Seven o'clock, the app, and the box on the side

It's ten to seven. You've been in for twenty minutes and you've done the things you do when you get in, the coat, the bag, the sitting down for a second that became ten. You're hungry, not starving, but hungry enough that the question has arrived. What's for dinner. You open the fridge and look at it the way you'd look at a cupboard in someone else's house. Half a pepper. Some cheese. A jar of something. Milk. You shut it. You know there's pasta in the cupboard and you know there's a tin of tomatoes, and neither of those feels like dinner. Dinner is a thing on a plate that someone thought about.

So you open the app. It's been used enough that it opens on the place you order from, and the place you order from remembers what you had. Two taps, a card that's already saved, and a screen that says forty minutes. You put the phone down. The hunger, which was a question, is now a wait. You do a bit of nothing while you wait. The doorbell goes. You eat it off the box on the sofa, and it's nice, and it's more than you wanted, and afterwards the box is on the side, and the kitchen is exactly as clean as it was, and tomorrow is Wednesday and you'll do it again.

Or it's the freezer version. A tray, a film to pierce, a microwave, and a plate you didn't really need because the tray was fine. That's the same habit with less waiting.

These are invented, but I'd guess yours is close. Some words. The event is cooking as it looks from the sofa, a recipe, a shop, an hour, a clean kitchen, and a result that has to be worth all of that. The plain plate is cooking as it mostly is, something starchy, something with protein in it, a vegetable, and one thing that makes it taste of something, done in fifteen or twenty minutes with no recipe. The seven o'clock question is "what's for dinner" asked at seven with nothing decided. The order is the two taps, or the tray, whichever it is tonight. The wait is the forty minutes between ordering and eating. The shelf is the stock of things that keep, which chapter 19 is about. The six is your repertoire of plain plates, which chapter 20 is about. And the box on the side is the morning after.

Before you go on, do one thing. Write down what you ate for dinner in the last seven nights and how each one arrived, cooked, ordered, tray, or something on toast standing up. Then, the next time you order, look at the clock when you open the app and look again at the first mouthful. Write the number down. You'll want it in chapter 5.