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As some of you may know, I used to be a vegetarian. In fact, I was a very strict vegetarian for about five years before I stopped on my eighteenth birthday. I don’t know why I stopped; some part of me just got bored of it, I guess. I just was tired of putting in effort. But now that it’s been a few years, my morals are reinvigorated and I feel ready to make a new change!
Lately, I’ve been thinking of being vegan. Maybe not completely cold turkey style, like I did when I became a vegetarian. But I would definitely like to cut down on my animal product consumption, if not cut it out of my diet completely.
One of the main problems for me, though, is that I don’t particularly like any substitutes for the real things. When I was vegetarian, I rarely ate fake meat, because I didn’t especially like it. Sure, there are some fake chicken nuggets or sausages here and there that taste alright, but to me it wasn’t really worth it go through all the trouble of eating fake meat when I could just, not. I was totally fine with that.
With milk, it’s a different story. I love milk, whole milk especially, and don’t even get me started on chocolate milk! In my pursuits as a vegetarian, I dabbled with the idea of being vegan, so I tried some milk alternatives. I hated all of them. Soy milk, almond milk, oat milk, rice milk, coconut milk, I couldn’t stand to drink any of them, or even use them in cereal. I even tried chocolate soy milk and I still didn’t like it. Even when I got the sweetened or vanilla versions of these milk substitutes, they just didn’t cut it.
That being said, in my newest pursuit for veganism, I decided to give milk alternatives a shot again. There had to be at least one I could tolerate, right?
Well, the other day, I happened across an ad for a new almond milk, Simply Almond. I had had the Simply brand of beverages many a time before; their orange juice, apple juice, lemonade, watermelon juice, etc. So to see them make a milk of some kind really threw me off.
I was skeptical to try it, but I picked up one of the vanilla ones anyway, which looks like this:
I’m not kidding when I say this is the best plant based milk I have ever had. Not only do I tolerate it, I actually really enjoy it! This almond milk is very good, and I can absolutely see myself making the switch from regular milk easily. It’s perfectly sweetened, creamy, and doesn’t taste significantly off like all others I’ve tried. I really recommend giving this a shot if you have been a milk-alternative hater for years, like me. This is the shining beacon in a world of dark fake milks.
While I was at the store picking this up, I also thought about how I would never be able to give up eggs. Even when I was vegetarian, I ate them, because I didn’t really count them as meat. I seriously love eggs, cooked in any style. Scrambled, omelet, fried, poached, deviled, hard-boiled, soft-boiled, they’re all amazing! They’re so cheap and easy and you can do so much with them.
Clearly, I was dreading giving them up. That’s when I saw this egg substitute.
JUST Egg. The packaging looked appealing to me, so I decided to give it a try, as well. And I was very pleasantly surprised! These cooked exactly like regular scrambled eggs, as evidenced here:
Tell me those don’t look like some regular ol’ scrambled eggs (yeah, I might’ve overcooked them, but I do that with regular scrambled eggs, too (I fear salmonella!)). Not only do they cook like and look like the real thing, but they taste like it, too! Sure, there’s a little bit of a difference, but it’s not even in a bad way, like these honestly taste really good!
While I definitely feel like I could absolutely make the switch from regular eggs to this alternative, it is a bummer to me that you can pretty much only make scrambled eggs with it. It comes as a liquid that you pour into a skillet, and you can scramble it or make it into an omelet. While that’s great and all, you could never make something like poached or deviled eggs with this, which are like my two favorite kinds.
When it comes to veganism, I worry about baked goods a lot. How can you make delicious baked goods without milk and eggs? Most milk alternatives are too thin to replace milk in recipes efficiently, and I didn’t even know about egg alternatives until the other day. Thankfully, both of these brands’ websites have a recipes page. While the Simply one doesn’t have any recipes for their milk alternatives yet, I would imagine they will soon, since their almond milk pretty much just launched. So I’ll check back with that later. However, the JUST one has many a recipe showing you ways to use their product, including oatmeal chocolate chip cookies!
So, yeah, I’m really glad I found these two products. I was very skeptical of both of them, but they turned out to be amazing, and I know if I do decide to go vegan, or at least cut down on animal products, these will both be essential parts of that.
Have you tried either of these? Are there any milk/meat/ice cream alternative brands you’ll swear by that I should check out? Let me know in the comments, and as always, have a great day!
-AMS
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