Nightly Supper

From The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/01/weeknight-dinner-never-easy/681210/

The writer, a young career woman, lamented disruptions that creating a suitable supper for her family every evening imposes. It likely does, but prioritizing a set time for everyone to assemble around a table at has benefits that are hard to recapture.  I'm an empty nester, the one who came home from work later than everyone else.  Sometimes supper awaited me, other times the onus of creating, or otherwise acquiring something for us to all eat together fell to me.  Later, as cable made Food TV readily available, I took a liking to the kitchen.  In late career, I allocated an annual bonus to remodeling it, mostly in a cosmetic way.  Now supper creation has become my challenge, one that I seem to meet most nights with an element of accomplishment.

The author's ambivalence is hardly unique to her generation.  In my childhood, we did not have the means to eat out and ordering online would take decades to become available to everyone.  Instead, fortunes were made by suppliers of TV dinners.  Banquet, Swanson, Stouffer's.  My mother, who did not work outside the home, popped them in the oven.  As a student, I went to a cafeteria most evenings.  Then as a wage earner with a kitchen and a family that progressed through its stages, supper came mostly from our stove.  We never ate Fast Food for supper, but would go out on occasion for a pizza.  Still, my family like her family, regarded supper each evening as our primary meal, both for sustenance and interpersonal cohesion.

Like the author, we have reached the modern age.  Preparing supper has never been easier.  Unlike the author, I have evolved a repertoire and a planning mechanism, which she has not developed.  The anchors have become the weekly Shop-Rite ad and my freezer.  Shabbos dinner creates a fixed point.  It has limited repertoire.  Chicken parts, beef cubes, occasionally ground beef.  Friday night is usually the only time of the week in which I will prepare meat.  Chicken is mostly seared and baked, enough for two meals.  Ground beef becomes a meat loaf, two meals.  Beef cubes become cholent, two meals this week and a portion frozen for a subsequent shabbos.  Thus I have 2/7 suppers done.  The template also includes a starch and a vegetable.  Near East Couscous or rice goes on sale, boil water, add contents of box, and sit on stove a while longer.  Or bake a white or sweet potato in the oven.  Boil frozen vegetable or make a cucumber/tomato salad.  

In my freezer I have pierogies, ravioli, fish that had been frozen at sea, garden burgers, a couple packages of plant based meat in various forms.  Fish is nature's fast food.  Thaw the night before.  Tuna steaks need only seasoning and a few minutes in a hot skillet.  Ravioli is boiled.  Perogies have differnt options for cooking.  My refrigerator has swiss and American cheese.  Two pieces of bread and grill on the stovetop.  My refrigerator has eggs and milk.  Quiche takes minutes to assemble, providing meals for two nights.  Sometimes I put extra effort to plan ahead.  Macaroni and cheese in the style of Horn & Hardart has been recaptured as a recipe.  Assembly is tedious, requiring a béchamel and precooked noodles.  The concoction gets baked in a lasagna pan.  Two meals this week.  Freeze two other quarters for single meals each of the next two weeks.  Same for spinach lasagna, recipe from the first cookbook that the upper tier Artscroll publishers ever authorized.  The Shop-Rite ad is useful.  When the ingredients go on sale, particularly the perishable kosher cheeses, that becomes my kitchen project.

And not to forget my pantry.  Spaghetti is quite versatile.  One third of a box, boil, strain.  In olive oil, sauté garlic that I have chopped.  Sauté sliced onions, mushrooms if on sale, some parsely from my indoor pot.  Mix in a bowl.  Often enough for two meals.  In the pantry I keep canned salmon.  Modern small choppers make this easy.  Onion, maybe celery into the chopper.  Add salmon and spin once or twice. Add egg, spin again.  Into bowl.  Bread crumbs or matzoh meal for consistency, spices chosen at whim.  Pan fry as sandwich sized patties.  Enough for two meals.

None of this seems physically taxing or mentally difficult to plan.  Restaurant once a month or so, pizza once a month or so.  Take-out never, fast food never.  We eat pretty well most evenings.

And for guests, shabbos, Seder, Thanksgiving, Rosh Hashanah,  I do a little more. Same for special events wife's birthday, anniversary, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day.  Expanded menu.  Planning a week or two in advance. Coordinating various courses with stove top and oven requirements.  It is those skills utilized for weekday suppers that enable executing the more elegant preparations.  

