The Science of Single

Dinner: Raw Tomatillo Salsa.

So it’s true. I don’t always sit down to an awesome supper. I grew up with Dinner Time is Family Time. You sit at a table, you eat the food on your plate, you talk about your day and you ask to be excused. There was no TV, no radio, and in the teen years, sometimes no talking.

But being single and living in a studio where the coffee table is the kitchen table, the TV is 5 feet away, and I don’t even start cooking til 9:30, well, dinner time has become decidedly less formal, and I don’t always make a “meal.” Tonight, I made salsa and chips. And let me tell ya. It was good. And pretty healthy if not mildly incomplete, though it beats the Root Beer Float Summer of 2005, during which I seriously had a root beer float for dinner every. single. night. (I’m not the only one talking about Root Beer Floats tonight. Something’s in the air.)

I think most people have special “single” dinners. There’s a book of essays about this very thing: Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. The Year of Spaghetti is my favorite. The winter sunlight imagery gets me every time.

I like dinners like this. They’re kind of like Breakfast for Dinner Night or Healthy Salad Night growing up. My family was strictly meat and potatoes, but every now and again we’d branch out with eggs and V-8 juice (for the vegetable) or a “light and healthy” salad buffet that consisted of romaine lettuce and every single cured meat and cheese from the deli piled on top. And homemade blue cheese dressing. My favorite though was when my dad went out of town or working late and my mom would make corn fritters (deep fat fried) and fried bread dough sprinkled with sugar. [Mmmmm. Fried bread. Sugar.]

If you have to know, I ate the entire bowl of salsa tonight while watching Friends reruns. With BLUE corn chips because I’m classy like that.

And G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S.

***10-minute later update***

I had to flush my eyes with cold water for 5 minutes because I took out my contact lenses with serrano chili residue on my fingers. That’s what I get for being smug about my single dinner.