College Candy

My favorite places to eat at in Los Angeles include In N’ Out for their double-double animal-style burgers and Bay Cities Italian Deli in Santa Monica for their “godmother” sandwich, a bread and meat monstrosity with cold cuts from every edible animal. I rarely eat at home because I can’t cook, and when I do, my go-to at-home meal is a ham and cheese sandwich. I’m telling you this to give you an idea of how hard it is going to be for me to eat like a vegan for week.

My vegan week isn’t due to some sudden desire to save animals that would otherwise end up on the tip of my fork. I’m not opposed to saving animals –– if a cute puppy were to cross the street in front of me, I wouldn’t run it over –– but this adventure is purely an experiment. I’m doing it just to see if I can.

In preparation for my weeklong meat, dairy, and gelatin-free adventure, I searched the Internet for vegan-eating rules and information. When I Google searched “veganism,” the pull-quote from Wikipedia read: “Vegans are the result of a conspiracy among the liberal elite to create a new race of inbred, herbivores.” I’m nervous already.

Sunday

12 AM: My vegan week officially begins. I am immediately hungry. I fix myself a bowl of oatmeal. Basically, I’m eating a bowl of mush for dinner. Not satisfied.

Monday

Breakfast: Oatmeal, again, but this time I flavor it with maple syrup and it tastes a lot better. My usual skinny cinnamon dolce latte from Starbucks is replaced with a soy latte. It’s good, and because they use Vanilla Silk, I don’t need any sugar.

Lunch: I’d heard good things about Jax Vegan Café in Westwood, so I go hunting for it. I drive up and down Westwood Boulevard for thirty minutes before I find it. It’s closed on Mondays. Just my luck. I go to plan B and drive to Santa Monica to go to Real Food Daily, another vegan restaurant. It’s closed for construction. Can’t a girl catch a break? I am frustrated and downtrodden, which requires a trip to Ross to cheer me up. But finding ridiculously cheap and cute shoes ($4 for a pair of high heel sandals!) that are made of leather (definitely not vegan) just worsens the situation.

Dinner: I finally find vegan food! I go to Swingers in Santa Monica where I get a vegan burrito: tofu, beans, quinoa, and spinach inside a wheat tortilla with a chipotle-style sauce to top. The spinach is a bit odd, vegan rice would have been better than quinoa, and I get extra sauce to add some more spice and mask the odd ginger flavor (from where? Who knows?!).

Overall, the day wasn’t great, but it could have been a lot worse. I managed to get a filling vegan meal, but Swingers’ vegan burrito is a poor substitution for the real thing. My sister suggests I keep a vegan power bar in my car for the next time I can’t find a quick veg bite. I wonder if power bars are vegan?

[photos from swingersdiner.com]