As a little girl, I loved sitting on the kitchen counter while my mom cooked. While I kicked my feet against the cabinets, she taught me how to peel an onion efficiently and how to crack an egg and use my index fingers to get all the white out before tossing the shells into the compost bin. And I still vividly recall the excitement I felt over the beautiful, golden, sesame seed-studded  loaves of braided challah we baked in my second grade class at the Woodstock Children’s Center–they were like some kind of miracle. Childhood is such an important, impressionable time of life when the vast majority of our lifelong habits are formed, or at least pointed in the direction in which they’ll head. That’s why my husband and I want to introduce our son, Will, to growing and cooking food alongside us.

Will, who is just shy of three, watches and “helps” us with our container garden where we grow tomatoes, greens, peas, beans and herbs. At this point, it mostly means he digs in the dirt but he’s learning.

He had the heady experience of drinking cold, clear, slightly sweet maple sap straight from the spile (was this a new vocab word for you, too?) during our first foray into maple sugaring last winter.

And we brought him with us to forage for ramps a few weeks ago (although we confined his enthusiastic excavation efforts to a patch of ground that was not home to this fragile delicacy.) We’ve also gone strawberry, raspberry, blueberry and apple picking as a family–all activities we plan to repeat on a yearly basis.

My husband sometimes plans baking projects in their hours together. At this point, Will’s attention span is still remarkably short so he mostly just enjoys the idea of helping and participates in the “dumping” portion of the experience where he moves pre-measured amounts of flour, sugar, nuts, raisins, etc., into the mixing bowl. Then he gets bored, climbs down from his stool and runs off to do something else.We’ve taken him to local farms and friends’ houses to gather eggs so fresh you have to chase the hens off their nests to pick them up. In addition to teaching him where his food comes from, it’s a great way to kill an hour or so. We have not yet taught him about where the meat we eat comes from, both because we don’t have a great local source and we’re also both a little wimpy about exposing him to something so bloody at a tender age (or to being exposed to it, ourselves, at our not so tender ages…)

It takes about 2-3 times as long to bake something when Will is involved and is inevitably messier and more work but not only are we laying the groundwork for future cooking projects and appreciation of real food, we have also noticed that our notoriously picky eater is MUCH more likely to eat foods he has helped prepare in some way (score!).

Will also enjoys using the salad spinner to dry greens and cutting food (cucumbers and tofu are perfect!) with the adorable toddler knife Rahm got him recently after being inspired by this Slate magazine piece by Nicholas Day on the topic of cooking with pre-schoolers. And he LOVES sitting on the counter smelling and identifying spices (cinnamon is his favorite; cloves and star anise rank second and third.)

I recently made him a child-sized apron to help him feel at home in the kitchen and, hopefully, keep him slightly cleaner, though it’s a bit of a lost cause at this point in his life. I chose the fabric (called “Dig It” by Michael Miller, in case you’re curious) since he is 100 percentobsessed with digging and construction machines and I thought I should go with something he’s already into.

We figure that laying the groundwork now will not only encourage him to appreciate good food, eat more healthfully, and enjoy growing and cooking his own food from scratch someday, but if we’re really strategic about it, in a few years, we might even get him to cook meals for us! If you are shaking your head in disbelief, check out this New York Times piece by Leslie Kaufman, who got her two sons (ages 10 and 14) to each cook dinner for the family one night a week.

One thing I love about Kaufman’s article is that she does not gloss over the challenges inherent in giving up control in the kitchen–she squirms in discomfort when a flame is left on too long for her taste and has to repeatedly battle her impulse to step in–something she unthinkingly does early on in the experiment that backfires. Her son storms off to his room and misses the meal he’d prepared altogether, despite her apology.

As a perfectionist (fine, I’ll just say it, I’m anal) who views cooking as somewhat of a devotional, semi-meditative practice–I like to clean up as I go and put everything in its place so that there’s no mess left at the end–this is HARD for me! I think it’s good to be realistic about the fact that this is not an easy process–it requires a lot of patience, faith in your child, and a willingness to spend more time and do more cleaning up than you would if you just handled it all on your own. But the end result should be worth it.

