I’m not quite sure this picture quite captures my enthusiasm for our weekly takeout dinner.

(Sunday Paper, Year VI, Issue 7)

For the most part, we eat fairly healthfully.

If anything, this has increased during the pandemic, because Kathy has been home for her classes at night.

When she was going straight from work to class a couple of times a week, I would be responsible for dinner.

This isn’t a problem other than the fact that my choices in dinners are less nutritious than hers.

So now that she’s home, every night thought is given to a pretty balanced meal.

But, for a number of reasons that I’ll talk about in a moment, once a week we’ve taken to ordering out.

And it’s one of my favorite parts of the week each week.

I’m not going to lie - there are weeks that I start thinking about what we’ll order for dinner as soon as we finish our takeout dinner for that week.

It’s a chance to break up the monotony.

We started doing takeout once we became pretty convinced that it was safe, relatively early in the pandemic.

We were not spending any other money, so it was definitely within our budget. (Before the pandemic we would make it a point to try to go out to eat maybe once a month…not overdoing it, but making sure we treated the family here and there. We had significantly cut down on our takeout consumption. It was either cook at home or eat out.)

We also saw it as an opportunity to help keep supporting some of our favorite places even though we weren’t allowed to be there in person.

And it also allowed us to try places we’d been meaning to try but hadn’t made the time to yet.

So we’ve done our part weekly to try to contribute to the economy. Some of our favorites? The Tuesday burger special at CJs was an early pandemic go-to. We finally acted on a recommendation to get shawarma from a Mediterranean place that used to be super nearby and moved to a location recently slightly farther away. We loved it. We have always loved Oak Barrel Tavern and that’s a frequent choice. (And it seems to still be a very popular destination for many people. I often remark to Kathy after we pick up our food that there always seem to be more people there than most places…not, like, too many people for regulations [though I don’t know, I’ve never counted], but too many people for my level of comfort. I’m just not ready to eat out at a place.) Fast food makes an occasional appearance too…which continues a pattern of pandemic rules being a little more lax than normal times. We don’t do pizza nearly as much as you’d think, but after recently discovering one of the places with pizza that we liked closed down during the pandemic, we’ve been ordering from Rossini’s in Sudbury. I like their pizza a lot…and I’m not crazy about a lot of the pizza around the commonwealth of Masaschusetts.

If you’re local, or in the area for any reason, you can’t go wrong grabbing a bite to eat at these places I’ve mentioned. There are more…maybe we’ll get a thread going in the comments either here or on the Facebook page. (Like it if you don’t already! Or we can take the conversation to Twitter where you can follow me!) If you love somewhere that’s close that I haven’t mentioned, throw it in one of those places. Let’s share some love.

The worst thing about all of this takeout is missing out on one of the thrills of eating at a local restaurant: Every time we’d leave the house I’d ask, “Who thinks we’ll see someone we know tonight?”

We’re early eaters, so this didn’t happen all that often…I suspect most of the time we were done with dinner by the time people were going out to eat.

But every once in a while we’d see someone we knew, and what a thrill.

Someday we’ll experience that again.

Notes

*This is February break week around these parts. Should be nice and relaxing. Crazy to think about a year ago at this time: Our youngest got very sick and then I got sick and in retrospect there’s a pretty good chance we both had Covid. We had to cancel a trip to New York because of how sick we were - in hindsight, a great decision. In thinking about this I’m remembering in her class there were constant absences leading up to February break - as many as half the students were out at a time. Craziness.

*I also remember learning last year that February break is a very regional break. I didn’t know how specific it was to the northeast.

*Hard to believe how close we are to spring training for baseball and I know sports are muddling through but I think spring training and then 162 games seems too daunting for everything to go off without it being messy. We’ll see. I’ll hope for the best because I’m ready for baseball season but I have a pessimistic outlook on these sports seasons.

*I’ll leave you this week with this story, in graphic form, from last week’s New Yorker, which I think is beautiful. I don’t know if you need a subscription to see it, or maybe it counts as one of your monthly free ones or whatever. Either way, it’s worth your click.