)

2 tbsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 tbsp. poppyseeds

Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and stir exactly 40 times.

I kid. Or as the my teenagers text, “JK.”

But do you remember the old Jiffy boxes of blueberry muffin mix? I remember they gave instructions about how many stirs to use when mixing the ingredients, and as a kid, I took that seriously. You can just imagine 10 year-old Maile with a look of deep concentration (and more than a touch of anxiety) on her face as her spatula carefully circumnavigated the Tupperware mixing bowl in her arms with exactly 30 strokes—it felt like lives were hanging in the balance.

Well, friends, lives aren’t at stake here, so relax.

Just give the batter a thorough mixing, heat up your skillet, griddle, or whatever you’re cooking on, add a bit of coconut oil if you’re not working with a non-stick surface, and pour on a healthy dollop of the batter. Let it cook till small bubbles begin to form on the surface of the cakes, then flip them over and cook another minute or two. Remove them from the cooking surface, slide them onto a plate, add a few berries or a drizzle of maple syrup, and tuck in. You’re day is about to have a great start!

Makes 12 pancakes, which serves 6 normal appetites or that of 1 soccer-obsessed nine-year-old who’s normally pretty picky but will happily eat an entire recipe of these pancakes over the span of two hours on a Saturday morning.