The Dinner Hour

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We have always lived on a fairly European meal schedule around our house. My husband runs on a very late clock, and I have always tended to write best in the late afternoon and early evening, so there is no way we are going to manage to sit down to dinner early. And summer is the absolute worst! 7:00 to 7:30 is when it just begins to get cool enough to do outside chores. There is the daily second watering for me (at this point I'm always tempted to just let all those potted plants die!) and pond maintenance and other yard chores for Rick, and any little extra things that need to be done (or can be borne) outside. By the time I come in and cook, we are lucky to get dinner on the table by 9:30! And sometimes even later, I confess, no matter my best intentions. I always think I'll start crock pot meals in the morning but somehow that seldom happens, and I've sworn off grilling until it cools off a little here.

(Disclaimer: This is not what our dinner place settings normally look like, although it is our china, silver, and glassware. We eat most nights at our coffee table in the living room, on our old cork-backed London landmark placemats, but that didn't make a very pretty photo!)

Even when I was growing up, my family didn't have dinner on the table at five o'clock. That was considered uncivilized in the extreme. Of course, my parents had spent a lot of time in Mexico City, and then in Europe and Asia. Also, my dad had grown up on a farm in East Texas and didn't like anything that reminded him of farm life. They quit work around five and then had cocktail hour (so very civilized!) then we ate around 7:00.

(I have always aspired to follow in my parents' footsteps on the cocktail hour, but, alas, I can never manage to squeeze it in. I'm usually having a very late cup of tea instead…)

What about you, dear Reds? Are you early birds, or do you run on a later clock? And do you feel guilty if you do run late?

RHYS BOWEN:  I’m married to an upper class Brit who thinks it’s uncivilized to dine before 8. As I get older I prefer to eat earlier. 7 is ideal for me so I have time to digest before bed. We tend to compromise! 

I hope I’ll never want to eat at 5 pm!

I do like my cocktail hour, especially sitting on my deck when the first cool breezes come in. Aperol Spritz is the current favorite although if the day has been hot then a lager goes down well, with root veggie chips or radishes and hummus 

HALLIE EPHRON: Dinner time growing up was always 6:30 sharp if we were eating with my parents who’d get home from a day working at the studio, ensconce themselves in the den, and drink scotch on the rocks until our wonderful amazing cook, Evelyn Hall, called us to dinner. If my parents were out for dinner, we kids ate at 6. Sharp. It was a very sheltered existence. But if you looked carefully: external order, internal chaos. (I owe my sanity to Evelyn Hall.)

These days I eat at any time after 6. Not on the clock, just when I’m hungry and feeling like throwing something together (or washing last night’s dishes.) It’s very Zen. And one of the few plusses of being alone.

LUCY BURDETTE: For me it wouldn’t be a matter of feeling guilty about eating late, it would be that I’m STARVING by 6 pm. That’s when we almost always eat, unless we have company and might push it to 7. My brother and his wife eat somewhere between 9:30 and 11 pm. Yikes! They are very kind to move it up when we visit. I suppose it partly depends on what time you get up?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: This is SO interesting! We generally eat at…9:30. It's because I am always working, and there’s so much to do– and yes, Debs, I also write best in late afternoon and early evening– then Jonathan finishes his work at about 6, and while I am still writing, he takes an hour on  the treadmill, and when he’s finished, I do my treadmill time, and then I change and cook and by that time-whoa. It’s 9 or 9:30.  It’s fun, and it works for us. 

I don’t think I could have dinner at 5–it would feel very weird to me. Like…lunch. :-)  

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I’ve had different dinner times at different stages of my life. When my mom married John Fleming, dinner was 6PM set. In. Stone. He got home from work around 5:30 and he was hungry! I think he also liked the rest of the evening to putter around in his work room.Tiny tots, we did something like the traditional tea in England. They’d eat at five, and Ross and I would eat after their 7pm bedtime. Then for a blissful decade it was the whole family between 6 and 7 sitting at the table. Then came sports, theater, robotics, etc. etc. and we devolved into “It’s ready on the stove by 5pm, grab it when you can.”

Now I’m a 7pm gal. Time enough for a cocktail at 6, and my stomach’s not full when I go to bed at 10.  I agree with Hank - the dinner at 5 stereotype of oldsters sounds as if they then turn in for the night at 8, and that can’t be right, right?

JENN McKINLAY: I eat whenever the Hub calls me to dinner, which is usually at 6 as he gets home from work at 5:15 and starts cooking because he’s starving. On weekends, he occasionally calls me to dinner at 4:30!!! If he has a late night gig the night before, he’s asleep by 9. There is no cocktail hour for us as Hub has been sober for 16 years and I don’t drink at home, unless it’s an Irish coffee after dinner. 

DEBS: Now, obviously the next question for you all is whether you actually sit down to dinner at a proper table or, like us, do you abandon decoram and gravitate towards the coffee table and the TV? I would apologize more, but that is usually my only hour of TV, and I look forward to it as my reward for a day's work as well as the cooking!

What say you, dear readers?

Oh, and here's the real dinner deal, as of last night. Cat included. So we're not too horribly uncivilized.

Dinner Hour

DEBORAH CROMBIE: My husband and I sit down to dinner together every night. Okay, not in the dining room, but at our kitchen island. With place mats and napkins (okay, paper napkins most of the time) and nice dishes. We don't read, we don't watch TV. (There is a TV in the kitchen, but if I've been watching something while I cook, I pause or turn it off.) Our only exception to the not watching TV while eating is our Friday night movie date, when we eat Chinese takeout at the coffee table in our living room and--obviously--watch a movie or something really fun. (Lately, the Chef's Table documentary series on Netflix. Fabulous!!)

