The Idea of Dinner

The idea of dinner startles me on Sunday afternoon. I hadn’t thought about what we’ll eat tonight or for the rest of the week. So, with my family—at the playground, on the couch, in the backyard, in the car—I feel myself pull away into my study, into the catalogs, into this occupation that is solely mine. Meal planning, shopping, and cooking are my escape, and my husband covers for me while I indulge in food fantasies that eventually, somehow, will turn into practical family meals. This is our deal. Now, while he plays with the kids and answers their multitudinous questions, I turn to the lists I keep in “Notes.” Saved posts on Instagram. The recipes I’ve added to my app. I shuffle through mental images of flags I’ve recently put in cookbooks. Meats I have in the freezer. 

Frozen chicken won’t do for tonight. I’ve tried dozens of times to speed-defrost chicken, and there is always something crucially wrong about it in taste or texture. Perhaps I’m the only one who notices, but I still feel guilty feeding it to my family. I think through recent Costco purchases: chicken tikka masala; chicken meatballs; roasted vegetable ravioli; spanakopita. Glancing up from my phone, I realize that my husband has been trying to get my attention, looking for help as the kids’ needs diverge. I drop in for a few minutes. As soon as I am able, I depart.

I think of tomatoes. I have been craving them—fat, sweet, juicy tomatoes that you can only find right now, exactly on this weekend, at the beginning of September. My dad used to send me to our neighbor Manley’s garden to bring back tomatoes. He would slice them thick, sprinkle them generously with salt, and say, “You have to try this, Gabrielle.” And I was sure he really felt this, with such conviction, so I did not hesitate—and he was right. It was just tomato, but it was exponentially tomato. It squirted when I bit into it, and it was sweet like strawberries are sweet, like peaches are sweet, and the salt made my mouth water. This, for me, has become the meaning of tomato.

But my son does not like tomatoes.

What can I make that features tomatoes and hides them from him or allows me to put them aside? Am I bending too much to the whims of unreasonable children? When I was five, I ate tomatoes.

Maybe a pimento cheese sandwich on sourdough with thick-sliced tomato. Hold the tomato. BLTs. Skip the Ts. Roasted cherry tomato pasta. Pureed and he won’t consider them tomatoes. A tomato tart in pastry crust. A caprese salad with burrata. My kids will always eat bread and cheese. I think of basil. Corn. A recent flag on social media: corn basil risotto. A corn and basil coconut-braised white fleshy fish. A pressure cooker corn soup topped with a tomato basil relish and crunchy olive-oil croutons. I could send my son over to the neighbor’s house to pick some of her basil, which may get him interested enough to taste it.

Who am I kidding? He doesn’t like soup. 

I catch my husband’s gaze. He is looking at me questioningly. He always says I make meal planning too complicated. I could simply defrost something from Trader Joe’s. Frozen pizza. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Nachos. How many ways, how many nights of the week, can I melt cheese and still feel okay about feeding my children? I work part time as a psychotherapist, part time as a stay-at-home mom, part time as the family chef. My husband seems to think I should quit this last job. 

But what if I love it as much as the others? 

Before kids, I fed my friends regularly. There were casual weeknight dinners, parties with dips and summer rolls, birthday evenings with cocktails, charcuterie, and four-course seated meals. As a mother, my culinary focus has shifted to my children. Now it’s my turn to pass down generations of love through cooking, to introduce the flavors and sensations that give each family evening texture and variety, that convey a sense of the vast world my kids will get to explore. As it turns out though, with two young children, this approach to food—the daydreaming, the planning, the shopping, the cooking, the reaching for new methods and new flavors—is completely impractical, foolish even. 

But I care too deeply. I cannot stop.

After all this consideration, I realize that there are enough leftovers in the fridge to cobble together dinner tonight. Beans. Cheese. Tortillas. Rice. Greens. Tofu. Eggs. Odds and ends will get us there. My son eats bean quesadillas, methodically removing the cheese and the greens from within the tortillas. My daughter eats rice and leftover crispy tofu. My husband makes himself nachos. I fry some eggs and eat them over greens and rice and use three different hot sauces during our ten minutes at the table. They are full. I yearn for something new. 

