I had a whole folder of photos I kept meaning to write up and never did. This is most of that folder. I’m setting them all down at once here, like clearing a table.
There’s a shrimp aglio olio from a night my husband was out and I was reading something long and didn’t want dinner to be complicated. Torn basil from the plant on the sill. Pasta water. Pepper. Done.
There’s a migas-style breakfast bowl - eggs scrambled soft with greens, a scoop of sour cream, salsa, an avocado sliced into half-moons. It was a Saturday. We ate it at ten.
There’s a meatball curry I made on a Sunday afternoon, the way I make meatballs when I’m not making red-sauce meatballs, which is to simmer them in a creamy, gingery, marigold-colored sauce and eat them over basmati with a piece of warm naan. Not traditional. Don’t care.
There’s a weeknight chicken breast sitting on mashed potatoes with a pale cream sauce and some roasted broccoli. The kind of plate where you’re tired and you make something because you have to. My husband ate it quickly and thanked me and we watched something dumb.
There’s a plate of chicken nuggets with shells and white cheddar from a night I was not in the mood to pretend. I photographed it because it was beautiful in its own way - small and yellow and honest. I don’t think all pictures need to be of real grown-up dinners. Some nights you eat nuggets.
There’s a bowl of broccoli-cheddar soup with a piece of sourdough and a glass of lime water, from a Tuesday that was colder than I was ready for.
There’s a tortellini-in-tomato-cream soup I now make at least once every cold month - cheese tortellini, baby spinach, a hit of parmesan at the end. One of those soups that’s hotter than you expect and you keep forgetting and burning your tongue.
There’s a sweet-and-sour chicken over rice that my husband specifically requested after seeing someone else’s photo of one on the internet. I did not tell him I had doubts. I was wrong about the doubts. It was great.
There’s another teriyaki chicken, because apparently this year my instinct when I don’t know what to make is to make something over rice with sesame on top.
And there’s a plate of quesadilla wedges with salsa and sour cream, from the night we realized we had used one tortilla too few for real burritos and adjusted.
Ten plates. None of them a story by themselves. Together they’re most of October, which is more than I had on the way in.
