Vegan eating out: Subway

I have a confession to make. This is the second time I try to stick to a vegan diet. The first time, it was from 2008 to 2009. I managed to eat entirely vegan for a year. Then I travelled to Brazil for the first time, and I got tempted by their vegetarian pizzas...and that was it. Now, in Brazil again, I decided to give it another go.

The first time I became vegan, I didn't tell my family, and when they came to visit me in Toronto my mom proudly handed me a bag of curd cheese she had brought from Quebec, thinking I would be happy to make my own poutine. I gently refused saying:

"Thanks, but I don't eat cheese anymore. I am vegan..."

My mother looked at me with surprise. She was horrified.

"You don't eat cheese anymore? You need it for your proteins."

She continued bugging me even when we were waiting in the line to enter the CN Tower.

"Not even a little egg?"

My mother's reaction is not uncommon when I tell people I am vegan.

"But it's just for a diet. You won't eat like that for the rest of your life, right?"

I thought I could make a series showing people what vegans eat when they go out.

For example, we can go to Subway.

I learned recently that Subway is trying some vegan sandwiches in some locations in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

There seems to be more vegan toppings in some countries too (like the U.S.) than in Brazil.

Here, we have only the white italian bread that is vegan. The others have cheese or honey in it. Sadly, even the whole wheat bread seems to contain L-cystein, and I am not sure if the source if animal or human (yuck). So I stay away from it.

I usually have a veggie delight on white italian bread with all the veggies (here this means lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, pickles, black olives and cucumbers). I top it with a fat free sweet onion sauce.

I am also not sure if Subway's breads here contain azodicarbonamide. A chemical used to make yoga mats... So don't be fooled: eating at a fast food restaurant is always fast food.

Pasta with mushroom cream

I am a big fan of re-using the leftovers and changing the dish a little bit for less boredom!

I had some cream of mushroom soup left from yesterday's dinner. I tossed it in with vegan pasta and voilà!

It was delicious. :)

Let's see

I have had a food blog before. One in Portuguese. I posted a total of 12 recipes there. Then I gave it up. I also had another blog in French in which I posted two recipes before closed it down. I was never really good at staying in focus. I attribute this flaw to a self-assessed attention deficit disorder.

I realized I had this disorder when a friend of mine told me she has ADHD. I seemed to have the same difficulty she has, minus the hyperactivity part. I do not get that excited about things, apart from the few and occasional joyful bursts. Still, for me, it was an epiphany: I seldom can stay focus on a conversation, make silly inattention mistakes, or serious ones.

In school, I was certainly the student who stared the most at the teachers, but my mind was never there. My face used to turn a vivid red when the teachers asked me a question, thinking I was their most fervent follower. I rarely knew what they were talking about.

I cannot drive a car because of that: I stop seeing the road, I think about other things while driving. It's very dangerous.

I also have a hard time sticking to my projects. My attention is divergent. I start doing other things. Still, I come back to it if it is something important to me and I manage to finish it, after going through countless detours.

I am an aspiring author. I am writing, and love writing, but I am working on four books at the moment. I write a little bit of one, then another, and another again. Right now, my attention is diverging again to try to keep a food blog once more. Let's see how this time goes.