Standing Room Only

In my household, dinner can be a million different things. Dinners with our friends tend to all fall from a similar (though lovely) mold -- drinks in the kitchen, dinner in the dining room, then all of us sprawled out on the living room floor, moaning about having eaten too much. Last, we pull ourselves back up to the table, stumble through coffee and dessert, and decide what tomorrow will bring. When it comes to dinner at home with just the two of us, though, there is no standard, no "usual." Frankly, when a dinner-ish sort of time rolls around, anything goes. Anything could happen. And this is something that I love.

If you've read the collection of short food memoirs, Alone In the Kitchen With an Eggplant, then you've already lost all your qualms about eating a dinner of oyster crackers, American cheese, and Nutella over the kitchen sink. And that is a good thing. I didn't always feel good about disorderly dinners. Just the fact that I regarded them as "disorderly" is a sure sign that I didn't think that it was okay to break away from structured mealtimes and, well, structured meals.

I grew up eating amazing meals. I mean, amazing, folks. My mother was (and still is) the queen of the Square Meal. I'm not talking about the boring square meal, the meat + potatoes + vegetable every single night meal. I'm talking about specially crafted and very delicious meals which represented all of the food groups in the proper way. Oh, and to boot, the rainbow was always very successfully represented. My mom was the one who taught me to use as many colors as you can on a plate, and to use a variety of textures and consistencies. She taught me about flavors and how to make them work together. These tutorials weren't always formal (although sometimes they were -- she did teach me how to cook, after all) because they were the kinds of things that she taught by example. The dinner plates always taught me something, like miniature cooking lessons. Little, delicious crash courses.

When I think about raising children, and all of the strength that it takes, I always think about dinnertime. When I cook dinner at home, I wonder, is this a good family meal? And then I ask myself, what in the world does that mean? I think I ask myself these questions because I want to do as good of a job as my mom did. I want it to look and feel effortless. I want to offer not only nutrition, but also comfort and safety and deliciousness. I want my weeknight meals to feel like events, though, too. Not events with formality, but family events. A time and place where it all goes down -- stories, woes, news, opinions, dialogue. Oh, and food. The meal will be there like our mediator, holding us up.

We ate in the kitchen when I was growing up. Two different houses, two different kitchens. I lived in the first house until fourth grade, and the kitchen was small and perfect. It fit a table that just fit the four of us, and it had two leaves that could fold up or down. I remember running my thumbnail through the leaf-seams while waiting for dinner. When I was older, I got to pour the milk. Sometimes I liked to have ice in it, and I liked to drink it before the ice started to melt and the water stood in a glassy layer on top. We had all sorts of things for dinner. My mother was adventuresome in the kitchen. There was a little, brown, paperback cookbook with silly drawings of huge-nosed men called Foods Men Like. I remember that we thought it was funny and odd, that little book, but it had the best goulash recipe. Or maybe that's to say, my mother made the best goulash using that recipe.

There was pizza with homemade dough and mozzarella that we'd eat in chunks as stuck the pieces into the cheese grinder, cranking the little red handle, and watching the long, thin cheese strands fall onto the pizzas in soft nests. There was chop suey with crunchy rice noodles (which I still am in love with, to this day) and sweet and sour chicken (pineapple can go in the dinner?, I wondered), as well as basics, like spaghetti, hot beef sandwiches, pork chops, pot roast, and hamburgers. There was a creamy chicken-stuffed manicotti, ravioli, tortellini, stuffed shells, and lasagna. There were tacos (always served with baked beans) and macaroni and cheese (always elbows, always homemade) and sometimes ham. There was chicken and dumplings, stew meat and dumplings, vegetable soup, and sometimes stew. There were horseshoes (an insane Springfield tradition which involves toast, meat, french fries, and cheese sauce) and chicken a la king (I was nervous about the pimentos). There was split pea soup, ham and bean soup, potato soup, taco salads, and Swedish meatballs (always served with mashed potatoes, always homemade). There was chili and chicken wings, meatloaf and pot pie. There were stir-fries, roasted chicken, sandwiches, and, sometimes (when Dad and I got our way), breakfast-for-dinner, replete with waffles or pancakes. Mom has never done more than just suffer through breakfast. She likes to make it quick so that she can move on to thinking about her favorite meal of the day, lunch, when salads abound. Certainly the last thing she wants to ever do is re-live breakfast in the evening, right when she's starting to forget about it even existing in the first place. All this, yet she'd cook it happily. We'd douse things in syrup (Log Cabin syrup, thankyouverymuch) while she, more than likely, consumed something else, something that more so resembled an actual vegetable.

My dad might have liked breakfast-for-dinner because there was no way to weave a vegetable into it, but I think I liked it because it felt crazy. If someone were to stop by while we were having this dinner, and they were invited in, I imagined them gasping in surprise and confusion as their eyes swept across the dinner table. What are you people DOING? Don't you know? This is dinner time, not breakfast time! You must have lost your MINDS! I think I loved doing something strange, something different. Here we were, me and my wacky family, doing something so funny, so interesting, so completely special.