If this sounds appealing to you, I’ve compiled some resources to help you in this journey.

• Kitchen Tools For Little Hands - beware, you may want to buy everything… it’s all so cute!
• Four Great Kids’ Cookbooks - a few excellent cookbooks to help you get started. Some are great for pre-schoolers (complete with pictorial recipes/instructions they can follow easily) and some will take you into the older years.
• Twenty Top Shelf Kids’ Books About Growing, Cooking and Eating Food - a big round up of all our family’s favorites plus some great recommendations from friends.

Please add your own thoughts and any recommendations you have on approach, books, tools, etc., via comments.

Originally published on The Garden of Eating

A little over a year ago, our family made a bold move by pledging to follow strict “real food” rules for 100 long days. A few of these rules included no white flour, no sugar, and nothing out of a package with more than five ingredients. And there were no exceptions whether we were traveling, out to eat, at a birthday party or with friends. We started this little experiment of ours simply to draw attention to how dependent Americans have become on highly processed food.

Just a few months prior, we ourselves had been relying on the very same factory-made junk and the scary part was we didn’t even realize we were doing anything wrong. So, after our little wake up call, thanks to Michael Pollan and Food, Inc., we didn’t think it was good enough to just make the appropriate changes within our own family. We felt compelled to share the shocking news we’d learned with others and “blow the whistle,” so to speak, on what Americans were really eating.

Once our fairly typical family in the suburbs of Charlotte, N.C. took on this extreme and sudden “real food” pledge, it led to quite a few interesting and surprising experiences. Here are some highlights:

Redefining the way we shopped for food

During the first several weeks of our real food pledge, I felt completely lost when it came to food shopping. What used to be an incredibly simple process became complex and confusing because I suddenly didn’t know where to go or what to buy. Before our real food wake up call, I’d never read the ingredients on a food label, never shopped at a farmers’ market, and never bought anything that was organic–at least not on purpose.

I used to barely even step foot in the grocery store because I did all of my shopping online. In one easy transaction I would order our food for the week then drive up to the store and wait for the personal shopper to load everything up in my car. There is no question that was easy, but I slowly had to stop going to our mainstream grocery store and instead drive all around town in what felt like a web to the farmers’ market, multiple health food supermarkets, a bakery, and a local farm for our CSA box. What was once simple, predictable, and painless was suddenly taking four times as long. But, with lots of practice and patience, I eventually become more efficient, although I of course had to start getting out of the car.

Convincing our children to embrace this new way of life

What started out as a little rough, with a severe melt down over a forbidden deep-fried donut, somehow turned into a surprising and amazing learning experience for our three- and five-year-old children. During the first month or so I constantly questioned myself over involving and restricting my children’s diets for this little experiment of ours. Here I was spending hours preparing and packing up “approved real food” just so I could take my daughters down the street to a birthday party. We suddenly became the minority and could rarely find “acceptable” food outside of our home.

But, as I saw our young daughters blossom and start to make better choices all on their own—like asking for a banana from a concession stand full of the worst junk food I could imagine–I realized I was actually doing no harm whatsoever. In fact, I was doing a lot of good by teaching my children at a young age how to make the best food choices and why. And while we’ve said time and time again, it isn’t necessarily the best approach to follow strict rules 100 percent of the time, it certainly helped us gain a new perspective so we could learn how to make the right long term changes for our family.

Accepting the response (both positive and negative) from family and friends

Our “real food” pledge” suddenly made us the minority. Here in North Carolina people are not quite as up-to-speed on the emerging real food movement as they are in other locations such as New York or California. This was the beginning of a long road in our attempt to explain what we were doing and why. Friends slowly got used to us bringing our own meals along, although I wouldn’t say they exactly embraced the idea. The jokes may have been lighthearted, but they certainly didn’t go unnoticed.

Then there were our extended family members. They may have said they were supportive, but words only go so far. When you are visiting family members from out of state and eating what they have cooked issues can and unfortunately do arise. We had been bending over backwards to abide by our strict rules for many weeks then we suddenly had to decide if we should eat the rule-breaking food or keep the peace with family. It was definitely one of the biggest challenges we faced during our pledge.

