 Good Sunday evening! I've been thinking about family dinner and the funniest thing my family used to do. I am from a prettyyyyy big family: Eight kids, stair-stepped in two-year increments from me to my youngest brother, born while I was a high school freshman. I didn't really appreciate what a heroic feat family dinner was until I had kids of my own — sometimes, I mentally quadruple my two into the pack of noisy appetites my parents were dealing with every night. But every so often, my parents called it: We were having ice cream for dinner.
This is exactly what it sounds like: ice cream with all the fixings, and nothing else. We made sure it was well-balanced nutritionally: peanuts for protein, bananas for fruit, chocolate for, well, whatever chocolate is good for. But it was truly just… ice cream for dinner (often attached to Friday family movie night). We loved it.
I was kind of absurdly grown-up before I realized this wasn't a standard thing in every family, and even more grown-up before I saw it for what it was: not just a treat, but a break. A break from the planning, cooking, wrangling of a balanced dinner, and a chance to goof off and have fun at dinner time, no pressure to clean your plate (although of course we always did, when ice cream was for dinner). It was a break for my parents, but also a part of our family culture that is way more memorable than all the healthy, vegetable-focused dinners combined.
I kind of love the way that the most memorable moments as a parent and as a family member (whatever family looks like at this moment in time for you) are so often made in the times when you let go, give up, skip the obligations and just give yourself a treat. For me and my husband right now, this isn't an ice cream dinner moment, but it is a cheese dinner moment. I'll throw a few wedges of extra cheese in my shopping cart, and we'll crack open a bottle of wine and just eat cheese and crackers for dinner while our kids crawl all over us. It's so freeing and fun to just let the cooking go, stay up a little late, and eat nothing but cheese for dinner. (You can even add Shirley Temples for the under-21 crowd and call it family happy hour, like in this brilliant piece from Cubby.)
I asked the Kitchn team for their favorite "cheese for dinner" buys and I'll send you out with their picks:
Amelia, Studio Food Editor listed one of our family favorites, too: Fromager d'Affinois with rosemary La Panzanella crackers. This soft rich cheese is widely available and spreads, "like butta!" as Amelia says. Lisa, our Lifestyle Director, is a major cheese-phile and she loves Jasper Hill Harbison with crackers. Any kind of crackers. And wine. Any kind of wine. But Lisa can go swanky (with Harbison, or Mt. Tam, or Murray's cave-aged reserve Greensward) or blissfully old-school, with cheese-in-a-can and a box of Triscuits. Sheela also loves Harbison, and Christine has a similar pick to d'Affinois with Saint Andre — an easy to find treat. "I love the creaminess and how I can put it on a cracker with something sweet (jam, fruit) or something salty, like prosciutto." Nina says they have two "house" cheeses: Midnight Moon, which is basically the only cheese her son would eat for years. "He would flatly reject mild cheddar and certainly things like American cheese (gasp!)." The second is Grafton 2-year Cheddar. "In the context of dinner, Midnight Moon goes on a classic cheese, fruit, nut, and cracker platter and the Grafton gets sliced thinly, put on bread, and broiled for cheesy toast. The Grafton is also REALLY good paired with cucumbers."
And there you have it: a whole list of cheeses that are certainly, definitely, indubitably good for family dinner. (Unless you'd rather have ice cream.)
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Sunday, August 22, 2021
The funniest thing my family did for dinner
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