Press Fast-Forward

Back-to-school chaos hits, the lemons get put away, and next week’s table needs to move quick.

Hello again, Family and Friends! Somewhere between the last of the lemons and this morning’s alarm clock, summer just… ended. One day we were slicing peaches over the sink; the next there was a school supply list and a now-junior in high school explaining her AP schedule plans. Every single year I forget how fast that switch flips. Our “slow summer days” are over; the song “Free Bird” just amped up and we’re in the last few guitar licks and rapid tempo at the end of the song. Can we please press rewind on the tape deck?

You know this rhythm whether your kids are in kindergarten or long since grown: mornings compress, activities multiply, and dinner — which felt so leisurely back in July — suddenly has a hard deadline wedged between homework and lights out. This is the season that separates the meal-planners from the drive-thru line, and I say that with real affection for both camps, because we have lived in both, often in the same week.

I spent a good chunk of my childhood in my grandparents’ house — as a toddler, and then again for a long stretch through my school years, from about 1988 to 1994 — and my paternal grandfather brought a very German, very unpretentious sensibility to the dinner table — what he called “poor people’s food,” though I’d now just call it thrift married to down home technique. Potatoes stretched every which way. Cabbage, dense pumpernickel, and a whole vocabulary of dishes I have never once put on a Sunday Forward menu and never will (I love you, Gramp, but Limburger and liver are staying in 1979). Mushrooms, though — mushrooms made the cut. Grandma too brought thrift into the occasion of cooking, with back-of-the-can soup and pudding-box recipe delights: green bean casserole, Watergate salad, and “mincemeat” pies (quite a misnomer, as there was never any meat). There was a box of mac and cheese in that era too, somewhere; it was the ‘80s, it happened to all of us. But the everyday truth of it was home-cooked and humble, built from whatever was cheapest or on hand, and I’m grateful every detail I can remember of my childhood and their principles at the dinner table.

My grandmother, his wife, gets full credit for this though: introducing me to real butter, unapologetically. She made me popcorn with real butter one spend-the-night Sunday when I was three or four, and I distinctly remember licking the bowl clean once the popcorn was gone — an early and entirely accurate data point on exactly what I like. My first buttered-popcorn movie that very night was The Wizard of Oz on TV — and I checked, because I wasn’t about to print a shaky memory: CBS held the rights and ran it as an annual prime-time special nearly every year from 1976 through 1991, which covers both 1981 and 1982 comfortably. (Please don’t do any more mental math with that data point.) So somewhere out there is a network broadcast schedule that backs up a four-year-old’s memory, and I find that very satisfying. Between the two of them, thrift and butter, poor people’s food and a bowl worth licking clean, I got the whole homey cooking education through experience.

Which brings me to the actual point: some night close to when school starts, in our house, we aim for a movie night. Nothing fancy — just the couch, a few blankets (and cats), and a bowl of popcorn that gets passed around until it’s gone. Somewhere along the way in motherhood I started making it with real butter and rosemary, which sounds fancier than it is and takes about the same ten minutes as a microwave bag, minus the bag. Here it is, exclusive to this newsletter, because comfort food deserves a proper send-off before the lunchboxes come back out.

Which is why I love that next week (August 8) turns us toward a Classic Italian table, because Italian cooking has its own version of my grandfather’s “poor people’s food” — cucina povera, the peasant kitchen that turned a few humble, affordable staples (tomatoes, beans, a little ground beef, a lot of garlic) into some of the most beloved comfort food on the planet. Same idea, different cuisine… Colin’s building it around one big pot of bolognese doing triple duty and ground beef stretched five smart ways — with less fuss than usual, just the reliable stuff done quickly. Because a from-scratch dinner in the back-to-school season has to move fast, or it simply doesn’t happen — which, if you think about it, was always the actual assignment for people who never had three hours to spare in the first place.

So consider this our version of hitting fast-forward on the cassette. We know the tempo just changed, and next week’s table is built to match it. See you at the bus stop, or wherever you happen to be standing when the bell rings.