A Late Dinner Alone: or, It Was Nine O’Clock and I Had to Do Something

My husband and child went to New Hampshire for a night this weekend. As such, I had most of a day, all of a night, and most of the next day to myself. This meant, naturally, that my usual framework for Life As I Know It went entirely down the toilet for about 40 hours. Which is fine — some of it was enjoyable, even. But one thing that definitely could have been handled better was the mealtime organization. Which is to say, there was none.
And it’s fine: if the only person who’s expecting anything is yourself, then you can raise or lower your standards as you see fit, right?
Much of my dietary intake on Saturday involved eating things that had been left behind in the fridge by the people who would normally eat them. For example: pizza. I ate the leftover pizza for lunch. Unfortunately, I ate lunch around 3 p.m., with the totally predictable result that at our normal dinnertime, I was utterly not hungry. So at six o’clock, when I’d normally be cooking, I was folding laundry and watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix. It got to be seven o’clock: I’d put away the laundry and was lying on the bed watching more Orange is the New Black, thinking, “Should I cook dinner? Well, I’m really not hungry, and why should I eat if I’m not hungry?”

Time went on. Another episode of Orange is the New Black. It got to be about ten to nine and I realized, with a bang, that if I didn’t eat something then what would happen would be, I’d go to sleep and wake up at three a.m. ravenously hungry, and that would totally suck.

Furthermore, if I kept watching Orange is the New Black, I was not going to sleep well, because inevitably each episode has some image or plot development that I find sufficiently upsetting that it’s just not healthy bedtime viewing for me.

So it was that at five to 9, I was in the kitchen filling a pot with water and thinking, “I’m gonna come up with a pasta sauce that might involve some chopping but will not involve actually cooking anything except the pasta.” There are lots of ways to handle this challenge, and I’ve written fairly extensively on the matter over the years. The kind of raw pasta sauce that can be thrown together quickly is a specialty of mine. I am expert in the field of Cannellini Beans and Tuna and Parsley and All Variants; I have spent years doing research into Uncooked Tomato Sauces. The Hausfrau has long advocated for the Raw Egg and Cheese sauce, which goes very unappreciated by most Americans, as far as I can tell; and there is a world of joy to be found in pesto sauces, which are great, but you have to have the ingredients on hand to make them. This evening, I did not. (Furthermore, making a pesto sauce would have compromised my rule, that moment, of “don’t dirty anything more than a knife and cutting board.” Making pesto is a snap, but you do have to have the basil ready, the nuts, etc. etc. — I had none of these things on hand — and even if I had, I wouldn’t have wanted to deal with washing the food processor. However, in the summer it is totally sensible to make big batches of pesto and keep it on hand precisely so you can throw together a good dinner out of pretty much nothing.)

I opened the fridge and the first thing that jumped out at me was the bowl of fresh figs. “I am the only one who likes figs,” I reminded myself. “What goes with figs? Goat cheese. Do I have any goat cheese?” The answer was, “Yes, I have half a log of goat cheese that actually needs to be used up because if I don’t it’ll get that weird yeasty smell and be inedible and gross and I’ll be really pissed off that I wasted two ounces of goat cheese.”

The figs were sliced on the cutting board. I boiled half a pound of pasta and dumped it in a big bowl. I drizzled on some olive oil, put the figs and cheese on top, and then tossed it. The goat cheese melted, the figs warmed up, and, because I was feeling madcap, I grated some Pecorino cheese on the whole thing. Then I sat down and watched an episode of 30 Rock, which I highly recommend as an antidote to distressingly grim episodes of pretty much anything.

My family came home on Sunday around 5.30 in the evening, just in time to walk in the door and have the first topic of conversation be, “What’s for dinner?” I was glad to see them, but I have to admit, I was not too excited to cook for them. I admit, though: it was good to be back on schedule. “I didn’t eat dinner until about 9.15 last night,” I told them. “And then I was up until midnight.”

“You can’t sleep well if you eat dinner at nine o’clock,” my husband chided me.

“But I wasn’t hungry at all at dinnertime,” I said.

‘That’s probably ’cause you ate lunch at four o’clock, didn’t you?”

“It was three o’clock,” I said smugly.

Last night we ate dinner at 7.15, my daughter was asleep by 9.15, and my husband and I were out cold by ten. Today is my daughter’s last day of third grade: the beginning of summer vacation. I’ve got a long summer ahead of me during which I will have to devise breakfasts and lunches and dinners and Special Picnics and 4th of July Treats and things to bring to potlucks.

Oh my god.