#i went almost all vegan for simplicity's sake this year

[bowserphobia]

Cookie Box 2024!

All vegan except for the shortbread. Links to recipes under the cut!

Some I veganized myself just by using vegan butter and Bob's Red Mill egg replacer. The only catastrophic failure was the Almond Cloud cookies, which I ended up omitting from the box.

Fudgy-Chewy Pumpkin Cookies Used Violife butter, it browned pretty well. I just kinda wing it with the spices, I added in turmeric (makes em super yellow) and cardamom and used Vietnamese cinnamon. these cookies are SO good.

Vegan Fluten-Free Gingerbread Cookies This recipe was soooo finicky but they are fucking tasty and the texture is off the hook, so I guess I can't complain. I did fuck up bigtime and realized in the midst of making these that i forgot to buy almond butter, and used applesauce instead. this may be why they're so delicate. don't make the same mistakes i did.

Chocolate, Raspberry, and Walnut Biscotti Couldn't find graham flour anywhere, used whole wheat bread flour instead. let's hear it for freeze dried strawberries, new favorite ingredient

1-Bowl Chocolate Peppermint Cookies last year i used chopped up Toney's dark chocolate peppermint instead of the chips but this year i couldn't find it anywhere!!! we used to be a country.

Cranberry Macadamia Nut Cookies Unfortunately vegan white chocolate is gross. these cookies are tasty but very very crumbly.

Homemade Gluten-Free Oreos i don't know what the hell happened with these. i make this recipe all the time!! my theory - i made the batter for the wafers the day before, and i think i let it sit on the counter for too long before i rolled it out, so the coconut oil got too warm and they spread. oh well.

Vegan Gluten-Free Mexican Wedding Cookies no complaints. this is a family favorite and this recipe rocks. real easy, you just need to have a tablespoon cookie scoop.

Almond Cloud Cookies Big L. something tells me that the egg whites are integral to the structure of this cookie. i used Bob's Red Mill, whipped as fast as my mixer would go, and they spread into oily puddles. really chewy and way too sweet. i made homemade almond paste for this!!!

Shortbread Cookies Regular ol shortbread. next year i really wanna get some kind of mold, but i do have a fun time using up extra ingredients to decorate these.

[blushbot]

owo ocs u say? have u got a lot? Just a few? Would you give a brief rundown of your favs? I like other people's ocs.

TRIPS OVER MYSELF TO ANSWER THIS

I have...like.......I wanna say like 8 main ocs right now, related to my would-be comic A Thorn Stood Between (usually abbreviated to ATSB) and like of those 5 that I really focus in on as my faves.

My current icon is (very old) art of one of them! His name is Gautier he’s a 516 year old vampire, he’s genderfluid (more masculine than anything else but there is wiggle room in there...) and he was born in Paris. He’s a bastard BUt he loves his family. All of them. The whole family tree. Even the ones who don’t accept the gift of vampirism. He’s telepathic and can fuck with peoples dreams also. He was turned by another of my ocs, an ancient Roman vampire who currently goes by the name Aurelio (it was originally Aurelius!) and they were lovers for uh... maybe a century before Aurelio had to go to Egypt for a currently indeterminate amount of time (this part of his backstory is barely fleshed out right now sorry) and didn’t leave any indication of why he had to leave and never sent any letters back to Rome or anything... Once he came home, no worse for wear, gautier got pissed because he figured Rello was dead and he stormed out, never to be seen again.

Aurelio is in his 2000s... he’s forgotten his exact birthdate so for simplicity’s sake he always says he’s 2000 and that his birthday is on January first. He’s demiromantic/pansexual, he kinda sorta has depression, and he’s a writer! He’s got his work published under many different names spanning... his whole life pretty much. He can also turn stuff into gold. I like to call it a selective Midas touch. I have the idea of him being a Roman emperor who faked his own death to not get assassinated for real rattling around in my head but idk if I want that to actually be canon.

