Merrill’s Quick ‘n’ Easy Malibu Dinner for One (Plus Four)

With increasing frequency, meal times at my house involve just me and my four dogs. That’s because I live in lovely Malibu, Calif., where not only are our restaurants less than ideal (in fact the motto of the Malibu Restaurant Assn. is “We don’t have to be any good. We’re right near the beach”), but constant acts of God and CalTrans do not permit even the hungriest Malibu resident the option of leaving the area.

Come meal time, no matter what my intended menu, the dogs form a circle around me to watch with rapt attention, much like an audience viewing the lover-on-the-beach scene in “From Here to Eternity” for the first time. To them, I am poetry in motion--Michael Jordan back on the basketball court. They don’t want to miss a single one of my incredible moves.

Of course, they are of the real opinion that eating involves teamwork and there is no bite of food that I should ever be taking all by myself. All members of the team should always be eating simultaneously .

Even if I wanted to accommodate them, this is not as easy to accomplish as they would like me to believe. First of all, they eat at roughly 10 times the speed that I do (often faster because they prefer, on occasion, to swallow things whole).

So say I select for our entree a lovely grilled chicken breast with a side order of pasta. Suddenly it is incumbent upon me to purchase and prepare 41 orders of grilled chicken and pasta. Ten for each of them, one for me. Even if I had the time, the money and the inclination to do this, I don’t really have room in my broiler or on my stove-top to manipulate that much food.

So what are my other options? Well, certainly dining alone in front of them is not one of them. That feels kind of like sitting down to a picnic lunch in Somalia.

I suppose I could lock them outside, but then their plaintive wails would ring out through the neighborhood, causing all my neighbors to check their watches, in case they are called upon to testify at the next celebrity homicide trial.

However, I have , through process of elimination, stumbled upon a solution that is both kind to them and beneficial to me. And that is to select for my meal something healthful and nutritious and, therefore, of almost no interest to dogs. For example, fresh-squeezed vegetable juice.

MERRILL’S HEALTHFUL, DELICIOUS VEGETABLE JUICE DINNER FOR ONE

Go to the market and purchase:

1 bag organic carrots

1 bunch organic beets

1 bunch organic parsley

1 pound organic tomatoes

1 box Wheat Thins

2 big spoonfuls of those supposedly dietetic gumdrops that they sell loose in the big plastic bins

Place ingredients on the passenger seat of the car and head out to Pacific Coast Highway where you encounter a new roadblock that has been erected to excavate the landslide that has happened while you were in the store. Suddenly the five-minute, three-mile drive home is going to take 45 minutes. People are already sitting out on the hoods of their cars, staring off lifeless and defeated.

Cut your engine. Open up the Wheat Thins and consume half a box. Now slowly work your way through the gumdrops, pretending as well as you can that they not only have to have some food value, but that they actually are dietetic. Finally, you arrive at your street. You are home and dinner is finished.

Enter the house. Open the real estate section and check to see how much homes outside Malibu are going for these days. Refrigerate the vegetables. Give each whining dog a Milkbone.