One of our favorite, quickest, and easiest meals is the Vegetarian Sloppy Joe. We cheat and use Simply Organic sloppy joe mix instead of making the sloppy joe flavor from scratch, but remember, this is so we can have a quick, easy meal on a night we might otherwise just give in and go out to eat!

Here's the process:

1. Sort and rinse a pound bag of brown lentils. Put them in a pot with water, heat to a boil and simmer for about 15 minutes or until mostly soft. (Make sure you check after 10 minutes or so to make sure that you don't run out of water in your pot.) Once the lentils are basically finished, strain the water from the lentils and return the lentils to the pot.


2. Pour the sloppy joe mix into 1/4 cup water and stir until well blended.


3. Add your seasoning liquid plus several tablespoonfuls of tomato paste to your lentils and let simmer for another 10 or 15 minutes or until most of the water is boiled out, stirring occasionally.


4. Serve on hamburger buns or regular bread. Add sliced cheddar cheese, slices of white onion or pickles as a condiment to the sandwiches. Serve with a few chips or a pickle on the side for a nice crunchy contrast.

This makes enough for 6 servings with plenty left over for freezing for even quicker (how is that possible!) meals.

Have you heard about the Meat Free Monday campaign? It's "an environmental campaign to raise awareness of the climate-changing impact of meat production and consumption" founded by Paul, Stella and Mary McCartney. We're vegetarians so every Monday is meat-free for us, but I'm thinking maybe we should challenge ourselves to have a lower-impact eating Monday. See, Mondays are the busiest day of the week for us - it's the day we're most likely to fall back on frozen, prepared (albeit vegetarian) foods. With a little advanced planning, I could probably prepare a healthier, more environmentally conscious meal that didn't rely on prepared foods. Here's ten of our favorite, easy to prepare vegetarian foods:

• Replace the meat in lasagna with veggies like broccoli, mushrooms, onions, and garlic.


• Green smoothies served with cracker, hummus and cheese make a nice light meal.


• Veggie tacos: Beans, rices, tortillas, and guacamole are all your need but you can sautee onions, peppers, and mushrooms for more robust tacos
  
• Beans and rice: Do it New Orleans style by using red beans, plenty of Tabasco sauce, and some bread on the side.


• DIY pizza: Make a dough in a bread machine or buy premade dough at the store (we've even used French bread in a pinch), and top with sauce and your favorite toppings - sometimes we just do cheese, sometimes we add sauteed veggies to the top.


• Brown lentils over rice with carmelized onions: This is one of the faster, cheaper recipes and it's so delicious!

panini - get some fancy bread at the store (or make it yourself if you're so inspired), add some sauteed veggies, olive tapanade, hummus, or cheese then grill

• Veggie pot pies are always a hit in our house, stuffed full of carrots, squash, mushrooms, green beans and covered with a cheese sauce in a pastry shell. Our favorite recipe comes from the Moosewood Celebrates cookbook. Bonus? Make two, they freeze great!


• Egg or tofu scramble: Add peppers, onions, cumin, and a touch of chili powder, serve on a tortilla shell for a savory breakfast at dinner.


• Rice and veggie sautee: Sautee and serve whatever veggies you have in the fridge on top of brown rice.

The health and environmental benefits of reduced meat consumption are well-established, but vegetarianism isn't for everyone. If you're a meat eater, have you considered participating in a weekly Meat Free Monday? For a month? For six months? For a year?

Zella had been asking about piercing her ears for about a year now, and we figured it was time to give in, but we were committed to the idea of having it done with a needle at a piercing studio rather than with a piercing gun. We've made our case for professional ear piercing over on Z Recommends, and encourage you to check it out. But what I'd like to talk about here is the experience we had of getting Zella's ears pierced. This is a story of how a five-year-old confronted and overcame her instinctive fear of real and immediate pain, and of our role as parents in helping her to do so.

I have done my best to describe this experience in terms that are true to the emotional journey it entailed for its protagonist. What may look like melodrama to the jaded initiate is, for those at the threshold, simply drama. The ability to willingly withstand pain is the most profound threshold of fear a young child can overcome.

The challenge

When Z was still an infant, Jenni and I had a long discussion about ear piercings, and eventually worked out that we'd allow her to get her ears pierced when she asked for it, and then only after a careful and detailed explanation of what was involved both in the piercing and in aftercare (piercings should be cleaned twice a day for six to eight weeks to prevent infection). We never suggested the idea of piercing her ears to her, or asked her when she was going to do such a thing; to my knowledge, no one else did either.

The first time Z asked, she was four. We explained the process (mark spot, pierce with needle, insert jewelry) and she declared that she would wait until she was six. We said that was fine and didn't bring it up again.

A couple of months ago, she asked again, and again we explained the procedure. This time she said she was ready and that she wasn't going to cry. Cry or not, we could tell that this was a meaningful challenge she was ready to take on.

The setting

Needle piercing means a tattoo parlor and body piercing shop. The only piercing shop in our town refused to pierce the ears of any child under 12, so we did some research and found a piercing studio in Houston that would do it with a consent form. Jenni had a photography conference in Houston last month, so we timed the an appointment for 7:30 on a Thursday evening as we rolled into town for the five-day conference. Zella would get her ears pierced before we even checked into our hotel.