As a teenager, I was, in fact, jealous of my friends who didn't have to be home for dinner, the friends who were allowed (encouraged, really) to graze the kitchen, putting together their own semblance of a dinner. I imagined what it would be like. A can of soup, two grapes, and seven cookies? Yes please. A popsicle, a pickle, and a cup of Kool-Aid? Bring it on! Cereal, Ritz crackers, and a leftover piece of chicken? Indeed. A glass of Tang, cold pizza, and a handful of peanuts? Dreamy. While this was never my reality, and, honestly, I didn't actually want it to be, I still just lusted after it because it was, well, different. And what is more appealing to a teenager than something different, something strange, something taboo? And since it wasn't enough to have two teenagers complaining about everything in existence, my parents got this, these dinner complaints. Oh, and my super-tired, growing-so-fast, adolescent brother, who usually fell asleep at the dinner table within eight seconds of sitting down. What a pair the two of us were. Honestly. If my parents would have had any sense at all, they would have opened the door, picked up our pitiful bodies, and plopped us down on the curb. Then, just the two of them could have headed back inside to the quiet kitchen for a cocktail and conversation that didn't involve whining. That would've been quite smart!

I think --well scratch that -- I know that all the memories of my family's dinner table shaped me and my brother immeasurably. Not only am I exultant about the manners that we were taught at the table, but I am just so grateful that we spent so many six o'clocks at the dinner table, learning about food and each other and the world. When I think of growing up, I think of a million things, but I always go first to the smells of dinner cooking, of watching my mom cooking with fluidity and happiness, of pouring the heavy, blue-capped gallon of milk, of setting the table, of watching the clock's minutes tick slowly tick by until it was six o'clock, which meant I would hear dad's tires on the driveway, and in he'd come, not missing a beat. With the same fluidity and happiness that my mom had in cooking, my dad would scoop us up in hugs and love, and, finally, it would be time. The table waited patiently til we soared in for dinner, collecting each other, filling our plates, and letting that food and those narrow wooden legs hold us all up.

These days, dinner is rarely at six o'clock. Our schedules are so different from one another! I work until the early evening, and Matthew works during most evenings, so, on weeknights, it's usually 9:oopm (at least) by the time he gets home. I feel sometimes like I'm the family dog, pacing around until he gets home, then pouncing on him with hugs and questions and pure bliss when he walks in the door. I cook when I get home, and get things ready, but when I hear the sound of his key in the door, then I know it's really dinner time.

We sometimes have a snack or a drink in the kitchen first, but sometimes we gravitate immediately to dinner. If we're both really tired, then we'll eat in the living room at the long coffee table (an old wooden locker room bench that is the perfect height for floor-eating). We'll watch something we've recorded, usually chatting so much that, at the end, we don't even know what the program was about. Sometimes we feel more civilized and we eat at the dining room table, me on the end and him just around the corner on my right. I love both of these ways to eat -- at two different kinds of tables, next to each other, reviewing the day and plotting our weeks, passing the salad or a sauce, sometimes sharing a glass of iced tea. I inevitably will not finish my plate, and he'll always -- always -- finish it for me. That's a perfectly good piece of chicken!, he'll gush dramatically, stabbing it with his fork as though it is the last piece of food on earth. Or, You'd better let me eat that crust so that it doesn't feel left out!

As much as I like these two dining stations, I must confess that my all-time favorite involves not sitting, but standing. Not forks, but fingers. Not napkins, but a shared kitchen towel. It's us, standing at the kitchen counter or around the red kitchen table, having snacks-for-dinner. It doesn't always start out as this. Sometimes we think that we will have a snack before dinner, and we just like the snacks so much that we don't even get to the plates-and-dinner part. Sometimes one of us hasn't eaten lunch and this, too, affects our dinner method.

Typically, things are pulled out of the fridge willy-nilly -- some chunks of feta cheese, salami, pickles, oranges, leftover ham, grape tomatoes, olives, fennel, some mustard -- and paired with whatever sort of vehicles we have in the cabinet. Tonight was one of those nights. I came home from work and errands, and he was getting ready to leave for work in an hour. Enough said! It was leftover chicken sausages, some wheat bread, pickles, radishes, and carrots. So here we were, standing at the counter, eating these things from the cutting board, discussing the pros and cons of the day, and I realized something.

One, I'm thrilled to live with this person who is so endlessly easygoing. Dinner and martinis downtown? He's in. Pub food and beer? Take out Thai? He's in. A strangely elaborate six course dinner at home? He's in. A thrown-together meal-snack that we eat together at the kitchen sink, mango juice dripping down our arms? He's in. In fact, he doesn't even judge me when he sees me eating soup from the pot. He just laughs and deems it the best moment of his day.

Two, I know that I appreciate all these dinner methods because they are so real. No matter what we have argued about that day, no matter what else has happened, there is always dinner. Dinner is always honest, and it's always just us, being us.

Last, and most comforting of all, I know that things have come back around. My family passed down to me the importance of the dinnertime connection, and now I, too, have passed it along to someone I love. Pass the peas, pass the rolls, pass the magic of dinner togetherness. Even if it means radishes, crackers, cheese cubes, and slices of sausage over the kitchen sink.
My invention of the evening, lovingly coined sausage stacks. For all of you out there just itchin' to fix some of these for yourself, I suppose I can part with the recipe just this once. That's one square of wheat bread (the grainier the better), one slice of jalapeno chicken sausage, yellow mustard, and relish (for crying out loud, sweet relish!, not dill). That, my friends, is dinner.