The Upsides to Downsizing Dinner

There are two types of people. The ones who say Congratulations! when you tell them you’re getting divorced, and the ones who grab your arm and gasp, That’s so sad!

Sure, at the beginning, it was odd to cook for three, or two, or one, and not our nuclear family of four. I wouldn’t say it was sad, though. It was weird. It was unfamiliar. It was quieter.

Once my ex and I had established that I was going to be the one staying in the family home, I thought a lot about what the new regime was like from my younger son Cosmo’s point of view. Dad’s at his place, brother is at college, and now you get to have dinner alone with your mother. From my side of the table, I was still adjusting to not seeing him during my off weeks, and I tried hard not to firehose 100 percent of my attention on him when we were reunited. Be chill, Mom. Normalcy is not being grilled for updates every time you see your parent. Even with that restraint on my part, we didn’t struggle to find conversation during dinner. Some seats around the table were empty, and that meant he was no longer witness to tension between his parents; he was not trying to find a way in edgewise with his older brother; and I still cooked the whole pound of pasta. This scenario was no one’s first choice. But — could be worse.

From then on, the more one-on-one time we spent together, the more our relationship grew. Because our gang-of-two scenario had never really existed before, there were no built-in triggers, and we got to invent a new dynamic as we went.

Cooking for mother and child was objectively easier and less expensive. Cooking a smaller volume of ingredients also took less time. Additionally, what I sold as “dinner” got a lot looser. Hard-boiled eggs and toast with some salami and a big salad? That’s a meal. The voices telling me this should be a horrible period quieted as I got into a groove and realized how freeing it was to throw something together on the fly, rather than panicking at 4 p.m. because I didn’t have enough protein in the house.

I had a boss who used to say: There are no problems, only challenges. He used this to deter complaining, and I thought he’d be pleased to know it also worked as motivation for our evening meals. I was willing to set up a three-step dredging station to make breaded chicken cutlets on a weeknight. There were fewer breasts to flatten, not as many bread crumbs in the mix, and getting everything through the conveyor belt was faster. To cutlet midweek is a treat: Cutlets are the best.

One afternoon I picked up a vacuum-sealed rack of lamb chops for the two of us. High price per pound, yet not as many pounds. Eating lamb always feels special, and I wanted all of my time with Cosmo to be special. We no longer waited for a reason to light candles. It became a part of basic table-setting along with forks and knives, and we played with the wax that flooded the wick and ran down the sides when we were done eating. I loved doing that as a child, and I loved doing it with my child.

Other rituals emerged. A one-and-done pesto pasta became our Monday night special, which then turned into TV dinner night — unheard of as a foursome, but sweet as a couple. We’d sit hip to hip on the floor of the TV room with our bowls on the coffee table in front of us. We like Bob’s Burgers, The Office, Parks and Recreation. We discovered Cosmo had outgrown his aversion to fish sauce after I added it to a marinade for beef; the resulting stir-fry becomes another weekly staple. Instead of dessert, we closed out our meals with a round of good-faith negotiation: Are you in the mood to make a deal? The terms are always the same: How will we divvy up the dishes, who’s It for the last dog walk, and who bundles the cardboard recycling. This is our thing. It is self-referential only in our unit; it deepens and changes based on the flair one of us brings to the after-dinner wheeling-and-dealing. (For the record, I’d rather load the dishwasher than do yet another dog walk.)

So, no. It’s not sad. It’s just different.

Sometimes we have stand-up dinner at the kitchen island: steamed (frozen) dumplings and edamame dressed with sesame oil and black pepper; multiple rounds of quesadillas; Mexican delivery from our neighborhood spot. Sometimes, Cosmo comes home late and cooks for himself. I want to observe, but force myself not to hover — mostly because I can’t watch the mess unfold. He emerges with steaming ramen that he eats straight out of the saucepot, perfectly fried eggs that he photographs and texts to his buddies, exquisite grilled cheese sandwiches with lacquered surfaces that he parades under my nose. The trick is mayonnaise and low heat, he tells me when I beg for a mouse bite.

