Family Dinners

The "Family Recipe" spread.

In late November of 2013 I found myself sitting alone and disenchanted outside of the cafeteria of the Milwaukee Area Technical College's Mequon campus.  A combination of things led to that disenchantment.  First, Mequon is equal parts extreme wealth and cultural destitution.  As snobby as that sentence sounds, there are but a few decent restaurants in the entire city to cater to the surrounding elite.  The few saving graces that do exist are integrated in to the indistinguishable and sprawling network of strip malls that line Mequon's eponymous main road.  Credit is due to the actually good chefs working to make Mequon a better and more delicious place, but unless you're Todd Solondz, you're not wrenching anything inspirational out of the blank landscape that is Mequon.

Adding to that was my schedule. Class during the day and work during the night left little time for me to exist as an individual.  The few days that allowed me any free time became a balancing act of sustaining something of a social life, spending time with my wife and simply finding time to complete the general errands and tasks necessary to exist in this world.  A reality that necessitated rigid scheduling and cold pragmatism was fiercely at war with my spontaneous brain and my impractical heart. I'm impatient and spasmodically manic so the foundation of my plan to just put my head down and work for a few years may as well have been built on pudding.

With an impending meltdown afoot, I needed to supplant the static boredom that was my life with something.  It needed be something intimate and galvanizing, something special.  Food, being an obvious obsession in my life, often served as an escape for me.  I would spend hours reading food blogs, or fantasizing as I pored over reviews of the greatest restaurants in the world.  It didn't take for it to add up that this mania could be used as an avenue for something far more fulfilling.

Judah and Neenah getting ready for some comfort food.

In an attempt to hone my enthusiasm in to something solid I took an account of all of the things that make me tick.  Friends (often in a the more-the-merrier context), hosting events, sharing and consuming ridiculous amounts of food. Those ingredients combined to form the foundation of the very first family dinner. On January 6th, 2014, my wife and I hosted some of our closest friends for an enormous Middle Eastern feast.  We opted to start with Middle Eastern cuisine because it's accessible, absolutely delicious and has the feeling of food that is meant to be shared.  Since then we've hosted 25 other dinners, meaning literally hundreds of dishes have graced our rickety old dining room table. Sometimes we pick a region or city like Sicily or Bangkok, sometimes we pick something less structured, like "summer" or "family recipes".  Either way, the end product is always meaningful time spent with people who you love.

One the many victims of family dinner food coma

Marketing and consumerism have turned "tradition" in to a four letter word in our cynical generation. Everything is either shoddy in it's cheapness or gaudy in it's luxuriousness.  On top of that, we have become so connected by way of electronic device that personal face-to-face interaction has found itself in to expendability.  For me, family dinners break that mold.  Every few Sundays I have the extreme pleasure of drinking wine and sharing food with some of my close friends, in person, and that is a tradition worth cherishing. Moreover, it's one I suggest incorporating in to your own lives. Find yourself living wedged in the doldrums? Did five tons of snow fall on to your house, striking you with cabin fever? I recommend trying to cook yourself out of it.  Make something cozy, indulgent, and don't be afraid of simplicity. After you do that, tell your friends to pick up a bottle of cheap wine and invite them over. It may be a cliche, but I think you will find it true that true richness can be found anywhere, and can never be purchased.