I'm going to lightly call this a review, because I know it's all going to be good stuff. I can't believe I haven't done this yet! 

"Life Alive" is  a vegan-friendly, hip, clean, and most importantly zen fast-casual restaurant in Massachusetts. There are three locations: Lowell, Cambridge, and Salem. Luckily enough, there is a life alive in where I live at school (Salem), and where I live at home (Lowell). I'm not sure about the other locations, but the location in Lowell has the whole Merrimack Valley area abuzz, and has for a while. I've been regularly eating there for about four years now, and I wasn't even an innovator.

People I know from my area talk about this deliciously nutrient-rich food just as endearingly as they do about a Doritos Locos Taco or a Whopper. They crave it. What do they put in their flaxseed sprinkles? Crack?

What's great about this establishment is that they promote a healthy, green, zen lifestyle in a warm, welcoming way. Free water in mason jars, herbal supplements for sale, and a bathroom that could be confused for a mediation garden are just a few examples. It's all about the decor. They also have a community bulletin board to ensure a sense of community. They also have live, local music as well.

So, what are some examples of the delicious, nutrient-dense food they serve? They serve filling bowls, wraps, salads, smoothies, coffee, tea, and more. Bowls are based on brown rice or udon noodles and are filled with veggies, nuts, cheese, and more and can be topped with add-ons such as hummus, avocado, flax oil, goji berries, granola, etc.

The Goddess Bowl

I usually get "the innocent", that is brown rice, corn, carrots, broccoli, and  tamari almonds, quinoa topped with a Ginger Nama Shoyu sauce. I get it alongside the "Elvis Alive" smoothie that includes peanut butter, raw cacao, banana, coconut-based ice cream, and rice milk.

I always go to Life Alive if I want an easy to love healthful meal, and don't feel like making one. Chain restaurants make eating healthy so hard, but Life Alive makes it so easy. It's also just a great place to sit and do some work. Good vibes all around.

Have you ever eaten at a Life Alive?

What's your favorite vegan restaurant or dish?

I may not "meal prep", however, I do sometimes make a big batch of something and have it multiple times throughout the week. That was my plan with these delicious sweet potato black bean burritos!

In my post about my vegan journey blog post, I mentioned that one day, the vegan gods of the dining hall shown down on me. Chartwells was serving sweet potato black bean burritos. I decided to make my own version with fresher, healthier, ingredients, of course. I basically put my Dollar Store Diva spin on them. 

The dining hall has to feed a bunch of starving college students on a budgets, so they had to use white tortillas and other shortcuts, of course. However, I only had to feed one broke, starving college students. I in this recipe, I used whole wheat tortillas, Green Giant niblet corn, mozzarella, sweet potatoes, and Bush's low sodium black beans.

Oh, sweet potatoes, how I love you. However, you're just too hard. Could you maybe soften up a bit? Just for me?

Sweet potatoes, when you buy them fresh, are very hard. You can't just mash them right away. I cut them into small pieces and microwave them for 5-10 minutes until they're a bit more soft.

After they softened in the microwave, I sautéed them in a pan with some maple syrup to give them a maple flavor. I put this pan on medium heat and covered it to finish the "make sweet potatoes mushier" mission."

While that mission was in progress, I sliced my mozzarella.

 After microwaving it according to the package instructions, I added the niblet corn along with the black beans. Time to mash this burrito filling together!

My mighty masher!

I'm many things, but not a great burrito artist. Chipotle would fire me ASAP. However, this is me trying to fill these puppies before letting them heat up in the oven. I also added the mozzarella, which will melt in the oven.

There they are in their glory!

Sweet Potato Black Bean Burritos

Ingredients:

Directions:

One of the the four values of healthy eating, according to the American Heart Association, is variety. Eating nutrient-dense, clean foods is great. However, if you're only eating bananas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you'll be overloading on potassium, and missing out on other nutrients that bananas do not contain. Sometimes, I find myself in a rut where I just want pizza... or enchiladas... or bacon. Deep down, I know I truly love the taste of foods that will fuel my body better than those, however I get bored. I was reaching one of these moods around the time of lent. So with the push of my friend, who also promised to do this, I attempted to go fully vegan for the 40 days and 40 nights of Lent.

