The inspiration? My Mom. Some people are cooks by choice and training; some have cooking thrust upon them. My mom fits into the latter category with six kids, fixing three meals a day for 20+ years resulting in over 175,000 meals!
My own experience raising four children is that it’s a daunting and often tedious task to develop a wide variety of nutritious and delicious meals a day in and day out, and desperation or boredom often make cold cereal on the run sound as good as anything.
But family mealtime has been making a comeback for a while. In a 2006 Time Magazine article, Nancy Gibbs reminds us, “Studies show that the more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use.” If it were just about food, we would squirt it into their mouths with a tube,” says Robin Fox, an anthropologist who teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey, about the mysterious way that family dinner engraves our souls. “A meal is about civilizing children. It’s about teaching them to be a member of their culture.”
And that’s how I grew up. We ate together. Breakfast, lunch when we weren’t in school, and dinner, each meal homemade, as we sat around the table talking, laughing, arguing, and bonding. So how did Mom do it? Not the cooking, how did she maintain her sanity? How did she avoid getting bored coming up with all those meals? She got creative and found reasons to celebrate, not only our culture but others as well.
This blog is a fine-tuning of my mother’s practice of celebrating big, little, and quirky holidays at mealtime, giving us insight into different cultures, exposing us to new foods, and saving her sanity by making dinner fun. My desire to re-establish and pass along the tradition for my children prompted me to ask mom for her menus and recipes, and when my writing group suggested that others might be interested, I thought I would start this blog. Please feel free to suggest holidays, activities, menus, and recipes and share your reasons to celebrate with food.
