While I have strived for much of this blog to highlight events, my blog post on the ordinary have been farer and fewer between, especially in recent years.  And somehow I neglected to write about a very important part of family.  Dinners, homerun dinners!  Cooking…I love it, most of the time anyway.  Of course we have some weeks where work is extremely busy and we have had pancakes or ordered pizza for dinner, but most evenings we cook.  Sometimes I do some preparation on weekends and other times we make a delicious meal that day.   

We eat together almost every night as a family and always have, even when the girls were little.  For us as working parents, when they were little, we did not get home until after 5:00 and so bedtime was never earlier than 8:30 allowing us to eat as a family.  The girls became accustomed to eating together and when we don’t, they generally are disappointed.  Even with the girls sports and activities in recent years, we still managed to eat together, even it that meant eating dinner close to 8:00.  (Family dinners have been somewhat challenged the past few months as the girls have taken on more sports commitments and there is now generally only one weeknight during the week that we don’t have a commitment if that). 

They view pancakes for dinner fun occasionally, but only occasionally as we all take great pride in eating really delicious mouth watering “home run” dinners at least three to four times a week.  

Home run dinners started probably around the time Ludmilla was with us and if dinner was so good, I would get up and the girls would take turns throwing me a pitch.  I was always trying new recipes and there were a lot of homeruns.  The funny thing is that a few years ago, the girls really didn’t eat a lot of the dinners I made, at least the main entrée.  So, I would make sure they had some sides…fruit, and usually a starch to go along with the main entrée that they wouldn’t eat.  And they too would think dinner was so good even if they weren’t eating the “homerun” portion.  I think for them the “homerun” on those days was the camaraderie of us eating together as a family. 

There was a time when food presentation was also huge and we would never eat our food hot as Justin and I were often trying to perfect who could plate the meal better and pictures were involved too.  The girls even started to get in on the plating of their food.

Trying new recipes has been a constant since Harper was about 15 months and I even began a log by month of many of the exciting meals we ate for dinner.  I regularly kept up with it until April 2020…we definitely did a lot of new recipes especially with baking during COVID, but with all the added responsibilities that came with the girls being home all the time, not being able to go out, I somehow stopped logging them. This is something that I commit to getting back to by the Fall when the girls are in school full time again.

Our girls are probably somewhat food snobs with certain things.  I hope that they aren’t snobs but that we have helped them create a love for good quality healthy food and to appreciate food and the act of gathering together to eat it with family and friends. 

Signing off as I sit here on a Sunday morning smelling the red wined braised beef stew that Justin is preparing for tomorrow’s dinner….it’s a new recipe, but from the decadent aromas, I am pretty certain it will be another home run dinner.