It made sense for me to make such an intense Lenten promise. With being busy at school, and not being in a religious club like I had been in the past, I found myself not making my religion a priority in my life. I figured, what better way then to remind myself every time I wanted to eat something? Here I will write my "vegan" story, what I ate, my favorite dishes, and if you choose to be vegan, how to go about that. 

Definition

What I do like about veganism is that it's not only about health and wellness of the person who partakes in it, but it's also about the greater good of animal treatment. I am totally for this cause, I love animals. If you need a reminder, just count how many pictures of my dog I have on my snapchat story (n_vergak) daily. However, I love my animal products too much. I also like trying different dishes and restaurants (I like to call myself a lowkey foodie), and I don't want any restrictions when trying new food! However, I really respect what these vegans are doing here.

Vegans have a much longer list of things that they CAN'T eat than a list of what thy CAN eat. No animal by-products means no dairy-based anything: cheese, yogurt, sauces, sour cream, cream cheese, ice cream, etc. No meat whatsoever, or anything prepared in meat oil. Two unfortunately banned items that are more inconvenient than you thought are eggs and honey. Also, they have to be really careful with how their bread, pastas, and grains were prepared, processed, and packaged. They CAN eat veggies, rice, quinoa, barley, fruits, legumes, fungi,  nuts, oils, hummus, etc. 

There's different versions of veganism. My version was a broke college student version. Basically, anything that didn't outright have meat, cheese, or dairy in it, I allowed myself to eat. I knew that the bread and the pasta in the dining hall were probably prepared with animal by-products, but I ate them anyways. Yes, I did have many times where I did cheat, I'll admit it. I always had a hint that they put cheese in their veggie burgers, however, I needed to eat SOMETHING. Also, sometimes I allows myself to have greek yogurt here and there if I knew I wasn't going to get enough protein that day. Here's a menu of what a vegan may eat for a few days. This was not my menu, as my options in the dining hall were limited. I would've LOVED to recreate this menu, however. Maybe next year in my apartment!

My Diet

I discovered a love for many delicious foods during my vegan journey. I'll go through my typical vegan day here:

Breakfast: Flaxseed vegan microwave waffles topped with strawberries and light agave nectar.

Lunch: Sandwich on a multigrain baguette with pumpkin hummus, apples, and greens.

Dinner: A blackbean veggie burger atop a bed of rice

Snacks (could include but not limited to): pita chips, popcorn, fruits and veggies, pretzels and hummus, nuts.

Here are some of my favorite dishes I ate while I was vegan.

"Vegan Sandwich": The sandwich listed as "lunch" above is actually what I ate at A&J King artisan bakery in downtown Salem. I was very pleased that they had a vegan section of their menu, this was DELICOUS! I would get it again even not as a vegan. 

lots and lots of burritos: Together, rice and beans make a complete protein, seeing as both rice and beans separately do not contain all amino acids, however, when combined, all amino acids are present. That being said, I HAD A LOT OF BURRITOS. I ate a vegan, gluten-free microwave burrito almost daily for lunch. Chipotle and The Howling Wolf were my saviors. 

Indian food: Not only did I discover Indian food is delicious, but it's also vegan-friendly mostly. Their unique ways of combining chickpeas, grains, peas, and more are delicious. Samosas and aloo matar wraps contain peas, chickpeas, and potatoes, and are delicious.

Sweet Potato and Black Bean Burritos: One day, the vegan gods were in my favor. The dining hall served mini burritos filed with just maple-glazed sweet potatoes and black beans. I swear I ate five... I plan on remaking these this summer and next year.

Reflection

On the surface, I can say that I accomplished the health and religious goals with this. Of course, there was a few days (including Easter day) when I went a little animal by-product crazy. I think there was a point where I ate pizza for five meals in a row. The newfound freedom was invigorating. However, I was very much looking to discovering this freedom. If you really think about it, I never would have been able to enjoy that freedom if I didn't commit to 40 days of veganism.

The only complaint I had about veganism was the stretch of days I was sick of eating the same thing. I loved my indian wraps and cereal with almond milk, however I craved chicken salad sandwich, or anything different. However, this wasn't because of the roles of veganism. This was due to my situation: broke college student in a dorm living off of microwavable and dining hall food. If I had my own kitchen, I would have had more variety.

