Introductions are in order!

Hello, and thank you for checking out my new website! If you’d like a little background on me, I’ll give it to ya. 🙂

This is my other blog: The Girl Who Stole The Eiffel Tower

There, I chronicle my life in France. I’m originally from Pennsylvania, where I grew up eating the crap that most middle class families eat. Canned and frozen goods, lots of candy, but then of course as much fruit as I could lay my hands on. And I was a kid who actually loved her vegetables, too.

Sometime around 14 years old, I decided to go vegetarian. I don’t remember my exact reasons, but part of it was I just didn’t think meat tasted all that great. Granted, my dad over-cooked nearly everything (one time he actually set fire to the chicken on the grill) and the only condiment we seemed to own was ketchup, but I decided to give it up. I think bacon was the last thing to go. For some reason, I love meat fat. Yep, kind of still do, though I haven’t had it in ages. Anyway, I went veggie, to the dismay of my parents who continued to try to feed me poultry and fish. After leaving home I became a better vegetarian for a while, but then lapsed back into meat-eating.

Fast forward several years, and I’m vegetarian again! And then I gradually started becoming more vegan. OK, so I never gave up sushi, I admit that. But here in France it’s not all that great anyway, so I have it much less often. 🙂 So I’m back on the track to becoming vegan, and then I read a couple books like The China Study and the 80 10 10 Diet. Although I already had a stack of raw food recipe books on my shelf, these books are making a lot of sense to me. So in the past month I’ve had a growing supply of fresh fruit in my house and have been sticking to a perhaps 75% raw diet.

I decided to start this blog and the accompanying website (and soon-to-be ebook) after about a year in Paris, struggling to find something to EAT. I was living in a small place with a tiny fridge and no real kitchen, so I couldn’t store much at home, let alone cook much. And going out to eat was a nightmare. Everything seemed to have meat snuck in there somewhere, and if it didn’t, then the thing was just covered in cheese. I’ve since moved on to a bigger kitchen and a bigger fridge, and have relaxed a bit at home now that most of my meals are just fruit or salads, but going out is still a challenge. So I decided to take up the challenge and do something that would help other vegans struggling in Paris. It seriously is a country where you get looks of confusion if you say you don’t eat meat or dairy. I read on someone’s blog that in a discussion between herself and school officials at her son’s school, she was told vegetarianism was not a recognized diet in France and that they would have to keep serving him meat at lunch!

So here I am, ready to do my part. I’m compiling a list of every vegan and vegetarian restaurant in Paris and hitting them all. And when I go out to a “normal” restaurant I will also post reviews of them here, listing anything edible that I find on their menu.

I will be doing my best to provide French content here, as well, but my French is not so good yet, so please excuse me!

I’m still in the process of organizing the website, so you’ll be watching it grow over the next couple months. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to drop me a note. Thanks!