Adventures in Eating: Whether Vegan or Omnivore There's a List for You

I first saw the vegan version of this Vegan 100 list on Girl Goes Vegan, who borrowed it from someone who borrowed it from someone.... You know how these things are. 

That sent me in search of the original Omnivore's 100 on the Very Good Taste blog. As Jill and Andrew, the creators of the list, wrote there, "The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food—but a good omnivore should really try it all."

The vegan list as published left some things on it from the original (like haggis!) so I deleted the stray meat items and made it 100% vegetarian/vegan.

I've been a vegetarian for I don't quite know how long--maybe eight or nine years? Before that I had the chance to try some unusual things at the North Idaho College annual Wild Game Feast and at a dinner prepared by the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association back in my legislative days. So I'm able to score pretty well on both lists thanks to my former life as an omnivore. (In fact, they don't list bear meat on the omnivore's list but I've had it. It's better in years the bears get lots of berries and honey.)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:
1) Copy this list into your own blog, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

4) What’s left are things you have not eaten yet that you would try.

(I note that my blog's style sheet makes the links look as if they're in boldface when they're not.)

The Vegan 100

1. Natto
2. Green Smoothie
3. Tofu Scramble
4. Agave nectar
5. Mangosteen
6. Creme brulee
7. Fondue
8. Marmite/Vegemite
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Nachos
12. Authentic soba noodles
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Taco from a street cart (yes, if they have a vegetarian option)
16. Boba tea
17. Black truffle (can't wait!)
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Gyoza
20. Vanilla ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Rice and beans
24. Knish
25. Raw scotch bonnet pepper  (because I'm not crazy and I've read about Scoville units)
26. Dulce de leche
27. Baklava
28. Pate (vegetarian, yes; diced fatty liver, no thanks)
29. Wasabi peas (yum!) 
30. Chowder in a sourdough bowl
31. Mango lassi
32. Sauerkraut
33. Root beer float
34. Mulled cider
35. Scones with buttery spread and jam
36. Vodka jelly
37. Gumbo (without meat)
38. Fast food french fries
39. Raw brownies
40. Fresh Garbanzo Beans
41. Dahl (also spelled dal)
42. Homemade soymilk
43. Wine from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
44. Stroopwafel (these sound delicious!)
45. Samosas
46. Vegetable Sushi
47. Glazed doughnut
48. Seaweed
49. Prickly pear
50. Umeboshi (I haven't had the fruit yet but I've had the vinegar made from it)
51. Tofurkey
52. Sheese (I haven't had this particular brand but I've had fake cheese, which is why I'm a vegetarian and not a vegan)
53. Cotton candy
54. Gnocchi
55. Piña colada
56. Birch beer
57. Carob chips
58. S’mores
59. Soy curls (kind of leathery and not worth it)
60. Chickpea cutlets
61. Curry
62. Durian
63. Homemade Sausages (vegan/vegetarian)
64. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
65. Smoked tofu
66. Fried plantain
67. Mochi
68. Gazpacho
69. Warm chocolate chip cookies
70. Absinthe
71. Corn on the cob
72. Whipped cream, straight from the can
73. Pomegranate
74. Fauxstess cupcake (what a fun recipe! memories of childhood)
75. Mashed potatoes with gravy (I have a great vegetarian gravy recipe from my 3 Bowls cookbook)
76. Jerky (vegetarian/vegan)
77. Croissants
78. French onion soup (it is entirely possible to make a wonderful, rich French onion soup without meat stock. I've done it.)
79. Savory crepes (again thanks to the 3 Bowls cookbook, I have a recipe for crepes made with chickpea flour stuffed with garlicky green beans)
80. Moussaka
81. Sprouted grains or seeds
82. Macaroni and “cheese”
83. Flowers
84. Matzoh ball soup (vegetarian/vegan)
85. White chocolate
86. Seitan
87. Kimchi
88. Butterscotch chips
89. Yellow watermelon
90. Chili with chocolate
91. Potato milk
92. Polenta
93. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
94. Raw cookie dough
95. Portabello mushrooms
96. Morels
97. Black rice
98. Sun-dried tomatoes
99. Bagels
100. Capers

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding (aka blood pudding)
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (see note above about Scoville units!)
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda (if they'll leave out the anchovies I'll give it a try)
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi (I've only had the sweet mango lassi)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (I've had cognac and I've tried a cigar--just not together)
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (my dad told us he'd eaten chocolate-covered ants and grasshoppers while he was overseas during World War II; he said the legs stick in your teeth)
43. Phaal (although it sounds vegetarian I think I'll pass; see Scoville units reference above)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu (being a vegetarian means not having to eat potentially poisonous fish)
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer (I had truly fresh homemade paneer, no less, thanks to dear friend Maggie teaching an Indian cooking class in my kitchen for a bunch of girlfriends)
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini (just not a big fan of olives)
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (well, as it's an ingredient in Kaopectate I guess in a way I have, but not directly!)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie (heck, in those lunches Mom packed I encountered many a Hostess product: Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, cupcakes)
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum (if I can get a vegetarian version, yes)
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare (but I've had rabbit)
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa (but watch the Scovilles....)
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Your turn

What isn't on either list that you think a well-rounded palate should experience? Any stories about adventures in eating? 

