Time flies when you’re turning your entire life on its head.

So here I am, 348 days after I first arrived dazed and jetlagged at SFO, about to head back to London for the first time in nearly a year.

Blimey.

So after the extensive preamble of the last 3 posts we get to the heart of the matter – my actual plan for experimenting with a meat-free lifestyle.

At the centre of this plan is my “Meat List” – quite simply a list of all the meat-based dishes that I really like; the things I might miss if I turn my back on a carnivorous lifestyle forever.

Bloody hippies.

That might seem like a strange sentiment given the content of this blog so far but here’s the thing: I’m not really a hippy; probably more of a pragmatic idealist. I know how I’d like the world to be, but I understand that it’s unlikely and I prefer focussing on what I can do right here and right now, rather than on the general state of humanity.

The problem with your real “I’m a world-changer me” nutters is that they pursue their beliefs about wrong and right with an almost religious fervour, thrusting leaflets into your face at Muni entrances and preaching every-which-where about the dangers of capitalism.

“Could you become a vegetarian?”

It’s a topic of conversation which has come up with friends from time to time over the years, especially, say, in the middle of a steak dinner. And my answer has always been “no”, followed by various reasons (not quite excuses, but close) for that being the case.

But I’ve been examining some of those reasons recently.

It’s been a recurring theme for me this year that 90% of the meat I eat is horrible, horrible crap.

Factory farmed, treated with anti-biotics and growth hormones, it’s not even really meat. And when it’s added to a pasta sauce or risotto, made up into a stew, minced into flash-fried burgers  or roughly cubed and wrapped in tortillas, it becomes little more than “generic protein” – something to bulk up a meal without adding anything much in the way of flavour and texture.

I have a confession to make and I feel awful about it, but the truth must out.

I’ve been hiding from your children.

For the last couple of nights, lights off, quietly extracting a baking frozen pizza from the oven, I’ve been living stealthily and ignoring knocks at the door.

I guess, much as I’d love to, I still just Don’t Quite Get Halloween.

So, although I’ve made the decision to get rid of the car, I’m still flip-flopping wildly between the sensible, grown-up conclusion that it’s the right thing to do and, well, the child in me who loves driving the Jeep. The adult must prevail, though, so I’m continuing to push ahead on investigating the car-free lifestyle.

Perhaps the biggest problem to solve – how to get hold of provisions.

Ever the resourceful, organised individual (no, really, occasionally I can be both simultaneously), I’ve started preparing for my city move by keeping a vague eye on the rental postings to cragslist. Actually, more accurately I’ve been using the really handy housingmaps.com, since it shows you the listings all spread out on a map (albeit one from the wrong search/mapping company…)

The map is important because, after a year of getting to know SF from afar I now have a very good idea of where I would really like to live, and more importantly where I really really wouldn’t like to live.

Sorry, boastful as it sounds, but it really is that good. I don’t often exclaim out loud over a meal, but this really was amazing, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

I can’t take all the credit – it’s based on a recipe from Nigel Slater’s Appetite, a food book (not quite a recipe book – he’s deliberately non-prescriptive about the way you cook things) which everyone everywhere should own. I just tarted it up a bit , primarily by adding meat and booze, the two essential ingredients of most meals made in my kitchen.

This is not a strictly “authentic” risotto. Italian food purists would likely have a lot to say about its deviation from the norm. But hey, as long as they sit around sulking about it that leaves a second helping for everyone else…

The wisest words that anyone said to me last year regarding moving to California came not from a close friend, but from Danny O’Brien, someone I can describe as a casual acquaintance at most.

That’s not to denigrate the advice which everyone else gave me – I had tons of useful hints and ideas, particularly from folks like Candace, who lived in the Bay Area for several years. But a single point that Danny made really lodged in my brain, and has probably been the single biggest thought that I’ve returned to since I arrived here in January. It’s advice which any expat, moving anywhere, should probably take to heart.

I ran into Danny completely by chance at a “Hacker Dim Sum” lunch at Yank Sing in San Francisco, in the middle of a two-week trip to the corporate mother-ship in Sunnyvale. The company had made a tentative offer of a job in California just two days earlier, and I was still trying to wrap my head around the idea.