For the past year or so, I’ve suspected that I have a gluten sensitivity. When I eat bread and baked goods, not only do I have a much harder time losing and maintaining weight (even if staying in my calorie allowance), but my energy levels drop way down (which usually leads to my drinking more caffeine), and I end up spending the rest of the day craving more bread, more sweets.

Long ago, I did all the easy swaps: gluten-free pasta, wheat-free tamari, oats & granola instead of cereals, cutting nearly all the bread out of my life. I did start to feel a lot lighter and I had noticeably more energy throughout the day.

The one thing I just could not give up was seitan. And I held firmly to the belief that I didn’t have to give up seitan, because eating seitan made me feel good! Yes, it was high in gluten, but after I ate it, I felt satisfied and full of energy, and I dropped weight really easily.

Well, it turns out that I was right. Or, rather, I was wrong. I was right that seitan isn’t  a problem for me because I was wrong in thinking that I am gluten-sensitive. What I am is a fast mid-oxidizer.

Oxidation is the process by which your body converts food into energy. The rate at which this process happens is your oxidation rate, and people fall on a spectrum between fast and slow, with most people ending up closer to the middle (balanced oxidizers). I took a test which placed me as a fast mid-oxidizer, and then I went about my merry way to find out what that meant.

Then I got to this page, and when I read this sentence, I had a giant AHA moment:

“When a fast mid-oxidizer eats too many simple carbohydrates it is likely that there will be weight gain, hypoglycemia, uncontrolled hunger, and chronic fatigue.”

YES! So that’s the good news! I know what is going on with me!

Then I read on to find out how I can adjust my diet to my oxidation rate, to increase my energy levels and keep off weight. What I discovered is that the suggested protein percentage for mid and fast oxidizers is 40%, and they recommend that fast oxidizers avoid grains as much as possible, getting their carbs and fiber instead from root vegetables and starches.

Uh.

In a way, this completely makes sense, because when I was pregnant and cramming protein in my pie-hole every chance I could, I felt really sensational. You know, except for the whole pregnant thing. Many of the tricks that I learned as a pregnant vegan are about to come in really handy, I think!

So I’m off to make a giant batch of seitan. Wish me luck as I attempt to reduce my soy and double my protein intake. If you take the oxidation test, I’d love to hear from you if you feel the same AHA moment as I did, or if it’s way off for you, or what.

Karla’s post the other day combined with Julie and Jay opening the Native Bowl cart really drove the message home for me that if there is a recurring theme in Portland vegan cuisine, it’s definitely the “complete meal in a bowl.” No question. The majority of the vegan-friendly restaurants I frequent offer one or many, and why not? It’s economical and easy to prepare for the staff, and it’s delicious, healthy, and wholly satisfying for the customer. Win-win, dudes. And since Portland weather is between 50 and 70 degrees ten months out of the year, it doesn’t hurt that digging into a big hot bowl of food is heart- and body-warming.

quinoa, chickpeas, broccoli, lemon-tahini sauce

We eat a lot of bowls here at my house, too. Just this week, I went to my favorite local grocery (the teeny-tiny grocery store inside of Proper Eats) and loaded up on ingredients to make mix-and-match bowls all week.

I bought:

• a big bunch of swiss chard
• a poblano pepper
• a red bell pepper
• garlic
• onions
• cilantro
• parsley
• spinach
• lemons
• limes
• asceptic tofu
• brown rice in bulk
• dried polenta grits in bulk
• dried black beans in bulk
• dried chickpeas in bulk

I came home, and while listening to podcasts, I whipped out in about an hour:

• lemon-tahini sauce (Yellow Rose Recipes)
• nacho sauce ( Yellow Rose Recipes)
• tangy sour cream (Yellow Rose Recipes)
• roasted red pepper ranch (Yellow Rose Recipes, omit chipotle and sub roasted red pepper)
• roasted poblano-cilantro sauce
• spicy peanut sauce (upcoming potluck zine)

With these ready to go in the fridge, and leftover white beans, quinoa, and some veg from last week, I’ve been able to quickly assemble lunches and dinners for us all week. I know that I’ve said it here before, so I’m sorry to sound like a broken record, but: you don’t need to rely on packaged and processed foods to make a quick meal. That is kind of my mantra. Consider me the anti-Sandra Lee. (Sandra, if you could just put down the cocktail, scissors, and glue gun and stop creating the elaborate tablescapes, you might have been able to find the 30 seconds it takes to chop the broccoli yourself instead of buying the shrink-wrapped stuff from the deli section, you psycho.)

