In the South They Call it Supper

I'm making ground beef stroganoff for dinner. It's one of those things that we always seem to have ingredients for when I am at a loss for what to make, or perhaps is one of a very few things I feel comfortable improvising. No sour cream? Greek yogurt. Only one can of soup? Just cut it with some milk. Include liberal amounts of garlic. Done. I may feel far more confident in my culinary skills than I did a few years ago, but I still love to follow a recipe and feel a little adrift without one. I am the same with knitting and sewing patterns, and probably loads of other things I'd do better not to think about or elaborate upon lest I expose myself as the World's Biggest Bore.

Better yet, let me further expose myself. I was just thinking how delightful it will be to settle in to eat this ragtag dinner and watch The X-Files with M, and how our evening ritual of dinner and science fiction will be quite undone when we have children. Instead of talking about our days between bouts of gaming or lazily together in bed before we go to sleep, I'll want to sit down to dinner at a real table which, because my bedroom most of my childhood was actually what our dining area had been, I barely have memories of doing with my family growing up. In fact, our family dinners were a lot more like the guilty pleasures of the childless life M and I are enjoying now. I remember them with some fondness, but if I'm guilty of a hundred things, one of them is wanting what I didn't have.

Once a week, I think, as a treat for us or them or both, we'll watch television while we eat. Maybe we'll be lucky enough to have children as nerdy as we are.