This Weekend's Sunday Dinner

In the late afternoon, for most of my adult life, I’ve felt an almost magnetic pull to the kitchen. Even when I was working at an office in a real 9-to-5 job, my brain would start drifting towards dinner and dinner ideas, and what I could spin into gold from the contents of my fridge and pantry at home. The pull doesn’t necessarily happen because I’m hungry; it’s more that I enjoy putting a meal together as a hobby and a creative act — probably the way you might enjoy gardening or knitting or, um, turning matchboxes into tiny, private worlds — and other than those well-documented harrowing years feeding toddlers, I pretty much always have.

Dinner, a love story and all that.

So it’s been a little disorienting to have the ritual taken away from me, at least temporarily. I won’t bore you with the details of my recovery, but these days I’m usually my best, most productive self in the morning, and depending on how good or bad I am about taking breaks — I’m usually terrible — by the afternoon, I’m spent, and not in the mood to bust out pots and pans and chop and clean-as-I-go and, well, cook. I do very much enjoy takeout and being cooked for, but preparing dinner has always been such a therapeutic, screen-free activity for me, one that recalibrates my laptop-fried brain, and marks the end of the day, and I miss it. Within a week of coming home from the hospital, I’d feel the pull to the kitchen without the energy to meet it, so I’d grab a single bagel from my get-well-soon stash, and turn it into two dozen bagel chips. I baked a single bagel at a time every afternoon for five straight days — slicing, tossing, and seasoning so slowly it felt almost like meditation — because it was just the sort of un-ambitious 15-minute project that scratched the itch. (Not to mention, is there a more heavenly afternoon snack than bagel chips spread with whitefish salad?) But that recipe was about as much as I could handle.

Alas, shed no tears for me! I’m getting a little better every day and also, I’ve discovered some extremely hands-off meal plans, where most of the work is done in the morning, and which, at least last week, add up to way more than the sum of its parts. It occurred to me that craving a delicious meal but not wanting to spend too much energy or time preparing that meal is not exactly a unique dilemma, especially during the summer, so I thought I’d share more about last week’s Sunday dinner triumph. Here’s what I did…