Dealing with restaurants and travel

Before starting our pledge, I got rid of every single processed food we owned. This simple act made following our “real food” pledge almost painless—when we were at home of course. Leaving our house was a completely different story. We could hardly go anywhere without plenty of preplanning including time spent packing up all sorts of “approved” food. When preparing for long-distance trips we often packed an entire suitcase dedicated to food–that I would spend days making–as well as logged many hours on restaurant and other advance research. Thanks to all of this painstaking preparation my oldest daughter and I even managed to stay in a hotel in New York City with friends–who were not on a real food diet–while somehow not breaking any of our rules! I am still amazed we did it.

At times trying to eat out at restaurants was almost a joke. It was no longer about what menu items sounded appetizing or might be in our price range, but instead it was about narrowing things down to the one or two items we actually could eat. And ordering off the kids’ menu was no longer even an option. So after multiple inquiries about what’s in this soup and what’s in that sauce we would finally make a decision and only hope that our high maintenance order didn’t entice any restaurant employees to tamper with our food.

Surprising health benefits

We initially felt compelled to cut out processed food because we thought it was the right thing to do. What we didn’t expect were the plethora of positive changes we experienced to our health during the process including:

• Our youngest daughter’s digestive issues completely disappeared.
• This same daughter went from five episodes of wheezing in 2009 to only one in 2010 and 2011.
• Neither of our children missed a single day of school from being sick during the 2010–2011 school year.
• My HDL (AKA good cholesterol) went up by 50 percent!
• The overall feeling like I have more energy and need less sleep.
• My husband and I both lost a few pounds without even trying.
• A change in our palate resulting in less desire for sweet, salty, and processed foods.

All in all, we are pleased we completed this project not only for our own personal eye-opening and educational experience, but also to help draw others’ attention to this important topic. Since the initial launch of our “100 Days of Real Food” pledge a little over a year ago our blog has had almost one million pageviews from over 160 different countries, which means our reach is far more than we could have ever imagined. To think that we are surpassing our goal of spreading the word to a few hundred friends makes every moment of this experience, good or bad, well worth it.

One of the how-did-we-get-here narratives of food goes something like this: Starting in the late 1960s, the women’s movement called upon educated women to forge a new path into professional life while an increasingly convenience-driven industrial food complex conspired with demanding weekday schedules to culminate in empty kitchens and the near extinction of home cooking. It’s a tale that oversimplifies the reality. But when Michael Pollan, in his 2009 New York Times essay “Out of the Kitchen Onto the Couch,”  singled out Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique as the tome that convinced women that cooking is drudgery, he set off a feminist firestorm. Several angry blog posts and counter-defenses later one thing is clear: If more home cooking is essential to changing the food system, men had better get into the kitchen as well.

It’s happening. In 1965, fathers accounted for only five percent of the time spent cooking for the family; now they’re in the kitchen nearly one-third of the time. John Donohue’s new book Man with a Pan, a collection of essays by fathers about cooking for their families, celebrates this change. Donohue, a New Yorker cartoonist and editor, pulled together thoughts by food writers and culinary professionals like Mario Batali, Michael Ruhlman, and Mark Bittman. But one of my favorite things about the book is the inclusion of the voices of “ordinary” dads who have come to cooking simply because it’s work–pleasurable, of course–that needs to be done for their families every day.

“It was very important for me to include a broad cross section of men who cook for their families in the book,” Donohue says. “I wanted the well crafted essays by professional writers, but I also wanted to hear from other working fathers, ones who might have more demanding jobs than being a successful writer. It’s one thing to make your own hours, it’s another to have to be on the job as a fireman, a bond trader, a carpenter, an economist, and still get food on the table. I wanted the book to be an inspiration to men of all professional stripes.”

Inspiration comes from surprising places, like from horror novelist Stephen King, who urges readers to lower the heat and take a “gentle” approach to cooking. Screenwriter Matt Greenberg contributes an homage to King in the form of a screenplay about a man who becomes fatally obsessed with a barbecue grill while caring for an empty, isolated hotel in the off season. There is the classic “overreacher,” Manny Howard, who writes about how his “stunt foodways” (like roasting a whole pig on the beach) are incompatible with feeding a family.

