The Benefits of Procrastinating Dinner

Isabella McBride, author of “Funny Woman Guide to Get Organized NOW! or at Least Sometime Before You Die. . .“, is sharing the benefits of procrastinating dinner:

It’s late afternoon. You’ve been avoiding the dreaded question: What’s for dinner?

Suddenly a horrible bolt of lightning strikes you.

You forgot about an important meeting you have tonight.

You look at the clock in a panic. Dinner has to be ready in 30 minutes and you have no idea what it could be.

A wave of emotions hit you.

Stress, guilt, blame, overwhelm.

You rush to the kitchen, rummage through the cabinets and refrigerator to take inventory.

You find onions, potatoes, eggs, pasta, parmesan cheese, peas, carrots and one small can of tomato sauce.

What do you do?

You think fast. In a split second, your brain scans through all of the recipes you know that combine these ingredients. It’s like you have turned into the Dinner-Terminator. Your brain lands on three possible menu choices. Omelette, soup or pasta. You had pasta last night, so you go with the soup.

Now you are on a roll. Your confidence is growing and now you think you may want to audition for the Food Network show “Chopped.” You are in a wild cooking frenzy and even the kids are drawn to you like mosquitoes to the light. Suddenly they want to tell you all of their secrets and get advice–all the things you have been trying to get out of them for the past few months. Then the phone rings. Now you become a force that any CEO in America couldn’t rival. You quickly delegate all of these activities. No distraction is big enough to get you off track–you have a laser vision to fulfill your quest and nothing can stop you.

In the blink of an eye, thirty minutes have passed. Not only did you create a delicious rustic soup, but you even had time to make some garlic toast and a small salad.

How is this possible?

It’s simple.

Procrastination sometimes brings out the very best in us.

Four benefits to procrastinating dinner:

1. Save time.

One thing I have noticed about cooking dinner is that no matter how much time I have to cook dinner, I use it all. Less time cooking means more time doing other stuff.

2. Use your creativity.

I have discovered some amazingly surprising dishes through last-minute dinners. You could either use a recipe that takes you thirty minutes to wrap your mind around (yawn) or get in your kitchen and start getting creative.

3. Adrenaline

Every now and then it’s fun to get all of your juices flowing for an exhilarating dinner experience. I don’t recommend this every night, but occasionally it’s a lot of fun. Some people bungee jump, some people go into shark-infested water in a cage, and some people cook against the clock.

4. Redefine “Dinner”

I heard a program once on NPR that forever changed my definition of dinner. The journalist was interviewing women during the collapse of communism in Russia. There was a severe food shortage. The women were talking about what they cook when their cupboards are bare. One of the recipes shared included a soup that consisted of some oil, flour, and water. That’s it. Luckily I’ve never experienced that level of want, but it opened my eyes to simple eating.

So if you procrastinated dinner tonight, no worries!

Enjoy the excitement and creativity that comes along with some good old-fashioned procrastination.

Bon Apetit!

Isabella McBride is the author of “Funny Woman Guide to Get Organized NOW! or at Least Sometime Before You Die. . .” She is a wife and a mother of two pre-teen daughters (who didn’t get the memo that they are not teenagers yet). She believes that one of the joys of life is to find the benefit from surprising things: like disorganization and even procrastination. Isabella can be found on Twitter and Pinterest.