So, I’ve just finished moving into my apartment…well, that’s an optimistic view. I’m living here, whether or not the place is truly livable is another story, but here I am. For the past two days, I haven’t had any cooking gas, which left me with…take out and a microwave and raw fruits and veggies. Now that I have cooking gas, I can hopefully tighten up my eating habits and eat good-for-me and delicious vegan food. I’m going grocery shopping tomorrow. But, before this morning I was going stir crazy (but not stir-fry crazy, alas) and relying on two of my “favorite” convenience foods: cereal and frozen meals. The cereal doesn’t really need to be elaborated on; it’s cereal. Woohoo.

I’ve been learning a lot about frozen meals, friends, and it’s quite a dangerous world out there in the world of microwavable nutrition. In this post, I’d like to give a few meals the old LPP review, starting with the ones I don’t like and make my way through to the ones I do!

Healthy Choice Café Steamers. Here’s the gimmick: these meals come in a fancy steamer bowl with sauce in the bowl beneath. You pop them in the microwave and your meat, veggies and pasta are steamed to perfection in a matter of minutes. Then, you dump the steamed treasures into the gourmet sauces below, stir and enjoy. That’s the gimmick, at least.

Healthy Choice Café Steamers Chicken Margherita: This was my first foray into Healthy Choice’s steamy foods. Unfortunately, there were more as I bought two. There were a few feeble chunks of tomato, some chicken, a rogue clove of garlic and some sickly looking pasta. The meal weighed in at 240 calories, with 6 grams of fat. 19 grams of protein and 5 grams of fiber. This meal tasted bland and required nearly double the cooking time in my very standard microwave. And where were the veggies?! Nowhere!

I give this one a:

Healthy Choice Café Steamers Grilled Chicken Marinara : First off, Healthy Choice? You are not fooling a soul with those painted on “grill lines” so you might as well leave them off. I found this to be too cheesey for my tastes and the pasta dried out in the amount of time it took to get the chicken warmed through. Glad we had a revolutionary steamer bowl! Not! This one, at least, had some vegetables! Yeah, wilted, mushy broccoli. Yuck! This one weighed in at 250 calories, with 4 grams of fat. 5 grams of fiber and 20 grams of protein. Nutritious enough, but the simple starches of the pasta? Pass, please. I also found that these meals didn’t keep me full for long at all. Sad.

I give this one a:

SmartOnes Chicken Santa Fe: This one was love at first bite. Chicken, yes, but the rest of the dish was red peppers, beans, zucchini, onions…mmm! It all tasted quite delicious and the veggies weren’t too mushy at all. And all for 140 calories and 2.5 grams of fat! 4 grams of fiber and 20 grams of protein. And a FULL serving of vegetables. Clearly, this kicks some nutritional butt! And it kept me full MUCH longer than the Healthy Choice meals.

I give this one a:

Kashi Southwest Style Chicken: Filling and delicious. I can’t rave enough about this one! Chicken with a hint of spice and lime juice, onions, peppers and corn and Kashi’s delicious 7 grain pilaf, topped with a yummy sauce. It’s an all around enjoyable eat and doesn’t taste like a typical frozen meal. It has: 240 calories and 5 grams of fat, 6 grams of fiber and 16 grams of protein. For the calories, it’s definitely a good amount of food, and tasty too. The stats aren’t as good for this meal as for the Healthy Choice ones, but this one actually tastes decent and kept me full all afternoon. And I can pronounce all of the ingredients.

I give this one a:

Today was generally difficult. I’m exceptionally emotional right now (hello PMS!), insanely busy doing messy, gross work all day (stripping fifty years of paint off my kitchen cabinets. Eugh) and things are sort of falling apart around me.

I received a voicemail this morning from my best friend. A co-worker we had in common when we worked together in highschool is more or less on her death bed. She has been fighting cancer for as long as I have known her (five years), and longer even, I believe. She means a lot to me, and, naturally I’m upset. More to the point, though, this will be my first real experience with death. The first funeral I’ll go to. My grandfather passed away when I was five or six–at the wake, no one would explain to my small mind what was happening. Maybe four years ago now, my grandmother’s sister died, also of cancer. I had seen her less than ten times in my life and she lived halfway across the country. My grandmother flew out to spread her ashes, but there was little else to mark the few weeks as out of the ordinary.

Fast forward to today. Someone I worked with for three years, someone who was there for me throughout highschool, is dying. I haven’t cried yet, and I don’t know that I will. I’m not afraid of death. It just doesn’t scare me at all. I believe I will be readily accepting of my own death. I have no religious beliefs and imagine just being switched off for good when I do pass away. Because of these beliefs, when people around me that have been suffering are near death, I can’t feel too sad. I see death as the erasure of all pain and suffering, a black abyss where nothing feels and nothing hurts, where there is no thought.

So, what does this have to do with diet and veganism? Well, it made me realize how poorly I’ve been taking care of my body. Lighting up a cigarette only to realize someone you love is dying of cancer (though not a smoking-related cancer) is an odd, inexplicable feeling. Ordering takeout when nearly everyone in your family suffers from gastro-intestinal ailments is also an odd, inexplicable feeling.

Here’s what I have going against me genetically (that I haven’t developed yet, knock on wood!): diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, arthritis, cancer, really poor eyesight, joint difficulties (my father had a hip replacement at 47) and proneness to gallbladder difficulties.

Why am I taking my body for granted? Why am I not doing everything I can to better my current health? I must be an idiot to be carrying on the way I do: loading my body full of processed food, take out and fast food, questionably raised meats and fatty cheeses. WHAT AM I DOING?! Am I CRAZY? The madness has GOT to stop. My body has been trying to tell me this for months. Meat makes me feel sluggish. Dairy makes my stomach VERY unhappy. Eating animals products and really processed foods makes me feel…unclear, blocked and phsyically wrong. So, I’m done. Done treating my body like gum under my shoe, centipedes crawling in my bed.

I made a pot of vegan soup tonight. It was a remarkably huge failure. What’s worse, I made it for someone who’s got a bit of a cold as a pick-me-up. It is kind of foul. The recipe proved to be full of errors–not enough liquids for the beans and grains involved and nowhere near enough spices, either. Instead of making the six servings it said it would, it made enough to feed about three armies. So, I have this ungiftable NASTY soup that I’m stuck eating. I worry that this is a bad omen for upcoming vegandom, but I must remind myself that it isn’t. I’ve had plenty of really, really delicious vegan food.

Soup, however, seems to be my worst dish. Three soups come to mind that ended up being fairly foul: a Mediterranean vegetable soup, a tomato bean soup with little masa matzo balls and tonight’s. I think I’ve pinpointed what I don’t like: tinned tomatoes and onions together, in broth. Now, I can throw a can of tomatoes and a roughly shopped onion together as a pasta suace and be perfectly pleased, but something about these two things floating around in salty vegetable broth turns my stomach, when combined with any cumin at all. My minestrone is fine–quite tasty, actually, but other than that, my soups involving tomatoes are nasty.

I guess it’s good to know, however I now have two huge vats of this putrid soup (hoping it’s better as left-overs…10 bowls worth of leftovers…) and am despairing a bit. What if I just can’t handle the food? What if I never get used to the textures of seitan and tofu? Can I hack this? Will I find tempeh to be disgusting?

These are the thoughts that are plauging me, that and knowing that it’s a bowl of soup I have waiting for me for breakfast. And Tasty Bite Bombay Potatoes for lunch. Thank goodness for that!