There’s a version of dinner I grew up eating - meat, potatoes, gravy on everything - that I used to think of as plain. Unfancy. The kind of meal nobody would write home about.
I no longer think that. I made a pork chop the other night and laid it over a mound of mashed potatoes that were mostly butter, and I spooned a cream gravy over the whole thing, and it tasted like somebody’s mother. Not mine specifically, although parts of it - the parsley, the pepper, the way the gravy ran down into the valleys of the potato - reminded me of things I hadn’t thought about in years.
My husband ate his in about four minutes. He looked up, surprised, like he hadn’t realized how fast it was going. We sat there a little while after, not doing much. Some plates are just quiet that way.
