Revolution in the kitchen?

About a week ago, Rob tells me out of the blue he’s thinking about reclaiming our once-upon-a-time vegetarianism. Or at least cutting most of the meat out of his diet. I’d already been feeling a bit short on inspiration in the kitchen as Will has grown a bit more finicky with age (although he’ll still devour twice the amount and variety of food as your average toddler). Now here comes Rob – who’s never really been a big fan of bean-based meals or fish of any sort and who has a bizarre red meat allergy – telling me go ahead and make your chicken casseroles, I’ll just pick out the meat. Nothing like preparing a meal so that not only your toddler, but also your husband, can pick out half of the ingredients in distaste.

So tonight I told Rob we needed to sit down and come up with a whole new repertoire of meals. There’s going to be a revolution in the Addington kitchen. I armed myself with two great vegetarian cookbooks borrowed from a friend (somehow the meals in my own cookbooks were seeming either tired or overly complicated). And Rob and I paged through them writing down recipes we want to try. I leafed through my recipe box and wrote down some old tried and true favorites we’ll stick with and I looked through a couple of my own cookbooks as well.

Now I have about 30 recipes that I’m going to write down in a rotation that looks reasonable. The inspired cooks among you will probably say: “What a dull way to cook.” And I agree that the most inspired cooking probably happens when you get in-season produce at a market or from a natural food co-op and then invent recipes based on the ingredients that nature and your own whimsical shopping have set before you. But I haven’t yet managed to make that work. And as my mom has been trying to tell me since I first started cooking for myself, half the stress in trying to prepare meals is simply deciding what to make. She writes out a dinner menu for a month and then knows she’s getting variety in her diet and is prepared to grocery shop for exactly what she needs. I won’t necessarily do a dinner a day (part of my domestic survival strategy since I started cooking for myself has involved eating on a casserole for a couple days). But I’ll have a list to guide me when it’s time to cook – and to push me beyond all the old, tattered recipes that I’ve grown weary of after so much preparing and eating. And yes, there will be meat in some of them for Rob to either pick out or eat as he chooses.

I’ll let you know how it goes. (The cookbooks I borrowed and will soon be buying my own copies of are “Vegetarian Planet: 350 Big-Flavor Recipes for Out-of-This-World Food Every Day” and “Fields of Greens: New Vegetarian Recipes from the Celebrated Greens Restaurant”) If you have any cookbooks or specific recipes to nominate for my little dinner revolution please post.