It worked out well but made for a late night. Zella was very excited to have her ears pierced, and of course we had given her all of the information we could to make sure she was making a five-year-old's version of an informed decision. She was very cavalier about the idea of it hurting, but cavalier is how she does brave, so we accepted it as her way of getting through it.

At the studio we met the piercer, a very nice young woman with pierced ears and a row of barbell piercings through the skin at the back of her neck. We picked out a pair of stainless-steel studs to be Zella's starter earrings, which she'd wear for six to eight weeks without taking them out. The earrings themselves are costly - stainless steel, with the back screwing into the post, they start at $25 each for the smallest ones, and go up to $30, $40 and more for those with larger stones. We went for the smallest ones.

The first ear

Zella and Jenni went into a little room with windows with the piercer while I stood outside of it. Zella excitedly chatted up the piercer as she prepared her instruments, charmed everyone, and asked loads of questions. The piercer had an instrument tray, wore gloves, sanitized everything, and had things in sanitized packages for one-time use, like prepping for surgery.


Zella seemed to get a little nervous when the piercer swabbed her ear.


I was petrified, and flashed Jenni comically frightened looks when I knew Zella wasn't looking my way.

Then the woman stuck the needle through one of Zella's ears and into a cork at the other side, then left it hanging there for a minute.


Zella didn't even know she'd been pierced, and asked what the thing hanging from her ear was. But when the piercer took out the needle and put in the earring, Zella flipped out; it probably hurt a little and she finally understood what had happened. She screamed and cried and we had to coax her to calm down enough to let the piercer put the front jewel on the post (stainless steel, with screw threads). But at that moment she announced with complete certitude that she would not be piercing the other ear.

We said that was OK, and that she could have just one pierced ear if she wanted to, but that we would not be coming back for a long time, because if we left without finishing the job we wouldn't think she'd be ready to for a year or more. Which was true. It also costs a lot of money to do this, and I had no interest in coming back to pay once more for not getting the job done. She agreed to think about it while Jenni had her lip ring changed (she has worn a stud for a while and wanted to have a ring put in again, and those are designed to be put in with tools), so she watched and got comfort and attention from myself and the heavily tattooed manager on duty. He offered her gum, which I wish we'd thought of earlier, because that is something we routinely deny her (don't want to start the habit) and she feels it is a very adult thing and a big treat.

Confronting the self

Zella and I went outside for a bit, sat on the steps, and talked about pain, fear, and meeting challenges in our lives. We discussed times when something was hard to do but necessary to achieve a desired outcome, and what it feels like to do something that is hard and even scary to get to that place we want to be.

Every parent who has had to take their child to get a flu shot knows that willfully subjecting yourself to pain or discomfort of any kind is totally alien to a young child, but having the end goal be something Zella had chosen and really wanted for herself helped clarify the issue for everyone and established this as a personal milestone she could (just barely) wrap her mind around. I told her I was proud of her whether she got her second ear pierced or not, and we talked about how much she wanted this.

This from a self-admitted pain wuss. But let's ignore my personal threshold for self-inflicted pain and consider instead something more universal: A father's instinct to protect his daughter from pain and fear. I have that too, and at that point in the evening, sitting on those steps with my anxious, self-searching daughter, it took everything I had to suppress that instinct and encourage her to face the challenge she had set for herself.

I have struggled in the past to explain how our children can force us to grow not just in terms of parenting skills and tactics but as human beings. I don't anymore.

The second ear

By the time Jenni had finished her lip ring change, Zella was once again adamant that she wanted to get the second ear pierced. I tested her resolve, pressing the issue because I didn't want her to get in there and use up more of the piercer's time if she was going to back down. I talked her through the idea that it would hurt as much as the other one had, but she now knew exactly how it would feel and for how long, and what the outcome would be, so she wasn't dealing with unknowns anymore. She was insistent that she was prepared to go through with it.

Zella steeled herself with two more pieces of gum, went back into the little room, this time requesting me as her chaperone, and proceeded to bawl, cower, scream, etc. at every approach by the piercer. At that point we wanted to do our best to help make it happen so she would succeed rather than fail at this personal challenge, so we coaxed and talked her through it. Between plying her with gum, helping her visualize showing off her new earrings and bragging about her bravery, and a desperate offer of a new Zhu Zhu Pet, courage won the day.

Slaying the dragon

I had been wary of letting Zella get her ears pierced. I knew it would make her look even more like a "big girl" than she already does, and it is hard to jump through some of those hoops when you see your child's early childhood slipping by so quickly already. I also wondered about infection and care and was concerned about the pain and whether she was ready for it. I had at one time advocated for making her wait much longer than we even did, as I know some parents do.

But seeing what that experience she chose made her grapple with, how she processed it, and the fact that she triumphed over it, all felt important and meaningful, disturbing and scary in the way that all real growth can be disturbing and scary. It reminds me of tribal rituals that use pain or fear to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood, the details of which would make most Westerners recoil. It also makes me grateful for this sanitized version of such rituals (if you'll forgive the pun) and for having the luxury to expose our children to fear at measured doses and self-selected intervals in a world that is so hard on so many children.

From where I stand now, I couldn't be happier about letting her go through with this, or more proud that she did. As for that "big girl" status, it couldn't have come at a better time. She earned it.

If you're interested in learning why we chose to use a professional piercing studio to have Zella's ears pierced, click that link.

Therapist Terry McNichols' biweekly Thursday column about marriage and family relationships, ZRecs Family, will appear tomorrow.