Esther C. Baird
First published in the Tri Town Transcript Oct 17, 2019
Mid-fall is the time of year when I begin to feel an underlying anxiety about dinners. You know, the fact that the family wants to eat one every night for, best I can tell, at least 18 years.
Here’s a heart stopper: that’s 6,570 dinners.
I asked a group of women at a Bible study I teach what their favorite ’“go to meal” was, assuming take-out was not an option. (Don’t panic, it’s just a thought experiment, you can still order take out!)
The most common choice was spaghetti with meat sauce. “So like a jar of sauce with meat already in it?” I clarified.
There was smattering of laughter. One woman piped up, “well it’s not that hard to brown the meat and then add the sauce, right?”
Oh, right. No. Of course not. That’s not what I meant at all…
Back in the day I had a myriad of cook books to help me through this muddle. But in the last two years I’ve barely touched them and instead have a Pinterest board where I’ve pinned all my favorite recipes. I can type in my requirements such as, “gluten free, fast, healthy, uses corn, avocados and a crockpot” and voila: a zillion recipes! (Including, with that example, a recipe for avocado, chicken, corn chowder which looks yummy!)
But also… a zillion pictures. People who post the recipes seem to believe that they are gifted in both food and photography. I’d like to suggest that just because you can snap a photo of your whole chicken breast on a lovely white cutting board with a yellow rim, and then a shot of your chopped raw chicken breast in a cute white bowl with a yellow rim, does not mean it adds to our experience over here just trying to make dinner — one of 18 years worth.
Psst, you’re cooking chicken. I don’t need to see every moment of that process in a bandwidth sucking photo montage. This is not National Geographic. It’s for moms who are in a rush to feed the starving teenagers before they descend like locusts on the pantry and destroy everything in sight.
But perhaps more importantly, as a mom on the run I so, and I mean sooooooo, do not want to read the backstory for your recipe.
Remember the time you were in Costa Rica and the coconut dropped two feet from you and almost brained you, but instead you looked up and happened to see a leaf shaped like a chicken, and in that very moment you knew you had to invent a coconut chicken dish, but first you had to find your way out of the jungle you’d somehow gotten lost in, when suddenly you came upon a little old lady with a stack of white bowls and cutting boards with yellow rims that she’d crafted out of sloth toenails?
Nope. I don’t remember. And I for sure don’t want to read about it.
I have about 20 minutes to make dinner. So, chop chop. Literally. Just tell me, “if you throw all these items onto a baking sheet and blow torch it, your kids will be happy and fed 30 minutes later.”
I was recently trying to work a variation on a sub-sandwich theme into our dinner rotation. I found a recipe for Healthy Sloppy Joes but, every time I opened the recipe link, I had to scroll through the back story. The author had not grown up eating Sloppy Joes. Riveting. She grew up eating more traditional American foods (uh, more American than Sloppy Joes?) and then, later in life, had this big aha moment: Sloppy Joes were more than just a box mix! They were a legit food if made with good ingredients folded in with care and love and…
Can you hear my sigh? This is me, not caring. At all. I just wanted to know what I needed to do to turn things into a dinner I could serve and clean up before I had to drive my crew to the next thing.
She hadn’t even learned how to read in her childhood recap, and my girls were about to eat the kitchen counter. Spare me your Iliad of a backstory and just tell me: do you dice peppers for Sloppy Joes and do you have a mushroom substitute? Yes or no.
Until this new trend in autobiographical recipes gets itself under control, I may need to return to my paper cookbooks. Probably a big one, I’ve got about 2,920 dinners to go!