Vegetarians Go Wild

This is either vegetarian nirvana, I told my friend Paula, or we've lost our minds.

The recipe for the grilled hearts of romaine came in my CSA box, so we tried it. Drizzled with its homemade lemon dijon dressing and accompanied with grilled lemon slices and sprinkled with shaved parmesan, it was fabulous. Meaty, even.

The evening meal also included Paula's homemade hummus.

the finished product

the process

And beets with goat cheese--which I didn't photograph.

And not only do Paula and I love to eat the same things, today we discovered we were wearing the exact same t-shirt from Target.

Report from the Road or A Lot of Water Under the Bridge

When I uttered the words, "three generation road trip" during a conversation at my brother's kitchen table a few days ago, my mom said, "Gee, that makes me feel old!" Tonight at dinner in Omaha after our first day, I explained to my ex-sister-in law and my niece that my mom had already been driven from Maryland to Iowa by her sister, that I had flown to the Twin Cities from California, rented a car, and driven to Iowa, then back to St. Paul where I met my daughter, and the two of us got into her car and drove back to Iowa where we picked up my mom in my hometown and the three of us began the long drive to California. Somewhere in the middle of this conversation, I felt old. Fossil old. Cooling crust of the earth old. Dirt and dinosaur old. All of those miles already and today just the beginning of the 30-hour, three generation road trip?!

Here are the rivers I've crossed since I drove out of the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport:
Minnesota, Straight, Shell Rock, Cedar, Maquoketa, Wapsipinicon, Mississippi, Iowa, Des Moines, Racoon, Middle Racoon, Middle River, East Nishnbotna, West Nishnabotna, Missouri, Little Papillion Creek.

Here we are having an organic lunch on a farm near a little town outside Des Moines. Just as M. and I began to bemoan the narrow prospects of road food, I saw a sign that read, "Organic Farm Restaurant."

It was fabulous. It was started by a doctor--who's now a farmer, I guess.

Now all four of us (that includes my mom's oxygen machine--I call him Mr. O because he rides in the back buckled in like a person) are safely tucked in for the night.

Four Day Carnival of the Carnivorous in the Ever-Expanding Universe

There's still a ziplock of turkey in my fridge, but I've chosen sunset as the time that I will turn back into a pumpkin-eater. I've thoroughly enjoyed my foray into the land of meat-eating, and now I'm done. All Thanksgiving leftovers--meat or otherwise-- that have not been consumed by this evening will be frozen or turned into something so tempting (sweet potato custard, cabbage & potato soup made with leftover mashed potatoes) that I predict they will be done away with by bedtime.

I consider myself an amoral vegetarian. I don't object to eating animals, but it seems to me that it's easier to keep weight off as a vegetarian who also goes easy on cheese and bread and sweets. And I no longer go into full-on hypochondriac mode when I read about the most recent batch of e-coli contaminated ground beef or lunch meat. I eat tons of vegetables because that's what vegetarians do, and I hope that will make up for the first two decades of my life when ketchup, butter-slathered corn on the cob, and an occasional salad garnished with bacon were my only concessions to edible plants. I lived on steak, ice cream, and homemade desserts then. I ate chips or french fries every day. Nearly every high school lunch was a half-pint of chocolate milk and a Hostess Snowball. In college I switched to Heath Bars and Cokes. If I were a horse, the condition of my teeth alone would send me to the glue factory. Thank god for modern dentistry. And my dentist probably thanks god for patients like me.

I saved a lot of money eating out of vending machines instead of paying for cafeteria meal plans. And oddly enough, going vegetarian is pretty cheap, too--but I didn't know that when I was 15 or 20. I'm not even sure I knew there was such a thing as a vegetarian. When I was 13 I met a boy who told me he was an agnostic. My whole world was Catholic then, and I had no idea what strange religion he was talking about. When he told me it meant that he didn't know if he believed there was a god, I was so perplexed that I wrote down what he said in my diary. I think I met my first vegetarian a decade later when one of my college friends joined a yoga "cult" and stopped eating meat.

Amazing how the world keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Bon Appétit!