The other night, the topic of TV dinners came up. For those of you young enough (or fortunate enough) not to remember them (or to have eaten them), here’s a primer: TV dinners were frozen meals consisting of a meat (turkey, fried chicken, Salisbury steak), two soporific starches like peas and mashed potatoes with a little puddle of brown gravy in the center, and a few excruciatingly sweet bites of cobbler.
Everything nested separately in a divided tin platter that went from oven to table in 25 minutes. They were greasy, salty approximations of real, home-cooked food, and my mother only served them on the occasional Sunday night when she had exhausted her repertoire of breaded veal cutlets, grilled steaks, hamburger and spinach casserole, spaghetti with meatballs, and chicken five ways.
I liked TV dinners when I was 8 years old. Now I eschew pretty much any food that comes in a box and goes from oven to plate without some sort of fuss. Which is unfortunate, because lately, I find myself unable to cook much. I no longer pore over recipes, adapting them on the fly to what I have on hand. I rarely rummage through the refrigerator and freezer in a quest for soup candidates. My enjoyment of cooking is one of the daily casualties of the pandemic. Now it’s all I can do to shove a few potatoes in the oven, shake out a bag of pre-halved Brussels sprouts onto an oiled pan, and then forget about all of it until I smell fire or my husband asks, in a small, hungry voice, ‘What’s for dinner?”
There are other casualties of the pandemic too. Daily showers, for example.
“It’s not like I’m around anyone,” I’ll say to my husband, at which time he’ll give me a little wave and say, “Hello, I’m someone.” And I’ve all but forgotten why hair care was ever important. I did finally snip off a few dry millimeters of my waist-length locks this past week, which I instantly regretted for no reason I can pinpoint. I spend hours at my desk every day, in a desperate attempt to inch toward a fully realized piece of writing. But my concentration is shot through with holes. Sleep has also been a casualty, as has wakefulness. I am not sure how both of these things are true, except that one feels like the other and neither abides by a schedule.