What I Had for Dinner Last Night

by Ukulele Ike

Okay, the first thing you have to understand before you find out what I had for dinner last night, is that my wife is Healthy.

She wasn't always Healthy. Our first "date," back during college days, consisted of sitting on the edge of her bed in her residential college, smoking cigarettes and drinking Bourbon whiskey from the bottle. The first part of the "date," anyway.

After we graduated and set up light housekeeping together in lower Manhattan, the Healthy thing started in. At first it was gradual. She quit smoking, and whenever we decided to try out a recipe that called for heavy cream, she insisted that I substitute either sour cream or plain milk.

As the years passed, however, and we had two children, the acute condition became chronic. We no longer keep the fattier cuts of meat in the house...pot au feu is made from flank steak rather than chuck, and pork tenderloin has replaced center-cut chops. A subscription to Cooking Light magazine was obtained. Vague threats of vegetarianism and Lite mayonnaise were bandied about.

Okay. Years ago, I shopped like a real New Yorker did, back in the good old days. We would decide sometime during the day what the plan was for din-din that night, and on the walk home from the subway I would stop in at the butcher (Hi, Dom!), the greengrocer (Hi, Ngyuen!), and the grocery store if dry-goods were required. But after joining the Park Slope Food Co-op we began to shop like real Americans…figuring out just what the hell we were going to be consuming over the course of a week, then making a list and trying to stock up. Vegetables for the week, milk, eggs, breads, whatnot. (Specialty items are still purchased at specialty shops, of course…the olive oil is Greek and comes from Astoria…the flatbreads come from Atlantic Avenue…the sausages come from Yorkville…otherwise what’s the point of living in NYC?)

This of course makes a menu plan necessary. Stews and roasts on the weekend, when we have more time; stir-fries, sautés, and grills during the work week.

Now, we own literally HUNDREDS of cookbooks. Everything from soul food to Thai cuisine; books specific to the foodways of Appalachia and the Florida Keys and the north Mexican border; books from Lundy’s restaurant and Andersen’s Pea Soup joint and Commander’s Palace and Luchow’s; Bulgarian cookbooks, Irish cookbooks, Belgian cookbooks, Filipino cookbooks. I like cookbooks. I keep ‘em on the bedside table and read myself to sleep with them.

But the wife REALLY likes COOKING LIGHT magazine. It is Healthy. And unless I involve myself heavily in the planning stages, I find that much of the week’s menu is drawn for the most recent issue.

In the current week, our evening meals have included:

1. Grilled chicken with a peanut-miso sauce, served wrapped in romaine lettuce leaves with cucumber, jicama, carrot, bean sprouts and red cabbage.

2. Mu-shu pork with egg and Savoy cabbage, stir-fried and served in tortillas (to avoid the frustration of making those damn pancakes from scratch).

3. Miso-marinated salmon with a lime-ginger glaze, sprinkled with sesame seeds and served with rice and black-bean broccoli.

4. A Vietnamese chicken soup with shallots, ginger, garlic, fish sauce, and rice noodles; garnished with scallions, cilantro, basil, and lime.

5. Sauerkraut and perogis. (My daughter requested this one.)

Now, forgive me if I sensed a certain…sameness…to the menu. “Dear, we seem to be dining on the Pacific Rim this week.” Not that I don’t enjoy Asian food, but I feel that if I were to suggest a week of Mitteleuropean dining…Bulgarian on Monday, Czech on Tuesday, Hungarian on Wednesday, Polish on Thursday…that some protest might be lodged.

My best defense, I suppose, is to enlist the children’s help. If only they would PRESENT an opinion when we ask “What would you like to eat this week?” beyond the inevitable “pasta and sauce.” My daughter is developing a affinity for dried bean dishes that is making me proud, though, and just this morning my son demanded fresh cornbread for his dinner.

More preliminary work will be needed in allowing the foodways of the Occident into the kitchen, too. Instead of letting the planning stage slide until the wife picks up pen and paper, I should be presenting her with my own carefully thought-out schedule. Cajun on Monday means no Thai until Thursday at least…can’t have two rice meals too close together, you see…we’ll pop in potatoes to go with that mustard/rosemary/Burgundy pork on Tuesday, and whip up some light linguine dish…maybe just garlic and olive oil and red pepper...to go with the Roman-style grilled shrimp on Wednesday.

Yes, I think that’s have to be the course, even if it does mean more work for me (we DO understand that everything above was cooked by my own two delicate paws, do we not? And shopped for? And washed up after?). The best defense is a good offense.

(And yes, every one of those god damn meals was god damn delicious, if I do say so myself. The Vietnamese soup in particular will be going into heavy rotation through the winter.)