Jun 18, 2015 3 min read

I am standing in the open door of the frozen foods case in the supermarket, picking through the packages of nonmeat burgers, hoping to choose the right one.

For the past two weeks, I have been cooking for a vegetarian. The mighty farmer’s son is visiting from out West, helping his dad with building and landscaping. He is a kind, hardworking young man with boy band-heartthrob hair and a wiry build that allowed him to crawl around on our roof in the hot sun for hours on end. The shingles melted, but he didn’t.

Keeping him fed has been a challenge – one that has forced me to approach dinner from a different aisle of the grocery store.

Patrick the farmer is a carnivore. Meat and potatoes and farm food knit his bones into the 6-foot-6 he stands at now. For him, if there’s not meat on the plate it’s not a meal. For a long time that included breakfast; the smell of bacon lingered in the house most mornings. He’s switched to cereal, but in order to count as lunch or dinner the food on the plate must at one time have mooed, clucked, oinked or been swimming. He’s a master griller, so most nights I do the side dishes while he cooks the meat.

With a vegetarian at the table, the side dishes dominate. As a hoarder of pasta and Israeli couscous (a topic for another column), I was set.

• Day One: Pouscous with vegetables and walnuts

• Day Two: Penne with tomato sauce

• Day Three: Pull out the frozen Stouffer’s lasagna. No, wait, that has meat. Order a veggie sub for delivery.

• Day Four: Order pizza for delivery; remove the pepperoni.

• Day Five: Salad, salad and a side salad. Fruit salad for dessert.

• On day six, I knew the delivery guy’s name and number by heart.

• Day Seven: Ichiban Steakhouse, where they serve sushi.

Our vegetarian does eat eggs, and he scrambled them up for lunch and as snacks. Most mornings I’d whip us up some smoothies. You can hide a bunch of kale in there- quite delicious if you can get past the Army green color.

Those of us who cook for families know that the question of the next meal is always parked right at the front of our brain. For me, the answer has usually been chicken. My freezer is full of it: breasts and wings and thighs just waiting for their turn on the grill.

These last two weeks, the chicken has stayed in the freezer and that cooking area at the front of my brain has been getting a workout. When we got tired of couscous we switched to brown rice. And knowing that fruit is always an option, we’ve munched our way through four enormous watermelons, three pounds of red grapes, two pineapples, eight mangos and 20 bananas.

By Day Eight, the new roof was finished. After crawling around up there, the men had skinned knees, bruised hands, sunburns and big appetites.

And that’s when I went shopping for vegetarian burgers. It’s amazing the kind of non-meat meat you can buy. Standing there feeling the cold of the freezer, I had to choose from among grain burgers, veggie burgers, chipotle-spiced soy burgers and bean burgers.

I stocked up on the black bean burgers, two different kinds. Because sometimes a working man – even a vegetarian one – just has to have something meaty.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.