I’ve been meaning to post this sooner, but it’s been a crazy few days and I’ve not had much time.

It’s time for an evaluation of 13 days of more-or-less gluten-free living. Yay!

All-in-all it was pretty easy, though eating lots of veg for lunch at work helped a lot. A normal Dutch lunch is a few slices of bread, and me not having to worry about thinking up a lunch in addition to a dinner was most convenient.

However, I was probably not quite as strict as someone with coeliac disease would be (certainly not about the work veg, I’m pretty sure half the food there contains shoyu), so it’d probably be a bit more effort if I’d really needed to avoid gluten.

I have tried a few gluten-free snack subs which weren’t bad, but weren’t that great either. The Garbo bread was better than I’d expected, though. Some time ago I tried Garbo’s cinnamon buns and they were a little dense and gummy and didn’t have much flavour beyond sweetly cinnamon.I’ve read the same often goes for gluten-free bread, so was pleasnatly surprised with this loaf. It wasn’t gummy at all and while it was a little different from the bread I’m used to, it wasn’t bad. Certainly not as icky as the thing I once tried at the restaurant where I worked some years ago.

While I probably won’t go totally gluten-free unless a pressing reason to do so ever comes up (I do love seitan), I will probably make eating the stuff an exception rather than a rule. At least when I’m in charge of the food.

I didn’t feel much difference to my general well-being during the project. The only thing I noticed was the bit about the subtle craving and the more (or less, depending on how you frame it) mindless eating, but that really was fairly subtle and kind of odd and I’m not sure what to make of it.
The first gluten-again day I had a quick bread snack at work, and I did get that “want more!” feeling. It was a bit odd. It felt so normal, and not very strong. Just like it’s absolutely the most natural thing to want more and more and more of that totally yummy food. However, when I had bready food later on, I didn’t notice that feeling.
I’m not sure I get that more-for-the-sake-of-just-more feeling for other foods when I’m not actually that peckish. Even with chocolate I can just have one cube and leave the rest for later these days. I enjoy it, and wouldn’t object to more, but unless I should really be having a proper meal, I don’t particularly care if I get more or not.

Basically, further study and more data required.

Now that I’m back to gluten-y food, I’m not really noticing that much of a difference, though a busy few days of little sleep and lots of social is probably not one where I’ll get a good idea of my general well-being.

In short, it was a fun project which got me thinking about my food differently and got me something to further explore.

While on my way to visit the boyfriend, I got a little peckish. Not unexpected, seeing as lunch was rice cakes and a bit of chocolate. So when I had to switch trains at Brussel Noord/Bruxelles Nord and had some spare time between trains, I thought I’d check out the nearby GB express to see if they had some quick vegan food.

They had a bunch of salads, and one of the pasta salads actually looked vaguely vegan (the veg ones all seemed to have dressings, which tend to be full of weird things) so I figured I’d check the label. I checked the whole damn thing but was unable to find the ingredient list until I gave the container a good shake and looked at the bottom of the container lid.
That’s right, they put the ingredient list somewhere you’d not be able to properly read it until you open the container. Something the staff doesn’t like you doing before you’ve actually paid for it.
Eejits.

Still, they had the good sense of putting the allergy info on the outside. That’s something, I suppose.

Some more shaking, a good bit of squinting, and taking into account the allergy information led me to conclude it was most likely vegan, so I bought it. If it had turned out to not be vegan after all, I’d have gone back in to return it with a polite (but Dutch. Apart from not being too confident at French, I would not have been in too a polite a mood and would’ve expected Brussels Belgians to be able to speak both the city’s languages, no matter how much they generally seem to dislike speaking Flemish) explanation.
Luckily (the check-out woman was friendly and didn’t look like she needed the hassle) this wasn’t necessary as the salad was indeed vegan. Okay, so ten out of ten for selling random prepared vegan food, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?

Horribly flou pic of container containing bland and somewhat filling food:

See? It’s a big label. Big enough to print both the Dutch and French ingredient lists somewhere.
Big enough to put up a little box telling us that customers thought this was a Good Product, apparently. Don’t you think the actual ingredients have some priority over that?
And this is just the one side, too. The other side was simply a bunch of red with some random and utterly forgettable print. No letters. But plenty of room for some.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know how this “fresh” salad will keep until August (or July. I forget), which is should be able to do according to the label. Before I ate it, that is.
Best not to think about it, really.

Since my time in Germany didn’t get me any of the falafel I was looking forward to, I thought I might as well get me some right at home.

At De Falafel:

Not too long ago a Maoz opened up fairly close to De Falafel, but I keep going to this one. I’m not sure if there’s a quality or price difference, but De Falafel has less of a chain feel to it than Maoz, which I like. BEsides, it was here first.
Also, it’s on a more convenient route to my place. While Maoz is probably not even half a kilometre further away, it feels weird walking that way.
The Stadhuisplein area is just not my kind of place.
Maybe it’s that SkiHut place…

They changed the prices somewhat since I was last there. IIRC, a white pita used to be cheaper than the wholemeal one, but now they were the same price. I think they simply raised the price of the white ones. Not that I really mind. It makes choosing the wholemeal one easier.

