For years, birthday parties in our house consisted of kosher turkey hot dogs (no dairy in those!) sometimes served on rice-flour rolls, followed up by barley flour cake and tofu ice cream. Not exactly the kind of menu your friends are hungry for.
But we decided a long time ago that everyone once in a while, it wasn’t bad to make our guests conform to what our daughter needed. After all, our family did it most nights and the dinner table and none of us was starving. That meant food with no eggs, dairy, nuts, fish, beef – and when she was very young, wheat.
Whenever we traveled, or ate as a family in a restaurant (which didn’t happen often) or were invited to someone’s gathering, she toted a lunch box. Usually, I’d checked ahead with the hosts and tried to mimic the menu with Nina-friendly food, for everyone’s comfort. But I also learned to make darn good chocolate chip cookies without milk or eggs, some pretty tasty applesauce cakes and pizza with tofu cream cheese. For Passover, I made gefilte chicken and we broke matzo into the soup instead of matzo balls.
When we could, we just made “Nina food” and shared it with everyone else. And guess what? They liked it.
So imagine what went through my head when we met with the caterer to plan her wedding and the chef said to me, “How about we make her a special meal and then we can serve whatever we want to everyone else?”
No how, no way, I said. “I’ve cooked for her for 23 years. You can cook for her for one night.”
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