Ladies, It’s A ‘Girl Dinner’ Summer
Being single and childless has really gotten a bad rap in the last few years via internet discourse. While one side of the web views it as a doomed position to be in life, I have to say, it has its perks. For me, when I think about my parental and relationship status, I can’t help but beam and have gratitude that with all the things that I have piled on my plate, at least I have only one mouth to feel.
This underrated freedom has a way of taking the pressure off my shoulder to not perform in the kitchen but instead create meals off of vibes and instincts.
Enter “girl dinner.”
@alanalavv Replying to @María GM thank you to everyone who commented ‘girl dinner’ on my snack plates and introduced me to the best concept / phrase ever 🫒🧡 #girldinner #snackplate #snackplates
The idea behind “girl dinner” first gained traction after creator Olivia Maher shared a TikTok video admiring the convenience and delight behind eating bread and cheese-centered meals as her “ideal meal,” similar to that of peasants during medieval times, and thus, the concept was born.
Now, if you’re finding it hard to imagine a meal that seems to lack nutritional value while being completely satisfying, allow me to walk you through it. Picture an elevated, grown-up take on the classic Lunchable, but instead of processed ham, you add Capocollo, swap the American cheese for brie or whipped ricotta, add olives, jam, sliced strawberries, a drizzle of olive oil, and voila, dinner is served.
It’s essentially a snack plate with more intuitive proportions and assorted by your cravings. Maybe you exerted a little too much of your brain power during the workday and have nothing left to conceptualize all the veggies and protein in your kitchen to put a meal together. Or maybe the heat from the summer days has you craving lighter bits as opposed to a full-course meal.
Girl dinner meets you where your day ends, and the chaos of cooking begins to say, “Hey girl, let’s take it easy tonight.”
@alanalavv If it’s not a snack plate, then I don’t want it 🫡 #snackplate #snacks #snackplates #summerrecipes #girldinner #snackideas
For food creator Alana Laverty, the spark to create easy, gratifying meals came during the heat of a Brooklyn summer that almost made her book a flight back home to Ireland. With her apartment already feeling like a sauna and a commute that left her overheated, she’d open her fridge for a cool breeze of relief, but what she found instead were the makings of her perfect meal.
“I started eating olives, pickles, a bite of cheese, and a piece of salami right out of the fridge,” she tells xoNecole. “We lived near a great cheese shop, so on nicer occasions, I’d grab some cheese and bread and throw it all on the counter for my husband and I to make plates out of. That was about four years ago, and since then, I’ve always called these ‘snack plates’ — but when I heard the term 'girl dinner' on TikTok recently, I resonated with it so much.”
Alana has been sharing her eye-catching and mouthwatering snack plates with her TikTok followers for over a year, but it wasn’t until June of this year that she gave the girl-dinner trend the visual aesthetics it needed to truly come to light. Her original girl-dinner video has since reached over 1.7M views.
@alanalavv Replying to @AshleeLatimer my fave snack plate yet 🍒 #snackplate #snackplates #burrataboard #summerfoods #summerrecipes #charcuterie #snackideas
If the weather can influence our mood, it can definitely affect our appetites. And as someone who enjoys a variety of foods, spreads, and platters while living in a city with temperatures on both ends of the spectrum, Alana says that eating intuitively to the seasons has served her and her cravings well.
“My diet is definitely controlled by temperatures. I live in London where we have very cold winters and increasingly warm summers. Therefore I want soups and heartier carb-heavy meals in winter, and lighter snack-style plates — like girl dinner — in summer so that I can avoid the stove at all costs,” she says, “I also love prioritizing eating seasonal produce because fruits and vegetables always taste 100% better when in season. I know this isn’t always possible, but when it is - it’s so worth it.”
Making a girl dinner of your own is completely dependent upon what you have in your kitchen, but Alana says that the perfect arrangement is all about the basics. “I always, always have olives in the fridge or pantry. I normally use crackers or bread, nuts, oils, honey, and other condiments that I already have at home too,” she shares. “I highly recommend the combination of cherries, nectarines, burrata topped with hot honey, prosciutto, olives, and tomatoes topped with olive oil, salt, and pepper” — i.e. her now-viral recipe.
The beauty in girl dinners is that it’s a meal made for one. It’s your time to indulge in your favorite bits and bites without the judgment of what lands on the plate. It can be pretty, a little messy, and only make sense to your palette, but what’s most important is that you take pleasure in how you choose to nourish yourself.
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for daily love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Featured image by Westend61/Getty Images
Aley Arion is a writer and digital storyteller from the South, currently living in sunny Los Angeles. Her site, yagirlaley.com, serves as a digital diary to document personal essays, cultural commentary, and her insights into the Black Millennial experience. Follow her at @yagirlaley on all platforms!
Smile, Sis! These Five Improvements Can Upgrade Your Oral Hygiene Instantly
This article is in partnership with Sensodyne.
Our teeth are connected to so many things - our nutrition, our confidence, and our overall mood. We often take for granted how important healthy teeth are, until issues like tooth sensitivity or gum recession come to remind us. Like most things related to our bodies, prevention is the best medicine. Here are five things you can do immediately to improve your oral hygiene, prevent tooth sensitivity, and avoid dental issues down the road.
1) Go Easy On the Rough Brushing: Brushing your teeth is and always will be priority number one in the oral hygiene department. No surprises there! However, there is such a thing as applying too much pressure when brushing…and that can lead to problems over time. Use a toothbrush with soft bristles and brush in smooth, circular motions. It may seem counterintuitive, but a gentle approach to brushing is the most effective way to clean those pearly whites without wearing away enamel and exposing sensitive areas of the teeth.
