What brown grain pellets will we eat tonight? That’s not what I say verbatim, but it is what I think whenever it comes time to cook dinner in our house this summer.
This is the situation: Our middle daughter has returned from her first year of college, where some troubling medical issues have been resolved by adopting a gluten-free, reduced-lactose diet. Our youngest, politically motivated daughter has decided to protest industrialized American meat production by becoming a vegetarian.
So I have my nightly challenge to see how I will pull it off. Pizzas, sandwiches and the like are just plain out. I can’t start with a package of chicken or hamburger, as I did in years past, and build a clean-out-the-fridge dinner around it. I’ve suggested using local grass-fed beef (White Oak Pastures from Bluffton) but my baby wants to make it through the year as a vegetarian before she considers nonindustrial meat.
So, we eat a lot of lentils. I’ve become pretty adept at making ersatz Indian dal. If you put onions, garlic, ginger, chilies, lentils, water and curry powder into a pressure cooker, you will end up with something that would confound a quarter of the world’s population but is nonetheless pretty tasty. If you finish it with a few mustard seeds cooked in sizzling butter until they crackle and some chopped cilantro, then your fake Indian food will taste less fake.
But the problem is a bowl of lentils is not dinner the way a pot of stew is. You need rice, preferably brown, for a nutritious meal with all the necessary proteins. Then you need a salad and another vegetable dish to make the meal moderately interesting.
Sometimes I can pull off a one-dish meal if I start with quinoa. As those furled little Andean seeds soften and plump in a pot of boiling water, I get busy with a big 12-inch skillet of quinoa fixin’s. Kale, squash, onions, tomatoes, carrots — literally anything I can get my hands on goes into a skillet with olive oil, salt, pepper and handfuls of any fresh herbs I can pluck from the garden or unearth from the fridge. I dump the cooked quinoa in, stir it up and have something that tastes pretty good with a healthy stripe of sriracha.
Yet, the more I try to plan dinner, the more it becomes a quagmire. Sometimes I find myself in the grocery store, staring at the bags of chickpeas and the mountains of kale and feeling totally incapacitated. Gluten-free, dairy-reduced vegetarian cooking doesn’t make my imagination soar. The other day I got all excited about making eggplant parmesan until I realized we needed breadcrumbs. I suppose I could find some gluten-free substitute, but I’ve never had much luck with any of them.
The one bit of wisdom I’ve gleaned from this summer? I do best when I rethink the very nature of dinner. Once I stopped thinking I had to give some weight to the “main dish,” then it all got a lot easier. For instance, last night I made mashed potatoes, roasted eggplant salad, green salad and sausages for the meat eaters. It was a strange mishmash but not an unpleasant one.
I imagine things may be different soon enough. It seemed like just a couple of years ago when my vegetarian girl was the die-hard carnivore in the family. Whenever I asked her what she wanted for dinner, the answer was “steak.” The gluten-free girl, many moons ago, was one of those kids who only ever wanted buttered noodles.
As a parent, I learned early on that you had to adapt if you wanted your kids to appreciate home-cooked food. They can be demanding and difficult — oftentimes because of problems out of their control. But if you go with the flow, stock your fridge, and then keep an eye on cleaning it out before everything rots or spoils, then you’re taking care of them.
Added bonus: It all makes you a better cook.
