"Welcome to The Kind Diet."

I love exam week because it means no extracurriculars. Sure there's still tons to do, what with marking those lovely exams and preparing a couple hundred report cards, but when you're doing 14-16 hours a week of extracurricular high school activities (including on Saturdays and Sundays), getting that time back for one beautiful week might just make you wanna get your Balki on and do a little Dance of Joy.

I'm pretty sure exam week was a major reason Motivation stuck around for this vegan endeavor. He figured this (Jan. 21-28...yay exams) was the best week to embark upon my Kind Diet adventure, he wanted to make sure I got off to a solid start, and he knew we should take advantage of a rare school-free weekend. So after church on Sunday morning, when I would normally be heading to cheerleading practice, the husband and I headed down to Whole Foods for our first vegan shopping excursion.

*side note...don't bloggers usually have clever pseudonyms for the people they mention in their blogs so they don't have to use their real names? Rob the husband needs a clever blog alias...hmmm...I shall call him Wentworth Miller. But then I might get used to calling him that and the lines between fantasy and reality may blur and then I might call him Wentworth Miller in the real world and he'll be like, "Huh?" and I'll be like, "Oops" and that might get awkward, kinda like this side note. So screw it; we'll just stick with Rob*

Armed with an impressive grocery list we set out to tackle the aisles.

I had never heard of a lot of the stuff on the list (umeboshi plum paste, seitan, mochi, tahini, tempeh, shoyu, daikon, peanut butter), so it was a bit like a treasure hunt. It was actually kind of exciting to find the more obscure items. And I just gotta say, the staff at Whole Foods are awesome people (seriously, in their spare time I know they rescue blind kittens from trees and knit scarves for baby giraffes living in cold climates). A young lad stocking the shelves saw me looking rather confused and asked if I needed help.

The poor boy didn't know what he had gotten himself into. It was like when you ask someone how she's doing (not really expecting an answer much more elaborate than "Fine, thanks" because let's be honest, nobody really gives a crap) and getting a detailed breakdown of her hectic day and ingrown toenail and frustration with the price of ferret food nowadays.

I proceeded to inform him that yes, indeed, I needed help, and rambled off a bunch of things on my grocery list that I probably didn't pronounce correctly. He wasn't sure where to find the seitan (which, fyi, is pronounced say-tan, not satan, as I soon discovered), and decided that I needed a more powerful jedi to take me under his wing, quickly tracking down just the employee/guru for the job. Not only did this man direct me to the seitan, he also guided me through the surrounding fridge sections where I found like six other items on my list (treasure hunt score!). I apologized for my denseness (because I'm crazy apologetic like that) and explained to him that I just started reading Alicia Silverstone's cookbook and most of this vegan stuff was foreign to me. He was superduper nice and extremely knowledgeable, and spent a few minutes giving me tips about how he likes to prepare some of the foods I would be buying. Then, as we parted ways he said,

"Welcome to the Kind Diet."

And then he went back to nursing orphaned baby dolphins.

I friggen love Whole Foods.