The Scrap Drawer: What's for Dinner?

Some recipes, Wanda Gág, a litter of kittens Weegee, Mad Men, and a found negative.

The Scrap Drawer is a monthly quilted letter assembled from the things I keep: memories, photographs, a page of a book I've tabbed, a scene from a movie...

The form mirrors the shape of each month.

Some are intricately pieced; others, a whole cloth. I stitch them together in an effort to soothe the questions that ache.

This is a monthly practice of cultivating attention—a way to make sense of a fractured world by honoring each scrap, searching for the place of small things within the whole.

Dear Someone,

Each afternoon the same question arises: “What’s for dinner?”

In my house, this simple question carries cosmic weight; even with a fridge and pantry fully stocked, the arrival of dinner lands like an anvil at the end of the day. There are many reasons why this is so. It is wrapped in existential dread. It is both personal and political. Dinner evokes memories of connection and disconnection, having and not having. Serving it or being served.

But today, I am in search of levity.

Whoever you are, I hope that this bodily need does not come as a burden. By posing this question, I must have stirred in you memories of precarity, or guilt of your own abundance. Perhaps a combination of the two.

In any case, dinner time is a ritual of care and connection. Although this seems forgotten, I try my best to stay present for it—dishes and all.

Last month I asked how you let go of the day. Now I’d like to know how you keep it—even the most tedious moments.

Perhaps tonight, as difficult as they day may have been, we can surrender to this looming question of dinner. We are very lucky to have it.

If you want some suggestions for your meal tonight, here are some recipes I’ve loved recently:

Golden Creamy Butter Beans served with a baguette or Coconut Milk Poached Chicken served over rice.

Do you have any scraps you’d like to share? A recipe? Your favorite struggle meal? Please share in the comments! I’m sure someone out there would appreciate it.

Here are my scraps for the month of June:

1. Wanda Gág

Beans Sprouting—Read Version. 1939. Watercolor on Sandpaper

Orphaned at 15, Wanda Gág became the soul provider for her 6 younger sisters. Suddenly finding herself responsible for nightly dinner plans, it is hard to image how she found time for her art, but miraculously, she did.

Against all odds, Gág went on to become an internationally renowned artist. She worked across several mediums and formats. She drew, painted, wrote for leftist and feminist publications, and became a household name for her work as an author and illustrator in children’s literature.

She is perhaps most known for her children’s book titled “Millions of Cats,” which to me reads as a mythic fairy tale made from the source material of her life experience as a caregiver to her siblings.

In Millions of Cats, a lonely elderly husband and wife wish for a cat as a companion. The man goes out into the world to find one, and instead finds “millions and billions and trillions” of cats. Unable to choose one, he leads them all home where, in a biblical fashion, the cats consuming the countryside like locusts.

2. A Litter of Kittens

Our cat Bobbie on 35mm

In the summer of 2021, a stray cat approached a resident at the shelter I worked at. She was skin and bones, brushing up against my ankles when I met her. I took her in as a foster, and was surprised a few weeks later with a litter of four slimy kittens in my carry-on luggage.

As the kittens weened off their mother’s milk, they observed her dinnertime rituals and mimicked them carefully. Soon, there were 5 cats in my kitchen every night pacing the floor, searching for any dropped scraps, screaming at the sound of opening cans, and growling into their food bowls.

With a family of cats at home, I worked the graveyard shift doing outreach on Chicago’s public transit, passing out cold ham and cheese sandwiches to people in soiled clothes. Some could not remember their own birthdays for the forms I asked for them to fill out at my fold out table.

For dinner these nights, I often had the same. There was nothing open to order at 4 am, nor the willpower to boil a pot of water.

3. Freedom from Want

A corner store near my house with a slot machine. 2025

This past Thanksgiving I wrote an essay contrasting Norman Rockwell’s painting Freedom from Want with the reality of my family’s holiday dinner table. The myth of American prosperity Rockwell’s painting depicts has somehow taken route in a family such as mine, who has living memory of severe hunger.

It is one of my life’s greatest mysteries how such a family could continue to remain devout believers in the American project.

This country often requires that we hold its contradictions in silence to survive; questioning the myth becomes a new kind of insatiable hunger.

4. The Critic: Weegee 1943

Weegee immigrated to the United States at the age of 10, settling in a roach infested dwelling in New York City. He grew up to become a renowned photojournalist. He is most known for his photographs of crime scenes, which he chased, listening to the NYC police radio for the next tragedy. Sometimes we have to get creative to earn our meals.

Weegee’s memory of hunger is palpable in his photo, The Critic (1943). The composition pictures a disheveled woman glaring at two luxuriously dressed women in jewels and mink with contempt.

In his book, he said of this photo: ‘I couldn’t see what I was snapping but could almost smell the smugness.’ Someone stopped the pair in the foyer of the opera house and asked them if it was appropriate to wear so much jewellery ‘in these critical times’. The older woman apologized for wearing last year’s jewels, and added that she wore them to help morale.”

I recognize this look of disgust; it is the involuntary expression on my face every time I see a Cyber Truck. It reeks of the same smugness.

5. Waterloo, Mad Men S7 E7

If you haven’t watched Mad Men, you should. Although it is only a TV show, it holds so much complexity about the construction of the mythologies we live inside.

This particular scene takes place the night after the moon landing in 1969.

We still cannot fully grasp the implications of this event. Since the beginning of time, the moon served as the ultimate symbol of forbidden love, and longing. In mythology, the moon is often symbolic of what is out of reach.

And so our mythology of the moon changed. It is now only a rock in the sky.

To sell her advertising spot to Burger Chef, Peggy Olson states to her client that most dinner tables are within 6 feet of a television set. She describes the common American dinner table as the battlefield and prize of corporations.

This late in the game, it seems there is very little we can do. But, at dinner time, we can at least do our best to shut corporate interests out. We can turn off our phones and be present with the here and now.

6. A Found Negative

Found negative. Scanned 2025

I scanned this photograph from a strip of negatives I found in a thrift store bin. This frame was between images of children’s birthday parties. Their domestic life on film suggests the idealic Rockwellian American dream. Much different than what my family knew.

But I do not envy them. I know that the same kind of insatiable hunger exists in their family, too. I’m sure that the TV set at their dinner table kept them hypnotized and distant from each other.

I’m afraid that the invention of the TV dinner did set us back spiritually. The spices we waged wars for are infinite and kept out of view in our cabinets. We have come to accept blandness as apart of life.

There was a time before dinner time was a consumer sport. Before, it was a sensorial experience. A time to take in the aroma of garlic and olive oil, and know them as gifts from the earth rather than a thing on the supermarket shelf.