Steph Not Stephanie

I’m going a little off topic here, so bear with me. Or don’t and go read Buzzfeed. You’ve already counted as traffic, so thanks for visiting!

I’m somewhere around my three-year anniversary as a vegetarian, a thought that struck me as bonkers all of a sudden. I messaged a friend, who thought I had lost my damn mind.

Me: Dude, I’m a real vegetarian. As in haven’t-eaten-meat-in-almost-three-years vegetarian!

Friend: Um, is this news to you?

It wasn’t, but for some reason it hit me that I am an actual, legitimate, for real vegetarian. This is crazy for many reasons I’ve gone into before, but also not crazy for even more. Some great things have come out of this whole journey: My business at the time landed a contract with the Toronto Vegetarian Association, I lost a bunch of weight (although I attribute that to many other things as well), and even more amazingly, I learned how to cook.

For those of you who have either known me for a while or had the pleasure of sampling my pre-veg culinary skills, you know what I’m talking about. I decided to learn how to make real food about a year into this journey, and holy crap, I think I’m there. I post my meals on Instagram because a) this is 2015 and a meal doesn’t count if no one sees it, and b) I don’t want to force people to look at it on Facebook. You can opt in to that if you so choose. It started out more a documentation of failures (kale I set on fire and lost battles with food processors), but a funny thing happened along the way: I learned how to cook.

Yesterday a friend asked me to start another blog with recipes (yeah, ain’t nobody got time for that). Others echoed that sentiment. Once I discovered how much I really liked spending time in the kitchen, I started experimenting with new recipes, trying them to see if they’re worthy of cooking for loved ones. Because that’s another big thing for me, cooking for people I like/love/tolerate. If you’re in my life, chances are I am going to shove food at you. Sad? Here’s some food I made. Happy? Here’s some food I made. And if we’re dating, I’m going to shove that food at you and be hella neurotic and fuss and downplay my skills because if you don’t like it, I will be mortified. So maybe lie and say you do. There’s a McDonald’s down the street where you can get a Big Mac later. See, I knew I’d find a way to sneak dating in here.

For those of you who care to, you can see my glorious creations (lovingly hashtagged #greenshit more often than not) at StephNotStephanie on Instagram. You may notice a lot of my food is vegan, and while I was vegan at home for about a year, I’m not anymore. Most of my dishes are. Deal with it.

For the recipe requesters: My go-to cookbooks are Fresh, Vegan Cooking for Carnivores, Oh She Glows, and the amazingly-named Veganomicon.

My favourite websites include Oh My Veggies, Vegetarian Times (I subscribe on my iPad as well because they’re fucking amazing), Buzzfeed’s veg features, and Thug Kitchen.

So invite me to your parties. I’ll bring hummus.