The more practical firefighter Josh Lomask says cooking is like building a house. “It’s a manual process. But unlike a house, which might take months to build, cooking takes one night, and that gives me a great sense of satisfaction.” He says what Pollan was trying to say in “Out of the Kitchen,” but somehow the sentiment is less incendiary coming out of a firefighter’s mouth. “With both parents working, there’s been a whole generation of neglect in the kitchen. Guys are going to have to learn what fifties housewives must have all known–how to plan a menu and feed a family week by week.”

Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for the Washington Post and author of The Hidden Brain digs most deeply into the topic of gender roles. Through a short exercise he illustrates the subliminal biases that cause many of us to think of professional cooks as male and home cooks as female. For Vedantam, when Dad walks into the kitchen to cook for his family he becomes an activist, “actually engaging in political activity that is every bit as serious as that of the suffragettes who marched to win women the right to vote, or the civil rights protesters who marched to win equal rights for racial minorities. If you’re a man who abhors sexism, take up the spatula.” (Somewhere a adjunct professor is photocopying this chapter long with Gabrielle Hamilton’s chapter on “where are the women chefs” from Blood, Bones and Butter for her food studies course.) If that’s not convincing enough for you, there is also the opening quote by 18th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin: “What woman wants, God wants.”

Donohue is hoping the diverse voices in Man with a Pan will inspire readers of both genders to cook more–and he’s not leaving those readers empty-handed. Every contributor also lists a couple of his favorite, time-tested recipes along with a list of his favorite cook books. There are several recipes for “The Best!” roast chicken, along with Tofu Bolognese, Ceviche, Chocolate Mousse, Ghanian Peanut Butter Soup, pickles, Pan-National Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Fish Cakes, and Whole Roast Cow. Okay, maybe that last one is not so useful (though the accompanying chimichurri recipe looks good), but the recipes and cookbook recommendations help Man with a Pan multitask as entertainment, polemic, and a tool book.

On his blog, Stay at Stove Dad, Donohue documents his own efforts to feed his family, wife Sarah Schenck, filmmaker and co-founder of video-based family food website Parent Earth, and their two daughters. Planning home-cooked meals for the family is, as Donohue puts it, like a chess game. “You have to think many moves ahead. Will there be something in the fridge to eat that Wednesday night you have to work late?” he asks. “Good question, one that can only be answered Sunday afternoon when you have the time. I make sure there are pasta sauces, pots of cooked rice, containers of black beans, roasted chickens, and the like always on hand.” Donohue does most of the cooking, but Schenck is usually the one to pick up the children and serve them dinner, putting together the sauces and staples Donohue prepares in advance. With his wife on the front lines with two hungry kids the food had better be good–and it looks like it is.

After reading Man with a Pan, I’m starting to catch a new vision of home cooking, one that involves men exchanging recipes and strategies. In the 1983 film Mr. Mom, Michael Keaton’s character is a recently out-of-work auto industry exec who has switched places with his wife. She’s supporting the family now while he does the housework. At a job interview he enthusiastically exchanges cooking advice with another laid-off worker, a scene that plays like a joke. They’re so into it–ha! When do we ever see men get so passionate about home cooking? I’ll tell you when; here and now, in one-third of our kitchens. For a book about men, Man with a Pan has surprisingly little chest thumping and a glorious amount of pleasure, generosity, and joy.

The story of the modern family dinner has been on the table, so to speak, for a while. Time published an article on the statistics behind family dinner in 2006. But in the wake of the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act I’ve noticed a new emerging wave in the good food movement that focuses on family dinner.

A few new non-profits and cookbooks are drawing attention to how family dinner can be the engine that drives the good food movement: our growing health crisis, the quest for a robust regional food system, the affordability and the access difficulties–all these issues manifest themselves at the family dinner table. Could there be a more significant expression of food’s importance than an intimate group of people sitting down together to share nourishment?

