Just prior to my retirement, I was working on a couple of intense communications projects involving missiles and people who love them, and while I love the people who love them, mostly I was bored and thought about dinner.
Retirement freed up my brain to think about dinner without the distractions of incoming missiles. My husband and I spend a good bit of our day thinking about dinner, shopping for dinner, cooking dinner, eating dinner and then talking about it afterward. However, Dale is retired military, so I’m pretty sure he thinks about missiles, too.
Dale and I are both avid cooks, so for us, dinner is a hobby, the highlight of the day. Well, that and happy hour. When we were both working, it was an opportunity to connect after a long day at the office. Now it’s an opportunity to connect after a long day of getting in each other’s way.
Although we’re not overly materialistic, we do like our kitchen stuff, old and new. We still use the dishes we bought at the PX when we got married almost 40 years ago, and we have a handheld mixer from the early 80s. Dale has a vintage Wearever Super Shooter specifically for making cheese straws. Then there’s the yogurt maker, the juicer, the Instant Pot. We converted a downstairs bedroom into the Williams Sonoma annex.
I also like what I call side dishes. Artichoke plates, egg cups. Bar ware. Pasta bowls. My sister makes us beautiful two-sided cloth napkins, my favorite being pizza on one side and garlic on the other.
We sometimes take sides on what to have for dinner, but during the meal itself we may bicker over what we had for dinner on that rainy Saturday in June of 1998. Remember, it didn’t rain until late? No, it was pouring down when I woke up. I’m pretty sure it was a rib-eye. I remember buying it. No, he says, I bought it, I remember it was on sale at Publix. No, it was Harris Teeter. No, they had closed by then.
Eating together unlocks the memories so we can argue about whose version is correct.
I don’t understand sacrificing dinner to climb the ladder at work. I met several high-powered women executives in my career who said they usually ate a bowl of cold cereal for dinner because they worked such long hours. A former boss said she often ate a granola bar in her room during business travel, presumably to win the prize for saving the company money and free up more time for emails.
Now, I get the whole thing about holing up in the room after a day in close quarters with vice presidents and their ilk, but I had different priorities. Bath fizzies! Movies! Room service! I didn’t care if I had to pay for it myself. It was like a fiesta. I enjoyed the time alone, but the best part was coming home, when Dale would make something delicious to celebrate my return.
We make almost everything from scratch and do focus on healthy foods, but we also have lots of not-so-healthy food rituals:
- Comfort Food Tuesday
- Full Mexican (Mexican food Friday, Saturday and Sunday night)
- Meat Weekend (Meat Friday, Saturday and Sunday night)
- Pizza and Beer Friday
I know there’s plenty of serious stuff going on in the world that probably needs my attention, but as you can see, I’m kind of busy.
Can’t imagine to have a Granola bar or cold Muesli for dinner.
More ore less we have similar cook-eat habits. A big part of my fridge is full of Spicery, Sauces, Dried Shrimps, Wasabi, Algas and a lot more…
Love those Garlic&Pizza napkins.
And your always funny writing.
I’ll bet our fridge’s are very much the same! Some of the best food I ever ate was in Germany — and it usually wasn’t traditional German food, although I love that, too. Lots of Mediterranean dishes, even Asian. On the German side, I tried to make leberknödel once, and it was an epic failure.
Leberknödel are a big challenge. I can get it from “my” butcher, and also Leberspätzle. Love it with a good beef broth.