I’m normally great with deadlines, but I must have been out of my mind when I thought I could finish The Healthy Vegan Breakfast Book by Christmas. In a nutshell, Chicago happened: three and a half weeks of holiday mayhem that was all at once wonderful, hectic, drunken, loving and very very filling.

Whenever I go to Chicago I think I’ll have all this “free time” to finally work on all those fun, creative personal projects that I never seem to get around to otherwise. But then I get there and my family and I immediately fill the calendar with things like “Cookie Making Day”, “At the Movies with Dad” and “Thrift Store Grab Bag Shopping” (we really do make a calendar – a big spreadsheet of dates with columns like “Events”, “Restaurants”, “Recipes to Remember”, “Memorable Quotes”).

Herein lies the problem with living far away and only seeing family once a year: the time spent on these rare visits is totally precious and we feel the call to pack as much as possible into those few short weeks. Plus side: we don’t take each other’s company for granted. Minus side: We are frequently exhausted from so much activity.

But The Healthy Vegan Breakfast Book was not forgotten. I did some research on my travels – scoping out vegan breakfasts at a few well-reviewed veggie spots (my tofu scramble is better than all of theirs put together, in my opinion – confidence boosted!). I also staged a few healthy vegan breakfasts for my family so they could see what this breakfast salad malarkey was all about (they liked it, and I don’t think they were being polite). In between all of that, there was Christmas, New Year’s, a lot of pizza, a lot of cheese and a lot of craft beer. Now the post-holiday decompression begins, and I can’t think of a better way to get back on track with life than to put my energies into eating healthy vegan breakfasts and finishing off the book.

I’m going to give myself some wiggle room here and say…

The Healthy Vegan Breakfast Book will be released in March.  

If you’d like to be informed when the book is available, please enter your email below. You can also follow SmarterFitter on Facebook and @monicashaw on Twitter for updates and healthy vegan breakfast teasers!

In the meantime, here’s a healthy vegan breakfast I made in Chicago. Red quinoa breakfast salad with roast butternut squash, parsley, spring onions, blueberries, toasted pepitas, a bit of lemon juice and olive oil, salt and pepper: