Coming to a Plate Near You
Laura Finney
9/24/2026
I have friends who will eat a bowl of cereal while standing over the sink and call it dinner. I have so many follow-up questions starting with: why over the sink? They manage other meals without springing a leak. What happens when milk is added to cereal that requires direct access to plumbing?
And this is their actual dinner plan. Not an emergency, well, I guess cereal will have to do. No, they just can’t be bothered to do anything else. This I will never understand.
While we’re discussing things I don’t understand, there’s my husband. Bless his soul, he’ll eat whatever I put in front of him. He’s just happy to be fed. I, on the other hand, spend an inordinate amount of time deciding what I want for dinner and how to make it happen. He sits down and dinner appears. Does he ever wonder what it’s going to be? Does he have a preference? Or is he experiencing each meal as a surprise party for his stomach?
I don’t expect everyone to spend the afternoon fantasizing about what’s for dinner. But surely at some point they think, Oh, I’d love chicken tacos for dinner. And then what? My cereal friends just wait for the moment to pass?
I want the chicken. I want to toy with the seasonings. I want to cook and chop and stir and taste and anticipate. I want to realize that I don’t have taco shells and agonize over going to the store at rush hour only to discover that I do have the shells tucked in the back of the pantry. Tiny victory. I want my husband to wander into the kitchen and ask what smells so good.
Most of all, I like eating. That should go without saying, but apparently, it does need to be said. For some, dinner is a task to get out of the way. For me, it’s one of the best parts of the day. Why would I relegate that to a bowl of cereal?
I love playing Wordle every morning. Bear with me, I’m getting to the point. I found it challenging enough until, about a year in, the game asked if I wanted to try “hard mode.” Seriously, all that time I thought I was killing it and I was just splashing around in the Wordle kiddy pool?
So it was with Alpha-Gal. All of that pre-AGS cooking left me feeling, if not Chopped ready, at least competent enough to throw together something worthy of the occasional chef’s kiss. And then the tick stole most of my ingredients and I found myself staring at the refrigerator wondering: what can one make with chicken, oat milk and despair?
I mean, if the meal doesn’t actually contain butter in eleven different forms, can it even be considered a meal? So yes, the first few months of cooking with Alpha-Gal were an odd sort of challenge. On the one hand, I was still learning about all the ways that mammals hide in everyday staples. On the other, I was having to discover an entirely new way of cooking.
Honestly, the red meat part was not the true challenge. I had no idea the degree to which dairy had infiltrated our lives. And Alpha-Gal has forced me to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: some of the things I considered my favorite foods were simply conduits for butter. Lobster was just a rather pricey spoon for butter. Artichokes! A labor-intensive way of ingesting butter by scraping it off a leaf with my teeth. Take away the butter and suddenly you’re just holding a crustacean and dismantling a thistle for no apparent reason.
Potatoes were another tough lesson. Of course, they’re still delicious in their Frenched-fried form. But just picture a baked potato – or worse, mashed potatoes, without dairy. It’s just sadness that no amount of olive oil and salt can rectify.
In the early AGS days, my sister shared a recipe for Marry Me Chicken that was not only dairy-free but delicious. It was rich and satisfying and seemed creamy thanks to the coconut milk and, quite honestly, I couldn’t get enough of it. So I made it. And then I made it again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Marry Me Chicken went into the regular rotation (by which I mean that I made it one or two nights a week) and I felt like I’d cracked the Alpha-Gal code. I had found delicious again. Sometime in the late fall, my husband kindly pointed out that he had, in fact, already married me. Twenty-eight years earlier, actually. The deal was done. There was no need to continue campaigning.
I ignored him. But eventually the Marry Me Chicken turned into Please God Not This Chicken Again and was rapidly heading toward Divorce Me Chicken when I retired the recipe for the good of our marriage.
Once I stopped trying to recreate foods I used to make with rather sad and suspicious dairy substitutes, I started looking elsewhere. At cuisines and ingredients and spices I’d never considered back when butter, cream and cheese were volunteering to solve every problem.
Which is how I discovered Butter Chicken … sans butter. Not only is it one of my favorite things to cook, but it has become the thing my friends request that I prepare for them – which certainly takes a lot of nerve but also makes me ridiculously happy.
Maybe that’s the part that’s been missing. I spend a lot of time thinking about what the tick took away, but perhaps there’s something to be said for what it revealed.
Take away half of my ingredients and I’ll go looking for the other half. I’ll learn new spices. I’ll go wandering down the grocery store aisles I previously considered international waters. I’ll make Butter Chicken without butter and discover that people want to come over to enjoy it with us.
Even my cereal friends.
Perhaps that’s my biggest reveal. Yes, I love cooking and chopping and stirring and tasting. But most of all, I like putting something on the table that makes people want to pull up a chair.
The tick might have stolen half my ingredients. But I’ll be damned if anyone’s eating cereal for dinner on my watch.