Shabbos Gourmet

For a number of reason's, I've included a target of three dinner guests per semi-annual cycle, and have done a good job fulfilling this. I like making dinner.  And it seems a decent way to address post-retirement loneliness.  I've been letting my wife select the guests, but a couple of times I have.  Dinner always becomes my challenge to execute.  It comes in several stages.  Menu first, largely now templated:

1. Kiddush with standard Kiddush wine
2. Motzi with two loaves of Challah that I make myself
3. Either an appetizer or a soup, recently the latter
4. A Salad
5. An Entree, typically poultry
6. A Starch, typically a kugel
7. A vegetable, always a fresh one
8. A dessert, nearly always a pareve cake
9. Beverage wine, in the $10 vicinity

And then I need to assess equipment.  Kiddush cups we use weekly and have extras.  For milchig dinners, rare, we have small stem glasses from previous wine tastings.  I make challah with a stand mixer and a granite pastry board.  The dough hook is a great convenience, but the last two seemed excessively kneaded.  I like the texture better when I knead it by hand.  It requires a large bowl to rise, then the second rise in its baking tray.  For Pesach I make chicken soup with real chicken, usually thighs which are the least expensive of the parts.  The meat can be harvested later for stir-fry.  And matzoh balls are a guest expectation.  However, for other soups I use premade commercial stock, chicken for meat meals, vegetable for dairy meals.  The soup's character comes from what else is added.  I've made fish soup, I've made Moroccan Harira, minestrone is versatile.  It requires a very big stock pot for chicken soup, the next size down for the others.  And except on Pesach, I serve it in a dedicated tureen for fleishig meals, a white porcelain bowl with matching ladle.  

Salad is sometimes highlighted by the vegetables, sometimes by the dressing.  Israeli salad, cucumber salad are staples.  With Asian dressing it is plain greens.  I have big bowls, metal, porcelain, and glass for fleishig, a wooden salad set obtained on a cruise for milchig.  And always with a dedicated salad fork and spoon set, of which I have a few.

The entree poses my greatest challenge.  I like to be adventuresome but not too adventuresome as this can be difficult to salvage once botched.  As much as I enjoyed Iraqi Tabyit made in a crockpot for myself using a whole chicken, the likelihood of error is too high.  For Thanksgiving and for Seder, reliable and easy is a half-turkey breast, coated with olive oil, then seasoned with whatever suits me that afternoon, placed in the oven about two hours before needed, removed at about 90 minutes, then carved with an electric knife, except on Pesach.  A whole chicken made in the manner of NY Times expert recipe always comes out flawlessly, and offers variations.  This requires a cast iron pan to make part of the chicken sizzle and keep the over very hot.  For chicken parts, I prefer cacciatore, easy to make, and allows me to use rice as the starch and presentation.  And something spicy, either Iraqi or Indian, always makes a good entree.  As much as I once like to make pot roast, the price and availability of suitable hunks of beef have prohibited this.

Kugel is mostly noodle.  I like Hasidic noodle kugel.  Rarely potato for guests.  Always matzoh kugel for Seder.  And sometimes barley kugel.  And for soppy poultry entrees, rice is better.

Vegetables vary largely by season, though I have staples.  Carrots are available, easy, and versatile.  They can be boiled, glazed, or seasoned Moroccan style.  Asparagus come on sale in the spring, so a staple of Seder.  Green beans have a season.  These are usually just boiled.  The bar mitzvah caterers add thinly sliced almonds but I don't.  I've made ratatouille, more trouble than it's worth.  And squash always works well, butternut in the fall which has many preparations, and zucchini or yellow squash in the warm months which is usually best sauteed.

Dessert nearly always requires an oven and some time to cool, so it is typically prepared while the challah is on its first rise.  Pareve can be a challenge.  Honey cake, apple cake, nut tortes, all classics.  While cheesecake and rugelach are also recognizably Jewish, they are dairy.  I've made baklava and strudel, each impressive, though each far more labor intensive due to the filo dough.

So that's what our shabbos guests can anticipate.

I can anticipate two days of washing fleishig dishes.  A stand mixer and two attachments.  Large pots, large bowls, oven worthy pans, a pastry board, a wooden cutting board, and utensils of all types.  Dinner plates, wine glasses, serving plates, kiddush cups.  Two days worth.  And satisfaction for an effort that always has something to show for it.

Some Cooking

Allocated this week to upgrading my kitchen skills.  Rough start but able to catch up.  Agenda:  Hungarian Monkey Bread for the Delaware Choral Arts Potluck supper.  Dough came out sticky, lots of cleanup, which I'll start during the rise, then make the coating.  Was not planning to use the food processor but I may need to grind some brown sugar.  Pastry board is a mess.  I will need that to roll out the dough, then later today I need to make rough puff pastry for later in the week.  That also needs a pastry board as well as a clean food processor.

Tomorrow, shop for rest of ingredients in advance of yontif.  Thaw cod.

Day after, blintzes.  I need a blender for that, which I have.

Big cooking for shabbos guests.  Start Challah early in the morning. Use stand mixer. Go to services while dough rises.  Make pie dough before services and chill in fridge.  I think I'll still be able to go to services.  When I get back, make pie.  While pie bakes, punch down challah dough and shape loaves.  Pie comes out, bake challah.  Then after that roast tomatoes for soup.  Make salad while pie bakes, as it is best refrigerated.  Late afternoon, assemble coulibiac which takes a while.  Set aside, but do not bake until about an hour or two before guests arrive.  Make soup.  This keeps.  It can be heated on stovetop while coulibiac bakes.  Steam carrots.

Set table.  Put everything in serving dishes.

I think I can keep this all sequential.

