It’s time to deal with tonight’s dinner. Most days I love cooking – love puttering about in my big kitchen, chopping veggies on a thick wooden butcher’s block, listening to the sizzle of a sauté mingle with a gurgling pot of water. I’m a good cook – not as good as my mother, true, who in an hour and a half, can and usually does throw together a banquet’s worth of dishes for an ordinary weekday family meal, but with enough culinary skills that my food tastes much better than your average available takeout alternative. Which is why I feel guilty when, on nights like tonight, I’m just plain uninspired to cook.

I open the fridge door and stand there for a good long while, letting the cool air wander out while I ponder the contents. Ash, of course, would not approve of my wasting energy thus, but fortunately, he’s not home yet to give me the lecture. There are two limp carrots, half a red pepper, and a handful of onions in the crisper. Smushy red grapes on the road to raisin-dom occupying space in the fruit bin. A container of leftover rice, plus four small tupperware boxes containing various remnants from meals that were far more exciting the first time around. Besides, there’s too little of each to yield enough for a whole dinner, and somehow, a medley of ma po tofu, refried beans, puttanesca sauce and thai green curry, just doesn’t strike me as even approaching the semblance of an edible concoction. I don’t do fusion.