Of Home-Making and Food

"There is no occasion when meals should become totally unimportant. Meals can be very small indeed, very inexpensive, short times taken in the midst of a big push of work, but they should be always more than just food. Relaxation, communication and a measure of beauty and pleasure should be part of even the shortest of meal breaks. Of course you celebrate special occasions--successes of various members of the family, birthdays, good news, answered prayer, happy moments--with special attention to meal preparation and serving. But we should be just as careful to make the meal interesting and appealing when the day is grey, and the news is disappointing. Children feel the difference in the home that takes this attitude. Father comes home tired and discouraged after some sort of failure or disappointment to find, not the food he dislikes, nor burned soup and sloppy serving, but a beautifully set table, with his favourite food served artistically, and a hot drink and some tiny cookies (biscuits) or nuts served afterwards with all the air of a special occasion. The room-mate receives a letter which is the dreaded reality of a fear long worried about, but comes back to the flat to find a meal prepared in anticipation, and the comfort of hot broth and melba toast, omelette and muffins, and chocolate scalding hot, topped off by a marshmallow or whipped cream. 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 the 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.

If the one who cooks is the wife in a family, her attitude toward the marriage as a whole should be to think of it as a career. Being challenged by what difference her cooking and her way of serving is going to make in the family life gives a woman an opportunity to approach this with the feeling of painting a picture or writing a symphony. To blend together a family group, to help beings of five, ten, fifteen, and sixty years of age to live in communication with each other and to develop into a 'family unit' with constantly growing appreciation of each other and of the 'unit' by really working at it, in many different areas, but among others in the area of food preparation, is to do that which surely can compare with blending oils in a painting or writing notes for a symphony. The cook in the home has opportunity to be doing something very real in the area of making good human relationships."

~*~ Excerpt from The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer (Chapter 8 "Food", pp.123-125) ~*~

* * * * *

...To this end, I inspired myself by watching episodes of my favorite cooking show (that I recorded onto a videotape a few years ago;) ) on this day of clouds and freezing rain. Delightful.

(The laundry in those baskets is folded...just need to put them away now!)