Big change is uncomfortable, therapy speak I repeated to myself during that transitional time. Cosmo and I talk about what’s been hard for him about having to move back and forth between two households, how annoying it is to repeat information for each parent, the awkwardness of those first holidays and vacations we spent without each other. These are the immutable and unavoidable downsides that come with divorce. I have no control over how he’ll feel about these changes; I can only try to show up for him when we talk. What’s on the table between us, though — for that we both have a say and a shared objective, and one way or another, we know how to get fed.

*****

Lemony Chickpea Stew With Rice
From Food Is a Feeling: Recipes & Stories, With Love by Carla Lalli
Serves 4, or 2 with leftovers

For the Stew
2 lemons
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
4 celery stalks, cut into small dice
2 medium leeks, sliced into ½-inch-thick rounds, rinsed and blotted dry
Kosher salt; freshly ground pepper
2 (15.5-ounce) cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 teaspoon coriander seeds, crushed
1 teaspoon dried dill
1 teaspoon dried mint
3/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 cup long-grain white rice, rinsed
4 cups chicken or vegetable stock

For the Magic Green Sauce and Serving
Ice
4 big handfuls of mature spinach, trimmed and roughly chopped
2 cups mixed loosely packed herbs, such as cilantro, dill, and/or chives
1/2 cup nutritional yeast
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove
Kosher salt; freshly ground pepper

For Serving
Greek yogurt
1 lemon, cut into wedges
Olive oil, for drizzling
Crushed red pepper flakes
Kosher salt; freshly ground pepper

Make the stew:

Use a vegetable peeler to remove the zest in wide strips from 1 lemon. Squeeze 1/4 cup of juice from that lemon, and possibly 1 more. Set zest and juice aside, separately. Heat a heavy deep skillet with a lid or 4-quart Dutch oven over medium. Add the olive oil, garlic, celery, and leeks. Season with salt and pepper and cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables get juicy, about 3 minutes. Cover the pot and cook until the leeks soften, 3 to 5 minutes.

Uncover, allowing steam to drip back into the pot, and increase the heat to medium-high. Cook, stirring, until the garlic is light golden. Lower the heat to medium, add the chickpeas, and stir to coat. Add the coriander, dill, mint, pepper flakes, and strips of zest. Stir to bloom the spices. Stir in the rice. Add the stock and 2 tablespoons lemon juice (save the rest of the juice for the sauce).

Bring the liquid to a simmer, then cover the pot, lower the heat to medium-low, and cook gently until the rice is tender, about 15 minutes.

Make the Magic Green Sauce:

Place two ice cubes into a blender jar and top with the spinach, herbs, nutritional yeast, olive oil, and the remaining 2 tablespoons lemon juice. Finely grate the garlic right into the mix and season with salt and pepper. Blend until smooth and emulsified, about 2 minutes (the ice helps keep the mixture green). Add water by the tablespoon if needed to get the blades turning. Transfer the sauce to a bowl; you should have about 1 cup or a bit more. Taste and season the sauce as needed.

Check the stew for seasoning; loosen if desired with more stock or hot water. Serve the stew topped with a big spoonful each of yogurt and Magic Green Sauce, lemon wedges, a drizzle of olive oil, a pinch of pepper flakes, and some salt and pepper.

Carla Lalli’s wonderful new cookbook, Food Is a Feeling comes out on September 8th. In her book, she shares beloved recipes and heartfelt essays about the transformative period following the end of her 24-year marriage. A former Bon Appetit editor, she now writes the newsletter Food Processing. Thank you, Carla! xoxo

P.S. Five things that surprised Joanna about her divorce, and what food geniuses eat when they’re home alone.

(Excerpted from Food Is a Feeling by Carla Lalli. Copyright © 2026 by Carla Lalli. Photographs copyright © 2026 by Lucia Bell-Epstein. Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.)