If a cow ever got the chance...

This weekend I will try--really, really hard--not to drag the family kicking and screaming to the frontiers of vegetarianism. The fact that my backpack contains (among other things) four plum tomatoes, two bell peppers, a poblano pepper, three eggplants, a lemon, and a large bunch of Swiss chard? Coincidence.

I used to cook huge, elaborate vegetarian meals for them every time I went home. To like show them that food doesn't need meat to be tasty, or something. Last year I was preparing five-course meals out of The Voluptuous Vegan, which is a great cookbook despite the fact that you need an entire weekend and a sous-chef to actually make anything from it. The only problem is that they hate my cooking. My mom will at least try everything I make (and like about 15 percent of it), but my dad will flee to his mom's house rather than endure split-pea soup without ham. Last Christmas I was making oven-baked tofu (in an orange/sesame/soy/ginger marinade), which caused him to turn on the exhaust fan and open all the windows in the kitchen (it was ten degrees outside). I was like, "Why are you doing that?" and he was like, "Because the smell makes me want to throw up!" and I was like, "Shut up, Dad," and he was like, "No, I'm not being mean, it's really nauseating." For the record, I am not a bad cook, and the tofu smelled fine. It wasn't burning. He says my food wouldn't be bad if it didn't have all those spices and weird Asian things that make it inedible, so I think his problem may have been with the sesame oil.

Are there any good ways to introduce vegetarianism to people who eat this much meat? By the time I made the tofu I had already given up--I know you're supposed to start with spaghetti and marinara and a green salad, but they won't eat my salad dressing either. I can't do the whole "think-of-the-animals" routine because they'll just laugh. It's not (only) that I want them to acknowledge what a great cook I am, etc etc, it's more a health issue. How do you convince a 53-year-old, 260-pound man on three different medications for gout, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, that he probably should not be taking a giant dinner roll, spreading both halves with butter, filling it with deli ham and three pieces of string cheese (which he will bite into as though they were a standard sandwich component, instead of tearing little strings off lengthwise, like any normal person), and calling that breakfast? I try to say this to him, but he rightly points out that my vegan diet has certainly not helped me lose any weight (but that's because I eat too much and am super-sedentary), so I probably shouldn't be holding up my lifestyle as a paragon of health. Glorb. I guess I will continue to do what I have been, which is bring all my veggies and weird spices home with me and make food for myself (and sometimes my mom when she's feeling adventurous), and hope that one of these dishes will be the miracle vegetable food that they will actually enjoy.

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