This is straight out of Tanya, chapter 27. Here’s my personal translation of that chapter (and the chapter before it and the chapter after it).

This is how this came to be: One of my daughters asked me to speak at a party her (all-girls’) high school was throwing. The topic? I forgot. They gave me a topic, but after a busy day, struggling to pound out words and wrangling with editors, fighting traffic and running errands, my mind was blank.

So I started speaking about dinner. Hey, I hadn’t had dinner yet, and it was 9 PM, so that’s what came to mind. I started asking the girls what they liked for dinner, and whether they liked cooking dinner themselves.

That’s when someone reminded me that I was supposed to be speaking about character improvement. Oy. Now I had to think fast.

So I said, “Sure, that’s exactly where I’m leading to!” That’s where this whole story of two dinners came in. The girls licked it up. So to speak.

And then I went home and wrote the script.