In addition to these landmarks, I launched The Lavender Lunchbox. It’s been a long, long - did I say LONG? - time in the works. It may not seem like a huge feat, but I’ve actually launched a blog before that I only kept up for one week. I got sick, and my excuse was that I couldn’t taste anything. That was four years ago.
The Lavender Lunchbox represents a willingness to embrace my own ideas as important, and put them out there. Forget what other people think… the most terrifying aspect of creating this blog was a paralyzing self-doubt that I’ve had for years! My greatest achievement to date in creating this has been to demonstrate that I have outgrown that paralysis enough to keeping writing and posting. Hooray! Oh god...
I am celebrating having officially gone VEGAN. For me, going vegan wasn’t an easy decision, but not because I thought giving up meat and dairy would be difficult. That certainly has been a part of it, but the truth is that I’ve eaten mostly vegan for almost 5 years now. Rather, I’ve always had an aversion to being lumped into any identifiable group that has strong stereotypes attached. I’ve always wanted to just be me, and for some reason that seemed really difficult to do when so many identifiers have so many things unrelated-to-me attached to them. I also know how critical I can be towards people who change their mind - like, stick to something already!
But this month, this year, I’m giving myself permission to even change my mind if I want to. I put that critic aside and let myself just BE (and DO!), and all of these wonderful things keep happening.
Only a few days ago, three months after that first tough week, did I actually decide to start calling myself “vegan.” Blast!! I’m one of them! But I’m also so fortunately just me.
So what does all of this lead me to? Well, it’s both very related and completely unrelated to a super fun recipe I want to share with you. In June, my company celebrated our 3-year Anniversary. I had so much fun making these classic throwbacks to the traditional Deviled Egg that I promised myself they would go into a post. I can’t claim the idea, as an original, unfortunately, but I am happy to claim the specific recipe that I concocted. Hilariously, that’s only because I lost the original recipe I found. (It got swallowed up by the wwweb.) From there, I used my tastebuds as my guide.