Dinner Diary: 26/52

Week 26 of Having People Over, and we’ve officially hit the halfway point of the year, and of this slightly ridiculous resolution to have people over every single week of 2026.

This week’s menu has become one of my real go-tos for summer: Sesame Chicken Subs with grilled veggies and avocado, alongside French Onion Dip, a pickled cucumber and red onion salad, and my Berry Salad with Lemon Cream. With the 4th of July next weekend, we didn’t want to overdo it on burgers and dogs just yet, so this felt like the right summer BBQ situation to keep in rotation. One of our guests called it a “California Cheesesteak,” which might be my favorite description anyone has given a sandwich (even if there’s no cheese or steak anywhere near it). I think it might need a rebrand! 

Our guests this week were a family from the neighborhood we’ve known for three plus years; the kind you keep saying “we should do dinner!” to without ever actually following through on it. You know the drill. Well, we finally did it. They have four kids spanning college down to middle school, and it was wonderful catching up on where everyone’s at in life. They showed up with Trader Joe’s sparkling lemonade and limeade, plus the ingredients for root beer floats, which might be the single best dessert contribution anyone has brought us! I hadn’t had a root beer float in ages and let me tell you, that hit the spot. Learning: Never a bad idea to show up with 2 liters of rootbeer and a pint of old-fashioned vanilla ice cream. 

One small moment worth sharing: right as we were finally sitting down to eat, Nora looked up at me with total sincerity and asked, “can I have spaghetti?” Not what was on the menu. She did not get spaghetti. She ended up microwaving herself a hot dog instead, which is its own small life lesson in flexibility, and also slightly deflating after I’d spent the afternoon making dinner. But that’s the deal. You make the meal, someone doesn’t love it, life goes on. Motherhood, amiright?

Some weeks I still ask myself why I signed up for this. But twenty-six weeks felt like the right moment to pause and take stock, and the truth is, it’s taught me more than I expected. The invitation is always the hardest part, and also the most important one. The resistance shows up every week in some form: a messy house, a broken appliance, menu indecision. Pushing through it is almost always where the good stuff starts. I’ve also learned that nobody is who they seem on the surface. The neighbor who saw the Beatles live in London. The 97 year old who outplayed and outlasted all of us. The psychiatrist dad who with better questions than ours. You really cannot know what someone is carrying until you sit down with them. 

And there’s something almost magical about what a table can surface: two families realizing they were at the same concert twenty years ago, birth stories that never come up in a grocery store aisle, twenty years of friendship that somehow never included an actual dinner until now. And maybe the biggest one: repetition beats novelty. A handful of go-to menus you trust will get you further than reinventing dinner every single week ever could.

The whole point of this resolution has always been building community, and getting to know my kids’ friends and the families we keep meaning to see falls right under that umbrella. We may never have the biggest house or the flashiest activities, but I love knowing that when people come through our door, they’re going to eat well.

Halfway there. Still always happy we hosted.

See you next Sunday at 5.

xo, Kelsey