By Joe Nuss
My first venture into a vegetarian lifestyle was a long and lonely road down Bland Street. While my friends continued to eat steak dinners at fancy restaurants I cooked alone in my kitchen, suffering through recipe disaster after recipe disaster. Would I ever find a tasty vegetarian dish that my carnivorous friends would enjoy? Or was I doomed to continue lying to myself that soy tofu ranch dressing tasted just like the real thing? For someone who thinks that sharing a meal with good friends ranks among life’s greatest pleasures, I was becoming as lonely as my jiggly veggie dog ostracized to a sad corner of a grill on the Fourth of July.
While my persistent search for an enjoyable vegetarian meal helped me lose weight and lower my cholesterol, I have to admit that rarely did I cook the same recipe twice. My bottle of soy tofu ranch dressing became another refrigerator science project, a constant reminder of my failure as a vegetarian cook. Then, I had an epiphany: Mexican!Of course fast-food and Americanized Mexican dishes are laden with cheese, sour cream and high-fat meats, but what really makes or breaks Mexican is the salsa.
In the past, I saw in salsa only a reason to demolish a bag of tortilla chips. Now I realized that salsa could bring me and my carnivorous friends together because salsa can hang with vegetarians and carnivores alike and still be life of the party. A big bowl of salsa can sit proudly on the table among bowls of beans, cheese, cilantro, sour cream, avocado slices, red peppers and those other add-ons a carnivore puts on his burrito. Everyone makes their own burritos. I keep mine vegetarian with some black beans, kidney beans, lettuce, red peppers and cilantro on a small tortilla and top it with a salsa. It’s not just vegetarian – it’s spicy and hot and healthy. More importantly, it brought me and my friends together for dinner. Salsa did that.
