I recommend restaurants all week long. Ask me where to go for dinner and I can help you. Ask me where I want to go, and suddenly I’ve got nothing.
I love food. I’m just tired of deciding what we’re eating.
At home, at least, there’s one rule: one dinner. My kitchen is not a restaurant. I don’t take orders, and there are no substitutions. If you’re making separate meals for everybody, I admire your energy. I don’t have it.
Ed likes to eat at six. That means I need to be home from the grocery store by four. Which means I need to know what I’m making before I leave the house.
That’s where you lose me.
I can shop. I can chop. I can get dinner on the table. But first somebody has to come up with the idea, and somehow that somebody is always me.
Especially after a decent lunch. Now I’m planning, shopping for, and cooking a meal I’m not even hungry for.
Then comes the question.
“What’s for dinner?”
After 37 years of marriage, you’d think I’d have a better answer than “I don’t know,” “I just had lunch,” or “How about we go out?”
But here we are.
And please don’t suggest takeout. I hate takeout. Delivery still leaves me in my kitchen. I want to put on lipstick, sit at a bar, and order a martini with blue cheese olives. I want to see other people. I want somebody to hand me a menu.
If you’d rather skip the cooking altogether, there’s a local option: Fairchester Farms (fairchesterfarms.com) is a farm-fresh weekly meal delivery service serving Westchester and Fairfield Counties. You choose your meals from their weekly menu, and they deliver Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
I’ll stay home for David Muir. But when World News Tonight is over, I’d like to get my coat.
Except now we have another question.
“Where are we going?”
We’ve worn out all the local restaurants. The ones I really want to go to seem too far away to bother. I wanted a night out, not another round of decisions.
If Ed and I can’t agree on what to eat, we just might have more problems than food.
This is what gets me. Food is something I love. Recommending restaurants is something I do all week. Yet when it’s time to figure out my own dinner, I’m tired of the conversation before we’ve eaten anything.
Do you feel this way? You don’t want to cook. You don’t want takeout. You want to go out, but nowhere sounds worth getting in the car for.
The other night, I was so frustrated I had a rum raisin ice cream cone.
It was pretty good. It hit the spot.