Here's our kitchen. (Okay, full disclosure. I did a wee bit of staging here. As in moving the huge pile of unread newspapers out of the sight line. And moving the stool that lets our cats jump up easily to the cat food bowl.  So un-glam, these real life things..)

And here is our dining room, which seats ten in a pinch. Fab for company and holiday dinners and Sunday quilting afternoons and doing puzzles and sorting papers... But, we rattle around in there a bit, and as much as I love our Stickley-esque furniture, the chairs are too big to be really comfortable for short me. So kitchen it is.

This eating dinner thing is not a statement--it's just what we do. The other night, it occurred to me to wonder if we were really weird. So 50s, so Leave it to Beaver. Do other people do this? Growing up, my family actually ate in the dining room most nights. It was a rare treat to get TV tables in the den. (Now, that's a thought. Who has TV tables these days?)

What about you, REDS? Do you and your spouses sit down together for meals, and eschew media temptations?
 
HALLIE EPHRON: We do sit down at 6:30 every night for a home-cooked meal (or leftovers or pizza or Chinese...) but always sit down, no media, no tablet, no phone, no reading matter. Usually wine. We don't have room for a table in our kitchen so we sit in the dining room and I only have one set of dishes so we eat off the good-enough ones that I got when we got married a loooooong time ago.

I believe in a real family dinner. In my family, we always had a sit-down dinner and my parents expected us to TALK (in my family it was a competition) -- as dysfunctional as my parents were, it was the one thing they did right. I've always made dinner when my kids were little -- my quiet 20 minutes in the kitchen after getting home from work, a glass of wine and an onion to chop and I could be civilized -- and we sat down as a family and *talked*. It teaches kids about table manners and how to have a conversation.  

As I'm writing this I'm preparing a chicken roasted in the barbecue over coals and a couscous salad for a late dinner with my daughter and her husband after their two little ones are down for the night. 
 

RHYS BOWEN: When my kids were at home we always ate dinner that I had cooked. Sometimes their friends joined us. These days John and I eat at the table in the kitchen, unless we have guests or family over. One of us cooks, from scratch. Never a pre-packaged meal in our house! Tonight it's pork tenderloin in a garlic mustard sauce. Sometimes we have the TV on, and watch Jeopardy, and sometimes we talk. But we've never owned TV trays and never had a TV in the kitchen or dining room when the kids were small. I love noisy family dinners!

LUCY BURDETTE: This photo is from 1963, our kitchen table from my growing up days. We always always had dinner together, with a German Shepherd or two under the table to accept scraps. When I was single, I usually ate in bed LOL. But once I married John and married into his little kids, we went back to the kitchen table. Dinner at six, and conversation, though I very much doubt we could have kept up with the Ephrons! John and I still eat together at six, say grace, and talk about our days. I hope we never give that time up!

 

HANK PHILLIPPI  RYAN: Oh, we are outliers. We have dinner at--forgive me, about 9. We always have dinner together, it's really a ritual, and although usually we talk, sometimes we watch a movie or something wonderful on TV.  I'd say I cook three days a week. (Tonight we are having rack of lamb grilled outside, and green beans, with coconut shrimp appetizers.Yesterday we had cooked out hamburgers and salad.) Other nights we go out, or carry out. Thursdays it's Jonathan's responsibility. I say--don't even ask what I want. Just provide it. It's usually pizza. wonderful.
 We eat at the family room table, since the dining room table is covered with book research and administrative stuff. Thats why Im always delighted to have dinner guests, because it forces me to clean it up.
 
When I was growing up, five kids, we always had dinner together, at a big round table in the dining room. And yes, we HAD to talk, and tell stories, and tell one thing that happened to us during the day. We'd also fight over who got to turn the Lazy Susan in the center. 

DEBS: Hank, we eat late, too. Dinner before eight at our house is a shock!

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: We do dinner at the table, no TV. We have a lot of dinner guests coming and going, so there are always new folks and new ideas and fun events to discuss. I think it's important for Kiddo to learn good table manners and also conversational skills. It's nice to come together as a family and laugh and tell jokes. Occasionally, often on Sundays, we'll do takeout and dinner on the couch with a movie. (Tonight, I have to admit, is pizza and the live-action version of Cinderella directed by Kenneth Branaugh—we have a friend over who's going through a bad breakup and she wants a movie and comfort food—but I'm including a picture of our table from the weekend.)

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: We've done it all ways at my house. I grew up with a proper dinner hour, every night at six on the dot, where we all sat down to a home cooked meal. Conversation was expected. You could argue, but only about factual points - I can remember various members of the family getting up to fetch the dictionary or a volume of the encyclopedia (those were the days!)

We had regular sit-down meals with the kids right up until The Boy began high school. He vastly preferred doing his homework on the kitchen table instead of in his room, and so unless we used the dining room table (which is very large and, like Hank's, usually covered with papers, etc.) we were stuck with working around a spread of textbooks, scientific calculators and notebooks at dinnertime. In addition, we now had TWO kids in two different high school doing cross country/track/track and field, as well as being involved in drama, music, etc. We still made homemade meals, but making the dinner itself eat-as-you-go became a lot more workable than getting everyone to sit down.

Things have obviously calmed down a lot since then, so we try to have a sit-down meal in the dining room about once a week. And of course, we have very formal seatings at our big holiday parties: six pieces of silver at each plate, bread dishes, soup bowls and plates and water and wine glasses. And Debs, we always use cloth napkins - they really are cheaper in the long run!

DEBS: Oh, so fun! I love it that everyone eats together. And I'm impressed that we all (mostly) cook. And I love everyone's kitchen/dining rooms! 

READERS, what about you? Do you sit down with spouse/partner/family for nightly dinners? And if you live alone, do you make dinner special?