Grownupable

“Any lunch requests?” I asked, as she started toward the shower.

“Bits and pieces,” she said. “So I don’t have to wait for the microwave.”

Her office has a pretty big staff and a pretty small kitchen. And one single, temperamental, microwave oven. It seems to take several tries to get a dish heated through, at which point the temperature might go from “still mostly cold” to “this will blister your soft palate.” And since there’s often a line of other busy people waiting to use the machine, she’s beginning to find the whole thing more frustrating than it’s worth.

So, okay. Something she can eat at room temperature.

We went to the theatre with friends on Saturday evening: the performance was a late-afternoon matinee of The Great Gatsby. We planned pre-theatre snacks and dinner after the show. Okay, she planned the snacks: our friends poured the wine and seltzer, while she laid our cabaret-style table with an assortment of olives, cheeses, sausages, and sliced baguettes. It was delightful, and so was the dinner that followed. (The production was good, too, though the play itself is a bit hard to follow, especially for someone like me who’s never read the book on which it’s based.)

For her lunch today, I packed up some of our theatre-snack leftovers. Cheese, crackers, vegetables, and cured meat slices and a hard-cooked egg; also little containers of lemon cookies and peeled-and-segmented clementine. It was hardly the most extravagant lunch I’d ever served her. It took no time at all for me to prepare–and, provided she remembers to take it out of the office fridge a little while before she’s hungry so it can come back to room temperature, it will be just what she asked for without much effort on her part either.  It looked a lot like the pre-packaged sort of thing kids might bring to school—though, befitting the diner, a little classier. Her very own grown-up Lunchable.

(Mine too. I’m packing the same for my train-ride-to-town lunch.)

Maybe I should make some chocolate pudding in case we want the same thing tomorrow.