P.S. Given the number of links to Wikipedia on this page, we all might consider making a donation!

A Monday Thought or Two (or More)

Last week I cleaned my office so I'm starting off the new year in a shiny clean space. In my cleaning frenzy, though, I didn't throw out the things I have nearby to look at when I need to shake my brain loose so it works better. Among them are a few quotations to start off the week for you--


Each of us is a seed of divinely inspired possibility which, when nurtured in its proper context, can and will grow into the fullest expression of all we are supposed to become. 
- Thomas Parham


He who binds himself to a joy
Does the wingéd life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.
- William Blake


Pay attention.
Explore intelligently.
Judge soundly.
Decide and act responsibly.
- from a long-forgotten speaker who was summarizing someone's works on ethical decision making


What will you:
KEEP doing
START doing
STOP doing?

What metrics go with projects and how do they relate to goals? 


Your turn


Do you have a favorite inspirational thought to share?

A Life Manifesto. Or, as Oprah Would Say,Live Your Best Life

For me the word manifesto has distinct political connotations. Wikipedia backs me up on this. Seeing it these days attached to “life” as in “life manifesto” has felt a bit funny, even for someone like me with a long history of political awareness and engagement. Am I supposed to nail my 95 political beliefs to the door somewhere? (Confirmed as a Lutheran in high school—can you tell? It didn’t stick though.)

But then hey, it’s the new year. Time for a fresh start and all that. Resolutions? Nah. Too trite, too frangible, too much effort followed by guilt. Manifesto? Hmmm.

Mousing around yesterday I encountered Gwen Bell’s piece on preparing your life manifesto. A lot of these pieces have you creating visions of the future life you want to lead, very specific goals (which have to have deadlines to count as goals), or the life list/bucket list of things to do before you die (the ultimate to-do list with the Grim Reaper running the timer).

Her article is no exception. It does have fun options from the artsy-craftsy magazine collage approach (Eldest Daughter is all over this one) to the techno-enabled Lululemon Goaltending free worksheet for goal-setting.

These all have a fatal flaw for me (plus Eldest Daughter has all the good magazines at her new apartment). They seem to be about doing rather than being. We are human beings, not human doings.

Rather than the to-do list approach I think it’s more useful to have a to-be list.

As in, what kind of person do I want to be? Then I will just be that person in whatever “doing” circumstances life happens to hand me or I develop myself (which, as I’ve pointed out here and here, I have a tendency to overdo).

Another way of describing this list is as a set of values.

My career and life pathways may explain my preference for this kind of manifesto. Setting out without any specific career goals beyond “I’d like to work in publishing” and “I think politics and public service matter” with my two bachelor’s degrees from Washington State University under my belt took me to some amazing and wonderful places: VP of a (really really) small publishing company, the Idaho state legislature, short-time history teacher and later chairman of the board at North Idaho College, grad student, and my current role of nearly 13 years heading up communications at WSU Spokane, where we’re building the health sciences/medical campus of the future despite the rocky economy.

I usually describe my career path as serendipitous. Then I go on to say that serendipity is what happens to people who are paying attention. The readiness is all, as Hamlet noted, whether your personal sparrow is falling today or next year.

If I had started out with a really specific career goal and focused only on that I might have missed some wonderful opportunities. Being open to the possibilities and saying yes when it scared me a bit has had tremendous value.

The key linkage between things I’ve loved doing—serving in public office, teaching, communicating, drumming up support for bike commuting and active transportation—is that all of them require that I master a body of specialized knowledge and information and communicate about that content persuasively to other people in an effort to convince them to support a specific action or direction. That’s me. So I’ve got the “doing” part of Barb Chamberlain pretty well nailed.

The upbringing I received from my parents is worth a post of its own. That and all I’ve learned from all this doing have shaped my to-be/values list. The kind of person I want to be—and on my best days am—will (for starters):

• Pay attention and give time to the people I love. Every day.
• Understand the impact of my actions and purchases on the environment and choose to live lightly.
• Care about the living conditions, earning power and families of the people who make things I purchase and choose not to exploit people who aren’t lucky enough to live where I do.
• Think about the well-being of my community and the ones around us and invest my time in organizations and efforts that make this a better place to live.
• Treat every person with the dignity and respect we should accord each human being and create meaning in relationships.
• Be kind.
• Add value.
• Breathe.

Or, as someone much wiser than I explained it, I will strive to live with right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration (the Buddhist Eightfold Path, for those who may not recognize it).

