The Dinner Files

My dashing and I have some classic marital opposites-attract divisions. I would like the house to stay in a state of perpetual spotless delight; he is a big slob. I think 3 o’clock means 3 o’clock; even our son knows his father’s “half an hour” has nothing to do with 30 measurable minutes. One thing we can really agree on though is this simple truth: spaghetti squash sucks.

We had both, at separate points in our lives, been served spaghetti squash topped with marinara sauce and told it was a delightful substitute for pasta. Maybe you like that kind of nonsense, but we sure don’t.

I once had to come up with a spaghetti squash recipe for work so I tossed with with a jalapeño-infused cream, smothered it in cheese, and baked the living daylights out of it. Of course that was good (check it out). My local foods site for About.com had a noticeable dearth of spaghetti squash recipes, and the people, they seem to really want to eat spaghetti squash. So I got to thinking, and thinking. And then it occurred to me: Spaghetti squash isn’t much like pasta, but it is somewhat like rice vermicelli. So I made a family favorite — pork and rice noodles — using spaghetti squash as the noodles. Everyone agreed: very tasty. It’s so good for you it’s almost wrong, but the mild sweetness of spaghetti squash works with the spice in this dish remarkably well.

Get the recipe for Spicy Spaghetti Squash “Noodles”. Note: You will need some cooked spaghetti squash to make it.

Sure, I’ve made doughnuts before, but I’d never made my very favorite type of doughnut: a lightly glazed sour cream old fashioned.

Or, to be more specific, a lightly glazed sour cream old fashioned doughnut from Top Pot in Seattle.

Then my food writing world pal Jess Thomson worked on Top Pot Hand-Forged Doughnuts: Secrets and Recipes for the Home Baker and there is was, on page 96, the recipe.

So after dinner I mixed up the dough (no big deal) and set it in the fridge to chill while I slept. I set my alarm to wake up a bit early (time to make the doughnuts!), and sipped coffee while I rolled and cut the dough.

I overestimated how long that would take (the rolling and cutting took less than 15 minutes), so I sipped more coffee while I read in the quite of the morning. About fifteen minutes before my friend and neighbor dropped off her kids that I oh-so-nicely agreed to take to school that morning, I heated up the oil and started frying.

I learned, from Jess, that old fashioned doughnuts are made from a cake-like dough, fried at a lower temperature than other doughnuts, and turned twice while frying—a combination that gives them those crunchable grooves and petals that hold a simple glaze oh so beautifully, especially when you do as Jess says and dip still-warm doughnuts in a still-warm glaze and let them set up for at least ten minutes before crunching into them.

Was I motivated to write an informed review of my friend’s book? A selfish desire to enjoy a homemade old fashioned doughnut with my coffee on a dreary run-of-the-mill Tuesday morning? A maternal need to make my son’s favorite breakfast (sadly, he knows just how awesome homemade doughnuts are)? A narcissistic desire to have two delightful little girls think I’m the bee’s knees? No one much cared, we just happily ate the results, leaving a thin layer of sugar and joy all over the house.

At our family cabin in northern Minnesota there are, as is the custom, many family photos, including a fine selection of oldey timey black-and-whites of my great-grandparents engaged in various antics. This lady here? She’s my great-grandmother, Georgie McGregor Bronson. She died when I was seventeen. Seventeen! I used to drive over and visit her. She would say I was an angel sent from heaven for coming to cheer her up with what, I now understand, was my sheer youth and existence. Let’s just say this: that wasn’t the usual reaction to me at the time.

So here she is, bathing, in the lake in which I bath every summer. Her daughter was the grandmother I adored. As a kid I swam at that very dock with both of them and pretty much every other member of that side of the family.

But all that is besides the point. I love the picture for those reasons, but I post it here because of words she said to my mother when she was fairly close to dying and was pretty much a fairly cheery pile of skin and bones: all my life, I wanted to be thin, what good does it do me now?

She wasn’t a heavy woman by any stretch, but she wasn’t tall and she had a “nice bosom,” so I suppose she never felt particularly svelte either. Of course, we have photographic evidence above that she was a normal sized, even thin by many many standards, person above.

I bring this up because, if you’re anything like me, you want to feel healthy and look good but not obsess about your weight or be weird and develop what I like to call an “under-control adult eating disorder.” The thing is, maintaining that balance becomes increasingly difficult as middle-age spread sets in and what you need to do just to keep wearing your own clothes is less and less fun.

For example, I would like to be able to eat cheese. Lots of cheese. I love cheese. Every single kind. I don’t want to binge or anything, but I would very much like to eat, say, a couple ounces of cheese everyday. And I used to do so. Happily. Every afternoon around 4 or when I got home and started fixing dinner, I would joyfully eat two or three ounces of cheese. Sometimes more. You know what? That’s no longer such a good idea for me. I’m afraid copious amounts of cheese may have to go in the same pile as smoking: something I’m going to put off for now, but when I hit 80, watch out!

In short, I’ve been working through what it means to work in food and have food be such a big part of my life and such a source of pleasure and camaraderie, while also taking quite seriously that I’d like to pretty much stay this size. Well, I’d actually like to be the size I was before I hurt me knee, which is just very slightly smaller than I am at this exact moment. Seeing how quickly I put on a few while laid up and then what it takes to take off a few at this point in the game is fairly depressing.

So, when I opened New York Magazine and saw this, my inner Joan Rivers shouted “can we talk?”

There are so many ways to read this page it boggles the mind. The skinny-women-are-the-ideal/skinny-women-are-freaks dichotomy is super fun to process, for starters. But as someone who loves food, let me say this: The model may very well believe that she eats “like a normal person,” and maybe she does, but to me it looks like she spends all day barely staving off hunger and then orders the least appetizing dinner I can imagine. Barley soup, a tuna wrap, and cole slaw? Each element sounds okay, but as a meal? Together? That shit ain’t right. There is not a single food episode (I can hardly call most of them “meals”) that she eats that a human could possibly look forward to. It’s all just so Spartan and sad. The ballerina, on the other hand, with her holier-than-thou attitude and bizarre eating schedule (which, to be fair, seems designed around maximizing her energy for performances while keeping her bird-like and lift-able), at least has a few things in there that sound tasty. A crab cake with chopped salad and Pinot Noir? Sign me up!

As someone facing the dreariness of a slowing metabolism, I can’t help but think that the model, who is young and naturally slim, is seriously wasting her time. She could be downing cereal swimming in half-and-half, snacks of steaming macaroni and cheese, troughs of trifle. She could, I bet, ditch the “light butter” and spread her “whole wheat flatbread” with avocado butter, a concoction as decadent as it sounds which a friend and I made way too much of in college, to no ill effect. Instead she lists “ice water” as part of a meal.

It’s enough to make an old lady cry. Instead, though, I hope that when my son and perhaps future grandchildren and even great-grandchildren look at what will be old photos of me someday in the future they will remember that I was active and fun, just like Georgie. And that I never served them barley soup, tuna wraps, and cole slaw. Ever.