If you look at that image in the Time article, you see the smiling, white, nuclear family enjoying a multi-course meal. (Sure, I’ll give you that it’s probably ironic.) What’s new about the current dinner movement is that we’re finally moving past this ideal and getting real about the challenges of feeding a family–and while we’re at it, we’re also changing our notion of what a family can be in the first place.

I don’t need to tell you about the statistics myself–for every issue in family life, from academic performance to health to drug use, family dinner is a solution. What’s new about family dinner talk, though, is the focus. For the most part, proponents of family dinner are not looking at this ritual through idealized lenses, but are instead acknowledging and meeting head-on the of the challenges that keep us from eating dinner, at a table, all together.

Bill Mawhiney founded the nonprofit Time at the Table just last year. Through his organization he hopes to help people with many of the challenges–time, cooking skills, lack of tables even–that keep families from eating together. But he is also interested in expanding the definition of family dinner to something more inclusive, that greater numbers of people can identify with.

“The idea of family is open to interpretation. Family is what you mean in your heart,” Bill says, and he would know. For three years he was a guardian to a troubled teen, now 21 and living independently. Bill’s dinner epiphany came from a dinner party with friends. He had moved away from his roots in the Midwest and settled in New York City, and as a single guy he sought to create a new family (he now has a partner of five years). While hosting a dinner party with friends he suddenly realized, “Never once did we turn on the TV and never once did we leave the kitchen table. Why don’t we do this more often? I did this as a kid. Now we’re all eating around the TV, and we’re eating crap, and it just snowballs from there… This is where my mission needs to head, where I need to focus my energy.”

Bill is especially interested in reaching out to single people with roommates, college students, and single parents.  He recently did a workshop in a Kansas City assisted living space for people with disabilities. The residents live in a dorm-like setting with individual apartments. When Bill came in he noticed that the posted menu for the residents featured Hamburger Helper for four different meals. Realizing how far the residents were from enjoying whole-foods cooking (“But we like Hamburger Helper,” they told him,) he designed a recipe that mimicked a favorite Hamburger Helper dish but used fresh ingredients. And with grocery budget is $65 per person every two weeks, he’s shopping with the residents at Walmart. He believes in meeting people where the are.

“There’s lots of great information [on the importance of family dinner] out there, but you don’t really see the story of families and what they struggle with: time, money, motivation. We know what families struggle with, but we don’t know how to handle those struggles.” In addition to workshops, Time At The Table is gathering solutions in the form of recipes, shopping lists, and videos.

Laurie David’s new book, The Family Dinner, is taking on those struggles, too. Previously known as an environmental activist and producer of An Inconvenient Truth, David is now becoming famous for having gotten her ex-husband to the dinner table. In fact, it’s her divorce that makes The Family Dinner such a powerful book; the ritual kept her family afloat through the crisis of divorce.

Laurie emphasizes that family dinner doesn’t have to happen every single night, and it doesn’t have to include a three-course meal. What’s most important is that the family have “ritualized access to each other.” Hers is a no-guilt approach, but she still makes it clear that if you really want to make family dinner happen you have to make it a priority.

I thought of Laurie David when I read Peter Wells’ farewell column for Cooking for Dexter. He lamented that he worked too much (responding to e-mails features prominently) to make family dinner happen. “In some circles, it has become kind of cool lately to talk about those of us who don’t manage to cook for our families as an abstract but urgent societal problem.” If I could get him in the same room with Laurie I imagine she’d give him some of the same advice she gave me.

“If you can’t do dinner, find another ritual that brings you around the table together, like breakfast or a bedtime snack. It’s about creating happy, cozy, family moments, where you’re reminding yourself ‘this is why it’s so good to have kids.’” As for those kids, even if they’re at the age where dinner is more chaos time than cozy, Laurie urges parents not to wait. “They’re in training. They will be teenagers someday, and that’s when you’ll really need the ritual in place.’” Her book is filled with ideas for making dinnertime meaningful for kids of all ages.