Note that you can’t cross these off and be done with them. A to-be list is much, much more challenging than a to-do list.

Your turn

What am I missing? What kind of person do you want to be, and how will that shape your doing?

Related posts:

• It’s All in the Attitude
• Biking as Downtime and Other Musings on Overproductivity
• Overdoing: The Seven-Course Meal Approach to Life (written, oddly enough, Jan. 1, 2009--so I do have annual rituals of self-examination)
• Thanks for Asking: Unsolicited Advice on How to Live
• Not a Bucket List, Not Resolutions, Not Really
• Green Is the Color of Money: Growing a Sustainable Local Business Approach
•  The SISO Method for Life Management
• Don't Buy That Case of Stuff on Sale. I'm Serious.
• Yet Another 11 Little Secrets
• Stuff I Didn't Do Today, Or, I Know What Happiness Tastes Like
• 3 Things My Mother Taught Me

Bonus item: A really relevant cartoon that is posted on Flickr (c) all rights reserved so I'm just linking, not embedding.

2010 Blogging Year in Review

A round-up of my 2010 blogging year just for the heck of it:

What I wrote about in 2010
(click for larger image)

Top post traffic:

• The Spokane Blogs list. Not surprising this one has over twice the views of anything else on the site since I keep pimping it out promoting it via Twitter, Facebook, LaunchPadINW and the signature block in my personal account to find more blogs via crowd-sourcing. I started with 105; the list is up to 237 as of Jan. 1, 2011.
• Help Bike Shop Girl Ride Again. I'm really glad to see this one getting lots of page views as a gesture of support for a bike-riding woman I've never met who was hit by a driver and needs encouragement to get back on the street.
• How Bikes Can Save the World. A transcript of my 5-minute speed talk at Ignite Spokane in September that reveals some of the (ahem) less worthy reasons I ride.

Top post comments: A tie between said trying-to-be-comprehensive list of Spokane blogs and I'm Part Dutch, You Know: What Do YOU Wear to Bike? which was almost my shortest post ever (hey, maybe brevity is the soul of wit).

Runners-up in the comment race:

• A tribute to my friend, Thank You for the Gift of Friendship: Goodbye, Christianne
• Women's Clothing for Biking that Doesn't Look Like It's for Biking: What to Wear, What to Wear (a fairly self-explanatory title, I'd say).
• At first I thought these were followed closely by a meditation on shopping and my mom's dementia, Don't Buy that Case of Stuff on Sale. I'm Serious. But in looking back at the actual comments I'm disappointed to notice that two of the comments on the latter are spam--not a problem I usually encounter and I'm off to delete those.
• With those deleted, Don't Buy that Case of Stuff ties with The SISO Method for Life Management, a related post on helping the tide of stuff in your life go out.

Posts I thought would get more comments:

• Signs I Would Post Somewhere: Because who doesn't have a great idea for a slightly snarky sign that would improve our traffic interactions?
• Thanks for Asking: Unsolicited Advice on How to Live: Because I wrote a funny piece about dying and isn't that worth a shout-out?
• Getting What You Want a Different Way: Can We Create New Models? Since I embedded a video of early Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger used to look practically human!) that should have been worth something, and the questions about the nature of ownership might have provoked some comments but haven't yet.

Posts I'm especially proud or fond of ("of which I am especially proud/fond," grammar police officers Eldest Daughter and Second Daughter would say):

• Yet Another 11 Little Secrets: Advice for living a good life can be a little ponderous (or boring) but I really like this post.
• Biking as Downtime and Other Musings on Overproductivity: Countering the Western/American tendency to rush-rush-rush and do-do-do.

Number of posts in 2010: 54--nearly twice what I did in each of the two previous years. But when I launched in August 2008 I was putting out an average of five posts per month and my all-time high month was January 2009 with nine posts.

If I kept up with my initial pace or that burst of creativity last January, I'd be posting 60-108 posts per year. So I'm doing more but am somehow still a slacker, which doesn't seem fair.

Top traffic sources in order:

• Facebook
• Google
• Twitter
• LaunchPad (that blog list link)
• LinkedIn
• DeathbyCar (where I commented and posted a link to my "ownership" post linked above)
• My own blog (seems weird this is in the stats, but I do crosslink relevant posts)
• BikeShopGirl (related to that post that's in my top three views for the year)
• StumbleUpon (here are my favorites on StumbleUpon, which I don't remember to use very often)

Blogging resolutions for 2011

• Get on a more consistent posting schedule, which will be tricky since I plan to launch a second blog sometime in mid-January
• Keep tweeting, Facebooking and using social media in general
• Remember to StumbleUpon other people's posts I like, since that does generate traffic for them

Your turn

Did you comment on this blog sometime this year? What makes you think a post is worth commenting on or sharing with someone else?