2) Use A Desensitizing Toothpaste: As everyone knows, mouth pain can be highly uncomfortable; but tooth sensitivity is a whole different beast. Hot weather favorites like ice cream and popsicles have the ability to trigger tooth sensitivity, which might make you want to stay away from icy foods altogether. But as always, prevention is the best medicine here. Switching to a toothpaste like Sensodyne’s Sensitivity & Gum toothpaste specifically designed for sensitive teeth will help build a protective layer over sensitive areas of the tooth. Over time, those sharp sensations that occur with extremely cold foods will subside, and you’ll be back to treating yourself to your icy faves like this one!
3) Floss, Rinse, Brush. (And In That Order!): Have you ever heard the saying, “It’s not what you do, but how you do it”? Well, the same thing applies to taking care of your teeth. Even if you are flossing and brushing religiously, you could be missing out on some of the benefits simply because you aren’t doing so in the right order. Flossing is best to do before brushing because it removes food particles and plaque from places your toothbrush can’t reach. After a proper flossing sesh, it is important to rinse out your mouth with water after. Finally, you can whip out your toothbrush and get to brushing. Though many of us commonly rinse with water after brushing to remove excess toothpaste, it may not be the best thing for our teeth. That’s because fluoride, the active ingredient in toothpaste that protects your enamel, works best when it gets to sit on the teeth and continue working its magic. Rinsing with water after brushing doesn’t let the toothpaste go to work like it really can. Changing up your order may take some getting used to, but over time, you’ll see the difference.
4) Stay Hydrated: Upping your water supply is a no-fail way to level up your health overall, and your teeth are no exception to this rule. Drinking water not only helps maintain a healthy pH balance in your mouth, but it also washes away residue and acids that can cause enamel erosion. It also helps you steer clear of dry mouth, which is a gateway to bad breath. And who needs that?
5) Show Your Gums Some Love: When it comes to improving your smile, you may be laser-focused on getting your teeth whiter, straighter, and overall healthier. Rightfully so, as these are all attributes of a megawatt smile; but you certainly don’t want to leave gum health out of the equation. If you neglect your gums, you’ll start to notice the effects of plaque buildup, which can irritate the gums and cause gingivitis, the earliest stage of gum disease. Seeing blood while brushing and flossing is a tell-tale sign that your gums are suffering. You may also experience gum recession — a condition where the gum tissue surrounding your teeth pulls back, exposing more of your tooth. Brushing at least twice a day with a gum-protecting toothpaste like Sensodyne Sensitivity and Gum, coupled with regular dentist visits, will keep your gums shining as bright as those pearly whites.
Why Do Millennials & Gen-Zers Still Feel Like Teenagers? The Pandemic Might Be The Reason.
There’s nothing quite as humbling as navigating adulthood with no instruction manual. Since the turn of the decade, it seems like everything in our society that could go wrong has, inevitably, gone wrong. From the global pandemic, our crippling student debt problem, the loneliness crisis, layoffs, global warming, recession, and not to mention figuring out what to eat for dinner every night. This constant state of uncertainty has many of us wondering, when are the grown-ups coming to fix all of this?
But the catch is, we are the new grown-ups.
As if it happened without our permission, we became the new adults. We are the members of society who are paying taxes, having children, getting married, and keeping our communities afloat, one iced latte at a time. Still, there’s something about doing all these grown-up duties that feel unnaturally grown-up. Enter the #teenagegirlinher20s.
If there’s one hashtag to give you the state of the next cohort of adults, it’s this one. Of the videos that have garnered over 3.9M views, you’ll find a collection of users who are overwhelmed by life’s pressing existential responsibilities, clung to nostalgia, and reminiscent of the days when their mom and dad took care of their insurance plans.
@charlies444ngel no like i cant explain to her why i had to buy multiple tank air dupes from aritzia #teenagegirlinher20s #fyp
The concept of being a 20-something or 30-something teenager is linked to the sentiment of not feeling “grown up enough” to do grown-up things while feeling underprepared and even nihilistic about whether that preparation even matters.
It’s our generation’s version of when we ask our grandmothers how old they are and they simply reply with, “I still feel 45,” all while being every bit of 76 years old. In this, we share a warped concept of time while clinging to a desire for infantilization.
Granted, the pandemic did a number on our concept of time. Many of us who started the pandemic in our early or mid-20s missed out on three fundamental years of socialization, career development, and personal milestones that traditionally help to mark our growth.
Our time to figure out and plan our next steps through fumbling yet active participation was put on pause indefinitely and then resumed provisionally. This in turn has left many of us hanging in the balance of uncertainty as we try to make sense of the disconnect between our minds and bodies in this missing gap of time.
Because we’re all still figuring out what the ramifications of being locked away and frozen in time by a global pandemic will have on us as a society, there really is no “right” way of making up for lost time. Feeling unprepared for any new chapter of life is a natural rite of passage, pandemic or not. However, it’s important to not stay stuck in the last age or period of life that made sense to us because self-growth is the truest evidence of personal progress.
So whether you’re leaning on your inner child, teenager, or 20-something for guidance as you fill the gap between your real age and pandemic age, know that it’s okay to grieve the person you thought you would be and the milestones you thought you’d hit before you ever knew what a pandemic was. If there’s anything that the pandemic taught us, it’s that we have the power to reimagine a better world and life for ourselves. And if we tap into our inner teenager as a compass, we can piece together our next chapter with a fresh outlook.
Sure, we’ve lost a couple of years, but there are still some really amazing ones ahead.
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for daily love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Featured image by Stephen Zeigler/Getty Images
