Pancakes for Dinner

Don't Flip Out at Dinnertime

By Joan Oberndorf

Sometimes I get very, very sick of making dinner. My usual standards become boring to prepare and to eat. I know there are others out there suffering the same fate, and I take comfort in the fact that I'm not alone.

I like to imagine thousands of parents re-enacting that scene from the movie "Network" where everyone is throwing their televisions out the window. In my re-enactment, we'll all be yelling "I'm sick of dinner and I'm not going to make it anymore!" while we toss out plates of pasta, hamburgers, bowls full of green beans and salad -- you get the idea.

Sometimes I think my lack of dinner creativity is genetic. I remember my mother sitting in the living room and leafing through her cookbooks, looking for inspiration. "What should I make for dinner?" she'd ask, totally frustrated. I wasn't much help, being no more than 5 or 6 and not much of a cook. At that point in my life, dinner was something that magically appeared on the table through some alchemy my mother performed behind a closed kitchen door while I watched cartoons on TV. I was clueless about the whole process.

I did figure the dinner thing out eventually; my sister and I once cooked dinner for our parents on their anniversary. This was the first time I realized that it took some planning and creativity to put a meal on the table. I still remember my parents sitting patiently in the dining room, baked potatoes and green beans cooling on their plates while something called "Baked Steak" was, well, baking (the end result was definitely not worth the wait). The finale of this meal was supposed to be cherries jubilee, flaming dramatically. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the cherries to ignite and lost a burnt-out match in the process -- which magically appeared in my father's mouth as he stoically ate his dessert.

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