Earth Week Challenge 2020: Meatless Monday

This year, for the first time, I signed up to participate in the Earth Week Challenge set by the environmental Organization Before It's Too Late. This is actually not a single challenge but a series of seven, one for each day of the week. So, this week, instead of doing one long post here on the blog, I'll be doing a series of seven short posts to let you know about each day's challenge as I tackle it.

The week starts off with Meatless Monday. The challenge is simply to avoid meat or dairy and eat "delicious vegan meals" instead. The 7 Day Guidebook on Before It's Too Late's website talks a bit about how meat and dairy production contribute to climate change and about how you can mitigate the problem by choosing plant-based, organic, and locally grown foods. It also touches on the problem of overfishing and how to choose sustainable seafood options.

Now, normally, this challenge would be quite easy for me. Brian and I eat about 90 percent vegan as it is, and we regularly go whole days or even weeks without eating significant amounts of animal products. But, ironically, this particular day happened to be one of the days it wasn't so easy. You see, before Passover, we decided to pick up a pound of real mozzarella cheese — our first in months — since our homemade vegan mozzarella contains soy and yeast, both no-nos for Passover. And since we didn't eat it all during Passover, Brian decided to use the rest last night to make our favorite butternut squash lasagna. We ate about half of it last night, leaving plenty of leftovers for today's lunch — but since it's just loaded with dairy, it's off-limits for a Meatless Monday meal. And the only other leftovers we had in the fridge happened to be an experimental dish Brian had made during Passover with tuna, potatoes, and eggs. (If I'd been thinking this through, I would have eaten that stuff for lunch yesterday, leaving the vegan pasta with eggplant and tomato for today. But I just didn't think about it.)

So, instead, I had to whip up a quick vegan lunch with what we had on hand. Not wanting to cook a whole meal just for this, I resorted to that vegan lunchtime favorite, the classic peanut butter sandwich, made on Brian's Basic Brown Bread. (Lately he's been making it with sugar instead of honey, so it is truly vegan.) I paired this with some baby carrots (also left over from Passover, since my usual afternoon snack of popcorn was off-limits), a clementine, a cup of almond milk, and one of Brian's vegan-friendly chocolate chip cookies. Definitely not a meal to feel deprived over, even if it's not quite as tasty as lasagna.

Fortunately, Brian assures me that tonight's dinner will be chili, which he always makes with Gimme Lean rather than real beef, so no special effort will be needed to make that meatless. He's even gotten into the habit of making the accompanying cornbread with aquafaba rather than egg, so the meal is naturally vegan. And if I feel the need for some dessert, I can simply fix myself a cup of cocoa made with almond milk and topped with Trader Joe's coconut whipped topping.