What's for Dinner?

By

If you are 60 and have been on your own as an adult since you were 20, you have been responsible for feeding yourself 365 days a year, X 3 meals a day, X 40 years.  Even with vacations, plane meals (BLECK!) and dinners out or fast food you eventually eat at home. Once there are kids or extra faces to feed you have to come up with a menu. The menu formula by the US government included 4 Basic Food Groups. Betty Crocker added that foods should look good, there should be variety both in texture, color and taste. And no, that does not mean sprinkling Fruit Loops on canned soup.

When I went to China I recall that most of the food for breakfast, lunch and dinner was interchangeable. Vegetables and some meat protein was stir fried and presented with a bowl of rice. Pretty easy, but in the good old US of A we are addicted to variety. That explains the plethora of cook books and TV cooking shows. We like to try new things. We like to mix in other cultures. Bring on the cardamom, curry, and cayenne.

And when I say "bring it on", I mean someone else can do the dang cooking. Because now that I am retired the last thing I want to do is some elaborate fanfare of color and texture. The good news is many a non-cooking spouse will find their new passion in the kitchen. Don't groan. Listen to me, it is worth the disruption to your kitchen. Because before you had to think up the meal, buy the ingredients, prep the ingredients, cook them, serve them AND clean up. Now all you have to do is clean the dinnerware and every pot and casserole dish in the house.

I know other people (I will arbitrarily call them women), who after cooking for forty years have plum run out of ideas or culinary ambition. Women are conflicted. We want help with meals, but we also have been trained to have our kitchens look like a magazine cover 24/7/365. I have a solution. Have one room as a display kitchen and build another one where "the other person cooking" can go to town.

My Italian friends tell me they always had two kitchens in their house growing up: the regular kitchen and the summer kitchen where all the canning, sausage stuffing, and pasta making went on. These kitchens were usually in the basement. This makes perfect sense to me.   

My mother was a product of the 1950s myth that good wives could whip up dinner out of thin air. She had a cheat sheet inside the cabinet door where we kept the dinner plates. There were three vertical columns. The first one was the main course, the middle one was the vegetable, and the third column was the dessert. In our house of five kids she could stop at hot dogs, green beans, and chocolate pudding. All the other entrees took one pound of hamburger, one jar of Ragu sauce, and a chopped onion.

Fortunately I expanded the main courses to include braised fish, seared meats, and cheese dishes. I have expanded the vegetables to include kale, okra, Brussels sprouts, endive, and leaks. Desserts now include Baked Alaska, slumps, éclairs, crisps, pies, and chocolate layer cakes. But quite frankly after about 13,000 stunning menus (and not so stunning…cinnamon, should never go into a beef stew) I am over the cooking thing.

I love home cooked meals. I love the idea of everything from scratch. I just don't want to be involved with it before it is served. So if the kitchen is trashed, so what? When I see dishes piled into the sink I start to hum a happy song. I didn't have to think it up or produce the event called dinner. All I have to do is soak a few pans. Better yet, all I want for dinner is a menu in my hands!

Sally Franz is a former stand-up comedian, motivational speaker, and radio host. She is a twice-divorced mother of two and a grandmother of three. Sally has a degree in gerontology and several awards for humor writing. She is the author of Scrambled Leggs: A Snarky Tale of Hospital Hooey and The Baby Boomers Guide to Menopause.