What’s for Dinner?

What’s for dinner is a shameless aping of Simcha Fisher’s regular feature “What’s for Supper?”

I am not a cook.

I used to be. When I was pregnant with Rose I used to watch Hell’s Kitchen and develop violent cravings for exotic restaurant meals we couldn’t possibly afford, so I set about learning to make cheaper and allergy-friendly versions of them myself. Later, when Rose was a baby, I watched The French Chef to keep my sanity during the twelve-to-five colic shift. I liked The French Chef, because she taught her viewers how to make fancy dishes out of the cheap foods available at a 1950s grocery store, or at the Steubenville Wal Mart.

For the first year Rosie was with us, we ate well. Then she learned to walk, and my days were spent chasing her instead of cooking. Then our poverty got more dire, and there wasn’t money for recipes. Then my health crashed, and that’s only recently beginning to improve. Somewhere in there we moved house twice in one year. I barely cooked anything more complicated than scrambled eggs and microwaved frozen vegetables.

Just before Pascha, Rosie told me that the most exciting part of holidays was getting to set the table. And I realized we hadn’t had a proper sit-down dining room dinner with meat, vegetables and starches on the same plate in months.

I resolved to cook regularly again.

We’ve started slow.

“I’m making Swedish Meatballs!” I told Rosie.

Rose was suspicious. “Sweetish meatballs?”

“You’ll love them,” I said, going into a full-blown Homeschooling Mother Fugue. “I used to eat them all the time when I was your age. They come from the country of Sweden. Let’s look at your map. Here’s China, which we learned about last month; here’s Australia, which we’re learning about lately; here’s the United States where we live; here’s Ukraine, where Father Vasyl comes from; and this over here is Sweden. Swedish meatballs come from Sweden.”

“But what is sweetish meatballs?” Rose knows when she’s being conned. “What is it made of?”

“Oh, hamburger, rice, seasonings–”

Rosie fell backward in a heap. “SEASONINGS!?”

I eventually calmed her down.

We had all the ingredients we needed for Swedish Meatballs, minus beef stock and cream. It was a day which the bus didn’t run, so my only choice was to go to the tiny local market. It’s a fun place, if expensive, run by a Greek family with an icon of Theotokos over the door frame, but it’s in one of the scariest parts of LaBelle, one of the only parts that deserves the neighborhood’s seedy reputation. There are so many security cameras and stern “no loitering” signs, you’d think you were trying to rob Scrooge McDuck instead of make Swedish Meatballs.

“Will you come with me to the market?” I asked Rosie. “So that we can buy ingredients?”

“You’d better not make me eat sweetish meatballs.”

“I’ll get you a little bag of chips,” I promised.

Rose got her sneakers on. We made our way to the market, trying to look friendly while also trying not to looks as if we wanted attention, as one does in the very seedy parts of LaBelle.

At the market, we found that there was neither cream nor beef stock. There was a jar of “soup base,” which was not safe for my food allergies; there was canned chicken noodle soup. There was tahini and halva and black olives, all the staples that I suppose are perfectly normal if you’re Greek. There was a big counter of hot food, mostly fried chicken, which smelled delicious. But no stock and no cream. There wasn’t any Fresca either, which made me want to cry. I’d worked up a thirst for Fresca on the walk to the market.

Still, they did have a rack of fifty-cent bags of potato chips. That ended up being Rosie’s dinner, with a nourishing bowl of gluten-free spaghetti and butter before bed.

The next day I was ready. I took the bus to Wal Mart. I bought my cream and my beef stock. I asked Rosie if she wanted to help Mommy in the kitchen, but she said no because she had a paper cut. I chopped onions. I mixed ingredients. I found a dead moth in the nutmeg so I left the nutmeg out.

I made Swedish Meatballs.

We ate them on the sofa in front of the television, because I was too tired to set the dining room table. Rosie would not touch the sauce, but she grudgingly ate one dry meatball on a bed of gluten-free noodles.

Later that week I made beef stroganoff, Johnny Marzetti and a shrimp stir fry. Rose enjoyed the plain noodles and white rice.
I am a cook again. I can make healthful and nourishing meals my five-year-old refuses to eat.

That is usually how it works, isn’t it?