This Sunday, we’re inviting Chris’s cousin’s friend over for dinner. She recently moved to New York City from Melbourne to do a masters in journalism at NYU, and I’ve seen her twice since she has moved here. She’s very friendly and we’ve gotten along quite well, but the one thing that is a bit different that we have to deal with in hosting her for dinner is that she is vegetarian. She’s not pescatarian — she really is vegetarian. So she won’t eat any seafood or meat, or their products (so fish sauce, oyster sauce, and kimchi are all out). At least she can eat eggs and have milk. So yesterday, I was trying to brainstorm things to make in the Thai and Vietnamese categories, and I realized that everything I could think up would violate one of her food restrictions (hello, fish sauce everywhere!). I eventually settled on a chickpea spinach curry (channa saag) with rice. I told Chris this, and he was very displeased.

“Why can’t you just give her a head of iceberg lettuce to eat while we eat the real food?” he whined.

It’s not a big deal to me if we have a chickpea curry. I really like channa masala and all forms of vegetarian Indian curries I’ve had in the past.

“I’m not eating bullshit food,” Chris insists. “I will get fried rice.” That is, fried rice with some meat in it via delivery.com. There is no way I’m letting him order a side of fried rice while the rest of us eat food I have cooked. No way.

So the compromise is that I’ll make another curry with chicken in it. This is what happens when you have a meat-eating and stubborn life partner and a vegetarian house guest.