Woohoo! This is my first ever podcast recording. I can't believe it.

It's four years in the making. 

My Journey

My journey to being vegan has been a long one. When I did become vegan in 2015, it was like all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle had come together. 

When I was 16, I decided to become vegetarian. 

There were a few things that brought me to this decision. 

We didn't even watch a lot of TV but it's interesting how TV does affect my life or has affected my life. They were sitcoms from the UK and in one there was a woman who had turned her lounge room into her bedroom and she was a hippie and proclaimed that she was vegetarian and she wasn't going to eat animals. 

I had no idea I had been eating animals

This just got me started thinking. Was I eating animals? I had no idea to be honest that I was eating animals even though my Mom had talked about how a T-bone came from the part of an animal's leg. It dawned on me that I was actually eating animals. 

This woman on the sitcom was highly ridiculed for being vegetarian and that really got me thinking because I was already looking at people who were marginalised and wondering why they were ridiculed for being marginalised. 

The other show was the Young ones; there was a hippie in there called Neil and he was forever at the stove stirring his mung bean soup and it looked revolting and everyone laughed about it but I liked the idea of mung beans. 

I asked my Mom if she would buy some mung beans and she did and we started sprouting them and they were delicious. I then announced to my mum that I wanted to be vegetarian and she gave me a salad that night without the ham. I couldn’t cope with that. I decided not to be vegetarian. 

Find out where you are going to get your protein from

By the end of the week it didn't feel right to be eating meat again so I told my mum I would be vegetarian again. She said she would support me if I found out where I would get my protein from. That took me to the school library where I went and did a big search on what protein was and where I was going to get it from. That made life as a vegetarian super easy.

I did have a wobble in my thirties when I read the blood type diet which, by the way, has no scientific backing. I started eating meat again, got very sick quite quickly and was very conflicted ethically. I soon stopped that and continued being vegetarian, created a vegetarian catering business, a very successful catering business.

The Vegan Chef Training  

Then in 2014 I decided that I was going to start a vegetarian chef training because I wasn't able to train as a chef which was something that I wanted to do when I was 15, but I was laughed at because I was vegetarian. 

I went on to a different path and became a primary school teacher and in 2014 I looked around to see if there were any chef trainings and there weren't any chef trainings for vegetarians. 

I could see on social media all these people who were wanting to work in the field of vegan cooking but there was no avenue for them so I decided to create what I thought was going to be a vegetarian cooking training.

I was criticised by vegans for not creating a vegan training.  It got me thinking and at that time I was reading  a book called Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and I started reading it and there was so much of it that just made me cry and cry and made me think about what I was doing. 

Looked up to Vegans

While I was catering I would get a vegan along on retreats and they loved the food I made for them and I felt so much respect for them because they were taking their food choices to the next level.  They weren't harming any animals and they were having a smaller impact on the harm of animals than I was as a vegetarian, but it scared the living daylight's out of me to become vegan because of my business.  Was my business going to survive if I became vegan? As a result I just kept that thought in the background.

At that point eggs had already gone from my diet I wasn't eating eggs just the smell of eggs made me feel ill, I never ate honey and I hadn't bought leather products for a good few years prior.

As I was preparing the syllabus for the  vegan-chef-training I was thinking and reading the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffran Foer and giving the book to Mak to read so that he could read the section on the pigs because I had cried so much up until the section on the pigs and I just thought I can't bear any more and he  gave me a rundown on what that section was. This tipped me over the edge,  I couldn’t eat the by-products of animals any more.

My commitment to being vegan

 I knew I had to really commit to being fully vegan but how was I going to do it. When I was writing the syllabus for the vegan chef training  I made a walnut sauce to go with pasta and it was delicious. 

It was just as delicious as a cream sauce. I went to bed after eating the pecan sauce and I slept right through the night, woke up going wow, that was amazing, because every time I made a cream sauce to go with pasta I woke up in the night incredibly nauseous. This time was different.

