About 18 months ago, one of our two teenage children went vegetarian for a month during the summer, and then decided to remain a vegetarian who eats fish and seafood (pescetarian).  At that point, preparing meals for three carnivores and a pescetarian was a challenge.  There are two things I readily admit not cooking well: cornbread and fish.  My cornbread is always dry, no matter whose recipe I follow, and my fish always tastes and smells too fish-y so my kitchen is pretty much fish-free.   Oysters, clams and calamari are a big yuck for me personally and I don’t ever buy or prepare them.  Thank goodness almost every Houston grocery store carries Gulf shrimp!

With our split family of 3 carnivores and a pescetarian, and my personal no-fish-in-my-kitchen limitation, I resorted to one of four options for every meal.

1. Prepare two complete recipes of the entree, one vegetarian version and one with meat.
2. Prepare a single entree almost fully; remove 1/4 of the dish for the pescetarian and add meat to the remainder.
3. Prepare the planned entree for the carnivores and serve something completely different, like vegetarian leftovers from a previous meal, or heat a frozen veggie meal, for the pescetarian.
4. One meal each week was prepared strictly vegetarian (one of the carnivores didn’t eat fish or seafood) and all four of us ate the same thing, usually a pot of beans, dahl, pad thai, etc.

After a year of cooking for the split family of four, the oldest teen (the non-seafood eating carnivore) went off to college and our meals shifted once again: now 90% of our meals are prepared pescetarian or vegetarian. This shift occurred around the time I was planning menus for weeks 13-20 and it shows in the recipes found in those weeks.

In ten months, the pescetarian will go off to college, and I will be faced with the challenge of revising all my recipes to serve only two people, but both will be carnivores!