Lentil soup

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, January 8, 2009

LIKE NEARLY EVERYONE we know, we generally don't eat the same meal two nights running. It occurs to me that was even the case in my childhood, during the Depression. We tended to eat the same meal in general each working day — six of them a week, I think, in those days, certainly during the War when my memories begin to lock in a lot more reliably. Macaroni and cheese on Friday, liver and onions on Tuesday, meat loaf somewhere, don't recall what the other staples were but I'm pretty sure they came around in regular rotation.

And even the Sunday dinner, while it varied from week to week, didn't range through much of a repertory. Chicken fried or roasted, roast pork, ham on Christmas and Easter Sunday: that was about it.

When we were first married we began collecting recipes. Not recipe books, particularly; recipes — clipped from magazines or, more rarely, the newspaper; friends' and relatives' recipes written out on file cards; various recipes from commercial sources, even. Among our favorites were those gathered in a series of pamphlets, each devoted to a different national cuisine: Hungarian, Italian, Greek, Scandinavian. Cosmopolitan by definition, they represented real connoisseurship, somehow. In a fit of deaccession we got rid of them several years back; I've regretted it ever since, and we've found some of them a second time, but I don't know where they are. Maybe Giovanna has them.

What I'm getting at is, we all expect dinner to be different every day. Yet here on Eastside Road we've been eating a mighty restricted repertory lately, and tonight's dinner was exactly the same as yesterday's, and you know what? I could eat it again tomorrow, except that I think there isn't any left.

Pomegranate juice. Cheap Pinot grigio for Lindsey, lucky woman.