I grew up learning how to cook traditional american food. Meat was front and center, surrounded by grains, cream, and cheese. Eggs were common for breakfast and in desserts. College brought on the processed foods, pasta and rice a ronis, microwaveable anything. I didn’t even like vegetables, the only one I would eat was corn. After college came vegetarianism, and that wasn’t too hard, the pastas and cheese stayed. Vegetables started entering the picture, but things weren’t too different.

When my wife and I went vegan in 2010, it felt like a good time to develop new favorite recipes.

I need to learn to cook differently. To remember the versatility of beans and the extraordinary amount of different vegetables that are out there. To enjoy my new found love for earth balance, ground flax, and nutritional yeast. I feel like I need to learn the basics of cooking all over again.

To that end, we decided to make every recipe in Veganomicon (this was Joey’s idea, and no, he had never seen the movie Julie and Julia). We’ve counted 243 recipes on everything from soup to dessert and we are going to make and eat them all in 243 days.