I'm a star for a day!

Some of you may remember that I said I was getting an article printed in the Winnipeg Free Press. Well it was in today's newpaper and here it is. I hope you enjoy it.






IT'S tough being a vegetarian sometimes, especially because your food choices are limited at most restaurants. Often you end up at a German restaurant eating caesar salad, or planted in front of the vegetables and dip at a catered event.

My boyfriend is also a vegetarian, so at least I have someone to suffer with most of the time. But I get incredibly tired of people holding up a piece of pepperoni-laden pizza in front of my face and declaring, "Oh, too bad you can't eat this; it's so good."

This is what I want my meat-eating pals to understand -- I don't WANT to eat it.

That's right; I'm not performing some sort of sacrifice by not eating meat. I don't like the taste, I feel healthier, and frankly, there's a huge "ick" factor there that I don't even want to get into with you. So stop it, or I will go into the gory details of how that pepperoni ended up on your pizza in the first place.

Eating vegetarian at home is easy -- I can choose and buy what I want to eat. And in case you're wondering, my grocery bill is significantly less than that of a meat-eater. Approximate cost for a pack of chicken breasts: $8.85; cost for a pack of portobello mushrooms: $1.67.

However, going out for food presents a whole set of challenges.

I recently noticed just how challenging during the recent Dine-Out Winnipeg event, in which a selection of local restaurants offered up two special set menus, one for $15 and $25. My boyfriend and I were interested in participating because we both love food and are always on the lookout for something new to try.

What we found, though, was that we were very limited in our choices.

Of the 31 restaurants participating in Dine-Out Winnipeg, only four offered a complete vegetarian meal -- and two of those were on the $15 menu list. The Old Spaghetti Factory was serving fettuccine alfredo, which isn't exactly what we had in mind when we thought of trying new types of cuisine. The other $15 menu option was The East India Company -- Indian culture is friendly to vegetarian cuisine, so this was not surprising. The East India Company was also the single vegan option on the list.

From the $25 dollar menus, Green Gates offered a wild mushroom ragout for one of its entrees and the Fusion Grill presented a vegetarian entrée and appetizer -- we went with the latter.

Our meal was wonderful. We started out with the soup of the day, a cream of mushroom with crème fraiche and a lovely little dumpling floating around in the bowl. (I had asked when I made the reservation about the soup of the day, and the staff had indicated that they would be happy to make us a salad if we were unable to eat the soup.) The entrée was gnocchi in a delicious, creamy mushroom sauce, and dessert was a piece of Bernard Callebaut chocolate cake. The restaurant also featured a great all-Canadian wine list (I am thankful every day that there isn't meat in wine).

Of the remaining 27 restaurants on the Dine-Out list, 10 of them had an option of seafood or fish, which many vegetarians will eat from time to time. This provides a slightly wider variety of choices, but for many this still isn't an option.

I am disappointed that more restaurants don't make an effort to provide meatless options. More than half of the restaurants featured in Dine-Out Winnipeg were off-limits to vegetarians. This city is specked with a few places that serve up great vegetarian fare -- La Fiesta, Yenat and Mondragon all come to mind -- but it is definitely not the norm.

Being vegetarian is a choice I've willingly made, and though it would be nice to have more meatless options, I'll patiently wait it out until there are more alternatives for us veggies. But next time we're in a restaurant and I'm forced to sit there with nothing more than a salad and breadsticks, while you munch on the house specialty, please don't wave your plate of ribs in front of me and say things like, "Oh come on, you can have meat just this one time." I'm hungry, but I'm not that hungry.