“This is what I want you to do: I want you to tell someone you love them, and dinner’s at six. I want you to throw open your front door and welcome the people you love into the inevitable mess with hugs and laughter. Gather the people you love around your table and feed them with love and honesty and creativity, because there will be a day when it all falls apart.
There are things I can’t change. Not one of them. Can’t fix, can’t heal, can’t put the broken pieces back together. But what I can do is offer myself, wholehearted and present, to walk with the people I love through the fear and the mess. Thats all any of us can do. Thats what we’re here for. ”
“If the home is a body, the table is the heart, the beating center, the sustainer of life and health.”
Shauna Niquist
“God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”
C. S. LEWIS, Mere Christianity
“Food and cooking are among the richest subjects in the world. Every day of our lives, they preoccupy, delight, and refresh us. Food is not just some fuel we need to get us going toward higher things. Cooking is not a drudgery we put up with in order to get the fuel delivered. Rather, each is a heart’s astonishment. Both stop us dead in our tracks with wonder. Even more, they sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around our dinner tables, they actually create our humanity.”
ROBERT FARRAR CAPON, The Supper of the Lamb
“The particular alchemy of celebration and food, of connecting people and serving what I’ve made with my own hands, comes together as more than the sum of their parts. I love the sounds and smells and textures of life at the table, hands passing bowls and forks clinking against plates and bread being torn and the rhythm and energy of feeding and being fed.”
“What makes me feel alive and connected to God’s voice and spirit in this world is creating opportunities for the people I love to rest and connect and be fed at my table. I believe it’s the way I was made, and I believe it matters.”
“I believe every person should be able to make the simple foods that nourish them, that feel familiar and comforting, that tell the story of who they are. Each one of us should be able to nourish ourselves in the most basic way and to create meals and traditions around the table that tell the story of who we are to the people we care about.”
If you don’t cook, begin by inviting people over. Order pizza and serve it with a green salad and a bottled salad dressing. Get comfortable with people in your home, with the mess and the chaos. Focus on making people comfortable, on creating a space protected from the rush and chaos of daily life, a space full of laughter and safety and soul.”
“Read through recipes as a guideline or set of ideas, to read through and add your preferences and tastes, your history and perspective. If you put in the time, the learning, the trying, the mess, and the failure, at the end you will have learned to feed yourself and the people you love, and that’s a skill for life—like tennis or piano but yummier and far less expensive.”
“I’m not talking about cooking as performance, or entertaining as a complicated choreography of competition and showing off. I’m talking about feeding someone with honesty and intimacy and love, about making your home a place where people are fiercely protected, even if just for a few hours, from the crush and cruelty of the day.”
“Either I can be here, fully here, my imperfect, messy, tired but wholly present self, or I can miss it—this moment, this conversation, this time around the table, whatever it is—because I’m trying, and failing, to be perfect, keep the house perfect, make the meal perfect, ensure the gift is perfect. But this season I’m not trying for perfect. I’m just trying to show up, every time, with honesty and attentiveness.”
“Cooking is no different the any other career or hobby. There are rock stars — people whose skill or perspective propels them to the top of their field. But when you ask them how they got there, they always tell you a story about working in a diner or making pasta with a grandmother. They tell you about repetition, knife, heat, salt, butter.”
“I want my kids to learn firsthand and up close that different isn’t bad, but instead that different is exciting and wonderful and worth taking the time to understand. I want them to see themselves as bit players in a huge, sweeping, beautiful play, not as the main characters in the drama of our living room. I want my kids to taste and smell and experience the biggest possible world, because every bite of it, every taste and texture and flavor, is delicious.”
“Following a recipe is like playing scales, and cooking is jazz.”
All above excerpts From: Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine
“Hell hath no fury like a woman starved.”
― Molly Wizenberg
“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.”
Ronald Reagan
“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”
-George Bernard Shaw
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
-Virginia Woolf
“A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“We build deep and loving family relationships by doing simple things together, like family dinner … and just by having fun together.”
—President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Of Things That Matter Most”
“Food cannot take care of spiritual, psychological and emotional problems, but the feeling of being loved and cared for, the actual comfort of the beauty and flavour of food, the increase of blood sugar and physical well-being, help one to go on during the next hours better equipped to meet the problems.”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking
“The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating
differences, arguing without offending. ”
― Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
President Spencer W. Kimball said: “It is important for us also to cultivate in our own family a sense that we belong together eternally, that whatever changes outside our home, there are fundamental aspects of our relationship which will never change.”
“Let us make our kitchens creative centers from which emanate some of the most delightful of all home experiences”
-Barbara B Smith
“Sitting down to a meal together draws a line around us,” says Miriam Weinstein, author of The Surprising Power of Family Meals, “It encloses us and strengthens the bonds that connect us with other members of our self-defined clan, shutting out the rest of the world.”
Plan for quality mealtime conversation. Mealtime conversations can be a genuine family lifeline to connect busy families swimming in a sea of hectic and conflicting schedules. A poll was taken by the Reader’s Digest magazine to determine what factors contributed most to a child’s success in school. Surprisingly, one thing they found was that “students who regularly shared mealtimes with their families tested better than those who didn’t” Simple questions during dinner conversation about a child’s performance in school motivated children to work harder and do better in their studies. In fact, families who eat together are more likely to take an interest in what all family members are doing.
