Dinner Table

For our parents' and grandparents' generations, the daily dilemma for any household cook was the question: "What's for dinner?" These days, as calendars grow dense with activities and obligations, the question in many households is not so much what to have for dinner but whether there's time for dinner at all. If you can't seem to get your family together for meals, take heart. You've got good allies, both in terms of practical advice and in research that backs up the common-sense hunch that there is something inherently healthy about a family chattering around a dinner table -- something healthy enough to prompt a reassessment of the frantic schedules that rule many American households.

Nora Ephron's collection of essays, "I Remember Nothing," was a memoir about aging, written while it was happening because, she explained, you never know which meal will actually be your last meal. In it, the wry and witty author and filmmaker included a list of the things she would not miss when she died - dry skin, bras, bad dinners "like the one we went to last night," Clarence Thomas and panels on "Women in Film. " And the things she would miss: among them waffles, the concept of waffles, a walk in the park, the concept of a walk in the park, fireworks, Paris, taking a bath and pie. We didn't know it at the time, but Nora Ephron was doing what she always did best - mining her own life and its mundanity to amuse the rest of us. She was battling a form of leukemia at the time, but she kept her illness to herself.

Matchmaking is what Ahuva Albrecht of Pikesville does for a living -- finding husbands for single Jewish women and wives for single Jewish men.For Passover, an eight-day Jewish celebration that begins at sundown today, she volunteers to use her talents to arrange different kinds of matches: Passover Seder companions. Albrecht finds those with nowhere to celebrate Passover and matches them with empty seats at a family's dinner table."I expect that when they first arrive at the house, it will be a lot like a first date," Albrecht said of the Passover matches she has arranged.

Annette Stanley may no longer set a place at the dinner table for her daughter, Toya Hill, something she did for about a year after the 8-year-old disappeared while going to buy candy at a store near their East Baltimore home. It has been, after all, almost 29 years since the quiet, bespectacled little girl vanished, a span of time in which Stanley has married, moved and seen Toya's three siblings grow up and give her 15 grandchildren. But with or without an actual place setting, her lost daughter remains a constant, if elusive, presence.

CHESTERTOWN - The questions were flying fast and furious around the formally set tables in a dining room at Washington College last night. Is it OK to tuck in your tie? What if the person you're eating with has food in his teeth? What's the proper way to sneeze? And what if your knife gets taken away with your salad? The occasion was the college's second etiquette dinner, a chance for students to learn how to eat soup and break bread with the best of them. "I know the basics," said Nicole Kesecker, a junior from Columbia, before the dinner started.

Q: My son, who will be 4 in October, has decided to be a cat. For about two years he pretended off and on to be a dog. Everyone said it was a phase. Well, now he's a "kitty," as he says. He even sits at the dinner table on his haunches with his fists balled up like paws and wants to be fed like an animal. I have tried to play along, but I feel this dinner-table bit is going too far. We have two cats he teases relentlessly, even though he knows this is not acceptable. I am a stay-at-home mom, and he is my only child -- so it's not about attention.

Los AngelesProducer Norman Lear said yesterday that his new sitcom, "Sunday Dinner," will have a Baltimore connection.The show, starring Robert Loggia, is about a father and three grown daughters, who live in Long Island. One of the daughters, Lear said, is a 32-year-old single parent who has returned to the Johns Hopkins University to earn a Ph.D. in microbiology.When reminded at a press conference here that Hopkins is in Baltimore, not New York, Lear said, "I know, but she commutes back every weekend."

I HAVE been lighting a lot of candles. It used to be that candles were reserved for weekend meals or semi-special occasions, which were also marked by the removal of the stack of newspapers from the end of the kitchen table.But lately I have been lighting candles virtually every time the tribe gathers for an evening meal. Sometimes I take the newspaper stack off the table, sometimes not.There are probably a variety of reasons, some conscious, some not, for my increased fondness for candles on the dinner table.

Peonies are old-fashioned plants with elegant, glossy foliag and soft, billowy flowers reminiscent of gentler days of yore.I call them Granny plants.There are two peonies growing beside our front door. One has fragrant pink blossoms the size of Shaquille O'Neal's hand; the other, huge white heads tinged scarlet at the core.The blooms will open soon -- our cue to divert traffic from the front entrance to the back, rather than disturb the delicate blossoms that are holding the front steps hostage.

James R. Neverdon, a retired steel worker who never let his family forget the importance of God, education and neighborhood, died Sunday of complications of leukemia at the home of a daughter in Northwest Baltimore. He was 96.He recently had moved in with his daughter, Gail N. Edmonds."One of his lessons was that poverty was not born in you," said another daughter, Joan Neverdon Parker of Woodlawn, a Democratic delegate from the 10th District. "So I guess we were the richest poor people in the world."

