cooking up friendship

How do you solve the problem of lives that never seem to intersect? Dinner.

She still lives in Bethesda, but works Downtown at Children's Hospital. I work in Silver Spring but live downtown. She goes to Baltimore on the weekends to visit her boyfriend of three (almost four, right?) years who is still at UMBC. And I, well, I'm generally everywhere on the weekends.

We realized one afternoon in the summer before I moved that unless we came up with a standing date in the middle of the week, we'd never see each other.

Enter: Wednesday Night Dinner.

We meet at my place (it's on her way home) and cook ourselves a fabulous meal (sometimes, we've only had one disaster), complete with wine, beer or a stiffer drink if the work week's calling for it. And we talk as we cook. It's girl time. It's cheap. And it's wonderful.

About two months into it we instated the 1-new thing rule. We must cook one new thing every meal. It can be something we've had before, it can even be an old family recipe, but we cannot have ever made it ourselves. So now, about 7 months later, we're really becoming chefs. We even grilled for the first time last week. A huge accomplishment for someone who's only ever watched her dad grill (me) and someone who grew up a vegetarian (her). They say you should do one thing a day that scares you, well, we do one thing a week. And it's not scary because we have each other.

A quick list of successes:

• Shrimp curry
• Fattoush salad, kafta and tzatziki sauce with home-made pita chips
• Lettuce wraps P.F. Chang-style
• Pad Thai
• Roasted asparagus with creamy mustard chicken with grapes
• Chicken with balsamic glaze
• Shrimp scampi

Four hands, two brains and my tiny kitchen make for wonderful Wednesday nights. A welcome respite at the middle of the week to help us over the hump and into the downhill of the rest of the week. The best part is that it's become a routine, which has even started to include a jasmine tea "ceremony" as we watch last week's episode of "30 Rock" or "The Office."

I've realized as I get older that when you're not seeing your friends every day at school, maintaining friendships, particularly really close, meaningful friendships, becomes harder and harder. It takes effort and time, and in our case, it takes lots of olive oil.

She and I are thinking about starting a blog about our dinners ... complete with recipes and photos and stories ... so stay tuned!