Entertaining

I have finally done enough unpacking to feel comfortable inviting some people over to my house. The apartment is still not stranger-ready, really, but it is looking good enough to have friends over. Woohoo!

On Friday of this past weekend, I had two other single moms from my childrens' school over with their kids. I am glad I have the bigger apartment to accomodate 3 moms and 6 kids (mostly the 6 kids--they need a lot of space!). I got out my cool appetizer platter and put roasted garlic hummus in the center, then piled sun-dried tomato and basil Wheat Thins, baby carrots, olives, pickles, dried plums and a spicy nut mix. I gave the kids some veggie sticks, which sound healthy, but is really just slightly healthier junk food. Many of them came in and ate pickles, olives and baby carrots, too, though. One 6 year old boy even drank some of the pickle juice! Just a little bit, because we wanted to see if he really would like it. He said it was good, but he didn't clamor for more when it was done ;-).

For dinner we had chickpeas and yukon gold potatoes cooked in a store bought vindaloo sauce that was actually nicely spicy. I find that a lot of store-bought sauces are too bland for me, but this one had a definite kick. We had brown basmati rice cooked with bombay saffron rice spice and Thai green beans from Trader Joe's. I was worried that it wouldn't be enough food, but many of the children were too busy playing to eat much, so I had plenty of leftovers to enjoy.

I had so much fun having people over on Friday that I did it again on Saturday. This time I invited my friend Mandy, her 11 year old daughter and one of her neices, A. My daughter has been wanting to do more with A for some time, but she goes to a different school, and I am not friends with her mother, so we don't see them very often. This time we were pretty casual. We had some hummus and flatbread for an appetizer, and I made a pasta with carmelized cauliflower recipe from the most recent issue of Vegetarian Times. (Have I ever mentioned how much I love that magazine? There is always something in there that I want to make, usually more than one thing. In this same issue is a wonderful looking vegan moussaka, which I am going to make sometime when I have more time available. And some adorable cranberry molds I am going to use to replace my gelatin based cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, as mentioned below.) Everyone ate at least some of the dish, which I consider a success with picky pre-teen girls.

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On another note, I was mistaken, the children will be with me for Thanksgiving this year! There are definitely some times when I am glad to be wrong. I am still doing most of my cooking at home, though, and avoiding the smoke.

Hysterical raw food song

One of my online friends shared this YouTube video that her husband made about raw food living, set to the tune of I Will Survive.

My friend reports that, although she does eat meat, her husband is not actually planning to dump her, and although he is definitely vegetarian ("he is a rabid vegetarian"), he isn't actually into raw food exclusively. Just in case anyone is concerned about the exact truth. Enjoy!

Eating at Other Peoples' Houses

When I decided to go back to vegetarianism, I made a decision to continue to eat fish, to make it easier to eat at other people’s houses. Also, at restaurants. But I really don’t want to eat a lot of fish, I am only doing it to be semi-flexible. I am just astonished, though, at how many people have not one single meatless meal in their repertoire of dinners.

I really don’t think we eat a lot of exotic food. Sure, I make some interesting Thai or Indian dishes, but more often we eat foods like pizza, pasta, some kind beans and rice, soups, salads, sandwiches, chili, bean burritos and other foods that seem pretty standard to me. I am a little more biased toward including lots of veggies in my meals than a lot of people I know, but that’s not a huge difference.

I do have a friend who makes an effort to eat less meat. She makes a lot of casseroles with a small amount of meat and more veggies to fill them out. But she has some meat every single night. That just seems so weird to me. When I did eat meat, I still made meatless meals once or twice per week.

I don’t want to tell anyone how to eat, mainly because I like having friends. But I really don’t understand what is so difficult about an occasional meatless meal. Every time we go over to my parents’ house for dinner, there is a fraught conversation about what to make for dinner. I hate this conversation. This past Sunday, my dad went ahead and got food on his own—ribs for everyone else, plus a piece of salmon for me. If I am going to have something different than everyone else anyway, I would rather pass on the fish, so I stopped and picked up something else on the way. Besides, I’d had salmon the night before at my friend’s house, and I didn’t want to eat it again.

Why is this so difficult? How did people get to the point where there is not one single thing they can think to make for dinner if the meat is removed? I blame meat marketers, personally. They have sold us a bill of goods that says that eating meat is a sign of wealth, and that a meal is not complete without it. I don’t really have a problem with people eating some meat, but this insistence that a meal is not a meal without it seems kind of creepy to me. I find myself wanting to ask people, “Don’t you care about your health? What about the environment?”

Of course, I don’t, because I genuinely like these people, and I don’t really feel that eating meat makes someone a bad person. But I keep coming back to my original question: How can people not have a single dinner idea that is meatless?