umaru

@@richdan I sent you an email of my vegan chili recipe. I will upload more recipes soon. If you have questions, feel free to message me! Good luck!

My tip would be to invest in a pressure cooker. Beans take a long time to cook, but pressure cookers make it so much faster. I make really great one-pot vegan bean dishes in my pressure cooker and it only take about 15 minutes of your active time and you wait about an hour and dinner is ready! I make a vegan chili, vegan baked beans, even tried vegan curry beans! They're all great and quick dinner options for me. Let me know if you want more info and I can send you myrecipes. Good luck!

Sorry to hear about your husband's job loss. It's hard not to grab a pint of ice cream and watch a movie at times like these. I recently started reading a book called "Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life" by Steven C. Hayes, PhD. It's really helped me sort through this type of emotional / mental struggle. To summarize, our language ability as humans can cause a lot of our suffering. It's important to be careful with our choice of words when we talk to ourselves. It's also important to know that we can place distance between ourselves and our thoughts. Our thoughts are merely an ongoing process of relating things (evolution has given us this big advantage over all other species), so we should take our thoughts with a grain of salt. Do not ride your "mind-train". Imagine you were a fish in the ocean. They don't know they're in water; they just swim. We are like fish swimming in our thoughts. Thoughts are like Water to us. We can not help to think, it just comes naturally, like fish swimming in water. Sometimes that water is a icy cold, swirling into a cyclone. Sometimes that water is warm and calm on a beautiful summer's day (next to a tropical beach, probably!). One technique to bring distance between you and your thoughts and become aware of the water you're swimming in, is to use mindfulness techniques to "de-fuse" you and your thoughts. Here's one that I really like: Close your eyes and imagine you're sitting on a large warm rock next a gently flowing river. You see fallen leaves that drift away in the water. It's a sunny day. The birds are chirping. The air is fresh and you can feel the sun's rays on your face. Now, keep basking in this imagery for at least 5 minutes. When you catch yourself thinking other thoughts, bring yourself back to the large warm rock next to the river. Place whatever you were thinking on one of the fallen leaves and let it drift away in the water. I find that doing this exercise everyday (whether I'm having a bad day or a good one) really helps me organize my thoughts and keep me grounded. I hope it helps you as much as it has for me! Hugs, TT

Eggs are great! Sometimes I do egg white omelets with mushrooms and chives. Lately I've been in tofu mode. I really like silken tofu with soy sauce, but that's just me. Also, I'd try some beans. I make this killer one-pot baked beans that cooks in 30 minutes (you still have to pre-soak the beans). It's got no oil, salt, or refined sugars, so it's super healthy yet delicious! Message me if you want the recipe! Hope that helps!

I'm about 90% vegan and I really like Vega protein shakes. My favorite flavors are vanilla and tropical tango. Hope that helps!