Weeknights at our house, Jeopardy! plays during supper. It’s a duet that works for us, and I think Dear Richard looks forward to the pairing as much as I do.

Our little tray tables in the den get a lot of use. Mine collapsed recently, dumping my entire pot roast dinner, gravy and all, upside down on the white carpet. My verbiage wasn’t ladylike, but the carpet cleaner was very happy to talk to me the next day… mere weeks after our last holiday cleanup.

It’s funny how you slip into a routine like our tray table suppers. After we married eight years ago, we ate our evening meal at the kitchen table. It was all very civilized, with tablecloth, cloth napkins, and an occasional candle. Civilization lasted almost two weeks. Soon, we were chowing down in the den with paper napkins. A few weeks more – straight to paper towels. Hey, they cover about the same space. That’s our every night supper routine.

Dinner, however is a different matter. When we have visiting family or invited guests, we eat in the dining room. That’s when we rise up from the paper towels, haul out the cloth napkins and “dine.” I mean, the room name says Dining, right?

When I was a kid, supper was the evening meal at home. Dinner was the big meal on Sunday and holidays. Have you ever heard of Thanksgiving supper? Me neither.

But there’s something about breaking out the vino that elevates supper into dinner. Now I’m not saying that a decent Cabernet transforms a cheeseburger to gourmet. I know better. When I was still single, I learned that Chardonnay is not an enhanced “pairing” with Cheerios – even when you add blueberries.

But the suppertime clinking of wineglasses transports an ordinary meal into dinner. A little bit of fermented grape juice makes everything better somehow – the chit-chat, the laughter, and the baby back ribs that made it out of the freezer after 11 months. Everyone relaxes more than usual – straight through to dessert. By then, the wine bottle is being passed around for “just one more inch – the final splash.”

Last week our tableful of weeknight guests inched our way through three bottles of Montepulciano – and I never once tasted any freezer burn on the ribs. Yup, it was just a weeknight supper, Caesar salad and ribs. But we wined and dined as if it were duck a l’orange with a fig reduction…on a Saturday night.

The next evening it was back to an ordinary meal in the den.

For example, we had breakfast for supper last night. Maybe once a month, when my schedule gets cramped or my imagination is as empty as the meat drawer in the fridge, we have some form of breakfast. Last night, I enticed him not with bacon and eggs-over-easy, but with Eggs Benedict. The light in his eyes indicated that this was a worthy substitute for pork chops. It’s hard to say “we dined” when the entrÈe is ham on an English muffin. But when the muffin halves are topped with pillowy poached eggs, napped with homemade hollandaise, it brings forth a “Good dinner” comment from the only critic who mattered.

Even after eight years, Dear Richard is still saying, “How come we’ve never had this before?” Usually, it’s a plateful of a long-forgotten dish I was craving, like chicken Marsala. Turns out, most of my long-ago suppers were never in Richard’s long-ago menu, so we are still in the discovery stages of our marriage. You find excitement where you can these days.

Thankfully, we are not locked into a routine. When I think back to my childhood, I can remember families who ate exactly the same seven meals every week. Meatloaf every Monday. Tuna noodle casserole every Friday, without fail. Roast chicken was for Sunday. You could smell it down the street walking home from church.

Every Wednesday, our Italian neighbors had spaghetti and meatballs. Tuesdays, our Greek friends had avgolemono – that heavenly chicken, lemon, and rice soup. Mrs. Nicholas probably made it from the leftover Sunday chicken. Every Tuesday.

Our only ritual supper was frankfurters, beans and brown bread on Saturday night- an old New England custom. I explained this wee bit of deliciosity to Dear Richard, but he remained unconvinced. “That doesn’t sound like supper to me,” he said.

Maybe it’s all just semantics. If the answer to “What are we eating tonight?” is “tuna noodle casserole,” that’s supper. And it comes with Jeopardy!

If the answer to “Wanna go out tonight?” is “You betcha,” that’s dinner. And it comes with a check. The only jeopardy is to your wallet.

But if it’s Friday night, and you’re hungry, either answer is a win/win. I recommend a Sauvignon Blanc with the tuna noodle casserole.

Marcy O’Brien writes from her home in Warren, Pa. She can be reached at Moby.32@hotmail.com