The complicated part about making dinner isn’t learning when chicken is done, or how to make rice, or even how to plan a balanced meal. The hard part is having everything be done at the same time.
Sautéed chicken
Corn pudding
Green beans
Salad
Most weeks I spend a little while on Monday evenings doing prep work for dinner on Wednesday. My roommate works late on Mondays so there’s no one home to distract me with things like conversation, and I find cooking in a quiet house is very soothing. Sometimes I listen to an NPR podcast, sometimes I dance around my kitchen while my cat looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, but most of the time I kind of let my brain go off line while I cook. Unless I’m trying to scale a recipe up or down, or do complex geometry to figure out how many individual tarts the recipe for a 9” quiche will make, cooking doesn’t demand much conscious thought. It’s not quite autopilot, but it’s different thinking skills than I use at work or in conversation. I can let my hands go on about the tasks of slicing and sautéing without much active thought being involved. It’s relaxing.
This Monday night I went out and had noodles and ginger cheesecake and saw a movie and that was relaxing too, but in an entirely different way. Since I knew I was going to go out and play on Monday night I planned a dinner that I have made so many times I could do it half asleep, and one that didn’t require any advance preparation. It doesn’t hurt that everyone loves corn pudding and I get greeted like a hero every time I make it.
Monday Night Dinner 
