Meal time in a neurodivergent household is all about options. What may have been good last year can lose its status permanently without warning. There are some meals that transcend sustenance and remain secure, safe, and stable no matter how many years they grace the menu. Ours are Dagwood Night, Pizza Night, and Breakfast for dinner.

Dagwood Night. The night of options .

Imagine a buffet of ingredients; a plethora of possibilities to be piled atop each other in any way you like. No one is required to eat anything they don’t like. Nearly all the rules are temporarily suspended except the ‘no waste’ rule. No waste meant that if you took it, if you served yourself, then you had to eat most of it, unless your eyes were bigger than your stomach. The clean plate club was permanently out of session.

In my family, not everyone eats meat. Textures can make or break a dish. The way food looks definitely matters. So what was on the menu?

A – Frozen waffles, bread, bagels and sometimes when I felt energetic American style savory drop biscuits.

B – Sliced deli meats for those who liked them and fried chicken (frozen-I don’t fry much food myself).

C – Any and every cheese we had from sliced cheddar to cream cheese and farmer cheese.

D – Spreads such as: Nutella, pimento cheese, mayonnaise, mustard, peanut butter and when we were bougie, almond butter.

E – Syrups and sauces. For chicken and waffle sandwiches maple syrup is a must and spicing up pimento cheese with Tabasco was always good. But those were more my choices than anyone else’s so there was also chocolate syrup available, whipped cream, or some Bird’s custard mixed up as well.

Dagwood Night allowed everyone to eat without stress. Since there was no way to make a cohesive meal that could be eaten by everyone. We couldn’t party every night but the person who experienced the least stress on Dagwood Night was me.

Pizza and Movies. It was the days before Blockbuster disappeared.

Pizza was always a winning option. But only if it was a cheese pizza. That not liking meat thing applied to pizza as well. Thin crust, regular crust, deep dish, and pan style were all equal in the eyes of the court of family opinion. We were poor so just the fact that it was pizza was sufficient and the lack of meat meant pizza was one of the cheap meals. After video rentals went away and we were watching online, we began to make our own for half the price of the frozen ones.

Breakfast for dinner. Options once again and who doesn’t like breakfast?

Breakfast is also a poor man’s banquet. Potatoes are filling and inexpensive. Eggs are full of protein and vitamins for minimal cost. Bring on the pancakes, the waffles, the biscuits, the southern cream gravy (Basically a bechamel sauce if you leave out the sausage), eggs, bacon and potatoes and there is something for everyone. Not every item would be made. That would have been too much to cook and I still had that rule about waste.

I am still the only one that will eat any of the green leafy stuff. But they’re all grown up now and their strong reactions to taste, texture and appearance have relaxed a little. We can’t force anyone to like something, but we can make someone so miserable that they are unable to like something they would have otherwise enjoyed. The family I grew up in believed in clean plates, no matter how much was served. Then they criticized any weight gain as if they were blind to their own involvement. In my childhood, I spent many nights at the dining table alone with my brussel sprouts. Even my dog wouldn’t touch those. Her reticence served to bolster my opinion on their edibility.

Those were the 3 meals that my family enjoyed. Not very traditional, but with neurodivergent opinions we have to get creative and not bring our judgements to the table. Kindness is the best guide for meal planning.