Everyone loves food.
People come together over food. Weddings are celebrated over feasts, families come together over dinner, lovers will enjoy getting to know each other over a nice meal. In the Christian faith, corporately eating bread & wine as a way of partaking in the body & blood of Christ. Food is not just something that gives us the energy to get through another day. The experience of preparing food, and eating food together is indeed a key social, cultural, and I dare say spiritual part of our lives.
I grew up in a family with a stay at home mom who had been trained as a dietary technician. We rarely ate out, always had dinner as a family, and because of my mothers background, we also always ate healthy food. When I was 11 years old, my father went back to school and my mom had to find a job to help support the family. This meant that myself and my younger brother often were left in charge of making dinner.
In many families today, this might mean a lot of microwave dinners, frozen pizzas, and perhaps even fast food. However, in my family, what got left for my brother and I were recipes. The early years didn't always go well. I recall mixing up some instructions and adding 6 tablespoons of salt to a chili recipe that asked for 1/2 tsp. YUCK! None the less, my brother and I learned to cook. Sometimes getting help from a parent, sometimes having to figure things out ourself. Food was always simple, but it was also home made.
As a married man, my wife and I continue to make food at home. I work as a musician and substitute teacher, while my wife works as an English graduate student. Needless to say, money is tight, but we have found that nothing excites us more than good food. We live on an incredibly modest budget - $75/week for food. Not $75 each - $75 to feed both of us for the whole week.
With that budget, and some good planning, we eat incredibly well and nothing has made our marriage stronger. Our finances are in check, good food keeps us feeling healthy and positive, and dinner is regularly a time to connect. I teach guitar lessons 2 evening each week, so we regularly plan to have left overs that we can simply re-heat those days. This also gives us a break from cooking (as well as a break from washing all the pots/pans that cooking entails).
My hope in starting this blog is to, over time, share with you (whoever you are) the joy that we have found in food. It is one of life's simplest joys and yet one that so many people today rush through.
But that's all I'll say for now...
