Thanksgiving for vegans.

My Thanksgiving plans fell through, so I found out about a week ago that I was going to have to pretty much spend Thanksgiving on my own.  While at first I was sad, I thought maybe I should take the weekend to have some "me time", get caught up on homework, and watch a few environmental and/or vegan movies.  I'm not going to detail my entire weekend in this post, because I did so much, but I will give you an idea of what a "Vegan Thanksgiving" may look like.

First of all, turkey or no turkey, family or no family, Thanksgiving is about giving thanks for both the bounty that nature has provided us, as well as for everything we have.  I kept these two concepts in mind throughout the day (and the weekend).

I started the day off with a trip to Whole Foods to get the ingredients that I needed to bake two dishes that I am going to need for a vegan potluck I am going to on Monday night. I also visited the deli department and chose five of the most delicious looking items. Then, I took a somewhat long drive out to Broadway and Yew in Vancouver to get some vegan goodies from Edible Flours, a natural vegan bakery!  I am sort of embarrassed to admit that I got a truffle, a chai chocolate, a chocolate cupcake, a vanilla gluten-free cupcake with chocolate chip cookie crumble, a maple-glazed doughnut, a chocolate cookie and a lemon cookie.  I really wanted to try everything in the store, but I "limited" myself to just those!

Once I got home, I worked on some homework for one of my sustainability courses.  We have to prepare a personal social responsibility plan and submit it in a couple weeks.  It really made me take a long hard look at what I am currently doing and how I can improve (in respect to the environment!).  I realized that the major are that I am not pulling my weight in is with respect of transportation.  So what I'm going to do is de-insure my car for the month of November.  I'll do a post about that later!

After I finished my personal social responsibility plan, I watched a movie about Monsanto and genetic modification.  Then I heated up the foods that needed heating, and it was time to eat!  Here's what my dinner looked like:

Something I'll say for vegan food: It's colourful!  And everything was so darn good!  The only thing that could make it better was something inspiring to watch.  And so guess what I watched?  An Inconvenient Truth.  I've never seen it before, and it was about time.  It was inspiring (a bit of the old rah-rah Al Gore stuff, but I'm able to see past that).  It is, of course, a bit outdated at this point, but the message remains just as pertinent.  If you haven't seen it, you can watch it here for free.

So that was my big vegan Thanksgiving.  I'm pretty sure I did more than just what I wrote in this post, but not much.  It was a pretty good day, but lonely.  To all of you celebrating Thanksgiving with your families, enjoy!  And to all of you, regardless of who you're celebrating with, happy Thanksgiving!