What are you having for dinner?

[Koharu]

I'm running out of ideas for things to cook. Share with me your plans for your big meal of the day, whenever that might be. I also am cool with hearing about whatever delicious takeout or delivery you had, so it doesn't have to be home-cooked.

Basically, let's talk about food and maybe share recommendations and recipes?

[Koharu]

I have had an absurd amount of pizza or pizza related meals this week. My wife needs to eat really bland foods recently, so that means I have to handle my dinners on my own, which ends up defaulting to the pizza in the freezer. Tonight might be takeout since I am going out for a haircut at 6.

Frozen pizzas have definitely been our "don't know what to have" fallback during the COVID stuff.

I'm bad at perfecting and memorizing recipes.

Channa masala (with rice) or chicken biryani are always good takeout options though. I prefer them spicy but there's mild as well.

I can't memorize recipes. Just not how my brain works. Luckily, my mom and stepmom were both amazing cooks and passed a lot of paper recipes on to me. I've gotten to the point where I'm brave enough to mess with recipes I've made many times, but I usually don't stray too far.

My mom told me when I was young, "if you can read, you can cook," and that's even more true now with the internet to show you how to do some of the less common cooking terms. So I have a huge hoard of recipe books that I don't look at often enough. 🤣

[Koharu]

German dinner is usually cold (lunch is always warm), but sometimes we have another warm meal. Some of our dinners:

- Cassic "vesper": Bread with salami or bacon and/or cheese in addition to vegetables. There many different combinations here (Wikipedia image)

- My favorite: Salmon filet (fried in the pan with oil) and Greek salad (cucumber, tomotoes, Greek feta and paprika in olive oil with some vinegar, plus salt and oregano).

- Salad with either crabs or tuna fish (or chicken wings, cold and warm). I'm usually adding lot of corn and paprika.

- "Egg bread", Put bread slices in stirred eggs with a little milk and briefly in the pan (with butter). This is a recepie from my Greek grandma.

- Noodle soup. Greek style is with chicken broth and an egg (that slowly must be mixed into the broth due to temperature difference).

If there's something left from lunch, I'm going to have it for dinner.

Danke für die Angabe! (I hope I chose the right noun, lol. Trying to say thanks for the information)

So, my dad and stepmom are of German-only ancestry (my grandfather came in the 30s; my stepmom's family has been here longer) and they both refer to lunch as dinner because it was the hot meal and the larger meal. I associated this with their being farmers. My mom grew up in the suburbs and her family was mostly urban historically, of Irish background, and for her dinner was supper, because it was the larger meal.

Previously, when considering dinner as lunch vs dinner as supper, I hadn't taken ancestry into consideration, so thank you for sharing that! Got me thinking about how that's likely one of the differences as well as jobs etc, if warm meal at lunch is common in Germany.

Personally, I don't use "dinner" as a word because of the differences between my parents. Breakfast, lunch, and supper, and if you invite me to dinner I will make no assumptions.

Anyway, today I just had a Hardee's burger and fries, as I had to do caretaking duties over lunch and didn't get food until 3, so it was lunch and supper all in one go...

[Koharu]

(Peruvian-style) Locro, a pumpkin-based stew with vegetables and cheese

Great dish for cold weather

I never would have thought of combining pumpkin with cheese. This sounds really good!