Tonight I made lasagna for dinner. Easy, economical, and the kids love it. So do I although I always end up feeling like my stomach has been injected with high-density polyester resin after I am through eating.
Maybe I should just eat less.
That is beside the point, at least as far as this particular line of inquiry is concerned. What I am talking about is lasagna. One package of Barilla no-boil pasta sheets, two jars spaghetti sauce, a container of ricotta, some ground beef left over from last week's tacos, and the end of a five-pound bag of shredded mozz that I brought home from the Cash & Carry to make pizza for Miles' birthday. Ten minutes to assemble, an hour in the oven while I read the paper and have a cocktail, and it's a done deal.
As I was digging in to slice the sucker, Jennifer raised the subject of stuffed shells. This happens often in our household; we have not even begun to consume the meal in question, yet we are already discussing what to make next, or what we have eaten in the past, or where and when we have eaten something similar or better or different or wholly unrelated. The food in front of us serves as a catalyst for memory and speculation as much as it does nutrition.
Stuffed shells. Something else easy and universally popular. Bears the same effective relationship to lasagna that a calzone does to pizza. Certainly not in the same league as a madeleine when it comes to blowing out the floodgates of memory.
And yet, at the mention of them I was transfixed. "You remember the last time we talked about eating stuffed shells"? Jennifer asked.
I was already there.
This happened maybe eight months ago, shortly after I left the hotel for the greener pastures of Redmond. It was a school night, coming up on dinnertime, and neither one of us had given much thought to planning a meal. Jennifer was still unused to having me home in the evenings, after years of feeding only herself and the boys from a simple but reliable repertoire fortified by the bounty of Trader Joe's freezer case. I was still growing accustomed to regular meals after living for the better part of a decade on whatever I could hold in one hand while I kept working with the other, so the very notion of cooking for my family on a regular basis wasn't even on the radar. In other words, we were screwed.
"Why don't you just run up to Sam's and grab some stuffed shells or something"? Jenny suggested. "They're pretty good. The boys love 'em". So off I went to Sam's Club.
And that's when I had the breakdown. In front of the frozen foods case at Sam's, considering breaded chicken products.
It was less of a breakdown than a full-blown crisis of conscience. As I debated the merits of frozen pasta versus chicken cordon bleu, it hit me all at once.
Whatever I chose, I was getting ready to feed my family absolute crap.
Coming to terms with my absolute lack of integrity was suddenly staggering. There I was, having dedicated my entire working life to the preparation of great food from scratch, yet not thinking twice about giving my kids a plateful of the worst kind of unpronounceable mass-produced garbage. All because I was too damn lazy to plan a real dinner for my own family after devoting the past ten hours to feeding complete strangers. You can spare me the rhetoric about the cobbler's children – it was absolute bullshit and I knew it. Looking at the overflowing freezers I knew I couldn't go there anymore.
For starters you have to understand how I was raised. My mother stayed at home well into my adolescence, and my childhood in retrospect was a nonstop cascade of fresh-baked bread, homemade soups, and frequent forays into the Julia Childs oeuvre. Packaged food was actually a treat as far as my brother and I were concerned, reserved for nights when my parents were going out or had dinner guests. Fast food we got a few times a year, only in the context of long car trips. I grew up assuming that sitting down every night, as a family, to a home-cooked meal, was an inalienable right of childhood. And as my own incipient parenthood loomed, I assumed that the same would hold true for my offspring.
As Eliot so ably observed, however, between the motion and the act falls the shadow. My kids grew into the age where dinner started to matter just as my own career entered a phase which precluded any semblance of a normal family life. Hence the near-cultish devotion to Trader Joe and take-and-bake pizzas. Sure, I would sometimes throw down on the weekends with homemade pizza or barbecued pork shoulder or huge pots of beef stew, but those were the exceptions. Dinner as a family was a novelty.
This has long since ceased to be the case. Ever since the night of the stuffed shell breakdown, I have consecrated anew the importance of the evening meal. Most days I am home in plenty of time to cook. Jenny and I strategize about meals in advance and shop accordingly. I can't remember the last time we cooked something out of a box, or exercised the "nuclear option" in any context other than a road trip.
And yet the sting of my own inadequacy still lingers like the pain of a phantom limb. I feel that there is still damage to undo, and a greater reckoning with my own sincerity which must be brought full circle. I am, in essence, a hypocrite. I talk sustainability at work until I am blue in the face, but I am too lazy to separate the food waste from the garbage at home. I rail against gas-guzzling SUVs, yet think nothing of burning two full tanks on an all-day ride for no particular reason. I preach integrity to my staff and colleagues when I know my own is sorely lacking.
Last week I spent a day touring a state-of-the-art aquaculture operation in Southern Washington, and finished the visit with an all-organic lunch of grilled salmon, salad, sourdough bread, and artisanal cheese. We sipped locally-bottled blackberry soda and apple juice while my boss held forth on the future of farm-to-table initiatives and our corporate commitment to sustainable fish farming. The air carried the scent of freshly mown hay and Mt Rainier loomed in the distance beyond the rows of greenhouses. And all the while I thought of those goddamn stuffed shells and how easily we lose sight of what's important.
Let everybody else eat whatever the hell they want. Screw it. I'm going home to make dinner for my kids.