My main character and current favorite boy is named Benji. He’s a piece of shit stoner who self medicates with weed for his anxiety and ADHD because he refuses to take his actual meds. He also kind of gets murdery if he doesn’t smoke weed because he’s only been a vampire for about 100 years. Gautier turned him when he was just 25 because Benji had watched his then-lover, Lance, die in some sort of work related accident, while he was in New York to go to school. He went back home to Montreal, gautier saw the state he was in, and... Benji was afraid of dying so he accepted gau’s “gift.” He almost went blind the first night he was a vampire because he stayed outside at sunrise and looked at the sun and now he has to wear glasses forever. In like the 50’s he reached the murdery phase that all young vampires go through and somehow got himself a wife at the same time? Who he got pregnant? But then he tried Drugs for the first time and it fucked with his head and he almost killed his wife but he decided to just leave instead because he was like actually lucid for once and realized he was a menace to society. He ended up living in a hippie commune for a while, got into punk subculture in like the 80s, dated another character, Desdemona, in the 90s until she cheated on him. A few years before ATSB starts a vampire hunter shows up in Montreal and almost kills him so he flees to the city he and Desdemona lived in, Theodore, hoping that she still lived there in the same apartment. She did and she let him live there! But Desdemona has a dickhead boyfriend named Luca who happens to be an alpha werewolf and he and benji do not get along but it’s fine. Really. Benji was really uncomfortable sleeping on their couch at first but he got over it. Until he crashed his car. Despite that he kept putting off finding his own place. He did manage to find himself a boyfriend though! Another main character and best boy, in fact :]

Zeb is a big buff himbo and he’s GAY and TRANS because I like to project. Zeb is an ex-Catholic satanist and part of him and Benji bonding at first was Zeb telling benji about how he beat up a nun and got expelled from catholic school when he was like 13. ...truth be told, the two met on Grindr and were SUPPOSED to just hook up but. Benji fell in love with Zeb immediately upon laying eyes on him (plus Zeb kind of looks like lance...) and insisted they go on a date instead. Zeb agreed and now 2.5 years later at the beginning of ATSB they are living together and in wuv. Zeb has a Pomeranian named princess and if anything were to happen to her he would kill everyone in the room and then himself. Princess is very small. Zeb can hold her with one hand. That makes him cry sometimes but unless you’re benji or his best friend Monica he will End you if you ever see him crying. He has a shitty mom and doesn’t like to talk about it. Zeb is a mechanic and works for his dad’s rival, which is the only thing his dad is unsupportive of. He has an older brother named Ray who lives in like Seattle or something whom he hasn’t seen in person for a while and he kind of dreads Ray eventually visiting because Ray is a vegan and zeb doesn’t know how to feed a vegan. Zeb really likes muscle cars and motorcycles and benji fucking bought him a vintage muscle car for his birthday or something one year because benji doesn’t have a good grasp on the value of money and zeb cried.

The last of the main 5 is Wiley...he’s the very oldest of my current ocs out of universe but the youngest in universe. He’s a 23 year old and he still lives with his parents on their family’s farm. He’s a werewolf BUT NOT THE SAME KIND AS LUCA. He’s a beta which I assure you isn’t related to a/b/o please believe me please. (I can explain the difference if you want) he’s a good ol country boy from the south but he’s actually good I mean that genuinely. He’s gay because I can’t resist having exclusively mlm in my main cast. He is just a simple farmer with self esteem issues. He was kind of a dickhead in middle school and to overcompensate for that he’s overly nice to everyone he meets. Part of why he acted a fool is because he hadn’t come to terms with being gay yet, part of is it because his folks moved up to Theodore, NY (as far as I know that isn’t the name of a real place. That’s a fictional city that I made up to be the setting if that’s the name of a real place I’m gonna die) because that’s where his grandpappy went to retire and Wiley’s dad, Baxter, wanted to be with his pa when he died. And Wiley wasn’t really able to properly process all of that when he was like 13. So he acted out... he and benji are best friends nowadays and benji and his younger brother, Grayson, are the only people he can really be rude to. He just can’t do it. He sells his family’s produce at a local farmers market every Saturday.

