Getting Re-Acquainted with Dinner

A love for making dinner is lost and then found.

Somewhere amid last year’s transition and change overload, I stopped cooking dinner. I got away from the habit slowly, almost without realizing the loss. I suddenly had a job where I got a free meal every day, half of which I often didn’t finish and took home for myself or J to snack on. I ate at random times, often around 10:00 a.m., sometimes at 1:00 p.m. I’d come home famished or stuffed after my shift, never somewhere in between that lent itself nicely to, say, a 6:00 dinner.

We got busy with life and started skipping dinner altogether or opting just for a plate of random fridge bits (i.e. girl dinner (i.e. cheese and crackers, a random apple, maybe a handful of chips, a single cucumber, a bowl of cereal)). If I did cook, I made something easy and quick. Read: not always very good. We stocked up on Trader Joe’s freezer aisle offerings and started eating out more and the whole of my digestion hated me for it.

I stayed away from cooking dinner long enough that the desire to do so began to fade. Gone were the long nights spent in the kitchen, windows fogged with the boiling and basting, rooms stinking up from onions cooked down, down, down into a buttery brown. Tasks and recipes that were once just muscle memory started disappearing and my cookbooks quite literally gathered dust.

When I stopped long enough to take notice of what had happened, I panicked a little. I began looking for the want to cook, taking a pulse of sorts on my attitude toward the kitchen. Often I found the desire still missing, occasionally pushing through and going toward the stove anyway. Like most things that are good for me, I never regretted doing it. Always I found delight by the time I plated dinner even if it wasn’t with me in the beginning.

Recently, very recently, my want to cook dinner has returned in small sparks. I have nothing to attribute it to other than perhaps the bitter temperatures of late which continue to force us indoors where I have grown tired of watching TV all night. So the kitchen calls. Heavy sauce, steaming bowls of rice, meat searing toward golden. One night inspired another and it feels like maybe, maybe, maybe I’m back? I am speaking gently to the dinner-making spark in case it gets shy and decides to leave again but while it lingers I am once again planning ahead, dreaming of ingredients while recipes clog up the brain and my palate re-awakens. I guess you could say I’m getting re-acquainted with dinner.

And that isn’t so bad a thing here in the cold heart of winter.

Here are a few projects, meals, and ingredients that have gotten and continue to get me excited to be back in the kitchen.

🥟Batch making dumplings. We’ve only made dumplings a few times but never in batches to stuff into the freezer. The feeling of having these to pull straight from the freezer whenever the craving for dumplings arises… absolutely yes.

🧅French onion soup. My favorite soup. My very, very favorite soup! I don’t care that even the closets smell like onions for a week. FRENCH ONION SOUP CURES ALL. I clear an afternoon, use Nicole Gulotta’s recipe from her Eat This Poem cookbook as a guide, and let those onions cook down for hours, okay?!

🥪Speaking of cookbooks, pretty much everything in Matty Matheson’s new cookbook inspires. Listen, there’s a crispy lamb pho!! A roasted shallot salad with 16 shallots. 16!!!! Also, a fried sprouting cauliflower sandwich and a muffuletta (oh god, a muffulettaaaa), and a sabich with cucumber, tomato, and pickled hot peppers. Just paging through the book, I already feel fed.

🥔Pot roast because every bitterly cold day needs a stout answer. I load mine up with an insane amount of carrots because, well, if I’m honest, the gravy-soaked carrots are my favorite part of pot roast and 95% of the reason why I make the dish in the first place.

🍲And as another answer to the bitterly cold days: cabbage soup. I saw this recipe on Instagram a while back and haven’t been able to make it yet but it’s burned in my brain and on the list. Cabbage is in line to be the star of my winter foods this year.

A few other things, although not necessarily dinner, have also got me in a tizzy, eager to get back to the kitchen, like orange marmalade and this clementine cake that someone shared on social.

It feels good to have a love for making dinner back again. I’m going to cling to it for as long as it stays.

Until next time—