Hi friends! I’m Karyn and this is the Family Food for Moms podcast. We’re talking about inspiration for family cooking and dining.
I want to help you with the inspiration, the perspiration, and the celebration of food in your family. So often we only talk about the middle one of these, the perspiration. That’s all the practical stuff. We need to plan meals, we need to shop, we need to actually cook the meals, and we need to serve them to our family. And that’s what takes up a lot of the time, but I think there’s so much more to food in our families than the perspiration. The first category, inspiration and the third category, celebration are just as important as the practical part, the perspiration.
So on this podcast, we’re going to be talking about all three of these things. We need inspiration! We can get it from all kinds of places: from our grandmothers or our parents; the way they used to cook and eat, we can learn from other cultures like the French, the Italian, or the Mexican; and the way they do things, or from the internet and famous cooks and chefs from both the past and the present. There’s so many ways we can be inspired. Even looking through a good cookbook can inspire us and it’s so important to be inspired by it.
We should know what we want to achieve and why, and then we should know how we want to go about it. Celebrating together as a family is such a wonderful thing, especially when it’s done with food. Having special family meals brings connection and closeness. Fun events and traditions help us to enjoy our meals, enjoy our food and to relax after the craziness of life.
Slow food makes time for conversation and to be together as a family unit. We need to create an atmosphere for our family that encourages celebration.
We need to make our dining table look special. And we should involve our kids in making this happen! There’ll definitely be seasons and days when we do this more than others – it’s true that sometimes we’re tired! Sometimes we just don’t have the energy to do much, but making food special doesn’t always have to be a lot of extra work. It can just be a way of life and the smallest little things can make a difference.
Try putting on some relaxing dinner music, choosing a style like piano or instrumental or Celtic music. Let the kids choose a style or let them do something like putting your napkins in your glasses or folding them in a fancy way. Something as simple as this can immediately help everybody to feel like, “Okay, this is significant!”
We’re going to make mealtimes not just ordinary and mundane. Then we must just recognize that the meal time should be one of family closeness and connection, of slowing down and being refreshed from the day. This helps so much!
Meals aren’t just a rushed thing. They’re not just something that you quickly do and carry on with your separate lives, but rather we should look forward to coming together at the end of the day to be a family unit, to enjoy each other, and to encourage each other. Just see what comes of it! In this podcast, we’re going to be talking about all of those things.
Some things I’ll mention are to do with the inspiration, where we can get inspiration from and what we can learn from all the different places and cultures and people.
Then we’ll definitely get into the practical side and the perspiration of actual cooking, actual planning, and deciding what to make and how to do it.
And then the celebration will be the most fun one! We’ll talk about all kinds of family events: family fun nights, date nights at home, larger family celebrations, or just all kinds of things you can do to help to celebrate your dinners together.
Oh, and just to tell you a bit about me and my family… my hubby’s name is Morgan. We’ve been married for 25 years and we have five wonderful children! The oldest is 20 and the youngest is 10. We love to do all kinds of things together. Life is certainly changing with young adults in the house – family fun nights look a bit different to what they did when the kids were young, but we still do lots of those kinds of things. We often enjoy events that engage the 10 year old and also the 20 year old. So we’ll talk a lot about all the kinds of things that we do together.
Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you in the first official episode!
Head over to the Family Food for Moms Podcast with Karyn Collett to hear more.
