My Nemesis… Dinner

I have a love/hate relationship with dinner.  The part I love is where my husband, daughter and I sit at the dinner table and catch up on the day.  The part I don’t love is, well, the rest of it. 

Rachel Ray can chirp all day about “30 Minute Meals” but she’s not counting the time involved in the weekly grocery shopping, menu planning and clean up.  It doesn’t feel worth it when you’re doing all this prep work and it takes us 3 minutes to eat.  Maybe 4.  I’m thinking my family should get into the whole “raw food” diet.  Then I could just toss some nuts & berries and a carrot on a plate and call it a day.

As I recall, I survived my 20’s eating a nice bowl of Captain Crunch every night and I turned out just fine.  Sometimes I’d change it up and have some pasta, but that was pretty much the extent of my cooking repertoire.  To be completely honest, many of my dinners occurred at a place that no longer exists.  It was a magical place called Happy Hour.  Oh, the joy of free chicken wings. Even if my friends and I only ordered a single cocktail each, our friendly bartender would reward us with free chicken wings and nachos.

Back then, I couldn’t afford much for dinner anyway.  I was spending all my money on rent. One friend offered her solution that she fondly referred to as  “The Poor Man’s Roast Beef Dinner”. Take a bag of microwave popcorn and a can of soda.  Ingest.  You’ll be so full that you feel like you ate a whole roast beef dinner.  Nutritious, no. Handy and cheap, you bet.

Now that I have responsibility for providing relatively healthy meals to my family, I realize that I need to stop complaining about making dinner.  I’ll never be that person who cooks all day Sunday in preparation for the week.  My Sunday has better things to do.  Realistically, I will continue to overuse my Plan B menu or as I like to call it “Breakfast for Dinner”.   Eggs, wheat toast, fresh fruit and bacon - a fairly balanced meal.  You could put bacon on shredded cardboard and it would probably taste good.  And where there is bacon, all is well in the world.