Grace Freedman, a public health researcher, founder of EatDinner.org, and mother of three, takes issue with the practice (common among professional families) of holding one dinner for the kids and a later, separate dinner for the parents. “If you get into the habit of feeding kids on a different schedule than the parents or different foods than the parents eat, that can be a habit that undermines family dinner.” She adds that everyone sharing the same food can pull you out of the “kids’ food” trap and encourages more experimentation “I council not to fight over the food, but just to offer it. I think there’s something about sharing a meal that has cultural value. It’s okay if not everyone likes everyone likes the meal every night.” (It’s true, my son doesn’t love every meal I cook, and yet he has not starved to death.)

Parenting media editor and writer Jenny Rosenstracht might point Peter Wells to the book Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage & Dirty Dishes. The authors recently wrote a paradigm-shifitng post on Jenny’s blog about managing dinner for busy families. Jenny herself is working on a book titled Dinner, A Love Story. “What led me to focus on family dinner was the fact that family dinner was getting the short shrift in the conversation! It’s almost always positioned as a chore, a dreaded inevitability, a major source of stress. I wanted to shift the tone and show how much fun it could be, too. How valuable. That’s why it’s a love story!”

How do we get from unhealthy habits to a love story, especially with families who work nights or who have poor access to healthy, affordable food? Health and hunger organizations are working on the big picture of access and affordability, but people like Bill Mawhiney and Grace Freedman are helping families deal with the food system we have now–table by table.

Photo: H e r m a n via Flickr

Alex is just the kind of guy that makes everything fun – especially an all-day cook-off that will yield him and Julie a lot of ease with meals and a whole heap of a lot more time to hang out with their two grade-schoolers. I can just imagine him, apron on, some happy music playing, laughing as he talks it up with his fellow parents and cooking pals. Alex’s family along with four others, give or take, get together about every six weeks, or so, to create healthy meals in bulk that can be frozen and still taste great.

So, if you’re tired of ordering pizza for you and the kids, read on. This could be your ticket to reading an extra book with your six year-old.

Alex and Julie got started a few years ago thanks to an invitation from some friends at their Lutheran church. They could tell immediately that the time savings could really help manage the family and help them save money as well. And, in this mixed up jumbled world that makes us all move at the speed of DSL and long for community and family, they felt they couldn’t not give it a try.

He and Julie always pull out some great tasting dish when I’ve visit them, mentioning with a smile that it’s from their cook-off day. Their kids seem happy. The whole family has a sparkle that I’ve noticed is lacking in some frazzled parents. So I asked Alex to give me the details on how he does it.

It’s all in the bulk meal and the process is very loose and open to interpretation.

– Find some like-minded families and invite them to a Cook-off!

– Each family chooses, amongst themselves, whether to divide up the various chores, or not. Who will cook? Who will shop? Who will be more of the scheduler/administrator? Think responsibilities for a full-day commitment, about 7-8 a.m. until 4, 5, 6 p.m. enough time to cook and pack away 25-35 recipes for four families of four or three, or however many. That’s a good three days of preparation, aggregated. And, only one person from each family can reasonably cook, day of, given the size of the kitchen. (Teenagers … have we got a job for you!)

– Make assignments.

– Coordinate the date and recipes.

Note: It takes a lot of emails, phone calls, Facebook messages, etc. to get a date and agree on the recipes. A meeting to decide on all of that might make more sense. Up to you, of course.

– Choose about 25-35 recipes. Quadruple or triple them.

– Then, each person brings their families’ share of the groceries. And, each family is responsible for their own freezeable storage solutions. Casserole dishes, plastic containers, what have you. One drawback of Cookoff is that you’ll probably use a lot of disposables and aluminum.

Note from Alex: “If some people didn’t like a product that another person brought, then we’d comment on it. We aren’t vegetarians, so we have to buy a lot of meat and cheese in bulk and that can get expensive. Each person has to make a choice about the products they use and we felt we couldn’t dictate how everyone contributed.” Of course, if you all agree, as a group, to buy only from the farmers’ market or organics, or share a cow, all the better.

– Meet at someone’s house. The family with the best supplies … the biggest kitchen, the best counter space, the restaurant-worthy range, etc.

– Consolidate all the ingredients, divided by recipe.

Note: Everyone is responsible for their family’s portion. If you have time to prep: pre-cut vegetables, pre-grate cheese, awesome! If not, no worries, just share the tasks.

