Love Story

Remember how I said after making my first 1945 dinner menu how much better the food I prepared for myself tasted? Well, I think I'm gonna have to take that back. Two dinners later, I'm finding myself so tired from the workout in the kitchen that I can hardly taste my meal.

And it is such a workout. Balancing a great pot of potatoes as you carry them over to drain in the sink. Twisting about between the pots on your stovetop so you can lift the lid on one without injuring yourself with steam from another. Just working in all that heat is a challenge. I turned my air conditioning up and pulled my hair back simply to try and feel a little more cool. By the time I sat down to dinner, I was wiped - and almost not even hungry enough to enjoy the meal.

Whipped Potatoes

Buttered Beets

Tossed Greens Salad

Chiffonade Dressing

Chocolate Pudding

I suppose this is the same kind of curve anybody goes through as they're getting in shape. Toning the muscles, learning the moves... I have to remind myself that the most I've done in "making dinner" for years has been: Open box. Heat in oven. This is a whole new world for me, and it's going to take some time. I hope! It really makes me wonder what dinner was like for Mother back in the '40s. Could she really enjoy a meal as much as might her husband and children when she had worked sooooooooo hard to plan it, shop it, and prepare it?

The 1940s seem to have been an era when home-cooked and commercially prepared foods both found a home at the dinner table. I'm trying to keep that tradition myself, including at least one item that's somewhat ready-to-eat. Last week: Canned Green Beans. This week: boxed Chocolate Pudding mix. These items were both readily available to most American households and - for a "bachelor girl" like myself - would have been particularly important. What a blessing they must have seemed to a busy '40s housewife! Even one course - made one or two steps easier --- what a gift. We see prepared foods today with such an overlay of their nutritional dangers. The MSG, the sodium, the preservatives and additives, the trans-saturated fats. It's hard to remember how wonderful they must once have seemed. And in their infancy, prepared foods weren't quite as chock full of the not-so-good stuff as they are today. They were still relatively basic, but what a help to knock even a quarter-hour off the time it took to prepare dinner...

Another miracle - the dishwasher. This was an appliance available only in the '40s to those with some serious cash. As hard as you work towards preparing a meal - and as nice as it would be to relax at the table and enjoy your meal - the dirty pots and pans and cooking utensils can absolutely haunt you! In my case, it was the red water from my pot of beets that had splattered all over my nice, clean stovetop. All I could think about was how nice it had been to see my reflection in my stovetop the day before. Would the beet juice stain? What about the cutting board? Would it be forever pink? There was still some milk left in a saucepan since I'd overestimated how much I needed for the Whipped Potatoes. Would it stick terribly to the pan?

Having worked so hard over this meal, it was great to scrape and rinse and whisk those dishes out of sight. I used to think of my dishwasher as my archnemesis. It didn't seem to clean the dishes very thoroughly. There was always that nasty crumb tray to clean out. And I never understood the whole rinse/don't rinse debate. "Of course you don't rinse," I thought. "What good does it do to have a dishwasher if it's not going to do the job for you?" Well, I'm here to tell you... it's all about the rinse. Since I started rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher (per the manual), I've found that only an occasional dish or utensil has a bit of residue and needs to be soaked and re-washed. The crumb tray? I haven't had to clean it in weeks. 1940s housewives who were lucky enough to own a dishwasher must have cleaned 'em 'til they shone and kissed 'em when no one was looking!