I loved discovering new ways to eat. Obviously, there are multiple ways to get your protein for the day. I was pleased to play around with polenta, tempeh, tofu, soy-based cheese and milk, soy-based yogurt, etc. I think some people think on a too-small scale when it comes to food. Broaden your horizons! Variety is a key to healthy eating.

sources:

https://www.vegansociety.com/try-vegan/definition-veganism

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/living-vegan-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.html

This lent, I went vegan. I've gone pescetarian before for a month, however this was on ANOTHER level. I plan on doing a whole post about my experience later. I'll admit it, I definitely had my cheat times. I would sneak in a piece of cheese on my sandwiches, or I'd dip my roasted potatoes in ranch (what, no one else does that?). After having rice and beans in some way, shape, or form for two meals a day, I was yearning for something new. Being at school has made it hard to experiment, however this weekend, while I was home, I experiment and made vegan pizza on my last day of lent.

For my consumer health class, we have to write a review of a health and fitness app. We had to rate the app on multiple criteria: entertainment, education, easy to use, reviews, and reliability. I decided to use the app "Substitutions" to make a recipe vegan. I chose to make vegan BBQ Chicken pizza. I learned a lot of different things using this app - for example I didn't know they made lactose free/vegan cheese and sold it at the store. This app not only substitutes for dietary restrictions, however it suggests similar products if you are out of something in your cabinet.

This recipe didn't come out totally vegan because I added feta cheese, and didn't particularly check the BBQ sauce or whole grain crust to see if it was vegan. You could make your own vegan BBQ sauce and pizza dough if you really wanted to veganize this recipe, however.

An obvious swap that Substitutions gave me for chicken was tofu. However, they also told me to add smoked paprika for it to taste like ham. I've never heard of that before, but it made sense. Instead of using the smoked paprika, I just cooked my tofu in a reduction of BBQ sauce and diced tomatoes, because I knew that the tofu would take on any flavor it was surrounded by.

My tofu, BBQ sauce, and diced tomatoes. It was nice to combine my sauce and protein all together.

These are the lactose cheese sliced I mentioned before. Each slice only has 40 calories, no trans fat, no saturated fat, and no cholesterol. Sprinkle cheese would be prime for this, however I opted for sprinkle cheese.

Here, I drizzled on some cilantro paste, feta, and BBQ sauce right before putting it in the oven.

Here's the finished product!

It was the perfect lunch!

BBQ Chicken Tofu Pizza

Ingredients:

Directions:

Before I started baking, I asked Jackie if she wanted to help and this was my answer. She must've been too pooped from her morning at the dog park!

Detoxing can be the first step in a weight loss program, or can be a helpful step in maintaining. For me, I decided to try the widely popular australian detox tea as a way to cleanse my body for summer. Not for my summer bod, because we should strive for "summer" bods year round, but just to rid all my toxins so I can enjoy my summer with more energy.

I'll go through this review by discussing the process, details, and results.

The first step in doing the cleanse is, well ordering the tea. You order it on http://www.skinnymetea.com.au/. The 14-day cleanse is $35 USD plus the shipping. You can do shipping with or without tracking. I would recommend with, because it's coming from Australia and it takes a while. I started to get nervous after two weeks, I had to end up e-mailing the company. Alas, I got it on my doorstep from the land down under!

There are two teas. One detox tea with roobios, goji berries, and herbs that make your metabolism faster. You drink this tea every morning with breakfast. The metabolism boost decreases appetite, increases energy, and gives you a clearer head and altogether happier outlook. It's not a bad kind of appetite suppresser, it will just teach you what portions are right for you! This is a loose-leaf tea that works with a tea infuser and tastes great with agave nectar or honey.

As for the second tea, you take it every other night. It's the colon cleanse tea. This tea comes in a tea bag for easier infusing. It has an odd scent, but that's just the herbs. The purpose of this tea is to cleanse all of the junk out of your colon so that you can absorb nutrients better into your body! It's not going to have to riding the porcelain throne all morning... it just works when you have to go! You will notice a difference.