That was our adventure for the evening.

Amy, who has been the driving force and the one to thank for all of this, worked up an eating plan for the week that stayed with mostly vegan foods. She came up with seven different vegan dinner meals that she felt like she would have no problem preparing and that neither of us would have a problem eating. We went to the market to buy just that food.

It was certainly more of an adventure than we really expected. Remember, we've both come from traditions where the parents eat out a large portion of the time, and from which those few times when food is prepared at home, it's a heat-and-eat situation. While we'd both made a number of things completely from scratch, we had never done that since we'd been together.

The store was not terribly large but it had a very nice selection of groceries. We started in the produce, because that was the first section. Very quickly, our unfamiliarity with all things that are not quick-prep was very apparent. The recipes called for things that I had certainly never heard of (shittake mushrooms, garlic chive, leets, etc.) as well as things that I had heard of but couldn't identify readily (any herb, celery, ginger, regular onions, and other things). Amy was in the same boat.

If nothing else, our foray into vegetarianism had already taught us something: our society is pretty fucked up if two people can go five years apiece of independent living and not be able to identify a large number of the vegetables needed to cook some fairly simple meals. I mean, really. I've always like to cook (if someone else is willing to clean...) but I never really dealt with this kind of cooking much.

We spent nearly 40 minutes in the produce section just trying to figure out how much of what things we needed. We had to ask what a garlic chive was, and the lady looked at us like we were from Neptune.

After the produce section, things came relatively easy but progress was still slow. Just needed some silken tofu, firm tofu, chips/salsa, veggie ground beef, seitan, cooking sherry (of all things, and I fucking got carded for it!), soy milk, bread, frozen spinach, Vegenaise, flours, some spices. Amy's pretty gung-ho about the soon transition all-the-way to veganism, so she was diligently checking labels for ingredients that she had just learned to be animal related. She said that the sooner she learned, the sooner she could more easily make that decision. Fair enough.

I got some chocolate soy pudding and fresh apple cider for myself as a treat. I think (though I'm not entirely sure) that our entire cartload was vegan.

The grand total for four (fairly full) bags of groceries? $107-something. Wow. This ain't Aldi anymore.

But then another sad point about our society's obsession with convenience of food: while we were driving home, Amy and I had a five minute discussion on what we were supposed to do with the produce when we got it home.

Amy seemed to think that the drawers in the bottom of the refridgerator were for things like these fresh vegetables. I thought these drawers mostly for convenience. It turned out that she was right, because she showed me the little script word on the handle that said "Vegetable Crisper."

I'll be damned. I thought those were for cans of soda.