Later, reading to my son in his bed, I float back to summer produce. Eggplant! My mother made the fussiest eggplant I’ve had. Oiled and broiled, crispy and charred in spots, then bathed in a marinade with garlic, lemon, and herbs, and there was never enough. My brothers and I would fight over the final slices, our mouths greasy from the healthiest food on the table.

My husband doesn’t like eggplant.

I don’t remember my mother seeming overwhelmed as she was making luscious food every night after work, with three kids at home. I do remember that the kitchen was hers on a weekday evening, an open Heineken and stained cookbooks on the counter, and my brothers and I content in front of hours of afternoon into evening into prime-time television.

Considering my options for the week, I wonder what my mother would have made. Chicken schnitzel, which she breaded and fried on the stovetop until crisp, then squeezed lemon over and daintily named it “lemon chicken.” Tuna noodle casserole, creamy with mayo and crunchy with crisped cheddar cheese and french-fried onions on top. A blender veggie soup, pillowy and pink from sour cream and sweet from V8 juice, but offset with store-bought croutons and chives. Peanut noodle salad with toasted broken ramen and lots of cucumbers and scallions. Her food oozed with spice, fat, salt. Her flavors layered with feelings, and she watched us as we ate, anxiously studying our faces and our bodies to decide whether the meal was suitable. I hope to share this love of food, this loving food, with my kids, but can they feel it?

Maybe with enough salt, sauce, and crunch they can.

I sing my son to sleep, kiss his sweaty head, and go downstairs to continue my planning. My husband has cleaned the kitchen and taken out the garbage. Flipping through books and notes and memories and emails of weekly recipe roundups, I start to land. There will be a pureed roasted cherry tomato pasta with green beans or broccoli on the side. No fat, juicy slices of raw tomatoes for me, but I will get to eat them soon, sometime. Won’t I? There will be grilled chicken and eggplant over rice, not with lemon and oregano, but with lime and miso and soy sauce. They can skip the eggplant. I’ll love it. I add the ingredients to the grocery list on my kitchen whiteboard.

My dad cooked once or twice a week. Spaghetti with meatballs. Beef barley soup. Sliced Polish sausages fried up with potatoes, onions, and eggs. The kids would like this! They’ve never had it before. This will be fun! But they think they don’t like potatoes, so I’ll use bagged frozen french fries. They’ll need a vegetable, so I’ll toss together a slaw. My son says he loves cabbage. 

That’s three meals planned—this gets me to Thursday. I just need to figure out Thursday and Friday dinners, then I’ll improvise over the weekend. I browse the blogs, arriving at something like a barbecue soy salmon bowl with ramen noodles, cucumber, avocado, edamame, and mango. They’ll love this. Or he will; she won’t eat the salmon. But that’s okay. On Friday I’ll get some rotisserie chicken and cut it up and serve it with roasted halved sweet potatoes, baked face down until the edges turn to candy, and a green blender herb sauce.

The kids don’t like sweet potatoes. But maybe they’ll try them this time.

I close the computer and the books and set my phone aside. This week’s menu will require four trips to the store: one tomorrow with my daughter for the bulk of it; a Thursday trip for the salmon; on Friday I’ll get the rotisserie chicken, each trip squeezed between therapy sessions with clients. A wiser person might plan a meal around a single grocery shop. But I am stubborn and steadfast in my vision. Filling my available hours with my craft is satisfying, as is having a project neither about kids nor work.

In the morning, after the kids are fed, I move my shopping list onto paper, organized by Shop-Rite aisles and the pattern in which I will weave through the store. On one large white piece of paper, the list is pleasing. It’s simple. I’ll sail through there.

After the bus pickup and a mom and toddler meetup, I bring my daughter to the store. She climbs out of the seat at the front of the cart and into the back. And back into the front and again into the back. She pushes my hands off the cart. She grabs at my list and tears it. She’s having fun. She’s bored. She’s teasing me. She tries to pull my attention back to her, but she can only get a bit of it. I stop in the produce section and admire things I won’t bother bringing home. Bok choy. Artichokes. Asparagus. Alfalfa sprouts. Mushrooms. Serrano peppers. My daughter calls this “shop shop.” We shop shop and return home. I am starving. 