– Meanwhile, have a soup going all day so you can eat at some point. Share a meal together.

– Get cooking. It may take a few tries to get into a groove, figure out what works for you and family.

Other Logistics and Tidbits:

You might need a large freezer. Alex and his family tried to use their regular freezer for six months or so, but it was really too much to freeze. He came across a stand-up freezer the size of his refrigerator and hasn’t looked back.

Recipes that last well in the freezer include: Chicken dishes, soups, enchiladas.

Chicken freezes really well. Beef not so much. Chicken Tetrazzini, try it.

The sooner you eat the frozen meals, the better. Most of them should last anywhere from 90 to 120 days.

Of course, nothing beats cooking fresh, but with bulk cooking you know what you’re feeding your family is not processed. You can always add a fresh salad or other fresh vegetables on the side. And, really time is the greatest gift.

As for the budget: It was never less than $400 for Alex and his family for six weeks. As you bring your own portion of the recipes or pay for a certain part of the Cook-off, the budget is really a matter of choice. Alex also mentioned that sometimes the other family’s products weren’t as great or that some people didn’t season dishes properly, but they never had any real arguments over quality and price.

It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it. To calculate for yourself, think about the amount you spend over six weeks to feed your family and exchange that to spend more time with them!

Alex recommends 2-3 days for planning with 4 as the ideal so there’s a day to prep beforehand. That’s even better.

It’s a lot of work and sometimes a huge headache. But, overall the quality of time spent with the family makes it all worthwhile.

And, if you don’t have other families to cook with, no worries, you can do it solo too. Just plan on cooking 15 recipes, tripled or quadrupled (for 60 meals that could last a solid quarter of the year).

Play ball!

These days Alex and Julie cook with only two families. They use that to their advantage by paying closer attention to ingredients and cooking only those recipes they know and love.

I bought it. It reminded me, like God was whispering in my ear, that my love of  pulling together ingredients was a gift, and a legacy. Gifts should never be taken lightly. It made me smile instantly.

It also reminded me that the ability to get up in the morning and decide what I want to cook, and making it happened, is a privilege. My grandparents raised their children during the Great Depression. I don’t have much knowledge of how they put food on the table, or what they pieced together for their four children every day. But I can guess that having lived through it shaped their sense of plenty—and it showed up in the pot, and on the table years later. Both great cooks, they’d sit in the morning and ask, “what do you feel like eating today?” It is a different question I now understand than the, gnawing, entitled whines of two kids who have defiled my empty nest, “what are you going to cook,” or “what are we supposed to eat.” Their question was more a response to living without. Their answer was a declaration that they could now have whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. It was their slice of affluence.

It is one of the legacies I brought with me into my marriage. And it has been a joy that has pulled me through the best of times and the worst of times. To go to the farmer’s market and get what’s looking good to you that day, or to do a good old fashioned meat loaf  has always brought me comfort and pride. Both because I could, and because I could do these things really well. And because I know in my essence, that slowing down to be present in cutting vegetables, or kneading a dough that will become a beautiful hot batch of rolls is more than utility, it is a gift to those you love. I had forgotten that, especially as the kids got older and got these opinions about what they will and won’t eat –  even after I cooked it.

I travel a lot now on assignment, so I don’t even get to cook as much. On the road, I grab nasty airport food, or in the evenings I get to experiment with some of the best restaurants in the world. The ones that make the most marked impression on me bring good home-style cooking with the freshest ingredients to the table. Whether at a friend’s house enjoying home cooking, or at a great restaurant, there is something that you just don’t get with a bucket of chicken. There is that moment when the chatter stops and there is silence, maybe even the collective moan of appreciation. It comes when somebody who prepared it, lovingly selecting ingredients, and got low and slow to bring it to you.