Polly Ailor Tucker of Knoxville, Tenn., was looking for a recipe of her late mother's for what she called "Pittsburg Potatoes." While she watched and even helped make the dish over the years, it's been too long for her to remember the specifics. She says the dish was a mainstay at her mother's dinner parties and that "it is legend among all those who joined us at the dinner table." Carol Rohn of Cockeysville had the recipe Tucker was searching for, and she said that this was a favorite dish while she was growing up. I tested the dish using a good-quality sharp cheddar cheese, which gave it a nice, rich flavor.

Let me begin by saying how lucky we are to live in an area where you can visit a replica of an 11th-century castle and feast on hunks of roasted chicken while knights on horseback joust and sword fight and a comely wench keeps coming up to your table and saying: "More to drink, sire?" Until the other night, however, I had not availed myself of this particular pleasure, owing to one major factor: Tickets are $50.95 each for adults. And I'm too cheap to fork over that kind of iron for anything less than Springsteen singing while I eat. Then Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament, the company that puts on these feasting-and-fighting extravaganzas in nine cities around the country, held a "Media Night" at its sprawling Arundel Mills site to preview its new show, billed as a "spell-binding evening of royal entertainment!"

When I was growing up, dinnertime was the most important time of the day. Table manners were strictly enforced. No hats, no T-shirts, no elbows on the table and absolutely no television. My father sat at one end of the table, my mother at the other. My two brothers, sister and I sat in between. In the early years, dinner conversations revolved around school and friends. As we got older, we talked about world events and politics. At the table, we were learning how to present our ideas, how to defend them and how to do so in a respectful manner.

THE CHALLENGE: Susan Kornick, an exhausted mother of three, needed relief from the nightly routine of making five separate dinners for her family. We helped design one meal with something for everyone. Robin Spence, the nutritionist for our monthly Make Over My Meal series, wanted to start the new year with a challenge, and we had one for her. "PLEASE HELP! MOM DESPERATE!" the subject line of the e-mail read. "I am the food preparer for our family -- me, hubby and 3 kids ages 12, 9 and 6," wrote Susan Kornick of Cockeysville.

In an effort to make nightly dinners with our young sons bearable, my husband and I created a conversation starter: We each go around the table and say a good thing and a bad thing about our day. This helps the kids focus their thoughts and lets us in on any goings-on at school we might not know about. I don't know about your dinner table, but ours borders on a free-for-all. One boy hates all vegetables, and one hates most meats, and they both hate a sauce of any kind. They salt their food until it's white.

When someone you love dies, the stories you tell about them - whether you're telling them to strangers on the street or to family members sitting around the dinner table - don't change. For the most part, it's the same details, same anecdotes, same punch lines, even years after they're gone. It's the tense, unfortunately, that changes. He has a great laugh gets replaced by He had a great laugh. And while that might seem like a minor thing, it's not.

WASHINGTON - So, what are you doing for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Day? Not much? Not a surprise. While we have rituals to celebrate other holidays - put up a tree for Christmas, watch fireworks on Independence Day, lie about losing weight on New Year's - King Day is less a celebration than a commemoration. Meaning that while some of us mark it by attending parades and interfaith breakfasts, many allow it to pass unmarked. Some folks in Dallas are out to change that. They'd like you to honor King Day by going to dinner.

Dinner time in houses with finicky kids -- as some of you know -- is often met with scowls, tantrums and defiant cries of "yuck!" The Chef Ladies at Barnes & Noble in White Marsh try to expand kids' tastes beyond peanut butter and jelly during a celebration of Cinco de Mayo today. Drawing ideas from "The Kids' Multicultural Cookbook: Food and Fun Around the World," the pair teach children how to make tortilla chips and then entertain them with stories while the chips bake. The idea is for kids to realize the importance of careful reading, especially when executing recipes.

One day, my dad bought himself a new Rolex. He was about 70 and had cancer. His entire life he never wore a watch. "Why would anyone need a watch?" he would ask. "I can always tell the time within five minutes." As kids, we would test him and, more often than not, he was right. "What do you think of my new watch," he asked from the couch. He sat slightly tilted, maybe from the pain, with a blanket over his lap and a dozen pill bottles on the coffee table beside him. Slanting afternoon sunlight filled the room from a row of windows behind him. I was home for a weekend visit during that long last year.

I DIDN'T KNOW it at the time, but the other day as I spooned down fresh spring peas, I was behaving in an au courant way. I was eating within my "foodshed." Modeled after a watershed, a foodshed is the area close to your home, some say within a 100-mile radius, that produces food. The idea is that by eating locally produced goods from this territory, you are encouraging more sustainable, ecologically sound practices and discouraging long-distance dining, that is, eating meals made with ingredients flown in from the other side of the globe.