To be vegetarian shouldn't be expensive

The last time I went to Hong Kong, we had dinner in this restaurant.  The menu made me very excited and I wanted to try everything.  How I wish the price was in Philippine peso though.  Sigh.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not complaining about the price as the food was really good and the effort put to prepare each dish was tremendous.  I've spent a good amount of time in the kitchen preparing food for friends and family, and let me just say that it takes a lot of time, energy, and focus.

I started cooking when I was around 12.  When I was in primary school, my parents would send me to my paternal grandma's place in Davao for summer holidays.  There I learned how to cook from an older cousin.  She said, "if you know how to saute and to fry, then you can cook anything."

The first dish was nothing fancy.  I think it was instant noodles with egg.  Then the typical Filipino breakfast of fried egg, corned beef with garlic and onions, and fried rice.  Eventually, I learned how to cook pasta dishes and Chinese stir-fries.

I became vegetarian about 10 years ago at the same time I started practicing yoga.  My teacher Sandy Carmona was a strict vegetarian and very militant about it specially to those who wanted to start teaching yoga.  Being a great cook herself, Sandy taught me a lot about how to become a proper vegetarian.

A lot of Filipinos, I think, used to think that vegetarian food is bland and lacks protein.  Another common notion is that gulay (vegetable) is not a sud-an (viand).  Sud-an can be beef, pork, chicken, or fish, but never gulay.  My father would jokingly say, "adto lang sa gawas kaon kay daghan sagbot didto (just go eat outside, there are plenty of grasses)."

In theory, eating vegetables can be very inexpensive.  One can plant several vegetables in their own backyard and just pick whatever one needs for lunch or dinner.  Living in big cities, however, doesn't allow people to have big enough space for planting their own vegetables.  Vegetables don't store very long also so I guess most prefer to buy food items which have longer shelf life.  One of the reasons also why people think that to be vegetarian is expensive.  Ideally, it shouldn't be.  But it sometimes is.