Most families have scheduled themselves so tightly. Some to chase the bigger house, bigger job, or the right social activities. Some to work two or three jobs to just make ends meet. For many, a good home-cooked meal comes in a microwave safe package, or a box or bag. After seeing that little plaque I was reminded that cooking is not just about love, but it is also about changing the pace. I can jump off the treadmill and say, I think I want to make a pound cake, or to start a pot of gumbo that will take all day to simmer slow. I can get off the grid to go shop mindfully for everything I need. I can put the rest of the “stuff” on pause and get in the kitchen with a stockpot, a mixer—whatever it takes. When I cook, I control the pace. The deadlines are mine. I breathe, I sing. And when I cook, I pray, or meditate. I center, much in the way runners do.

Over the past year, I have learned to my horror that I am a food elitist. I approach food and cooking the way I do because I can. I have a car to go get what I want. I don’t have to stay in the neighborhood and buy rank fruit, or bad bread from a party store. I can afford to eat local and organic. Most days I work at home, so I can spend hours in the kitchen if I choose to. I am aware that poor people, both urban and rural are doing all they can to get by. They don’t have my choices or my resources.

Some are people who grow my food, and get it to places where I can buy it, and who ring it up. There is a woman who works in my favorite grocery store. She like me, is a woman of color. She asked me if I was a cook for someone else. I explained that it was just for my family of four, and a few friends coming over for dinner. By the look on her face, I could tell that I boggled her mind. As she asked me for my money, she said, “one day I’m going to be able to feed my kids like that.” She said it in the way that I say, “One day I am going to be an Oprah book club selection,” or “one day the kids are going to move into their own places.” It reminded me that I am one blessed cook.

The problem with being interested in food is that it seems so frivolous. Sure, everybody has to eat, but caring about what you’re eating seems, well, indulgent. If you can afford enough food to feed your family, then you should stop there. Because there are more important things in life than food — war, disease, global warming, getting your hair cut. Right?

I grew up in a family that enjoyed food but still thought of it as fuel. Nutrition was important; cooking was not. My mother raised her kids on “lite” cheese and tubs of margarine because that was the conventional dietary wisdom back then: fat is bad, margarine is better than butter. Meals were civilized but not particularly appetizing. My parents liked good food but didn’t know how to cook it, and didn’t want to learn how. I grew up thinking that it didn’t much matter what I ate so long as I tried some of everything offered (that was polite) and tidied up afterwards.

It wasn’t until high school that I met people who ate differently. Many of my peers embraced vegetarian or vegan diets for ethical, health, or taste reasons. Others simply had higher expectations for what their food should taste like. With few exceptions, however, most of us couldn’t cook. That changed in college, when we had kitchens of our own for the first time (and cafeterias with dreadful glop on offer). So we began to learn how to shop, and how to cook.

A year or so after graduating, however, I mentioned to my mother that one of the many things I was glad I’d learned in college outside the classroom was cooking. She was appalled. “We paid for you to go to college so you could learn to cook?” she demanded. “What a waste.” College was for thinking; cooking was for doing.

But any fool can sling a frozen dinner into a microwave; it takes thought in order to cook well. You need skills, and those skills aren’t just the knife techniques taught in culinary school. You need to know where and when to get or grow good ingredients. You need to know whether that fish is really fresh or whether that peach will taste as good as it looks. If you’re going to spend time and effort on dinner, you want that dinner to taste good as a result. And you quickly learn that so-called “timesavers” — packets of dehydrated seasoning, for example — are not flavor-savers. Quite the opposite.

So you find yourself buying only real food — the local berries, the unsalted butter — because it tastes better. You notice that the cheap pork doesn’t taste as good as the organic stuff, say, so you decide to do a little reading about hog farming, and when you’re done — if you’re still a committed meat eater, that is — you tell yourself, “Forget that mushy meat, even if it is cheap.”

And on the evening news, as you’re preparing for dinner, you hear about people “rioting in Egypt and Haiti” over skyrocketing food prices. Or about the evolution of “drug-resistant bacteria” thanks to the antibiotics-laden chicken sold in much of the country. Or about the “disappearance of maple syrup” because winters in the Northeast aren’t cold or long enough anymore to make the trees produce enough sap.

And then, somehow, that trip to the barbershop doesn’t seem quite so important.

Photo courtesy of Culinate
If you’re going to the trouble of making a peach pie, you might as well make sure those peaches are tasty first.