Dinner for One*

I hate cooking for myself. It feels like such a chore. I spend so much time preparing and chopping and stirring and cooking, and then I inhale the entire meal in about three minutes in front of the TV. Then it's time to return to the kitchen to a sink full of pots and pans and dishes and spoons and forks (how a meal for one can produce seven dirty forks, I will never figure out), not to mention the pasta sauce splattered across the cabinets and crusted onto the stovetop. The rest of my night turns into OCD dishwashing and scrubbing away at cooked-on leftovers and turning my hands into toxic prunes. I suppose this is what frozen dinners and the like are for, but eating neon orange macaroni or flakey mashed potatoes from the microwave is even more depressing than spending $20 and one hour preparing a single meal for one.

The problem here is not a hatred for cooking, and it most definitely is not a hatred of food. In fact, I love both cooking and food, but there's one missing ingredient: people. I feel a need to center all of my human interactions around food. I love going to dinner, hosting potlucks, attending family dinners, and cooking with my boyfriend. I love cooking for a meal, a meal that lasts an hour or two and involves conversation, laughter, and stories. Oh, I love the stories. No matter how many times I’ve heard them, I love hearing old family stories (especially those involving me).

I was on a family vacation this spring with my parents and aunts and uncles and my boyfriend. During our last dinner before the end of the trip, we had a huge meal that took what seemed like hours to prepare, but it wasn't a chore. We shared the responsibilities and cooked while telling and listening to stories. I barely remember what we even ate. I know someone made steak, and I think there were some veggies and pasta. I do know there was white wine. There was definitely wine. It was Aunt Ellen's job to pour the wine (this helps get the stories rolling). It was during this preparation that I heard all kinds of stories, like the time Uncle Bill had too much to drink and my cousin and I painted his toenails red and he thought his feet were bleeding when he woke up. Or how when my parents met at the newspaper, another employee was in love with my mom and stalked her at the gym. Or Aunt Ellen's stories of being a hospice nurse and the crazy things that old people say to her. It's hard to replicate the hilarity or nostalgia of any of these stories, but I think we all understand what I mean here. These are the meals that I truly enjoy preparing, because the emphasis isn't on making something half-way nutritious just to keep my tummy from rumbling all night; it's about togetherness, a communal effort to create a delicious and savory meal that accompanies friends, family, and conversation.

*I'm taking a [free!] 5-week writing workshop (actually called a wordshop) at Open Books. At our first meeting last Tuesday, the prompt was "Write about your most memorable meal." After surveying all the delicious, exotic, expensive, etc. meals in my head, I came to the realization that people, not taste, make my meals most memorable, and that is how this post came along.