In any major undertaking, one should have a good risk abatement strategy. Identify the risks up front and have a plan to deal with them. So what are the biggest risks to my plan for a vegetarian diet? Four risks come to mind immediately: daughter, daughter, husband, me.
Daughter, Jackie: committed meat eater, willing to exclaim insistently and noisily her disapproval, in other words (and here I recall a somewhat heated game of Password), she will clamor for meat.
Daughter, Jocelyn: also signing up to go semi-vegetarian in 2009. The problem here is providing a balanced diet to someone who prefers a food pyramid composed entirely of baked goods.
Husband. Ralph: does most of the cooking and likes to eat meat. Ralph is willing and ready to fix vegetarian entrees, but he is dependent upon RECIPES and likes to follow INSTRUCTIONS.
Me, Marita: backslider extroadinaire.
So on to the abatement strategy.
Jackie is a grad student and works nights at a restaurant. She can buy her own godzilla burgers and white chicken chili at work and eat vegetarian for free when she's at home.
With Jocelyn, we can get her more involved in the selection and preparation of the menu while subtly pointing out that the word vegetarian has the same root as, you know, vegetables.
The Ralph risk is surmounted by finding some vegetarian recipes (check), shopping for all the ingredients (check) and printing out the instructions (ran out of black ink in the printer). Once I get the recipes printed out, we should be good to go.
My backsliding ways - that's a toughie.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Veggie Menu Planner
Just what I wanted - someone to do all the planning for me! Found this list of menus on the internets. This is especially nice because it doesn't include all those weird pretend-meat substances that I see in the health food stores - the "Veggie Burgers" and the "Not Dogs". If something is called a burger, I fully expect a meat product, not some tofu-mushroom mishmash substance that has some strange smoky flavor added to make it seem grilled. And I will be disppointed. Who wants to start out a new vegetarian resolution disappointed?
Of course, in the case of the Not Dog hot dog, I'm glad it's not a dog. Now that I think about it, a real hot dog is not a dog, either, and it would be very disappointing, appalling, even, if it were. Wow. My whole "meat-names should taste like meat" theme just came tumbling down.
The menu came from here:
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