I'M WRITING THIS from my parents' basement during my annual visit home to Cheyenne, Wyo. The vegetarian scene here is somewhat bleak, to say the least. Beef is king in Wyoming, and bison is on the menu at the local sub shop. To top it all off, it's rodeo week here, so there is a very large, very well-attended celebration of cattle ranching and its attendant culture going on.

I'm optimistic enough to believe that I don't have to stay confined to the Bay Area or other large metropolitan zones to find tasty vegetarian cuisine. Why, it's just a matter of digging hard enough, I tell myself. But for the most part, servers in these restaurants just look at you blankly when you mention the word vegetarian. "There's a nice grilled chicken Caesar," they offer, meanwhile bringing my daughter's Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes with a side of sausage (I had asked them to leave off the bacon, so they made a substitution).

Of course, there are always bean burritos. There are a few really great Mexican restaurants here, and they all will do a meatless taco, burrito, or tostada for you. I wish I could say that I was 100 percent sure that the rice was meat stock free and the beans contained no animal products, but one step at a time. For here, for now, I'm just trying get the vegetarian meme out there.

And speaking of consciousness-raising, one of the first tasks I volunteered for was cooking dinner for the whole crew – parents, brother and sister-in-law, my four-year-old daughter, and me.

Menu planning was the first hurdle. Let's see, two vegetarians, two superpicky eaters, one four-year-old (not in the superpicky-eaters category, I'm proud to say), and one borderline diabetic who is trying to stay away from white flour. The smart money would have gone for a big crowd-pleasing pasta dish, but I decided that consciousness-raising begins at home – with a big ol' slab of tofu.

Off I went to the local Safeway for ingredients and supplies. My first stop was the produce department. As I was pondering a huge watermelon for dessert, I noticed the produce manager looked pretty familiar. He nodded to me. Superthin, baddish posture, long graying hair – could that be ... yes, it was: the former news editor of the high school paper and the object of my abject crush of 20 years ago. I introduced myself. "Did you ever go into journalism?" he asked.

"Well, I write a column on vegetarianism for a paper in San Francisco," I replied. "And you?"

"Overnight disc jockey for the local country station. Oh, hey, I just had a guy asking about vegetarian stuff like soy milk and tofu. We've got a lot of that stuff."

And so they had. I picked up a couple of packs of tofu and headed back to make dinner. Ingredients that are staples in my kitchen were strangely absent from my mother's. Where was the sesame oil? Why was there no ground ginger? Why in god's name had the turmeric expired in 1977??!! I managed to cobble together a marinade of liquid smoke (yes, I know it causes cancer), La Choy soy sauce (double-plus ungood), and some garlic-flavored marinade in a bottle. Against all odds, it made the tofu taste pretty good, especially after being grilled on my dad's Weber.

Since I started to get a little bit nervous about the reception of the tofu, I opened a couple of cans of chickpeas, tossed them with olive oil and paprika (I usually use curry powder, but my mother's had expired in 1994), and put them in a 400-degree oven to bake.

With a big salad and some roasted brussels sprouts, it was a vegan meal anyone would enjoy.

I'd love to tell you that the meal was an unqualified hit, but that would just be a lie. Oh sure, everyone liked the crunchy, salty chickpeas sprinkled on the salad like croutons. My daughter and I enjoyed smoky, meaty tofu. She was snagging pieces of it before it even went on the grill. But the rest of the family was less enthusiastic. "It has the consistency of quiche," my mother said, charitably. "Yeah, quiche with too much milk," my brother chimed in. My father didn't bother to comment, just fed bits to his prized lapdog.

Family.

I guess you can't turn the carnivores into vegetarians in one meal, or even a week of meals once a year. Sure, I wasn't happy with the reception my dinner got, but hey, there's a bright side or two. There were plenty of leftovers for me, and I got the last laugh by writing about the experience right here in this column. Maybe tomorrow I'll mosey on over to Safeway and see if they have any tempeh. I have a great recipe for Indonesian-style tempeh I'm sure they'll love.

Go to Miriam Wolf's Meatless archives.

E-mail Miriam Wolf at miriam@coolcopy.com.