meat eating vegetarian

i foresee that the next couple of posts will be about my short term adventures in vegetarianism. yes, its day 14 of my non-meat eating quest as part of my fasting sacrifice for lent.

so people count the traditional 40 days of lent in different ways, but for catholics such as myself, lent starts on ash wednesday, ends on holy saturday (the day before easter sunday), and you don't count the sundays in between. those sundays could be the potential loop hole, the break from the fast if you will, but hey, this ish is supposed to be hard, and so what good would using the loop hole be?

this is my 5th year doing the vegetarian thing for lent, and this year it seems particularly hard. i guess the rude awakening came this past weekend during my 2nd trip to florida for vaca in less than two months (como se dice florida junkie?). we went to port st. lucie first, to catch a mets spring training game. i am sure everyone is aware of the baseball game eating pastime, and here are just some of the foods i missed out on due to this fast:

• hot dogs (obv!)
• premio italian sausages (a mets signature item)
• chicken fingers (could've ate the french fries that comes with, but it just wouldn't be the same)
• because they were playing team italy, there was a vendor selling a plethora of italian meat sandwiches. (i wouldn't have gotten it anyway, because that's weird to eat italian sandwiches from florida, but it's just the principle of not being able to)
• pulled pork sandwich (that's a first that i've seen at a baseball stadium)
• beef taco in a mets helmet (i don't want to say i shed a tear about that one, but i did)

on to disney...the thing about disney is that i was just there in january, eating the same food (and actually the same restaurants because we loved it so much), so i actually DID know what i was missing. the veggie eating experience was two fold. when we were at the parks for lunch, it was all fast food type stuff, so my selection was limited. but we did eat at "real" restaurants for dinner, so there was actually vegetarian friendly, and quite delicious (highlights include life changing smokey portabella soup, potato chive pot stickers, and a nice cod dish).

i think the biggest hit that i took while in disney was when we went to the character breakfast at the polynesian. the restaurant was called ohana.."ohana means family". it was an "all you care to eat" (as opposed to the all you can eat, which i think was a plug to mitigate gluttony), where the food (scrambled eggs, biscuits, breakfast potatoes, sausage, bacon, and mickey waffles) was brought out to you on a huge skillet. james and i had went there on our january visit, so i knew what to expect. aka i knew to expect that i would not be having bacon or sausage, but rather an abundance of scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes, and mickey waffles. in hindsight it doesn't seem that bad, but everyone knows breakfast is not complete without the meat! i think i just accidentally started an engineering a connoisseur slogan...