Falafel, hiding under a bunch of veg and sauce.

While the falafel was good and perfectly satisfying, I was vaguely disappointed about the whole thing.
I’m not sure, but I think I got more falafel last time I went there. And the salad bar wasn’t kept up as nicely as it normally was. The counter was kind of messy and they were nearly out of some things. The beet bits were just a few pathetic strings and there were just a few bits of carrot left. The veg didn’t have that much flavour, either.
The tahini dispenser gave pathetic little squirty blobs of sauce rather than a nice good amount. I had to push the thing a few times before I got what I wanted, when before just one push would do.
I hope it’s just this once. When I went there before things always looked clean and abundant, so I’ll probably go back there next time I want falafel because of habit and convenience. But if it turns out to be the start of a general decline of the place, I might consider checking out if Maoz has wholemeal pitas.
There aremany kebab places which sell falafel (most do, I think), but that big freaky meat thing they have hanging around kind of puts me off my food. Also, I doubt they do falafel as thoroughly as falafel places, with salad bars and everything.

Today I was lazy again and made something as close to insta-food as you can probably get without using a readymeal and a microwave.

While traipsing around the conveniently-located Globus, being not at all surprised at the German manufacurers’ tendency to chuck pointless and unnecessary animal products in their tinned readymeals, I came across some vegan tortellini. Since wrapped food makes me childishly happy, I bought me a pack.

Today I decided I should maybe eat that, as it looked convenient enough and didn’t need anything currently unwashed for the preparation. I only recently figured out that people put sauce on their tortellini. I always sort of assumed you just ate it plain, since there’s already stuff on the inside. So I figured I’d try it the way other people seem to do it for a change. I still had a jar of pasta sauce laying around I never seemed to get around to using, anyway.

Prepackaged food in all it’s plastic-wrapped glory:

I chucked the tortellini in a small pan of boiling water, drained it when I thought it was done (which was way before the ten minutes the instructions mentioned), added the sauce to let it heat up, and chucked the whole thing on a plate. Since I’ve not done my dishes in a good while, I didn’t have any of my deep plates more suited to this kind of meal. Also, this fork was all I had left of my cutlery.
Guess what I should do this evening?

Anyway, the result:

I’m glad I ended up going with the pasta sauce. It wasn’t a spectacular sauce by any means, and even my most half-hearted efforts would produce something superior, but the tortellini itself was as bland and boring as slightly salted food can be, so really needed something which had some flavour to make it at least half-way decent.
While bulky enough to keep me going, it’s hardly a meal worth repeating.

I should really stop buying vegan convenience foods just because they’re vegan. I’ve had similar stuff before and was similarly disppointed.
At least the minty Ritter Sport was most tasty. Should’ve bought more of that…

I’m back!
And I had fun.

I didn’t get particularly close to Berlin, nor did I spot any falafel places. I didn’t sleep as much as I normally do, I didn’t manage to find any particularly humorous licence plates, and I could do without hearing the Radetzky March for a good while.
But I managed to have a very good time regardless.

I found something vegan among the catered stuff about half the time and actually had one of the catering people ask “vegan?” when I asked if something had milk in it in my best German, which made me exceedingly happy (though I was also most appreciative of the guy who bothered to ring someone about whether the mash had milk in it, even if he assumed food sensitivities rather than ethics), I met my quota of conga line-fun for the year, if not the decade, spent a lot of time in a car yet didn’t get carsick even once, got delightfully loopy due to lack of sleep and abundance of social time rather than abysmally grouchy, and had a ton of fun hanging out with people from all over and making music.

And while I spent most of the time indoors, either in hotels or in sports halls, I did manage to visit a supermarket for some extra food and got to see enough of the outside of Germany to aquire a strong desire to go back there for a nice holiday.
Preferably the sort that involves some nice hiking.

Conveniently, it turns out my German isn’t actually that dismal. My dad did say I’d pick it up easily.
The weird thing is, though, if I didn’t quite know how to say something in German, my brain quickly switched to French. A language in which I may have been fairly fluent some years ago, but with me not having anyone to talk to and losing TV5 and thereby the ability to watch French-Canadian news during breakfast and French krimis during the weekend, my fluency level has dropped dramatically. So it makes no sense whatsoever to switch to that.
Also, with me not coming across too many Germans who seemed to speak English well enough to try it on me (the Musikparade had an overwhelmingly geriatric audience), I doubt French would be much use.
My brain is delightfully strange at times.

