The most-dreaded question: "What's for dinner?"
My husband sometimes calls me from work at 10am and asks, “What’s for dinner?”
When I invariably reply that I have absolutely no idea, he says, somewhat forlornly, “I just wanted something to look forward to.”
Bless his heart. And I mean that both sarcastically and kindly.
For the first five years that we were a couple, Rick and I rarely ate dinner together — at least four nights a week, he typically was in the newsroom until 10 or 11pm and ate takeout there. Fridays and Saturdays were our nights together, often spent out and about with friends, and on Sundays, I would often make an early dinner that we’d have together and then he’d head to the office to get a head start on Monday’s work.
I fell into a routine for the four nights that I cooked dinner for myself that might surprise some: I cooked the exact same thing nearly every night.
It’s not that I’m a creature of habit — as a food writer and recipe developer, I really enjoy experimenting with ingredients and trying different recipes. And like anyone else, I also have my go-to dishes, the things I can whip up without thinking. But the dish that I ate at least a few times a week for years centered around a box of pasta that I happened to pick up at the grocery store one day: DeBoles Garlic & Parsley Angel Hair Pasta.
This pasta was made with a blend of durum semolina and Jerusalem artichoke flour and I fell in love with it from the moment I tasted it. Tinged with garlic, mildly herbaceous from dried parsley, and with a nutty undertone from the Jerusalem artichoke, it had a distinct flavor that didn't require too much effort to dress up, which was exactly what I wanted in a quick weeknight meal. That first night, as I looked around the kitchen to figure out what to add to it, I pulled pine nuts and dried currants out of the pantry — and my mainstay meal was born.
By the second night, I’d perfected it. Before cooking the pasta, I toasted the pine nuts just until golden, then set them aside to cool while using the same pot to boil some lightly salted water. When the water came to a boil, I added the angel hair pasta, which cooked up in just about four minutes, tossing in a handful of dried currants to plump up during the last minute or so of cooking. Reserving some of the pasta water, I drained the pasta and currants, poured them back into the pan, and stirred in a healthy glug of olive oil with a few tablespoons of the reserved pasta water. Once it all had emulsified nicely, I tossed the pine nuts, some red pepper flakes, and a little salt into the pasta, poured it into a bowl, and topped it off with grated Parmesan cheese.
Sweet, salty, nutty, garlicky, herbaceous, a hint of spice. Perfection.
I hardly ever make that pasta anymore. One reason is that DeBoles, sadly, discontinued that variety some years ago, a crushing blow. The other reason is that Rick has been home for dinner pretty much every night for a couple of decades and so, as the family cook, I’m in the position of having to come up with something new to eat. Every. Single. Day.
The name for this is “invisible labor”. When Rick — and my daughter, back when she lived at home — would ask me each day what was on the menu for that evening, they truly had no idea the amount of time and energy that the family cook has to put each day into figuring out how to answer that extremely loaded question. Every meal is not just about the food on the plate, it’s also about money and time. There’s the mental calculator in my head that’s always measuring the price of something in one store versus another, and how that impacts our food budget. There’s the time I spend planning and cooking a meal that I cannot spend making the money needed to purchase the ingredients. There’s the amount of brain power that I expend every day of my life knowing what is, and is not, in the refrigerator and the pantry. There’s the knowledge that I’ve amassed over the years about how many carrots, onions, and potatoes I need to purchase to make a stew on a wintry day, or to avoid buying the packet of a dozen mini cucumbers because three of them will inevitably end up rotting at the bottom of the vegetable crisper. And even if someone else helps with clean-up, I’m still the person making sure that there’s dish detergent, sponges, and other necessary items stocked for that purpose.
So I was, admittedly, a bit delighted the other night when Rick texted that he was doing something with a friend after work. Not only did I not have to make dinner for two, but I decided to have a go at my old pine-nut-and-currant pasta dish, even if I couldn’t use my old favorite angel hair. I had all the ingredients already in the pantry — and then Rick called to say that he was on his way home earlier than expected and, no, he hadn’t eaten.
I think he could hear the disappointment in my voice: “Oh. I was just about to make this pasta dish but I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know — it’s not packed with legumes or vegetables, it’s just really simple.”
After prodding me for more details, I explained to him what was in the dish, to which he replied, “It sounds delicious, I’d love to have that too, if you don’t mind making enough for both of us.”
So I did. And it was a hit. I’m not sure he’d eat it four nights a week for five years, but maybe it can go into the regular rotation.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
It does take a lot of brain power to keep a running inventory of your available ingredients in your head! Maybe that's why I know where the ketchup is before opening the fridge, and my family can never find it. It's how I know that nobody ate that one sad dill pickle spear, or that the milk is almost expired,or that we have half a head of cabbage. It must seem like a magic trick that I can conjure any number of meals in that kitchen! But they never say so.
Love of food, love of family, love of quiet time to oneself. It’s all here in a delicious mix.