Dinner Happens Every Day

Every afternoon, at some point, dinner becomes a problem.

Not a serious problem. Nothing anyone needs to be notified about. Just a small administrative burden that appears around four o’clock and steadily becomes more urgent.

What are we having?

This question is especially irritating because dinner happened yesterday. We dealt with it. Everyone ate. Plates were cleared. The kitchen was technically restored to working order.

And now, somehow, we have to do it again.

Dinner happens every day.

This feels excessive.

There are people who seem prepared for this. They have meal plans. They buy groceries with several specific futures in mind. On Sunday, they apparently know what they will want to eat on Thursday.

I have never known what I wanted to eat on Thursday.

Thursday Brandon is a stranger to me.

Most evenings begin with considerably less infrastructure.

There is an inspection of the refrigerator.

Nothing has changed since the last inspection, but this does not prevent a second inspection approximately nine minutes later.

A cabinet is opened.

Something frozen is considered too frozen.

Something fresh is discovered to have become less fresh while we were busy not eating it.

One ingredient briefly becomes the foundation of an entire imagined meal before someone notices we are missing four other ingredients necessary to make that meal.

Eventually somebody says, “We could just order something.”

This is both a suggestion and a threat.

Because ordering something means choosing something, and choosing something means opening an app containing approximately 900 restaurants while being unable to remember a single food you have ever enjoyed.

So we return to the kitchen.

And usually, somehow, dinner happens.

A box of pasta becomes dinner.

The vegetables that were purchased with better intentions become dinner.

Eggs become dinner considerably more often than eggs probably expected.

A piece of chicken, one acceptable onion and a bottle from the refrigerator door that says something vaguely promising become dinner.

Sometimes it is actually good.

Occasionally it is so good that everyone immediately begins speaking as though this was the plan all along.

“Oh, we should make this again.”

Absolutely.

We will never make it exactly this way again.

Nobody measured anything.

One of the ingredients was added because the container was almost empty and throwing it away felt wasteful.

The oven was set to a temperature based largely on instinct.

There is no documentation.

This meal has occurred once and is now extinct.

Which is part of why Eventually, Dinner. exists.

Not because dinner needs to become more serious.

Dinner has enough pressure already.

It does not need twelve paragraphs about sourcing shallots or a personal transformation before you are allowed to find out how long to roast a potato.

But food does collect stories.

There is the thing somebody always makes.

The thing we ate on a trip and then spent years trying to recreate.

The recipe attached to a person, a house, a holiday or a night that got significantly more complicated than expected.

There are dishes that are technically recipes and dishes that are mostly instructions like, “Keep adding cheese until the situation improves.”

Both count.

The goal here is good food without pretending that getting to it is always beautiful.

Sometimes there will be a plan.

Sometimes there will be six people in a kitchen designed for two.

Sometimes someone will forget an ingredient.

Sometimes someone will become weirdly confident that they can substitute something they absolutely cannot substitute.

Sometimes dinner will be served at 6:30.

Sometimes the words eventually, dinner will be less of a name and more of a progress update.

That is fine.

The table does not particularly care how organized we were on the way there.

Dinner usually happens.

The route there is less reliable.

And, for some reason, tomorrow we will have to do it again.