Resources

I do not have a ton of resources of yet that I can totally endorse (besides the books I have already linked to and will do again). A friend, K, sent me an incredible email with her take on a lot of vegetarian/vegan websites and cookbooks, but since I have not yet checked everything out I will only link to a few here, and I will let you know as I go other things I find.
Resources:

• my dad: I have to give him a shout out because for years he has been talking health foods/diet change to us and while we did listen, we may not have really listened entirely. Get what I'm sayin? But now I am remembering, and pulling some of the books off the shelf and calling him for some things. He is a resource, and a really good advocate for what we are doing.
  
• I have gotten recipes off of The Mayo Clinic website: here.
• I have also used allrecipes.com, on this one just use the ingredients tab and say you don't want meat, etc. or search 'vegetarian'
• This is a really cool site that I could spend hours on (don't worry, I don't), it categorizes vegan recipes by world region. Really cool.
• I have gotten some decent recipes off of VegWeb
• This is one of my new favorite sites: nutrition data. It is awesome for figuring stuff out on nutrition, I will just cut and paste what my friend says about it:

  You can look up a certain food or create an account and enter a recipe + serving size to figure out calories/serving. One of the things I love about this site is not only does it give you the nutritional label of a food, but it also gives you its nutrition breakdown. If you're trying, for example, to get a complete protein, it will tell you what amino acid is missing and let you link to foods that contain that amino acid. (It's good for the learning curve.)

• Dr. McDougall is another guy who pioneered the idea that diet really can change the health of your body and prevent/reverse disease. His website gives menu plans, I have used a few of them, a lot of them have things I cannot get, but it is still a decent resource
• my friend gave me two other sites that I have yet to thoroughly use and review (like I said, I am just starting out) The first one:

  This is an amazingly helpful website for figuring out what things are that you may have not seen before and for substitutions. I refer to it a lot to figure out the grains I've never encountered before on the

  shelves.

• If you have vegetarian nutrition questions, I have found this website

  helpful. Just type "protein" or "iron", etc. into the search bar and click on their "Information Sheet" tabs.

Okay, those are things I have found helpful. I will do one more post that will be a typical week menu plan. Again, we are just starting out (a month now of unplanned but no meat, and a week of planned everything). I will try to post some recipes when I can, but don't forget, I just started language study again, days are full (the week was so crazy, but still blessed, may blog it later).

Oh and one more word on faith:

I know I may get cancer in three years after eating a vegan diet. Or I may be killed in a car accident in ten, and everyone would say, 'what a waste, she missed out on some good hamburgers.' I know I am not in control of the future. I believe in the complete and utter sovereignty of our God. I am not spouting off a 'religion' of eating well in order to have long life. We are trying to live well today and be better stewards of our bodies, that is all. This is what is working for us now, we hope to be the better for it, giving all praise to the one who gave us our bodies, taste buds, great food, etc.