"family meals" news and stories

Last week, I got to cook with my sister. She's a musician who lives in Austin, TX when she's not on the road, so while we check in with each other often, we don't manage to work it out so that we're in the same city frequently.

We didn't grow up cooking together, our parents (mostly our mother, to be honest) did the bulk of the food prep for the years we lived in the same house. I left for college in 1997 and when I moved back for six months after graduation in 2001, she was long since gone. However, having learned to cook from the same people, I've found that we have an innate compatibility in the kitchen that makes cooking together a joy.

Last Monday night, we didn't make anything particularly fancy, just some onion-spiked turkey burgers and a vast pan of sauteed veggies. I mixed the ground turkey and formed it into patties, as she washed and chopped the broccoli and cauliflower. She opened the fridge as if she were in her own home and rooted around for toasted sesame oil, Braggs and little sweet red chili sauce. It delighted me that she was so comfortable and that we could move around my two-person, galley kitchen with such ease.

After dinner was over, we headed back into the kitchen to clean up and I found myself wishing that these moments of cooking, eating and cleaning together came more frequently than two or three times a year. Sadly, during this phase of our lives, it is just not to be.

Do you have a person in your live with whom cooking is a joy? Do you cook with them regularly, or is it a rare occasion that you find yourselves in the kitchen together?

You had to work late. The traffic on the commute home was horrible. You're tired. You're hungry. But you've got to get dinner for the family on the table now. What do you do?

You could resort to picking up a bucket from the Colonel on your way home, or call for pizza delivery, but you're better than that, right? Apparently, you are, according to a study by UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families that did the first academic study to track American families moment by moment as they make dinner. They had expected to see a lot more takeout in working families but what they really saw was that 70% of the households in the study cooked at home. However, these "home-cooked" meals heavy reliance on "convenience foods."

However, these convenience foods, things that augment home cooking, didn't necessarily make dinner preparation any faster or easier. In fact, the difference in time to prepare dinner between a household that relied on convenience foods like boxed mixes, packaged vegetables, and pre-made stirfries and a household that made everything from scratch, was not statistically significant.

Really? You mean all this time I've been using Hamburger Helper, and I could have made lasagna from scratch in the same amount of time?!?!

Source

When I was a kid, my mom would have a schedule of what dinners to make on each night of the week. It wasn't completely strict. She would be flexible sometimes, especially during certain seasons. But for the most part, Sundays were for pasta (or, as we called it, spaghetti), and either Tuesdays or Wednesdays were for The Hamburg Plate, which consisted of scrambled hamburg (side note: is calling it "hamburg" a regional thing?), mashed potatoes, and creamed corn. It was sort of a Shepherd's Pie, only all separated (side note #2: does anyone even eat creamed corn anymore? I think the last time I had it was in the 80s.) Other nights were set aside for a chicken dish, sandwiches, and another night maybe for some sort of soup/stew.

How about you? Did your family have certain nights for certain meals, and did you continue that sort of trend when you became an adult? I have frozen dinners and pizza a lot more than I probably should, but that's more about laziness and an addiction to pizza than anything else.

According to a few recent studies in the U.K., fewer and fewer households own or use dining tables for family meals. Roughly one third of the 1,000 people surveyed by vegetarian food and book purveyor Cranks said that their dining tables were used only for holiday meals such as Christmas dinner. The Cranks survey also found that nearly a quarter of households don't even have a dining table. Sales of dining room furniture have dropped eight percent in the last five years, according to study by market research group Mintel. In the same time period, sales of bedroom and home office furniture have both increased by roughly 40 percent.

Many attribute this shift from eating at the table to factors such as higher divorce rates, smaller apartments and fast-paced, job-oriented schedules that require meals to be eaten on the move.

The Daily Times has more, as does News24.