I propose an experiment

There lies a problem in our household (and in our marital bliss): one of us prefers a vegetarian diet, and the other one likes sausage (don’t go too far with sexual undertones on this one.)

In an effort to make everyone happy, yours truly has tried to go vegetarian on several occasions.  Very thin skinned, I haven’t done well. “What do you mean you don’t like my lima bean patties!?  Is there not enough salt in them?”

So, I propose an experiment.  I have a plethora of vegetarian cookbooks, from Indian to Soul Food, but I can’t seem to produce kid-friendly, man-satisying meals.  This is the dilemma.  The solution???

1. Find out where all our food comes from.  So, this is huge.  We have learned we do not do well as farmers and our garden produces little (refer down to solution #2.)  Therefore, we must research and discover where our food comes from and how it is being processed.  I’m thinking this can be tied into a cub scout project somehow, right?  The main reason for us going vegetarian, or trying to in the past, is because of the atrocious methods for raising and slaughtering meat in this country.  Therefore, at the risk of become a localvore snob, we will attempt to find and buy only meat, eggs, etc. that we know have come from “good” sources (we’ll figure out how “good” we can get later.)

2. We will become fruitful gardeners.  Year one was hard.  Gardening year two promises to do better. This year, we hope to feed the family.  We’ll shoot for “so-much-we-will-give-you-bukoos-of-our-bountiful-produce” another year.

3. Make quasi-vegetarian tasteful!  This I’m going to have to work on, and at the moment, I’m just going to have to beg advice and try to be more accepting of criticism.

4. Raise healthy children.  Of course, the most important thing on our minds is how to raise children on a vegetarian diet that don’t turn out to be mal-nutritioned, muscle-less waifs.  I think I have a cook book for this.

With these four guiding principles in mind, I will attempt to plan a diet with minimal meat from “good” sources.  What shall the time limit be?  With Christmas on the horizon, I’m thinking… by New Years of course!

All jokes aside, let’s take our research and test period into the future for… one year.  That will get us through a spring/summer garden and the beginning of a winter garden.  I think this is a good limit of time to find out if we can hack it as quasi-vegetarians.  And, as I consider eating vegetarian and out of the garden as “cooking cheap” and I certainly need to figure out how to “stay sane.”  I’m posting this under my previous blog.  Of course, I apologize for stopping the posts earlier.  I have to admit that after I was so faithful to my notebook entries on food from the garden and pretty good about my blog posts, our summer garden went to pot and our summer pretty much went to pot too.  I’m thinking that now is a good time to pick back up!  Getting past Christmas is the hard part of any grieving, right?  New Starts in the New Year – we’ll just call this a little early planning!