Take the Time…to Set the Table
Check out the recipe that goes with this story here.
One of the best pieces of advice that I have given my girls over the years is when travelling or when they find themselves in the midst of a new experience, take the time to stop and stand still. Stand still and notice the moment they are in. What does it look and sound like? How does it smell? How does it make them feel? Let the moment touch each of their senses, imprinting a memory that will evoke a smile as it resurfaces in years to come.
For me, this stand still awareness most often comes when I think about cooking for people I love. The aroma of a day’s effort in the kitchen is the hug they get the moment they walk in. I’ve also taken the time to set the table. Maybe there are flowers. And there is music…always music!
It’s an intentional effort to marry all of the senses into a moment in our day that makes us smile. Wraps us all up in a cocoon of “in this moment, all is right with the world.”
As a child, my most frequent memories of these sensory food moments are wrapped up in the dinners prepared by my father for my younger sister Lisa and myself. In our house, my dad was the cook. His culinary creations were often a mash up of his experiences growing up in Savannah, and his travels through Europe. While my mom was a fine cook in her own right, he was the one who embraced the fun of experimenting and creating new dishes to present to a young but always eager audience. During the week, our meals might have ranged from a simple grilled cheese (though never ordinary) on a busy night, to coq au vin, to soft scrambled eggs with the most extraordinarily perfect grits that I have never quite been able to duplicate, to our favorite spaghetti sauce.
Most often, my father would make dinner for my sister and for me and then wait to eat with mother when her day ended. It was an open kitchen that had a bar in the middle separating the cooking and the eating areas. Our dinner was served at a small round wicker table, once belonging to my grandmother. I can see the table, feel the soft cloth napkin in my lap and hear the music is the adjacent room. My mother, a ballet teacher, had her studio in the house we lived in for many years. The evening classes that started at the same time as my dinner, were those of the adult students, many of whom were the moms of my friends. While the music from the studio floated through the wall and into the space where I sat with my sister, the aromas of our meal simultaneously filled the ballet studio, making it all the more difficult for the students to concentrate on the instructions from their teacher. Even then, very early on, I had a keen sense of the moment at that table, in that kitchen, listening to that music, as we ate our evening meal.
Now, much to my dismay, as an adult trying to recreate his many wonderful dishes, my father usually made up his recipes, never measuring a single ingredient or recording any of the steps. While frustrating, it is a wholly unfair criticism as I have turned out to be much the same in my own cooking. When one of my daughters now asks me for a recipe…well, let’s just say that it becomes more of a story than anything else.
A perfect example of this “not sure what I put in the pot the last time” recipe is one of my favorites, his spaghetti sauce. What kid doesn’t love a big, messy bowl of noodles? While I didn’t understand the nuances of why I loved it at the time, it came down to the great depth of flavor created from the vegetables and garlic to the warm herby oregano, the hefty serving of Parmesan cheese and of course, a great deal of love.
Over the years I have made this sauce countless times for my girls-starting when they were at the table in high chairs to filling their freezers with big batches when visiting them in college-each time not quite the same as the last.
Over time and through each meal, I have been intentional in my efforts to create similar memories for them around our dinners, birthday parties and celebrations and even how we experienced our food moments during the many nights camping at music festivals.
So I leave you with this. Take the time to set the table. Put on some music. Dance, eat, drink. And then stop for a moment and stand still and notice the moment you have created for yourself and those you love.
Cheers!