The Question No One Wants To Talk About: What the Hell Is For Dinner?
Yes, you care more about your texting grammar.
So what the hell is for dinner in your house? That’s right. I’m asking you. You, the reader, what the hell is for dinner?
The question, what’s for dinner, is like the spiky hairs you feel after a haircut. They poke you and bother you and get inside your head. They’re a real pain in the neck. Few things in life are worse than palpable hunger pains. These are pains that can’t be just brushed off or blown off (and neither are those spiky hairs).
Dinner decisions aren’t exactly a muse, are they? In fact, the whole subject is a palpable pain! It’s the quiz that never has the right answers. It’s the one question that demands your attention. It’s the kind of hardship you endure after a bird craps on your car door handle.
As I said, there are no easy answers, forget the right ones. Supper is the puzzle you try to solve by seeking inspiration in your cabinet, refrigerator, and freezer. You see the same old stories in cans of soup, frozen pizza, leafy greens, all of which spark a weak sigh.
All you want is something easy. Something you can unwrap, unbag, or unbox. Something you can zap in the microwave.
But solutions can be hard to come by when you have one fewer piece than the day before and no interest or energy for a trip to the grocery store.
Either way, the question inevitably forces your hand toward something. And unless you’re gung-ho about complex stir-fries, steak fries, and smoked ribs, the question pushes you to another night of pasta for a quick escape.
You can fool yourself into believing tonight’s noodles look different from the ones eaten the night before, but pasta is pasta. Rigatoni tastes the same as ziti, which tastes the same as farfalle. And sauce it up, boil it down, and season it to death if you want to. Anything to make it different, right?
What about soup, you ask? That could work provided it has the thickness of cement.
Kids start whining, “More chicken?! Again!?” If I had a dollar every time someone repeated the word again like AGAIN, I wouldn’t be writing on Medium.
You’d think with all the recipes on the web that you’d want to reach for your inner Bobby Flay and create something flavorful, something new, something that spices up your life like slow-cooked braised ribs. But that takes hours and this is a ball and chain. Yet, if made tender enough, like falling off the bone tender, that rack is worth any limitations.
Salad can work. Vegans go ga-ga for garbanzo beans on a bed of leafy greens. Try tossing in some tomatoes, perhaps granny smith apple, raisins, crushed walnuts, some cilantro, and you’re good to go.
But even the delicious can have a hard time standing out and instead look like the same ole’ thing. That once exciting Rice-A-Roni can appear like a rock among a bed of rocks. Just another side dish you toss in your hand and kick around while you walk and consider how to get through.
My wife and I struggle with this every day. We never know what’s for dinner- and we have kids! We’re forced to produce. If I were single, I could get away with a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, one at midnight and another at noon.
We tried different meal planners. Mondays were for bar-b-que chicken, Tuesday was “taco Tuesday” Wednesday was whatever Wednesday was, and so on. Friday was roasted chicken, Saturday something else, and Sunday was usually either Chinese or pizza.
I know, that sounds like enough variety to keep the fort fortified. Here are seven different dinners markedly eclectic in taste, heat, texture, disgust, and likeability. And yet, it didn’t.
The problem is another Monday inevitably comes around, as does Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on. Kids start whining, “More chicken?! Again!?” If I had a dollar every time someone repeated the word again like AGAIN, I wouldn’t be writing on Medium. What we learned was that our meal plan needed a plan B which was to wing it, or, as I like to call it, plan A.
Before the pandemic, I drove my wife to and fro the commuter train each day. And when she got off said train, she’d get in the car, and as kind as any person in human history, would ask me, “Did you do anything for dinner?”
Now that’s a loaded question. It’s not all that loaded the first time it’s fired your way. However, when it’s fired at you every afternoon, it becomes a baked potato with cheddar and bacon kind of loaded.
I could react in any number of ways. I could say, “Well, thank you for asking, honey, for the fifteen-thousandth time. How about shrimp, how about chicken, beef, tacos, soup, what, WHAT WHAAAAAAAAAAT!!!”
But I don’t. I don’t because we have an agreement — an unspoken one. It goes something like this: When asked, did you do something for dinner, I murmured one-word answers, shrimp. . . chicken. . . beef. . . veal. . . pork. . . toast.
And you know what? She was cool with it, and I was too because that’s the only way to respond. There is no argument and no hostility. We’re just appreciative of the fact that there is no burden between us. If whatever we eat is fantastic, great. If it sucks, no one cares. Why? Because we just want to get through it so we can get back to life. That, and tomorrow’s another day with another dinner to deal with, just like we did this one, the last one, and the one before that one.
Dinner is whatever it is around here. We’re blessed to just get through them.
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