All of that started to change this past spring. I read a book: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. It offered a number of arguments for being a vegetarian appealing to all types of people: the environmentalist, the animal-lover, and anyone who just wants to know exactly what it is they’re eating. I definitely fit into the last category. Some of the descriptions of what the industry allowed to pass as meat had me thinking, yuck! So I decided to try becoming a vegetarian.
But that was obviously easier said than done. My mom worried that with all of the restrictions I placed on food, I’d never get all of the nutrients I needed without meat. Although at this point I had outgrown some of my rules and expanded my dietary repertoire to include pasta with a light sprinkling of sauce, I still refused certain staples such as soup, beans, humus, and other less than solid foods.
My mom and I have been working to overcome that this summer. We’ve been cooking our way through the Vegetarian Classics cookbook by Jeanne Lemlin this summer. Well, she’s been cooking and I’ve been stirring or rinsing or grating at her command. We’ve tried Zucchini Frittata, peanut noodle, corn chowder, and roasted eggplant sandwiches, all things that would have failed my earlier standards for consistency and taste but that now I’ve begun to find exciting and delicious.
A few nights ago we tackled Spanish Tortilla. Everyone’s familiar with a Mexican tortilla: a thin, round pancake made of corn or flour. But this is more like an omelet. The word tortilla comes from the Spanish word torta, which means cake. The -illa on the end is a diminutive. When you put them together, you get “little cake.”
The eggs, potatoes and onions cook ninety percent before the whole thing is flipped over.
This omelet is simple, with just potatoes and onions on the inside. Instead of placing the ingredients on top of the wet egg and folding it over into a half-moon partway through cooking, everything is mixed together and this omelet fills the whole pan. The climactic cooking moment comes when you have to flip the whole thing from the pan onto a plate and then slide it back into the pan to finish cooking. I let my mother do the honors.
We had some fresh greens on the side. It was a perfect meal in hot weather.
The Spanish tapas (meaning appetizers) bars serve their tortillas at room temperature, but ours was delicious right out of the pan--warm, mushy, and flavorful. Eating at the dinner table with my mother, I realized that there’s no faster way to overcome your pickiness than to be forced into trying new things by dietary restrictions. And it’s easier to be a vegetarian when you’ve got company. Although my mom and dad still eat meat, they also only want to make one meal a night. When there’s no meat around, it’s easy not to miss it.
