Several months ago, when my partner and I were both pretty busy, and were finding it difficult to come up with ideas for dinners that could be accomplished quickly, we started a list of meals that we liked. It had two columns -- one for things that took a little bit of time, and one for things that took longer. We went through a couple of iterations of how to organize the list -- one of the first tries was Hard to Make, Easy to Make, and another was Weekday/Weekend -- but it settled down pretty quickly into QUICK and LONG. QUICK is something we can make quickly, and LONG is something that takes effort, and is expected to be seen again at some point. QUICK is as you’d expect; things we can make almost on the fly -- burritos, hamburgers, soup, grilled cheese, and the ever-popular Round Food, a.k.a. pizza. The LONGs are more complex, or at least take more time to make than we usually have during the week. They’re expected to generate leftovers. In fact, some of them generate so many leftovers that the output is bifurcated into something we eat and something we store, and that second category is split again into something we store to have later in the week, and something we freeze to have in two or three weeks -- or longer. An example of that is the Bean Bake, which I dearly love; it’s a simple recipe that takes a while to cook in the crockpot, but once done, I know I’ll want it twice, perhaps three times in one week -- and then not again for a while. So, some we eat, some we store, and some we freeze, to be found weeks or even months later when we’re roaming through the kitchen saying Don’t we have anything to eat?

In our house, it works out that if someone is going to make a complex breakfast (meat, waffles, coffee, muffins or toast), it’ll probably be me; if someone is going to make a complex dinner (more than five minutes prep time), it’ll probably be my partner . Lately, though, with all of the time that my partner been putting in with preparations for the school’s Science Night, our dinners have been a little on the basic side, even if she’s the one making them; if I make them, you can pretty much count on them being of the soup or spaghetti level of difficulty. So, we thought that this might be a good time to start doing a little revamping of the menu list, the better to motivate one or the other of us to actually make the meal. To that end, I took two of our cookbooks into the bedroom, settled back, and started leafing through the first one. It happens to be one that we bought for our child, but though it is a ‘kids cookbook’, it’s a real one, with real food in it. Insofar as I eat like a kid, this is a cookbook for me, but some of it is advanced for my tastes. Still, its a great place to start, and indeed I came up with two things to try. One is a simple spaghetti sauce. A couple of years ago, we thought to try to make our own sauce. I had visions of the scene in The Godfather where the round guy -- what was his name? Don’t recall, but I do remember a line he had after they’d just shot the chauffeur and were abandoning the car - "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." -- is stirring the huge pot of sauce while commiserating with Michael’s troubles. It turned out that it was a lot more difficult to make the sauce than I thought it would be, and since then we’ve discovered the Newman’s Own brand of sauce. I had originally been against buying it (or Emeril’s, or any other sauce with a recognizable name) because I thought heck, how good can it be? But it turns out that the Newman’s sauce is actually quite good, and that’s been our staple ever since -- and probably will be even after we try the one from the book. But the one in the book is really quite simple -- carrot, celery, garlic, tomato and puree -- so what the heck, we’re going to try it. It’ll just be the two of us; our child believes that to have any kind of pasta other than angel hair is an abomination, and to have any topping other than butter and a lot of grated cheese compounds the offense. We’ll see. The other thing we’ll try out of that book is a form of french toast. We all like FT, though since we discovered the delights of freshly made waffles, especially made our way, which is to say, with white chocolate chips in the batter, with a side of sausage or bacon, it’s been a tossup. But this sounds good -- cut the bread into star shapes, make the FT immersion batter, fry it in hot oil, sprinkle cinnamon on it. Crunchy French Toast. We’ve still got a little vanilla ice cream in the freezer, too, so we’ll likely have that on top. That’s actually the kid's idea, and its a good one. First time I bit into it, I recalled the story of how the ice cream cone got started. Don’t know if it’s a true story, but I like it.

That's the plan for two meals, this next week. If I can come up with two more additional things to try for the first time, we’ll add them to the menu list, and that’ll be it.