What's for Dinner

A Stream-of-Consciousness Appetite

What’s for dinner, you wonder.

Photo by Rachel Clark on Unsplash

It starts with three plump Italian sausages browned in a cast iron skillet with some olive oil and a half onion you had lying around, sliced then layered on top.

You actually begin with the onions and oil but quickly add the sausages because you realize your pan is too hot and it’s only a moment before the onions start to burn. You need to add something to the fray, something to cool things down, something to start the alchemy. So in the sausages go.

Next, you start the rice in its cooker. But first you rinse the rice, not once, not twice, but three times as it should be done, each time agitating the water until it gets cloudy, emptying, refilling, and repeating until it runs mostly clear.

Then you click the start button, put the top on the cooker and let that wonderful piece of machinery work its magic.

It’s hard to imagine sausage without lentils, so I never do.

One cup dried lentils, four cups chicken broth. This is the recipe on the bag of lentils, anyway. You only have two cups of broth, though, so the rest is water, but that’s fine; you would’ve used water anyway. And in goes a single bay leaf—well, actually two, but that’s all right—and some garlic powder because you ran out of fresh garlic a week ago and there was a storm and the grocery store was a barren wasteland. And, oh yeah, let’s add another half onion, uncut (well, cut in half, of course, but not diced, you see).

Ah, but what about the sausages? You worry again about the onions burning, so you grab some wine, an old bottle that has long since passed its freshness, a Carménère, which is fun because it’s French but grows in South America and has two accent marks. What else can get away with such extravagance . . . but wine?

You glug some in, and it immediately dyes the onions purple, and you worry you’ve made a mistake. So now you go searching for other things. You see some harissa in the fridge, crack open the container, sniff, shrug, and spoon a few spoonfuls out.

The onion-harissa mixture with sausage links now cooks down quickly and the wine evaporates, so you add in some chicken broth (turns out, you had another container in the pantry). And that’ll do for now. Now you let it go. Now you let it all cook and become what it will be.

Back to the lentils. Add some olive oil right into the soupy mix, throw in some more salt like Emeril, stir, bring to a simmer, add the lid. You’re dancing now, from one dish to another, trying to find the beat.

These sausages need something. Tomatoes? Why can you never get away from including them in a meal? The Italians were onto something, it would seem. So into the skillet they go—plop, plop. They are diced, the lowest quality one can get, but they are all you have, and dinner is about necessity not preference, making do with what you have instead of imagining what you’d prefer. Just like life.

They are fire roasted, these tomatoes, and as you taste them coming out of the can (because you should always taste each bite), they remind you of something, so you dash back to the pantry like a lunatic in search of paprika. You add it to the dish only to realize it’s sweet, not smoked. Too late. No matter. You return to the pantry and bring back some smoked paprika, shovel it in, coat the sausages and let it all cook. The sauce smells right now and is bubbling.

Now: some more salt and pepper, a roughly chopped stalk of celery, a few slices of carrot to tame the acidity. Add some fennel seeds and red pepper flakes, some more salt, a few cracks of pepper. This is improvisation, it’s surfing. You are moving faster than thought now, more intuitively than knowledge.

The sauce cooks down, and you taste it. It’s a little rich, so in goes some water. It can always cook out later. Almost everything is forgivable. Then you add a spoonful of tomato paste. This is the fun part where you taste and tweak until you are almost satisfied.

The lentils are close to done now; you taste them with a spoon and nearly burn your tongue. They are almost right, in need of just a little more salt, some more oil, a little more garlic powder. The pieces are coming together now, almost automatically, as if guided by some invisible hand.

The rice cooker clicks. You let it sit for a few minutes, because rice is always better when it’s left alone. Then you salt and add in a pad of butter or two, fluff with a fork, more salt, more butter, and wait (leaving the top to the cooker on).

You stir your sauce, taste, surrender, and turn off the burner.

Let it all settle for a minute.

Then you cut the sausages, dropping them back into the sauce and splashing the cooktop, letting life do what it does. You add the meat’s juices from the cutting board, some more salt, and you smile to yourself, then turn back to the lentils.

A drizzle of oil, some salt, and they are done, soupier than expected. Upon second glance, you realize the recipe was for lentil soup, not plain old lentils, but with enough time everything works out. The water and broth has cooked into the legumes, and this is the way it was always meant to be. You are a fatalist.

Out come the plates now: two rice paddles’ full of rice placed on each plate, then the lentils on top of that, the sausages with their vegetables and some of that spicy tomato harissa sauce, along with plenty of sea salt and cracked pepper. A hunk of bread with butter, some freshly torn romaine with oil and vinegar and fresh scrapes of Parmesan. This is your meal.

You sit and you eat, and you say to yourself that you may not have done much today and the world may still be a mess, but if dinner can come together without much planning and so much improvising, with a little intentioned effortlessness, and it can still be delicious, then maybe it’s all going to be okay.