The Spanish I knew was of little use in trying to communicate with the lovely (and remarkably polite for a bunch of teenagers) people from the Mexican band, but then my Spanish is limited to the most basic stuff picked up from U.S. television, and maybe a handful of insults. I also have some vague recollections regarding the correct pronunciation of “pollo” and remember correcting my dad on it il y a quelques années, with some embarrassment due to the meaning of the mispronounced version, but I forgot what you’re actually supposed to be talking about when you’re saying it wrong.
Probably penises or something.

There were a bunch of other bands, either more showy marching bands, or military marching bands. There was a Polish one, a Ukranian one (which mixed the military with the showy into something pretty damn cool), a Czech one, a German one, and another Dutch one. The public were told we were Scottish, which we aren’t technically, but no one seemed to care.

Though I took my camera, I forgot to take pictures most of the time. Besides, while there was some vegan food, it wasn’t all that spectacular overall, so apart from being very happy that, unlike the rest of the people, I had my own food to fall back on and wasn’t fully relying on the catering, I didn’t really bother taking any pictures of it.

I did, however, take some other random pictures, mostly not related to food.

Don’t feed the water birds.

Use condoms.

Bracelet I got from one of the Mexican kids. At least I got to use some of the Spanish I did know to properly thank them.

DNA car! This is about as funny as it got for me, licence plate-wise.

And for your entertainment, a minute’s worth of afternoon autobahn, showing you, among other things, that I don’t have very steady hands.

To make this seem at least vaguely like a vegan food blog, I’ll tell you that I very much loved the Berief Soja Fit Schoko +Kalzium and wish I could get my hands on it here.

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While going through my stats from the last few days, I noticed someone found this site by searching for “picture of twigs as a meal”.
Cracked me up something good.

Back to food.

About a week ago, I actually went out to dinner for once. Some work-related thing because of someone leaving.

Before dinner we all had some autoped-related fun which was most amusing and got me slightly nostalgic. I hadn’t done anything like that since primary school, which might explain why it left me sore in peculiar places the day after. Worth it, though.

After the sporty bit of the day was over, we went to get us some proper dinner at Sumo, an all-you-can-eat Japanese restaurant.
While it wasn’t a vegan restaurant by any stretch of the imagination, there were enough vegan options for me and the waiting staff were very good about me asking about them.

Pictures of some of the things I ate:

Miso soup. Yum! I love this stuff. And, lucky for me, the chefs here didn’t put bonito flakes in it. Go chefs!

Some kind of udon noodle soup. Quite nice, if somewhat salty. The tofu was my favourite bit.

Some of the shrimpy tempura bits (not mine) on one plate and some of the sushi things on the one in the back.

I also had inari, which was some yummy tofu thing, chuka wakame, a kind of seaweed sushi (which can be seen on that last picture), the cucumber (also on that last picture) and pickle rolls, little curry triangles, little potato thingies, and some aubergine and courgette. Onna stick.
And lots of soy sauce. Just because I could. I also seem to have mastered at least the basics of eating with chopsticks. Yay!

It is a lot of fun eating this kind of food with generally pleasant people who enjoy it, i.e., are not afraid of seaweed and anything more ethnic than lasagna and bami.
With the friendly people, tasty food, and relaxed atmosphere, it’s the kind of place that’d be fun to visit with relatives or friends. Provided they don’t object to the occasional bit of nori, at least.

There could be more vegan option, I guess. While I felt there were enough of them, and all on the regular menu, too, there were still less than ten vegan things. Still, I’m generally perfectly content with limited options provided they’re good. If there are many vegan options I just get indecisive and frazzled, utterly unable to choose, which isn’t much fun. (just wondering. Do other vegans get this?)
Then again, the way this is set up, with the possibility to sample little bits and bites of everything, more vegan options wouldn’t necessarily lead to that kind of frazzle. Rather than having to decide what to try, I’d have to decide what to try first, which is a lot easier and a lot more fun.

The other slightly negative thing about eating here is that I was peckish again pretty quickly after getting home. While I didn’t exactly stuff myself, I didn’t hold back, either. I just ate until I was satisfied. Still, it was easily folved with a before-bed snack and is something I’ll just have to remember for next time, should I ever go here, or somewhere similar, again.

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Three things I very much love at the moment:

So, in order to see how it would be like to prepare all my meals using foods I already had at home, I chose to not do any grocery shopping at all this past (almost) week.

It wasn’t all that difficult, it saved me time, and it most likely saved me money. It got me using some long-forgotten mysterious foods, it got me soaking beans again, and I ate more soup than I normally do. And while I didn’t buy any fresh vegetables, I still had plenty at hand to make reasonably healthy meals. I could’ve eaten some more fruit, though. I had three fruity breakfasts and a meal containing an apple, but apart from that my fruit intake was pretty pathetic.

While I will have to do some grocery shopping in future, I will try to look ahead a little more and use the things I already have instead of continually buying more food.
This will take some planning, but I should be able to get myself organised enough to set up a basic meal plan. Probably…