Dinner, a Semi-Complete List: Part Three

After Sarah Ruhl's essay "On Interruptions"

What if I list what it takes to get dinner on the table? Not simply the cooking. That’s where you find me again. (Read Part One and Part Two.)

Sarah Ruhl’s book 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write is one of my favorites, especially the opening essay “On Interruptions.” I return to it when I need to remember this: “At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.”

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Make steel cut oats and serve a bowl to each child. Sit down to eat my oats, topped with butter, maple syrup, and soy milk. My four-year-old has already finished hers and asks for more. I push my bowl over to her while feeding the baby, thinking she’ll eat a few bites.

My four-year-old eats my bowl clean. 

Consider the range of appetites under my roof. They are fleeting, or they hold fast. My son, 10, would eat four apples a day. My daughter, 7, takes thirty minutes to eat half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She wraps it up to eat later.

Michael and I talk about tariffs and fiscal policy before he leaves for work and I screenshot the local Fry’s (Kroger) weekly ad. I might want to look back.

I document my days like I’ll have a real need to reference them in the future. Perhaps to create the need.

At the farmer’s market, citrus are in season, and there is a blood orange cut in half. A friend and I marvel at the color. My daughter picks it up, demands to know why this piece of fruit was left laying on the other oranges. I take it from her, probably too quickly, and replace it. Often still feeling that one shouldn’t touch, should look with one’s eyes.

I read about people living in the Sonoran Desert centuries ago who built complex agricultural systems. Systems that were ridiculed, rejected, destroyed, eradicated by the Spanish invaders and then the US government. Keeping up to date on regenerative food news, I see other words used: forgotten, lost, revived, renewed, brought back.

There’s a small red notebook I keep in my kitchen cabinet, next to the spices. Entries from January read:

Fried rice made with leftover chickpeas and squash in tomato broth. Added two eggs + soy sauce, froz carrots + peas. Served with kimchi and nori. Next time: add kimchi while cooking.

Putting beans in jars. Let M & E play with the mung beans in a roaster pan. 

Beet stems in baked rigatoni bled, leftovers were pink.

Weekday lunch time arrives without notice. Quick: Eat something before we leave for tutoring appointments. The older two make themselves sandwiches, or heat up yesterday’s dinner. This may sound orderly but it isn’t, there is often grumbling over leftovers, too much mayo used on a sandwich that drips, something missing (a shoe, a binder, a hairbrush.)

Sometimes I bring my lunch to eat at the park.

The park, land of dried wasabi soy beans and peanut butter crackers (the bright orange kind that Michael has loved since a kid) and gulped water after running so hard their little faces are bright pink. I bring a book, reading it sitting, pushing the swing, trailing little feet in circles through the sand and grass.

Earlier in the morning I read the Food note Michael and I use to list our regular meals and groceries, so I already know we’ll eat a baked rigatoni for dinner. The steps exist in my mind, I run through them once again, the timeline, the order.  

There’s an eggplant from the farmer’s market in my refrigerator and I am craving eggplant parmesan but don’t have time for it. I wonder if I can make something that tastes similar – the fried flavor, the creamy eggplant, the crispy bits. 

Text a friend, an idea forming, “Do you like eggplant?”

Write in my Notes app about shopping for food locally and seasonally. Something I believe in, that also feels like yet another edict issued from high to people who are struggling.

As the day moves I can tell I will want to scream by five-thirty p.m. Nothing happened, everything happens. Children in and out of the vehicle, play, and then in and out again, pick up the older two. In again, talking over each other as they race to say their news first. As the noise and need circles around me, I start to fume, to sputter, and hiss. 

Text Michael, “I’m going to need to get out for a bit tonight.” He agrees.

Home and I’m not fuming. Slice and salt and rest the eggplant. Pull a Mason Jar of leftover roasted fennel and tomato sauce from the refrigerator, and peer into the pantry for extra canned tomatoes. Rinse and dry the eggplant. Ask my four-year-old to arrange the eggplant on the sheet pans.

Pause to watch, charmed by her precision. Smile to myself when she grows annoyed all the eggplant slices won’t fit on one pan. Something about apples and their trees.

Defrost and dry Einkorn bread in the oven. Roast eggplant in plenty of olive oil, more than usual. Boil rigatoni until right before al dente and let it rest in the colander. Blitz the bread in the food processor and fry in butter with salt, pepper, garlic powder, thyme, red chili flake. Take the eggplant out, cut the half-moons into bite size pieces with scissors. Pour the rigatoni into two baking pans, one oval, one square. Mix in the sauce, layer on the eggplant, top with bread crumbs. Bake.

Drink a half Mason Jar of water, my face surely bright pink.

Listen and chatter with my ten-year-old as we wash and dry dishes, as the girls dart in and out of the kitchen spying on us, or asking for water, or opening the refrigerator and staring into it vacantly. I feel most like Mom™ when I shoo them out, “Dinner’s almost ready,” on my lips.

Michael gets home, we lean on the kitchen counters gossiping, taking turns peeking into the oven. His office drama, the national drama, family drama. We’re hungry, bringing each other events and taking turns going, “This crazy thing,” “No this wild thing,” “But then this was even weirder.”

We say we want to know less, but so much finds us as we go through our days, trying to treat each other well, doing our jobs, breathing in the meantime.

He and the kids will eat and watch a movie, clean up, play whatever loud Dad™ games they play. I will sneak away with the smaller rigatoni to my friend’s place, where she’ll have a bottle of wine open, and we won’t move from her kitchen table the whole evening.

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The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays, interviews, and shorter updates. I also take on freelance editing and writing projects. Reach out if you’re looking for help in those departments — I’ve worked on everything from zines to textbooks.