Food for Thought

March 6, 2005 - 12:00am -- swingbug

It's interesting to me how as you grow older, entertaining revolves more and more around food.

When we were kids, food was a footnote. Hotdogs were punctuation marks in the day. Now I find myself planning a weekend with friends around brie cheese. Throwing a baseball around the park is fun, but it must be called short in time to marinate the lamb for dinner. Shall we have a picnic for lunch? Or shall we have a big breakfast and a hike around the lake and back in time for fajitas for dinner? We used to wolf down dinner and sprint off to play but now talking over a bottle of wine and a nice salad keep us at the table for hours.

It's not neccesarily a bad thing. I like sitting around the table after dinner talking about life, the universe, and everything. Sometimes I just wonder when exactly it happened and how it came about. Within a few years the celebration of festive occassions traversed from pizza and birthday cake, to way too much beer and little if any thought bent towards actual food, to a plate of pasta at a nice restaurant with a few good friends.

They say your palette changes as you get older. That's why adults like things like, oh, say, liver, and kids can't stand it. (Truth be told I still can't stand liver, but I hear that adults are supposed to like it.) Meanwhile, I still have Halloween candy around the house and it's nearly Easter. When I was the treat-or-treater and not the treat-dispenser, such candy would have been lucky to make it to November.

Most of the time I'm at peace with growing older and my changing tastes, but there are times I wish the dinner party could wolf down dinner and run outside and play kickball in the streets until dark. I suppose once you have kids of your own, you're back to pizza and birthday cake again, at least to some degree.

That solution seems like a lot of work for a slice of pizza though.

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