A Family Meal

Your last post mentioned family in the kitchen, and I’d been thinking a lot about that over the past couple of months. In a more figurative sense, though. When Millie first started eating solid food, it made me think about my own issues with food, and their origins in my own family. I started thinking about my own bad food habits, and how those might affect her. I started to catalog the food challenges ahead. Because now those challenges are not just my own. As I teach my daughter to eat, I think about what I feed her, how I choose to eat in front of her, especially as she so attentively observes every morsel that goes from our plates to our mouths. And I think about where these challenges began - where did I begin to think that dessert is "supposed to" follow dinner most nights? And sure, I could (and sometimes do) go down that pathway, trying to sort out the origins of my eating habits - what came from my parents, my southern upbringing, my own food preferences, and my own choices - but really, that all seems so...fruitless, I guess. Not only do I not have time to pull apart those threads, it doesn't get me anywhere.

Now that I have a child of my own, I am more than ever aware of how my choices and behaviors influence hers. And I hope to give her the tools to make good choices when it comes to food. So then what I find myself thinking about is finding ways to eat more consciously, to establish good habits now. 

But all of this thinking had a very real manifestation with my parents' visit this past week, the act of their cooking for us showed just how indebted I am to my family for giving me perhaps the best good food habit: the home-cooked meal. While they were here, they made every single meal. Every. last. one. They took care of all the meal planning, the grocery shopping, the prep work, and the storage of leftovers. They made every dish in quantity, thoughtfully planning to leave us with tons of leftovers so that we wouldn't have to worry about cooking or grocery shopping for a few days. (Actually, my parents probably made enough of everything that we don't have to cook again for a MONTH, but we're working on making room in our freezer for some of the leftovers so we can have a little variety).

As I sit here and look at the homemade chicken pot pie, the fresh green beans, and the baked apples, I think how lucky I am to have grown up with parents who valued making a home-cooked meal. AKA real food. Not the kind of home-cooked prepared meal that's "Add 1 lb. ground beef to Hamburger Helper." If you google "family recipes" these days, like I just did, you're most likely to hit an overwhelming number of bullshit recipes. Recipes that garner 4-star reviews from users. I can't remember what I was looking for around Thanksgiving, but I do remember that the first results page consisted entirely of recipes telling me to add 1 bottle of ranch dressing and a carton of sour cream and calling that done. There's a whole industry where folks sit around coming up with recipes that feature Campbell's soup or Velveeta or Kraft Mac'n'Cheese as the main ingredient. Look, I am not above canned diced tomatoes, heating condensed soup for dinner (especially when we're low on funds), or grabbing something pre-made from the store. But when I think about a meal, I think about the kinds of things my parents made this past week. Real food, made using real produce and real pantry staples like flour and spices. (Luckily, to counterbalance the counterfeit recipe sites out there, there are also great truly authentic, personable recipe sites out there just for that, too! Two of my faves are here and here. There's also room for fun, like here. And since I often love the LA Times food section, I'll toss in this one too). And what's really become obvious to me is it's not just, or even mostly, about what gets put on the table. It's about the act of gathering for a meal.

It sometimes seems like any time there's a family visit involved, everything revolves around meals. But in my mind, that's exactly as it should be. Every time I hear some statistic about how families rarely sit down to dinner together any more, I think "How can that be?!" It has just always been so intrinsically part of my upbringing to sit down together every night and have a meal together that I can't wrap my brain around how life could get in the way of such an important act. So even though I may try to steer my daughter away from having dessert every night, or drinking lots of sugary drinks, or whatever, in the years to come, I hope that I can do my best to demonstrate that the act of sitting down together to eat, even it's just Happy Meals, that that's what's most important. To eat together, and prioritize the family meal, is also a way of eating more consciously, and that is a good food habit we've already started.