Driving You Crazy: Having to Figure Out What You’re Going to Eat 365 Days a Year
Adeline loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out. Usually, that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the Sunday Roast series, she shares her observations. This time: why it’s actually pretty maddening that you have to figure out what’s going to be on the table again, 365 days a year.
It may well be the most important question of the day. Especially when, like me, you have a warm relationship with food. Dinner is my moment; anything can happen around it. Eating can suddenly turn into going out for dinner, or into small bites, people can join us, it can be delivered, or my inner cook can emerge, leading to me stirring a homemade soup barefoot. Except when I’m heading off on holiday—then I simply don’t know anymore.
The Bottle Cap
Normally, it’s not a problem, because I have a partner who likes to cook and does so often. We take turns in the great not knowing what to eat, which usually means something tasty appears on the table, and on the days when nothing comes to us, we eat out. But now the situation is as follows: I’m in the final week before departure, and last night I gave him a glass of wine as an appetizer, a Turkish pizza as the main course and a milkshake for dessert. And for that glass of wine alone, I performed one action: twisting the cap off the bottle and pouring it into a glass. For the rest of our meal, I simply paid a scandalous amount in delivery fees.
The Nerve to Sigh
I always thought my mother was joking when she used to say: ‘what shall we eat this week?’ But now I understand her struggle. She came up with an entire week’s menu all by herself, and then I dared to complain when we had fried potatoes with lettuce and boiled eggs again on Wednesday. Fried potatoes, mind you, made from potatoes that had been boiled beforehand, in a hefty slab of butter—not even pre-cut ones from the supermarket.
In retrospect, I should be utterly ashamed. That woman figured out what to serve me for three-hundred-fucking-sixty-five days, and I had the nerve to sigh. My punishment is probably that I can’t even manage it for a week.
Hereby, my sincere apologies on behalf of everyone who has ever sighed about what was on the table. What am I eating tonight? A little burger, of course; I couldn’t come up with anything else. Maybe I’ll fry up a little potato to go with it, out of respect for my mother.
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