After going out with friends from India this evening we made our way back home and cooked dinner. As some of the people were vegetarians we also prepared vegetarian food. By mistake I roughly cleaned the spoon from the chicken marsala and stuck it in the vegetarian dish. Result = Try again, player 1?
It turns out that our friends have a philosophical problem with the fact that the spoon touched the vegetarian dish without being washed. I started from scratch and began questioning my skills in cooking a good vegetarian curry in a hurry. After creating something that matched my advanced needs for "hot and spicy" I turned it over to them. They added one more Indian chili and a bit more of the homemade curry they brought with them and decided that I had not only ruined their meal but saved the evening with interesting conversation (about how stupid I am, my wife loved it).
Maybe this is just me, but it kinda sounds like your friends were being rather rude. You go to the trouble of re-doing their entire meal (over a hairsplitting factor) and they spend the evening talking about how you "ruined" the meal (despite them bringing their own grub!) and how "stupid" you are.
ReplyDeleteMy little sister is vegetarian (for health and taste reasons), yet I've never had this sort of thing come up when I was cooking for her (you'd be surprised how creatively you could use Boca Burgers). It sounds to me like your friends are vegetarians for "moral" reasons... and behaved exactly like everyone else who does it for that reason.
You handled the situation with more maturity than I would, that much is clear. After bending over backwards and getting disrespect in return, I'd have been force-feeding them meatloaf.
philosophical is only half correct :), its more religious (and based on my experience, your friends are probably strict Hindu Brahmins).
ReplyDeleteIf you think thats a philosophical issue try dealing with orthodox jews :-) They will not eat from anything that has ever had any contact with anything either non-kosher (not permitted) or any utensil or surface that has ever had both meat and milk on it (at any point in time, even separately)!
ReplyDeleteIt makes it pretty hard to cook a meal for them.....
My friends were not the only ones laughing. It was quite an evening - we all had a good time and I found the perfect way to break the ice, unexpectedly easy.
ReplyDeletedbera mentioned that it is a religous requirement for my friends and he is right. I am not sure exactly which religion they are but the extent of their vegetarianism is clearly not a matter that was up for diccussion.
For anyone who has such beliefs my suggestion would be to tell the cook before they use one spoon in two pots :-)
We have done a few public events that included a good number of vegetarians in our audience. We also where providing free food. We had two grills, one for meat, and one for veggy patties. We where unable to cook the patties fast enough and started making many of them on the meat grill. As it turned out there was a significant number who didn't care. Yet, there where still many who insisted on only patties from the meatless grill.
ReplyDeleteWell, you are an honest guy... Let me know if you ever open a restaurant and I will be sure to visit. Most would simply not say a word.
ReplyDeleteFirst time on your blog...