The Protein Question

...and how I work it into a mostly vegetarian diet

Every now and then, I’ll get an email from a newsletter reader or a cookbook owner asking me if I have nutritional information available for my recipes…or if I’d ever consider providing that as part of what I do here on Dinner: A Love Story. I completely understand where they are coming from, but the answer, at least until this point, has been no, that’s not something I’ve ever offered. And the reason is implicit in the name of this whole operation: I come at dinner from the Love Story angle — I am not the best at thinking about recipes in terms of “good” and “bad,” or breaking down whatever is on my dinner plate to numbers and nutrients. In this space, and at my dinner table, it’s important to communicate that cooking and eating should be about pleasure, connection, and joy. And I find that all those things can be elusive if you sit down to a beautiful bowl of pasta with Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce and, say, the words of an old nutritionist friend come to mind: Now there’s a dinner that’s nutritionally bankrupt.

BUT OF COURSE….

…not thinking about nutrition is an unrealistic and privileged existence. People have to read labels and follow restrictive diets for a multitude of health reasons, something I was very attuned last year when my father was diagnosed with a heart condition and given a limit of 2 grams of sodium a day. To say nothing of people with allergies, or people taking care of kids with allergies or any of the other zillion reasons why we think of food, rightfully, as medicine. And maybe it’s because I’m following too many menopausal influencers on instagram, but these days I have been thinking about protein a lot — how important it is for my energy level and how to get enough of it when meat and fish is not in the equation. Until the past year or so, I never really thought about protein…or well, I thought of it the way I thought about all nutrition, assuming I’d get what I need on autopilot if I maintained a well-rounded diet. But lately, I find myself in unfamiliar territory, consciously working protein into my daily routine as much as I can. Here are a few ways I do that as a Weekday Vegetarian…