nacho bowl

Back to bowls! I think that my friend Julie “It’s in the mix!” Hasson would agree with me on this point: if you’re playing around with making whole bowls at home, and you want to take your bowl from a 7 to a 9.5, try multiple (complementary) sauces together. You don’t have drown your food in sauce—it will taste a lot better if you don’t—but try adding a squirt of hot sauce to your barbecue bowl, or a dollop of ranch to your baked beans bowl.

I’m not going to list “a piece of fruit,” because, come on.

5. Primal Strips. You guys, how did these get so good? I only get the seitan ones because they have better mouthfeel than the soy ones, but I love them so much. Matthew hates when either I or Milo have been eating Primal Strips, because he says he can “smell it on us,” but he chews sunflower seeds all the time, which make him smell like salty driftwood, and not in good way, so.

4. Trail mix. I only get the all raw kinds, and if I can’t find any, I just buy all the ingredients and make my own.

3. Olives. The fancier, the better. A handful of olives is fantastic appetite suppressant when you look up and all of the sudden it’s 7 PM and you haven’t even started dinner yet and your stomach is already growling. If I had to give up every food in my life one by one, I’d save olives for the final five.

2. A few squares of dark chocolate. Yes, I eat chocolate almost every day. Having a couple of squares of high quality dark chocolate pushes the button in my brain that wants a sweet, but it’s such a small amount, and so little sugar, that it barely affects my glycemic levels. Why am I even giving a reason for eating chocolate every day? Why aren’t you eating chocolate every day is the real question.

1. Nachos! Granted, you can’t throw these together unless you already have all of the ingredients ready to go in your fridge, but I love nachos so much that I consider the advanced prepwork to be worth it. A couple of years ago, a PPKer (please email me if this is you!) compared the nutritional information in a batch of nachos prepared with the Nacho Sauce and Tangy Sour Cream from Yellow Rose Recipes to the nutritional information of dairy-laden nachos. Mine had several hundred fewer calories and practically no fat. That’s right, dudes, my nachos are straight up good for you. I have also been known to make nacho bowls with brown rice, beans, sauteed swiss chard, nacho sauce, tangy sour cream, and roasted poblano-cilantro sauce in the fall as a complete meal. (When I say “I have also been known,” you know that means I had it for dinner last night, right?)

nachos from a billion years ago

I think I’ll be doing top 5 posts this week. I know it’s lazy, but it’s also fun. I mean, let’s be honest here, which would you rather read: a long heartfelt history of my problems with my lady parts, or a top 5 list with photos? Yeah, that’s what I thought!

Breakfast is my favorite meal to eat out in Portland. I happen to think that it’s what Portland does best. I’m going with “favorite” here, but you should know, of course, that favorite is not necessarily synonymous with best.

I will employ the countdown to favorite, starting with #5:

5. Vegan Tofu Scramble (with hashbrowns and toast) from Jam on Hawthorne: The tofu scramble is tasty, sure, but I could make it myself at home and save the trip. I’m at Jam for their hash browns and their JAM on my toast. Every table features two of their four housemade jams—but we have been known to poach jam from empty tables before. The pear chai is my favorite, but they’re all delicious.

4. Breakfast Burrito from Laurelthirst: What differentiates this from just being a run of the mill breakfast burrito is their housemade veggie sausage. Laurelthirst also makes vegan pancakes, which are the favorite pancakes of many of my pals, but like I said: I’m a savory breakfast girl. If only they served the pancakes at night…

Breakfast Burrito from Laurelthirst

3. Everything Bagel with Chipotle Cream Cheese and Bac’un Chive Cream Cheese (opposite sides) and Hempmilk-Almond Milk Latte from Sweetpea Baking: I hope I’m not pissing anyone at Sweetpea off by saying that this is my favorite breakfast there, but I’m not a sweet breakfast type! I love pancakes and waffles and french toast, but I can only eat them if it’s after noon. If you’re like me, then get this awesome bagel & cream cheese combo, then eat it while sitting in a booth and people watching (or hugging Katie), then get a Caramel Nut Bar on your way out for later.