Leftovers

Big Shabbos Dinner.  One guest.  Lots of food.  Lots of dishes.  Wash as you go helped.  Still food two two meals beyond the dinner.  I want to have all fleishig dishes done, then begin accumulating milchig items, which have grown and which are better done by hand than dishwasher for many.  That means dealing with food.  Freezer Bags to the rescue.  Probably enough soup to fill two, both for freezer.  Salad would fill one.  Does not freeze adequately.  Turkey, two meals, one fridge later in week, one freezer for a subsequent shabbos.  Kugel, probably two freezer, one later in week.  Then wash the dishes used to cook them.  Then put all fleishig dishes away and exchange sink to milchig.

All within my capacity by end of day.

Setting Out Ingredients

When I watch a cooking show with a master demonstrating his or her creativity, they do not work with measuring cups or teaspoons.  Instead, all needed ingredients, are arrayed on the counter or other flat surface in small containers, usually porcelain, all premeasured, and in roughly the order they will be used.  While the TV stars usually only present one dish at a time for videotaped preparation, the reality is more likely that what they prepare is really one component of a larger menu.  That's a lot of porcelain mini-cups, certainly more than I have.

With an esteemed guest on the schedule for shabbos, I have generated the full menu, from Kiddush to start to Stuffed Monkey to conclude.  I will have a half day to assemble all the components, starting with an ingredient list, pared down to a shopping list. Non-perishables can be set around the dining room table, sorted by dish.  Turkey half breast out of freezer to its new temporary home on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.  Prep vegetables the night before.  Portion seasonings the night before.  Shop for perishables and other things I don't have two days before.  Make sink fleishig that morning to enable me to clean as I go.

Then for an afternoon, wearing a blue striped apron, I can function like a TV chef.

Out of Beer

Apparently no beer on the top shelf of the refrigerator for shabbos dinner.  Cannot remember the last time that occurred.  Indeed, my consumption of suds has gone way down over a couple of years, now pretty much limited to a bottle on Friday evenings, and not every Friday evening with the regularity of challah.

Beer has its share of attributes.  I've not abandoned it.  At a time in history, some brewed concoction had a safety advantage over river water for drinking.  It probably tasted a lot different than what we pour out of cans now.  It also did not compete with soda. My father arranged periodic beer delivery when we first moved to our house in the 1950s.  A wooden case of 24 bottles of Blatz would arrive on a schedule.  New York State allowed beer sales in the supermarket which became very convenient, allowing advertising of sales and on-site selection of brands.  Despite consumer choice, my father had a limited array of preferences.  Wife and kids had soda, he had one bottle of his brew.  Despite the legal age of consumption in NY at the time being only 18, I did not join in.

Beer mostly became a special event beverage in college, a disposable plastic glass from the keg at a frat party mostly.  Even in medical school, now of age and in a city known for its immense brewery, beer was never something I brought home.  It could be had with a meal or at a pub alone or with friends, bought by the pitcher at a restaurant, sampled in the tasting room of the brewery tour.  It was not something to displace soda as the beverage of choice at home.  It started to change as a resident, then as a homeowner and young parent, wanting to minimize soda, I started keeping beer at home, initially six packs, later bottles of twelve became my preference.  And going out, one that I've not had before became my preference.  But at home, I drifted towards cheap, cold and wet with some foam, but not soda.

A transition point probably came with the emergence of craft beers in their many varieties.  Now Brewpubs became a place I would occasionally stop or seek out after my last office patient session.  It was often the dinner out place of choice.  Many were short-lived.  But having a package of twelve bottles at home, with preference for samplers, kept the bottles at hand.  They would last awhile, maybe just under a month.  Sometimes I would go cheap with mass market brews.  For a while, I filled one of two growlers until it got expensive.

But over time the purchases of twelve lasted two months instead of one, the growlers assigned to a shelf in the basement where they've been forever.  Soda has not returned, though.  Beer had just gotten expensive, the more intriguing small batch stuff exceeding what I was willing to pay.  It became a shabbos treat, never quite running out until this week.  For a while, the Blood Bank offered its donors a discount coupon for a regional pub.  Those few redemptions have been my only pub visits, deterred in part by price, in part by waning interest.

I do not know how much of a microcosm I am for the larger marketplace.  Maybe.  Probably on my next occasion to go to Total Whine I'll get another twelve bottles, or maybe cans as there are advantages to the brewers to packaging them that way.  But I'm not ready to set replacement of weekly shabbos suds as a gotta have.

Chicken Cholent

Assembled.  Chunks of onion, potato, celery, carrots at the bottom.  Seared chicken parts make the next layer, Then a half cup rice, can rinsed white kidney beans, splash of corn, and two chicken bullion cubes.  A shake or two of black pepper and poultry seasoning.  Can and a half of water using the can from the kidney beans.   All into crock pot on high for one hour, then low.  Stir mid-afternoon.  Serve at usual supper time.  Fridge overnight.  One more meal this weekend.  Portion the rest for future shabbatot.  Easy Peasy.  Chicken needed trimming, carrots peeling, celery washing.  Searing the chicken sets off our smoke alarms.

Small effort early in the morning enables a lot of other things during the day.  And my Daily Task List has a lot of other things.