Two-day vegetarian

Kale in a smoothie (www.bbcgoodfood.com photo)

Eating healthy is all the rage today. Scroll through Instagram’s explore page and you will see what appears to be a million and one voices shouting at you to be healthy. To be specific a complete plant-based diet is the latest fad.

In all honesty, because I grew up eating meat (chicken and beef mostly), for a long time I thought it would be impossible to ever go a week without it. Thursdays and Fridays were   vegetarian days when I lived at home with my parents and they always left me feeling unsatisfied to the extent that I would beg my uncle who usually took us to school to take me to Popeyes or to a nearby Chinese restaurant for my meat fix. On Thursdays we ate some type of vegetable with rice and on Fridays we would have dhal and rice.

It’s not that the food tasted bad on those days, but there was no particular explosion of flavour going on like on the other days. I guess it was since then that I attributed being vegetarian or vegan as some sort of daily torture. When people told me they were vegan, I viewed it as self-inflicted punishment, and I immediately felt sorry for them.