That is exactly a treasured memory of mine…driving up to central PA (from NJ, where I lived at the time) at around age 18-19 to take Grandma from her nursing home and bring her to her house (which is where the family stayed while visiting her), stopping at Weis Markets to pick up food, and then up to her house to cook her her dinner.
An unfortunately slightly overdone steak in the small broiler she had on a work table in her kitchen next to her stove, Minute Rice (because I didn’t know how to make “real” rice yet), and probably peas. But it was all enjoyed by the two of us, and Grandma got to spend some time in her house before I brought her back to the nursing home. She talked about how much she enjoyed my visit and cooking her dinner several times after that. Miss her a lot, and it’s been 46 years since she passed away.
Although, I haven’t cooked dinner for decades – I very much enjoy, meal planning, preparation and to a lesser extent cleaning up the kitchen. Up until recently, I was cooking for three, but am back down to just cooking for the two of us.
I do admit it can be challenging finding items/ingredients on sale/clearance. I have the benefit of a lot of great posters here offering up ideas and suggestions.
There is no way we would be able to eat out with any regularity.
Recently, I made Pierogies for the first time. I was so happy to see Sunshine enjoy them and clean her plate. And excited that I learned a new dish to prepare!!
I do look forward to putting a hot meal on the table and having a dinner with my partner.
Grew up in front of a tv with a meal on a tv tray-- often a frozen dinner or money to order a pizza. This was despite the fact that my father is a trained cook who is exceptionally talented. To me, family dinner is a myth anyway. There are so many things I dislike about the Times but this is low on the list.
Like my grandparents and my parents, cooking dinner has always been a chore, a delight, and a privilege. Sometimes if I am exhausted, it may be thawing some grilled chicken thighs to chop and toss into a salad. If it’s been a month or more, we may head to our favorite Mexican restaurant. I hardly ever default to pasta with a marinara, and I don’t even have jarred sauce on hand to encourage it!
Yesterday I knew I needed to go grocery shopping, but I really didn’t want to. So while we had cocktails, I cooked a couple of defrosted pork chops with fresh sage, black pepper, and dry Marsala, mashed potatoes drenched in a pan sauce thickened with some crema, and a butter lettuce salad with an easy vinaigrette. I am horrible at planning ahead. But we were fed, the dishes were minimal, and cooking is still fun. Sometimes rifling through the fridge and the freezer is all it takes to plan a meal.
The whole thing of sitting down together at the same time to eat and have a conversation while not watching the tv and reading the newspaper. That pretty much never happened. I can’t even remember a time when all of us actually had dinner together at home that wasn’t a holiday meal with other guests. I’m not sure we ever had dinner together. Let alone the special impact. My father cooked constantly-- but almost never meals for the family. My mother pretty much never cooked. My siblings never cooked. I started making meals for myself long before I was a teenager.
To me it didn’t exist as anything but a myth. Correct. I never saw it. Never experienced it. Didn’t know other people having that experience except on television.
It strikes me that growing up in a Navy household and having neighborhoods filled with more of the same, the standard of eating together at the same time was just about inescapable. You needed to organize it that way in order to feed between a few hundred and a couple thousand people on a ship. When the fathers were ashore, they just seemed to stick with it, and mothers seemed to like it, too, especially at the cocktail hour. As we have evolved and begun to move away from the family hierarchy of the mid twentieth century, everyone seems much more comfortable about structuring their own lives around their own likes and dislikes.
My father had been a cook on a Merchant Marine ship where he cooked for hundreds and was in the Army, so he was definitely used to communal meals. But in my entire childhood it was virtually unheard of to have a meal as a family. He travelled and worked many nights. My mother was studying for her phd and getting clinical hours in clinics, my brother was in boarding school, my sister had moved out. I was the textbook latchkey kid as were many of my 1980s peers whose parents were completely self absorbed or just absent. While I suppose it existed for others, Family Dinner was non existent for us.
Except that doesn’t mean it’s a myth. Just not normal for your house growing up.
I’m 67yo, and I grew up having family meals. Granted, they weren’t alway steady every day of the week based on Dad’s travel schedule (sometimes gone fror weeks at a time) and Mom directing the HS plays as we all got older and were able to fend for ourselves.
But family meals were a regular occurrence in my house.
But that is very specific to you. I can’t remember a single dinner we didn’t have together growing up without TV. Same how we now live together as a family. Many friends when I grew up and now in today’s world are doing exactly the same (unfortunately the TV part in (too) many of our friends families isn’t any longer always true)
Here’s a source on “latch key kids” that folks can use without relying on “AI”.
Yes, both my parents worked and I, and the younger sibling I was in charge of, came home to an empty house. My particular experience was that dinner was still expected on the table for the family when they got home and it fell to me. Everyone’s experience will be different.
