{"id":58,"date":"2009-02-21T10:28:38","date_gmt":"2009-02-21T15:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/?p=58"},"modified":"2009-02-22T07:13:46","modified_gmt":"2009-02-22T12:13:46","slug":"why-are-we-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/why-are-we-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Are We Here?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve always loved to cook.  I&#8217;ve been told I&#8217;m pretty good at it.  And when you love something you&#8217;re good at, you should do it, right?  And &#8211; you should share it.  <\/p>\n<p>I stopped eating beef and pork in 1996&#8230; for a number of reasons.  Top on the list was animal cruelty and personal health choice.  I thought I had to eat some protein &#8211; like chicken and fish.  I carried that belief until 2007&#8230; when I decided to drop poultry and fish from my diet.  <\/p>\n<p>I gave it up for a week &#8211; as a test.  And found that it was really easy for me to do. It&#8217;s a BIT tricky on the road&#8230; I&#8217;ve found myself ordering the kid&#8217;s grilled cheese more than once.  But most of the time, I can find great food that works.  Vegas is the toughest place I&#8217;ve found&#8230; especially if you&#8217;re on the strip without a car.  There are some cool vegetarian restaurants&#8230; but they&#8217;re a hike.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve not gone vegan yet, but it&#8217;s on my mind a lot.  <\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, I&#8217;m careful to buy vegetarian, free range eggs, use vegan cheese and &#8220;mayo&#8221; as often as possible, and switched to Soy Milk over a year ago.  (I still haven&#8217;t &#8220;figured out&#8221; how to cook tofu just how I want &#8211; but I will, and we&#8217;ll feature it on the show.)<\/p>\n<p>But last year&#8230; I made a major switch (even more major than dropping beef and pork, and then dropping poultry and fish).  For years&#8230; many years&#8230; we went out to eat 6 nights a week and ate at home 1 night.  We did it because it was social, it was fun, it was EASY, and it was fast.  <\/p>\n<p>I started training for the Disney World half Marathon in May of 2008&#8230; and decided that as part of my training, I would cook at home at least 5 nights a week.  <\/p>\n<p>Started out that way &#8211; and now it&#8217;s MORE than that.  I cook at home 6 to 7 nights a week &#8211; and the family loves it.  I&#8217;ve searched and searched for the very best recipes.  I&#8217;ve bought dozens of books, spent countless weekends surfing the web looking for really great options for our meals.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve found quite a few really great things&#8230; and constantly search for more.  <\/p>\n<p>A couple of months ago&#8230; I came up with the idea.  Why not start a vegetarian cooking show and stream it live on the web?  I&#8217;ve been in television production for a long time, having worked on camera and behind the scenes.  And I&#8217;ve got one of the funniest co-hosts on the planet, Shana.  If you tune in&#8230; you&#8217;ll see that she&#8217;s amazing.  And funny.  And irreverent.  She&#8217;s my step-ex-wife.  <\/p>\n<p>Shana puts the POP in PopVegOnline.  She&#8217;s a pop culture crazy&#8230; who knows more hollywood trivia &#8211; about people working (and not working) today&#8230; than anyone I know.  You&#8217;ll love her.  <\/p>\n<p>Todd helps out behind the scenes&#8230; doing audience analysis and feedback.  I might even get him to help out with production one day.  Cameron helps, too&#8230; when he&#8217;s not crazy busy with homework (man he has a LOT!). <\/p>\n<p>So here we are.  We&#8217;ve got a couple of shows in the can, and the feedback (and viewership) has been great.  We&#8217;re committed to doing a new show every Sunday at 7 east (new time based on viewer feedback) when we&#8217;re in town (which is most of the time) for at least 8 shows.  From there &#8211; we&#8217;ll see where we go.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, I&#8217;ve started this blog&#8230; and archive of shows, and recipes.  <\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;d love your feedback on the shows, the recipes, and anything else you&#8217;d like to contribute. <\/p>\n<p>Oh &#8211; and tell your friends!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of months ago&#8230; I came up with the idea.  Why not start a vegetarian cooking show and stream it live on the web?  I&#8217;ve been in television production for a long time, having worked on camera and behind the scenes.  And I&#8217;ve got one of the funniest co-hosts on the planet, Shana.  If you tune in&#8230; you&#8217;ll see that she&#8217;s amazing.  And funny.  And irreverent.  She&#8217;s my step-ex-wife.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[9,3,23,19,4],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-and-other-thoughts","tag-popvegonline","tag-vegetarian","tag-vegetarian-cooking","tag-vegetarian-cooking-show","tag-vegetarianism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/popvegonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}