Veggie Gal’s Litmus Test
By Lisa Tuck

I went vegetarian seventeen years ago. My family did not. For the most part, I do not cook meat. My family eats little else. The family member who comes closest to being a true carnivore is my twin brother, who mainly eats one vegetable: green beans. I am fairly certain my sister-in-law knows four hundred recipes for green beans.

The first time I invited my family over for dinner after becoming a vegetarian, my twin called me four times prior to D-day with the same statement: “Let me make sure I have this right: you are having me over for dinner and you are not cooking meat.” Each time I answered, “That is correct.” Every time he responded with dead silence, followed eventually by “That’s what I thought you said.”

I don’t even remember what I served (well, other than green beans). What I do remember is that before he left he very grudgingly said, “That was really good.” Mouth agape, I heard the Halleluiah Chorus playing in the background. If my twin brother would eat it, it must be good! Thus was born my live litmus test for recipes.

For myself, I don’t care if the dish looks or tastes like meat. Some folks, on the other hand, don’t even want to taste it if it doesn’t look like something they recognize, so I often make dishes using meat replacers. I recently made up a recipe for rolled lasagna using fake ground meat and cooked it for my dad. My twin brother happened to come by and tested it. I got a mumbled “This is really good” and knew I had a winner.

An Italian restaurant where I went with a group from work served hot bread with some kind of paste instead of the traditional herbed olive oil. It turned out to be really tasty olive paste. That weekend I bought several kinds of olives and experimented with various olive, garlic and caper combinations in the food processor to come up with my own recipes. I took three olive pastes to a party at my brother’s and earned another “This is really good” for those. To take these pastes even higher up the “I’ll make this again” scale, each paste has three or four ingredients, so they couldn’t get any easier.

My true measure of success for cooking is orchestrating a relaxed, happy meal experience where everyone has a good time and comes away satisfied. The one meal my twin brother and I consistently agree on is chips and salsa. I can hear some of you out there saying “That’s not a meal.” If so, you have clearly never tried salsa for breakfast. My cousin Yvonne gave me her recipe for homemade salsa. All you need to do is change the number of jalapenos and serranos to suit yourself and you have the freshest, easiest salsa imaginable. Put it over scrambled eggs or scrambled tofu—or just eat it with chips—and blast yourself into your day.