For lunch, she eats some more rice and tofu and a bite—a half a bite?—of a cucumber. I chop veggies on high speed while reheating a bean quesadilla in the air fryer. In the bottom of a big salad bowl, I whisk together a dressing using yogurt and salsa verde, throw in the veggies and lots of salt and the hot quesadilla, chopped into small squares.

“You eatin’ salad, Mama?”

“Mmm yes! Salad,” I say. “Want to try it?”

She does not. This is an excellent salad. I wish I had someone to share it with.

I bring her upstairs for a nap. Now I can put groceries away and roast tomatoes with shallots and garlic. They smell sweet and nutty! There is so much umami fragrance coming from the oven; I cannot believe tomatoes can give me all of this. They come out of the oven 40 minutes later, and they fill my kitchen with scents of late summer and early fall, winter pasta sauce, my dad’s bolognese, my mom’s broiled tomatoes with parmesan bread crumbs, and thoughts of the kitchens they shared, with us three kids around their table, dinnertime the holy time of togetherness, of oneness, at the end of each day, and of their two kitchens now, where neither of them hardly cooks anymore. 

Through the week I race to cook during naps or between my working hours. I stir together a marinade for chicken and eggplant between clients. I chop cucumbers and mango and store them away. I rinse rice and toss it in the rice cooker and return to my desk. Three days a week, when my husband is at the office, I fumble to occupy the kids with television or other sedentary activities while I get dinner out. My daughter returns to me every minute or so. “What are you doing, Mama?” she asks, pushing between me and the kitchen counter. Many redirects later, the living room littered with crayons, Magna-Tiles, stuffed animals, and shreds of paper, dinner is ready, and I’ve gotten all components warm at once. It looks beautiful: a rainbow of rich flavors, another opportunity to wrap my love and effort around my kids—and I pulled it off while they were both home with me. I rush to set the table while it’s still warm, and I wrestle her into the bathroom, bribe him into the bathroom, threaten him into the bathroom, to wash their hands. They climb up into their seats, where they are met with their meal, each plate arranged differently, my estimation of how they’ll like it best. 

“What is this, Mom?” 

I explain. I coax. I beg. They don’t taste, or maybe they do. Maybe they even like it, and then they take three bites. She whines, “Get down!” He scowls, “I’m dooo-ooone!” They skip the sauced pasta. “I wanted it plain!” My daughter rips open the green beans, popping out the beans and leaving the pods on the table and scattered around on the floor. They take a bite of the chicken, snarl at the eggplant, and ask for more buttered rice. They eat bites of sausage and leave the french fries, the eggs, the onions, the slaw.

“It’s cabbage. You love cabbage,” I plead. They eat noodles drizzled with Japanese barbecue sauce. My daughter considers the salmon and looks at me, offended. She whines and from her booster seat, pushes her chair away from the kitchen island. She eats an edamame bean. A cube of avocado and cucumber. They ask for more mango. She cries, “get down,” pained by the fact that she’s still at the table. My son needs to go to the bathroom. 

The pureed tomato sauce is luscious, and I return to the stove to scoop out as much of it as I can. The steamed green beans are perfect tonight, but I add a little more flaky salt on my second portion now that the kids have left the table. I squeeze half a lemon over them. I finish them. No one has touched the eggplant except me. It’s almost great; it needed a little more time on the grill. I never can get that quite right. The buttered rice is irresistible; luckily, my kids have eaten most of it. The french fries are missing paprika and garlic powder. My dad would have used those, I note for next time, picking up all the crispy edges of potatoes and charred bits of onion, until there is nothing brown left in the pan. I finish the salmon; no one will eat it tomorrow. I dip bits of chicken into the green sauce I’ve made and keep taking bites until I’m uncomfortably full.

On nights my husband is home for dinner, we try to talk with the kids and to each other; we try to taste with them, but they shout over us until they are removed from the table, their plates full of colorful meals that have taken me a full week—and only 45 minutes—to prepare. Releasing them from the table comes with relief. Their dinners are at once completely deconstructed and hardly touched. The mealtime moment is over and gone. And though I know this, I will do it over and over again. The family meal was my fantasy, my memory, my aspiration. Dinner was just an idea.