Honorable Mention: McBrunch at Sweetpea. I don’t want to love vegan versions of the McGriddle and Egg McMuffin, but I do. I soooooo do. Thankfully, they don’t do this one frequently, so I don’t have to feel bad about indulging every few months.

McBrunch at Sweetpea

2. Vegan Sausage and Maple Waffle from Flavourspot: Veggie sausage, maple butter, wrapped in a warm waffle. What is your problem? Why aren’t you eating this right now?

Vegan Sausage and Maple Waffle from Flavourspot

1. Vegan Potatoes (with tofu added and a side of cinnamon toast) from Junior’s Cafe: This hits exactly what I want in a breakfast on every level: crispy potatoes, sauteed veggies, perfectly seasoned and cooked tofu,  a creamy and tangy (and spicy!) sauce, and the very slightly sweet cinnamon toast on the side. The portions are so generous that I can stretch one meal into two by taking my leftovers home, which means that I get to eat it again later. Heaven.

Vegan Potatoes from Junior's

Come back tomorrow for my top 5 favorite ways to hold a fork!

I’m proud to say that I was the very first customer of the brand-spankin-new vegan food cart in Portland, Native Bowl, run by friend Julie Hasson and her husband Jay.

Milo and I showed up at a little after 11:30 this morning and chatted to Julie and Jay while they prepared our bowl, the Mississippi Bowl: BBQ soy curls, slaw, peppercorn ranch dressing, scallions, and rice. It’s really hard to tell from this picture what’s underneath the slaw, but trust me, it’s a creamy & tangy delight.

I can’t wait to go back. One of my favorite things about the cart is that, because Julie and Jay are parents, they thought to buy an easel and provide chalk to give the kids something to do while they wait. Totally genius. Milo happily drew bees on the chalkboard for Julie and me while buzzing. (Bees are his current favorite.)

Native Bowl is one of a half dozen or so carts in the new Mississippi Marketplace, and we will for sure be visiting them a lot. I can’t wait to see how the menu evolves over time.

Congratulations to Julie and Jay!

Appropriately, I spent the entire first day of the (annual) Vegan Month of Food cooking. My pal Katie Jane came over this afternoon and drank hot toddies with me as I hurled myself around the kitchen, knocking out seven different Thanksgiving-ish dishes from my upcoming potluck zine. She then took photos of the food and then—finally!—we ate! I’m pretty sure that I could eat Thanksgiving foods every Thursday of the month and never get tired of them, although our plates were hurting for some green.

While Katie was here, I told her about the most recent revelation in my diet, which is that I’ve come to decide that I need to lay way off the soy.

I’ve had killer menstrual cramps every month for as long as I can remember, but it seems as if the pain intensified and the duration lengthened in my early 20s and hasn’t let off since. When I say killer cramps, I’m talking about: occasional vomiting from pain, having to take at least one day off of work every month to lay in bed with the heating pad, popping maximum strength ibuprofen like candy just to take the edge off. I’ve gone through childbirth, and I can tell you that I was in active labor for hours before the contractions were worse than my standard monthly cramps.

A few years ago, I saw multiple doctors about the situation, and after several hundreds of dollars in co-pays and prescriptions, the diagnosis was a universal: It might be endometriosis, but it would take a lot more tests (money) to find out for sure, and even then, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it. Most likely the cramps would ease off after I had my first child.

Well, I had my first child, followed by eleven blissful months of no period at all. Then, last October, the period came back, and the cramps came with it, strong as ever. And now I’m desperate, because I have a son, and I feel really guilty if I spend two days every month unable to be a mother to him because I can barely get out of bed.

I’ve been doing a lot of research in the last week or so, and I’ve noticed that soy keeps popping up in lists of foods to avoid if you have bad menstrual cramps, because of the phytoestrogens. My soy intake is currently higher than I would like for it to be, and while it would be nearly impossible to completely eliminate it from my diet, it’s worth it to me to reduce it drastically for a month or two and see if I notice a difference. The plan is to finish up what we have in the house and then try to switch over to beans, nuts, seeds, grains, and seitan as our protein options.

Dudes, I’m cringing at the very idea of being a soy-free vegan. Soy is in everything; it’s like corn or peanuts. Damn.

Let me know if you’ve reduced or cut soy out of your diet, especially if you did it for the same reasons. I need some commiseration here!