Dairy Diary

I'd like to say that this blog will be a long term project, but I know myself better than that. I kept an online journal back before blogs existed, back when we had to use an html editor or code the pages by hand. I was pretty good with it for 5 years or so, covering the end of my grad school, my move to Georgia and the first few years of my marriage. I had a domain for it and everything, but eventually I outgrew the diary and let it expire.

Since then, I've halfheartedly started a few blogs; in fact, they're probably still out there somewhere, but I never wrote more than a dozen times in any of them. I'm committing myself to write in this one till the end of January, and we'll see what happens then. This is my dairy diary for the next 5 weeks or so.

To that end, my only dairy today was the butter and milk I used to make French toast around 1 pm. Oh--and some chocolate-covered edamame. I'm about to eat some cheese and crackers now. (A little English Cheddar, some sharp cheddar, and a couple schmears of Brie.)

I'm definitely not restricting my writing to dairy updates. It's going to be whatever comes out, for sure--I just need a place to keep tabs on myself and my ice cream consumption. Plus, it will be nice to have an official record from No Dairy January the next time I need to convince myself to give up dairy.

I'm also not sure how careful to be with cutting dairy for the month. The big culprits (as if you don't already know, and after only three entries) are cheese and ice cream. I'm not too concerned about milk as an ingredient in other foods. I will stop cooking with butter, not that I really cook with it much now, other than baking. I've been experimenting with coconut oil--it's been wonderful in pancakes, peanut butter cookies and cornbread, and we used it to fry hash browns and grits cakes.

One issue (even when I had my vegetarian stint back in college) is that I won't ever restrict my diet to the point of being rude to other people. I always eat food that others serve, even if it violates whatever diet I'm on. I learned more about defending my food choices when I gave up alcohol a few years ago. I'm not worried about getting peer pressured into eating cheese, but if someone is passing out cookies, I'm probably not going to ask if they used cream in the icing.