Cooking For One
Week 2 of Your Vegetarian Dinner Challenge
Welcome to Week 2 of our January Challenge where I humbly invite you to attempt eating exclusively vegetarian dinners from Monday through Friday, or well, at least through Tuesday, I’ll take what I can get. Here is last week’s plan if you missed it.
For the past sixteen years, across every incarnation of Dinner: A Love Story — newsletter, blog, book, magazine column, Instagram, Facebook — one thing has remained consistent: A steady stream of texts from parents asking for guidance on feeding their children. What should I make my kid who only eats kalamata olives and Teddy Grahams? When will family dinner feel calm and restorative and not like we are all trapped inside a Safdie brothers movie? How do I get them to eat a f#@king vegetable? But these days I find myself on the other side of things, administering most of my advice not to parents, but to their children (and to my own!), who are in fact no longer children, but instead — how did this happen? — capable young adults living and working and eating their broccoli in the real world. They are med school students and campaign managers, grade school teachers and gig economy artists, publicity assistants and production assistants and paralegals. They work for think tanks, coffee shops, restaurants, book stores, immigration lawyers, local political campaigns. They are so bright! It’s beyond heartening! And yet, they all struggle with the age-old dilemma: What do I make myself for dinner?
This week’s meal plan is dedicated to all of them…and to any solo cook out there who who, at dinnertime, might find themselves standing in front of the fridge with a fork, eating a meal about as mindfully as a wood chipper (guilty 👋 ); or who feels there might be something more to life than takeout, Girl Dinners, and Trader Joe’s Mandarin Chicken. (No shade on any of those, just maybe it’s time to branch out?) Some of the recipes in this menu plan rely on store-bought heroes like pesto and pickled onions to speed things up; some ask you to make a little extra so you can take leftovers to the office for lunch the next day (Oh Happy Day!) All of them are simple and tasty enough to hopefully earn entry in your ever-expanding vegetarian rotation.
For those of you looking for a menu plan specifically geared towards feeding a family, please know that all the recipes included here can be scaled up as needed. But also, allow me to point you towards other serves-four plans like this one and this one, both of which are vegetarian, both of which get consistently high marks from DALS readers. There is also Week 1’s Monday-to-Friday Plan, which serves 4, if you haven’t already tackled that one.
And with no further ado, here is Week 2 of your Weekday Vegetarian Challenge…