Earth Day

This is a belated post on going green for Earth Hour which fell on March 28 2015. However, I was not in the mood to write this post as seem in this post. Therefore, I blogged this topic for this week when we have Earth Day 2015 which was on April 22.

To begin with, I try with whatever small habits to contribute to protect our Mother Earth.

Small habits like

• turn off water when lathering shampoo on hair
• turn off the lights when not in use
• keep the air-con at 25 degree or higher
• half flush toilet for “small business”
• reuse the water for washing rice to water plants
• bring own containers to takeaway food

Now, I am going to add a new habit – increase my vegetable consumption.

Reasons being:

• My small way to reduce carbon emission
• To be healthier
• Family and religious purpose

You may think eating more vegetables is a small feat comparing to people who eat full vegetarian and vegan. However, this new habit is a difficult challenge to me as I don’t eat veggies since young. I dislike the bitter taste. Just seeing a whole plate of greens will immediately turn my appetite off. Even famished, all the beansprout from the fried noodles must be picked out before I can start eating. I will not touch the soup at all if it contains cabbage.

My mum is headache about my pickiness as she tried all methods to trick make me eat vegetables. One method she used was to cut vegetables to smaller pieces and wrap them into dumplings. Yes, I eat them but I can’t eat them everyday to make up for the whole day vegetables consumption.

Things got better when I was in high school. I started to love kimchi. I learnt to make them from Maangchi’s recipe and even develop my own method. However, most of the times, if there are other meat dishes, my fork will usually avoid the vegetables and go for the meat. To work toward this habit, I ate from vegetarian food store, choosing 2 out of 3 dish of vegetables instead of meat and limit myself to only eat full vegetarian meals the whole day. Now, I learn to appreciate different kind of greens which I don’t eat in the past. My veggie favourite are Sambal Kangkong, stir fry pumpkin, garlic chives dumplings, watercress soup, sayur manis (mani cai) with broth, lettuce salad, coleslaw. (PS: Some ideas for mums to cook for their children who hates vegetables.)

Although Earth Day 2015 has just passed, I will continue to pledge 2 days a month to eat vegetarian meals the whole day.

Below are some photos to show one of my vegetarian day.

Breakfast – homemade lettuce, raspberry jam and chia seed sandwich.

Lunch – yong tau foo with seaweed, mushrooms, black fungus, tofu and rice.

Dinner – long beans and fried beancurd with rice.

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