Dinner Recipes (Video)

Simple Dinner Recipes for video version. It's free.

DINNER. Dinner is the important meal in the daily or another cycle of meals, typically requiring more formal culinary arrangements, table trappings, and etiquette, and probably more abundant foods and drinks. While rural households have tended to share the main daily meal during daylight hours, industrial societies have pushed dinner into the evening, thereby making this meal more important than breakfast, lunch, tea, subsequent supper, or any intervening or alternative snack. Major meals within weekly, monthly, and annual cycles are often identified as "dinner" (Sunday meals, Christmas, and Thanksgiving). However, with rites of passage, dinner's importance may be transcended by something grander: a banquet, feast, wake, or wedding breakfast.

In the West, all family members attend the conventional dinner. In religious homes, the meal may be offered with grace. In some patriarchal versions of the family dinner,quick and simple dinner recipes, the head of the family sits in a carver (chair with arms) at one end of the table while a woman (generally the wife) serves the meal. The household might bring out a special set of matching crockery or "dinner service," especially when guests are in attendance. A succession of courses is served that often centers on a meat dish—most impressively, turkey, prime rib, or spring lamb—and some occasions conclude with a dessert course.

Beyond immediate family gatherings, a dinner can be elaborate, involving written invitations,simple dinner menu ideas, keen anticipation (or dread) on the part of the guests,simple dinner ideas, and requiring toasts and speeches. On such formal occasions, diners wear special clothing, such as a dinner jacket or tuxedo for men. As it is maintained by dedicated food-and-wine societies, dinner extends through many courses of exquisite foods and matching drinks. Courting couples become acquainted over restaurant dinners and cook together for newly shared friends. Homecomings,healthy dinner recipes,delicious dinner recipes, departures, graduations, new jobs, business deals, and the like are ready excuses for a dinner date, often outside the home.