If You Ask Me What’s for Dinner One More Time, I’ll Cook You
You know who we are.
We’re the dinner doers. The sole responsible party for feeding our family dinner, each and every blessed night.
Somewhere along the way, within our families, an unspoken rule was born in our lives.
We’re still working out how it happened. Yet, it seems, it morphed from all the grocery store lists we wrote down or typed.
The trips to the supermarket.
Accidentally making dinner too often.
Going back to the store for items forgotten.
Even our frustrating cries for help with said lists and dinner menus weren’t enough to get us out of the doom of dinner.
Because those pleas went…somewhere and likely unanswered.
When the innocent, fact-finding question, ‘What’s for dinner,’ is asked, do your toes curl, and your shoulders stiffen? Does your jaw clench on the name of the beautiful course you will serve this fine night? A shot in the heart, and a reminder, that the dinner job is all on us. Mostly, and on any given typical night.
And perhaps we hold the dinner menu a little too close to the vest. It’s not something we wish to divulge because, really, it’s all we have left. The only little piece of control over this whole process we dinner doers undergo.
In regard to this question, I find myself replying after a lengthy silence — on the decant dinner they’ll be feasting on for all of ten minutes — through clenched teeth. Meanwhile, the weekly dinner menu is also posted on the board for all to see. Ri-ight? Perhaps it should be placed one on everyone’s pillow at night.
When the call for collaboration and pleading begins on Friday evenings after a long day at work. I ask the wild call question, hoping it will reach the depths of each room they are relaxing in, “What would you all like for dinner this week?” Nothing in this world quiets my family more than this harmless inquiry.
Crickets chirp, the air conditioning hums in the background, the floorboards creek, and even the TV’s volume dies down. The children seem to be playing rather suddenly in their room, vanished upstairs in a blink. My partner is tiptoeing around the home out of my line of vision. No one whispers a word.
It’s also a good tip when you really want silence. Why not.
And, so, with the silence comes googled dinner ideas. The easiest, quickest, simplest, timesaving, three ingredients, healthy, but not too healthy family dinner everyone known to man/woman will eat.
But you all know the hacks. You’ve been in my shoes. Maybe you think I’m complaining. But I’ve accepted my fate, and I’m coping with it. Just like I would be if I happened to be married to Tom Hardy, and then I woke up from that charming dream.
If you’ve been doing dinners for a while now, you’ve probably learned all kinds of hacks and make ahead meals. You’ve even learned how to skillfully get your partner to put the food in the oven on certain nights. You know how to plan dinner for the week like a boss. Online grocery ordering. Pft. Delivery. Pft. You know where and what to do. You may be so organized even your pantry is labeled and color-coded. Or you’re a throw-it-together person, and it’s always worked out, so you’re sticking with perfection.
You even make it a treat. Getting yourself a bottle of wine to go with those chicken tenders. Or the creative’s out there, own aprons that read, “If you ask me what’s for dinner one more time, I’ll cook you.”
With a glass of red in one hand, and a meatloaf on my plate, which I’ve been told doesn’t taste like it usually does, and no one will be eating it tonight. Cheers to you, our special dinner club.