That was my decision to ditch dairy. 

This was just a few weeks before the chef training commenced and I made a massive announcement and said it was going to be a vegan chef training.

The best decision I had ever made

The vegan chef training was very well received, then the very next day I flew down to Canberra to cater for Justine Janssen's yoga retreat in Bawley Point and at that stage everything had been planned to be vegetarian.  I cooked dairy and eggs but didn’t eat any of it. 

It felt like the best decision I'd ever made to be vegan but then when I got back to my brother’s after the retreat I had this big block of cheese left over and I got stuck into it, I ate chunks of it one after the other. After my pig out I felt incredibly guilty. I was letting everyone down but the person I was letting down the most was myself because it had felt so incredibly good for my body, for my mental health, for every part of me, that I had made the decision to be vegan.  So it was that day in May 2015 that I did not eat another piece of cheese or have any dairy and I became vegan. Yahoooooo.

It has been the best decision I've made in my life. It's been rocky. I was labelled a fundamentalist at the beginning because when I find something that I am very passionate about, like when I was 16 and working with people with disabilities I was so passionate about it I told everybody about what I was doing and about how we needed to treat disabled people with more respect.   If anyone spoke out of turn I was on to them and I actually came with this same passion for being vegan.

I came with the energy of,  why would you want to be eating dairy if you can eat this amazing walnut sauce. Because I had this sort of energy I was labelled fundamentalist and I lost friends and that really concerned me. I had a lot of sleepless nights over it but I got over it because I've got new friends now who are vegan or vegetarian.  Some of my the  friends that I lost have come back and we've discussed how maybe I was a little bit over the top and they’ve shared they felt  guilty and some of them are even vegan now. 

Another difficulty was going out to eat. I remember the first time I went out to eat and I asked if they had any vegan food at the cafe and they laughed at me. I was so stressed, I thought what have I done, I am going to find life a whole lot harder now.

Then there was the issue of my business.  I announced my catering would all be vegan now. I didn’t lose a single client and they all loved the food. Many people said the food was even better now it was vegan as it was very creative.  My business flourished and got even busier.

Vegan number one for my health

As I'm talking and you're listening, if you're not vegan don't think you can't listen to this podcast and that I'm a fundamentalist vegan, I'm not. I want to help you along your journey to either become vegan or if there's no way you're ever going to be vegan I want to help you add more plant-based food into your diet if that's what you want to do. 

If I am totally honest I'm vegan, number one not for the animals. I'm vegan number one for my health, because after doing my nutrition degree which was a mainstream nutrition degree at Deakin University and seeing all the science, I am 1000% percent convinced that a vegan diet is the healthiest diet you can have if it's done properly, if you're eating all of your nutrients and you're not eating vegan junk food.  I will go a step further and say if you're eating vegan organic food.

I'm vegan, number one for my health, then for the animals, for the environment and for my spirituality because when I was still eating animal products I was completely conflicted and my meditation could not go as deep as it can go now when I'm not conflicted.

What it takes on a daily basis to be vegan

What it takes just on a daily basis is, I get to really eat amazing food that is so healthy and delicious and the one problem with that is I eat too much of it so I have got a few extra kilos on. Food has never tasted as good as it has since I've been making vegan food.

Recipe share

Walnut Sauce 

¾  cup of walnuts

½  cup of boiling water  (if you have a Nutribullet just use room temperature water)

½ cup of soy milk 

¾ tsp salt or herb salt so maybe three quarters of a teaspoon 

2 cloves of cooked garlic 

100g pasta per person or 80g if you are a smaller eater

100g mushrooms sliced, and chopped veg of your choice (zucchini, spinach, broccoli)

1.        Cook the pasta as the instruction say. Add the vegetables to the boiling water.

2.        Blitz the rest of the ingredients in the blender. Then mix in with the cooked veg and pasta.

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 Have the most awesome week and until next time I hope you get to cook amazing food.