Cooking: Our daily bread

Cooking for your family can be a complicated, emotional event.

We cook because we have to meet a need, a very basic, physical and necessary need.

We have to eat to stay alive. 

But as a mother or parent, we feed our families for various other reasons as well.

Cooking a meal can be an act of control. I want my family to be healthy, and cooking dinner nightly gives me the control that they will eat at least one healthy meal a day. For my children, hopefully this is encouraging a lifetime of eating healthy and making good choices.
At the very least, it holds them hostage once a day to have to eat well, whether they like it or not.

Also, cooking a meal and eating at home encourages communication. We  are not dictators at the table, requiring certain topics to be discussed, but we all talk about various things that occurred during our day and tell stories about the past. Conversation tends to be silly.

The best thing about cooking (and the thing I most remind myself of when I don't want to cook) is that I am showing love to my family. 

My husband works hard and has a lot of stress in his work life. 

My kids work hard at a challenging school and usually rise to the expectations we put before them.

Our house, our dinner table is the oasis in the hectic frenzy that tends to be our day.

Dinner with the three other people who know what you are going through is the touchstone in our family life. Sometimes making someone's favorite meal can be the easiest way to say " I love and support you!"

So, as I sit and plan what we are eating, I am also planning an important event in our daily lives. Not just literal daily bread, but the bread that feeds our spirits and restores our resolve.

Casa Swann's Daily Bread Menu

• Crockpot chicken sandwiches, roasted carrots, salad
• Brunswick soup,Sweet Potato and Cauliflower soup, buttermilk biscuits
• Tuna patties, oven roasted green beans, baked sweet potatoes
• Balsamic chicken, butternut squash and apple casserole, spinach salad
• Chalupas!!!!!