Dinner

Yes, there is some irony to my writing about a meal on a day when I've been fasting.  Truthfully, I've been thinking about food since I woke up this morning and didn't have breakfast.

So what makes dinner blog-worthy?  It is a baggage-filled meal in our home.  While breakfast and lunch tend to be eat-what-you-want meals, we really do try to eat together, so unless we're ordering in, which we try not to do too much these days, the challenge is to find something, or a set of somethings, that will satisfy everyone.  Well, actually the other challenge is to find something I can make without ruining.  For which we have all (or at least most of) the ingredients in the house.  And which will be reasonably healthy.  See--baggage.  Oh, and we've got one who won't eat anything that was ever cute, and another who avoids cheese, and a third who will try things as long as he can put unlimited ketchup on them and as long as he didn't eat six times between coming home from school and sitting down for dinner.  And a big somebody who sometimes eats lunch at 12 and comes home starving and sometimes eats at 3 and would happily just have salad.

So, here I am, once again pondering dinner.  When I was working, there was a time when we decided that our babysitter should give the kids dinner so that they were not always waiting to eat with us at 8pm.  Problem was, even if they ate at 6, they wanted to eat again at 8.  We gave that up pretty quickly.  Now that I'm here most afternoons, timing is no longer the problem, but deciding what to have remains.

So--where was I going with this?  Oh, yes, as full of baggage as dinner was even when I was working, it has become a central part of my existence now that I am home.  It is part of how I "prove my worth" in our family unit now, and honestly, if I were cut out for proving my worth that way, I would have become a chef.  So while I do it, and my husband and kids are not malnourished (or obese), I look forward to the day when my "worth" gets proven some other way and we go back to having some dinners made by my husband (who actually could have "proven his worth" as a chef).

For tonight, I'm just glad to be eating and writing.  Another year of fasting done.  Shana tova and bon appetit!