A little dinner

My easy/light favorite dinner hack is to just put a bunch of stuff on a platter, and 50%+ of it has to be vegetables. Ranch or onion dip at the center. Hummus works too. Or olive oil flavored with fresh garlic, dried herbs, and a generous pinch of kosher salt. But usually, it's ranch. On one half of the platter, I pile up baby carrots, chopped broccoli, cauliflower, radishes, snap peas, cucumbers ... whatever veggies you have that you need to use up. Chunks of crunchy romaine heart are surprisingly nice. The trick making sure it takes up at least half the platter. Veggies are the main event here, not an afterthought. When we have leftover roast chicken, we'll do a pile of that as well. If there’s no chicken, maybe some nuts, but we're not on the obsessive protein train. And then, to make it fun, some chips or crackers on the other side of the platter. We love Kettle jalapeño chips or salt & pepper chips, but if i stumble upon Nabisco's increasingly hard to find Chicken-n'-a-Biscuit crackers, a few of those get tucked in as well. It ends up looking massive, because we're generous with the veggies, and again ... it's dinner. We plop it on the table, pour a glass of wine, put on jazz, and pull out whatever books we're currently into. We nibble, sip, read. By the end of the night we're happy, satiated, full, and despite having eaten mostly veggies, we feel like we “got away with something” by having snacks for dinner.