A lot of people are suffering from holiday stress right about now, and I only wish I were one of them. At least it's seasonal.

I live with tension 365 days a year. Yes, I have What's-for-Dinner Stress - the dreaded WFDS.

``What do other people eat?'' I asked my husband as we sat down to broiled salmon for the third night in a row.

Salmon is one of three dishes in our dinner rotation. Because we'd just OD'd on it, the next night kicked off a bean burrito double header, followed by ``Efrat stew'' (a delicio us carrot-and-sweet-potato dish we picked up from my sister-in-law. Thank you, Efrat - it's really helped break the monotony).

``You need to take a cooking class,'' one of my friends said when I confessed my limited repertoire.

Maybe, but I suspect my problem goes deeper than an inability to parboil or dice. I think it's more of a rut thing.

My name is Beth, and I've served my family pasta with Classico four-cheese sauce for the past 37 nights.

It's not that I don't want to cook a wide variety of foods. I do. Or at least I want to buy books about cooking a wide variety of foods. My cupboards may be empty, but my bookshelf is full: ``Dinner's Ready: Turn a Single Meal Into a Week of Dinners,'' ``A Dinner a Day: Complete Meals in Minutes for Every Weeknight of the Year,'' ``Rescuing the Dinner Hour: Easy Meals for Busy People,'' ``Desperation Dinners: Home-cooked Meals for Frantic Families in 20 Minutes Flat.''

They all sound so promising, don't they? And indeed, they're filled with an almost endless number of socially acceptable meals. I could learn to make a corny chicken casserole, or a roasted vegetable lasagne, or a zippy tomato consomme, or even a skillet shepherd's pie.

``Those all sound delicious,'' my husband said when I read him some recipes.

He was right: They did. And yet, I knew that when it came time to grocery-shop, I'd leave without checking what ingredients I needed to buy, so it would be impossible for me to make any of those dishes - if only I had ground cumin - and in the end, I'd have to go with a fallback.

Hey - how about broiled salmon? Or maybe the Efrat stew would be good tonight.

Actually, I shouldn't sell myself short. Recently I did make a fourth dinner (chicken with tomato sauce and black beans and broccoli, to be served over whole-wheat pasta), but at the last minute, I chickened out (literally), deciding to freeze that dish and throw some salmon on the broiler instead.

``We'll have the chicken tomorrow night,'' I told myself.

Yeah, right.

So theoretically, I'm in the catbird seat now, with a home-cooked meal in the freezer. But because I stupidly froze the entire batch in one huge container, I don't want to defrost it unless we're having 10 people or more over for dinner, and if we are having People Over, I want to serve them something nicer or more interesting than chicken - like salmon or the Efrat stew.

Or maybe the burritos would be good.