4-11-11 8:35 pm Make Them Eat...Their Own Cooking!

It's a popular topic, "why we should eat dinner together". Although I'd have to locate research to support it empirically, my hunch is that even rushed, instant, and restaurant meals provide families time enough to sit across the table from one another, sharing conversation, time, and stories from the day. Eating together seems like a wholesome idea regardless of circumstance. Of course it's wholesome, and yet distractions compete with this institution of well-intended time together. The television blares a sports game, attractive wait persons offer another re-fill to the water-glasses, and this week's spelling list needs reviewing. The relative quality of shared time directly connects to various degrees of the hellatiousness it entails. If disagreements regularly surface, questions about unpaid bills, or how the job search fared today, family members might begin to avoid the dinner table. The institution of an evening meal, when everyone rejoins at a common table, requires intentionality and care. And in today's world of instantly-available food, it's especially important to ferret out what it is about dinner together that we most enjoy. Tonight I'm reminded of one thing I most enjoy: when everyone cooks. My mother, even my grandmother, might be saying to themselves as they read these words (based on a recent conversation) "What is she talking about? I only cook with certain people in the kitchen - everyone is not necessarily welcome." I think this is why my maternal betters might be doubting me: Some activities require the kind of attention that lets all worries, all distractors fall away. Playing a musical instrument, driving a motorcycle, and rock climbing all come to mind. Cooking, like science experiments, requires deliberation, and the kind of attention that demands a similar focus to those undistractable activities. Even if you avoid measuring tools, chances are you use taste to guide adding ingredients. And coordination plays a key role. Hot foods, in order to remain hot when platted, must cook at just the right rate (time and temperature). Creating a meal requires the full attention of its cooks. Cooks cooking together, well, it's a little like performing with spontaneous choreography. It requires faith and commitment. Kitchens can feel small. Multiple cooks might interrupt or get in one another's way. It ain't pretty. And the same is true for real life. It's messy, rife with injustice, and full of accidents. And when we stick together through it all, the journey brings us closer together. It seems worth the investment. It's just that you have to look carefully and practice a great deal of patience for the returns. They are sometimes disguised as huge pains in the butt. Tonight Anne made our salad. She took too long to slice up the apples. Way too much spinach sat in the top half of the salad bowl. The entire task took her, (I may be exaggerating here) 20 minutes! The lettuce was pre-washed and everything. While she whittled away at the salad, Harold managed to perfectly steam two salmon fillets, and I concocted a lovely salad dressing, made the rice, re-heated left-over homemade tomato soup and garnished it with fresh slices of avocado. Obviously, an apparent time and effort discrepancy rears its ugly head, yet who has the most experience? I do. It's natural I'd get more done, so I can replace "equal effort" with "equitable effort" as one of my goals for our co-cooking. In fact, I remember intentionally assigning Anne a task at which she could take as much time as she wanted, that was completely independent of our other cooking projects. Autonomy gave her freedom from nagging adults who otherwise might have needed her to complete one step in a dish so that we could then move in with our parts. In the end, her memory of the task was hopefully a revisitable enough one so that she'll do it again tomorrow night. She also seems sensitive to respect, so when I asked her to make us a salad, it sounded more like, "Oh, Anne, you have such good taste in salads, would you make ours tonight?" than "Anne, make the salad." An added bonus: she seems to eat more of her salad serving when she makes it. Go figure. Harold. He trusts me with meats, especially when it comes to cooking fish. It was hard-earned trust, and since I have it now we're fairly efficient. He asks me what to do, I tell him, and he does it. "Put the fillets in this pan, fill it with just enough water to almost cover the fillets, and heat it on high in the microwave for ten minutes." That done, he sat at the table and passed out vitamins while the rest of us finished our tasks. He's tired after a long day of delivering mail. Besides, he had to touch raw meat, and I didn't. Yay. Let's hear it for equity! My soup project was ready well before the rest of the meal. And the natives were restless. So, instead serving everything en semble, we ate in courses. I hear they do that at all the fancy restaurants. And at the end of our time together at the table, everyone felt good and tired. We all cleared the table because it was too big a job for just one person. In between the cooking and the clearing came conversation. We talked about our days, up-coming visits from relatives, manners, we joked, and we laughed. The act of cooking forced our worries of the day into the periphery of our minds, in order to make room for feeding ourselves. On really fun nights we blast a little Jimmy Buffett, "Cheeseburger in Paradise" and dance around the kitchen. To me, this is quality family time. It's ultimately about enjoyment. When meal preparation becomes unpleasant, it's about something else. When we work to make this task a coordinated effort, it brings us closer. One person cooking the meal is a little like a solo vacation. You might get exactly what you're after, but in the end, with whom do you have to share it? So, eating out, I think, is OK. And instant mac'n cheese holds a permanent place of honor in my book of life's necessities. Yet, when a seemingly menial daily task presents an opportunity for getting to know one another better, for making a little history, and it's fun, it demands attention. Kids, I think, are more likely to eat their own cooking. They'll certainly learn something useful in the process. Reading. Measuring. Equivalency. Team work. Love. Tonight Anne accumulated a memory that filled her heart and her mind. Affording her that opportunity helped make me feel like a better parent. And my hard-working husband got fed. So many layers of resource accumulation demands my deliberate attention and continued effort. If you want to get closer with someone, try cooking. It's essentially free, and we all need to eat!