About Being Vegan

Many many times I've wanted to write about me being vegan. How it started. Why. But I had so many arguments that I've got a shortage of words for it. Since I can remember I always loved animals, well I first wanted to be a vet and then I just wanted to have a farm full of animals to pet.. (what a great job.. ;-b). My parents aren't vegetarian and I've been raised as most of the kids with a marked distinction between the animals I wanted to pet and 'the stuff' on my plate. My mind just never connected the two things. Beside the fact that I've never eaten chicken in my life or horses, sheep.. cuz I used to see 'em around. Until a day I saw someone killing a rabbit at my grandma's.. the violence was absurd and I swear even if I was a kid (6-7 years?) I started to have a clue about what that meant. But forget about it.. being vegetarian was unacceptable.. even if I asked to stop eating animals.. and I remember my dad approved it and of course he got into a huge fight with my mom.. result: I had to keep on eating meat. The rest of my family lives in the South of Italy, so we usually went to visit them one time a year (we live on the northwest coast), it was 26th Dec 1997 when, I can say without exaggerating, my life changed.. positively! Basically i saw my uncle killing a beautiful rooster. An incredibly beautiful one. He just cut his throat. That was it. I saw the life in the eyes of the rooster I saw the fear. Then I didn't see anything anymore. That was death. I know it might sounds a bit 'too much' for almost everybody I know. I tried to tell my story and I saw people laughing at me. But I can finally tell everything. I was 15 and vegetarian. By then I was grown enough to take my own decisions (now my mom is the biggest fan of my vegan diet.. not bad!!). The way I felt (even if in high school and mocked all the time) was just paradise and becoming vegan it just took me 2 years, the time to realize everything behind livestock, milk farms, egg farms.. I became veg* because I love life and all the animals. I abhor the idea that someone, some asshole, just decides that someone's life has to be miserable and eventually has to end. I'm vegan because of this.

Of course as a vegan I had to learn a whole different way of seeing the ingredients of my food, and I eventually made my first Vegan Birthday Cake for my 18th birthday (I don't have pictures here but I gotta say it was amazing). Today I wanna invite all my friends to try the best recipe of BROWNIES I have. I swear you're gonna love them:

You need:
3\4 cups of soy vegan margarine
1 cup 1\2 of sugar (I use brown sugar)
1 cup 1\2 cup of flour
1\2 cup of bitter cocoa powder
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1\4 teaspoon of salt
1 cup of apple cream
2 teaspoons of vanilla
2 cups of chocolate chips

Prep! Preheat oven to 175°C. Mix all the ingredients, putting aside 1\2 cup of chocolate chips. Spread into oiled 9X13 pan. Sprinkle remaining chocolate chips over the top. Bake for 35 minutes. Let it cool... cut and eat!
Enjoy being vegan!

Being vegan is healthy for the body & the soul and drinking soy milk makes you pretty! ;-b