I’d talk about desdemona, Luca, and Monica a bit more but I’ve written a damn novel already Jesus Christ. I have a toyhouse if you wanna take a look there though!!! A lot of pages are kind of outdated and only four characters have proper profiles (gau, Aurelio, benji, And Zeb. I’m sorry Wiley) but you can at least see what my guys look like on there!

[behardonyourself]

Why Did I Choose a Plant Based Diet?

Most people don’t think of your typical Ironman Triathlete and Vegans as one in the same.  Over the years, Vegans have been viewed as weak and spindly, much closer resembling an 5th grade Science teacher instead of an ultra-endurance athlete.

I want to do my best to help change that perception. 

My story is well-documented here on this blog:  I had gotten fat, lazy, was drinking daily and was depressed.  Oh, and I was really fucking fat.  In December, I made a huge change.  First, I got off my ass.  Second, I stopped eating bullshit all the time.

Of course, a few weeks later, I went to the level that most people consider insane:  I removed all animal products from my diet.

Note:  I don’t post to beat people over the head about going to a plant-based diet.  Nor do I give a fuck what anyone else eats.  If you like meat, good for you.  I assume most of you do, when less than 4% of Americans identify as Vegan.  So it almost goes without saying that you are a meat eater.  I just happen not to eat meat, workout really hard, can run, bike, and swim really long distances, workout upwards of over 30 hours a week, look amazing for any age, much less a 43 year old dad, and I am one bad motherfucker.

My point isn’t to call you an asshole if you eat animals:  I think you know you’re fucked up if you lead to the torture of modern day animal agriculture.  It’s pretty fucking evil and well-documented - why else do you think it’s illegal to film inside of the giant slaughterhouses?  Because the shit that goes on in there is completely fucked up.  (Don’t get all defensive like the political and religions zealots on Twitter, I love me some sarcasm, motherfuckers).

But hey, that isn’t the purpose of this post.  Again, I’m not looking to attack anyone’s current course of action.  I do hope to bring attention to a lifestyle that has completely turned me into a new man and encourage you to explore it and see the many benefits.

Weight Loss Yes, I exercise like a fiend and that attributed to my ability to get lean and also is a huge cause why I stay lean, but hey, you are what you eat, and I’ve never had an easier time dropping fat as I do eating only plant based.  In 5 months, I went from fat bucket of shit to pretty damn hot.

Athletic Performance For five years prior to starting my journey, I had allowed myself to become grotesque (see the pic above).  But prior to that,, I regularly competed as a powerlifter and a bodybuilder, so I do have a vast training background.  What’s different this time around than it was for the other 18 years I trained heavily?  Simple.  Recovery and fuel for workouts.  Eliminating animal products drastically reduces inflammation.  I can run 20 miles on Tuesday and then do it again on Wednesday.  I am training 3-4 hours everyday, and always wake up ready to do even more.  Previously, I never would’ve recovered enough for the drastic training load that an Ironman requires.  No soreness and unlimited energy?  I should’ve switched years ago.

Internal Health For fuck’s sake, I was taken to the ER for a heart attack false alarm last May.  My blood markers were terrible, and I was a ticking time bomb.  Post going to a Vegan diet?  My doctor barely believed it himself.  Every single blood marker was absolutely optimal within 2 months of going Vegan and has stayed that way.  I was able to kick cholesterol and blood pressure meds within WEEKS of starting a plant based diet.

Simplicity

Most plant based foods taste great together and preparation is far simpler than meat preparation.  

Animals Are Awesome To look at and watch, not to eat.  Drop your dog off at a place to butchers dogs where he can hear other dogs yelping and go to leave him - think he’d panic?  That’s exactly how it goes for cows and pigs.  Give them a break!

Over the last 5 months, my health has drastically improved, I’ve dropped nearly 70lbs and I have the energy to train at an absolutely insane volume by any stretch of the imagination, and I attribute that to the complete removal of animal products from my diet and only enjoying plant-based whole foods.  Ironman training is difficult for anyone, but I hope that a 43 year old doing it completely plant-based breaks a lot of the molds that people think about Vegans and athletic capacity.