Cooking is an arduous endeavor: planning, shopping, organizing, preparing, cooking, eating, and finally, cleaning up the mess left in the wake. This is especially true and frustrating when you are cooking for finicky young children. Despite the difficulties, cooking and enjoying home-cooked meals with your family can be incredibly fulfilling. By using your hands, tools and senses, you nourish your family with wholesome meals, creating important food memories and habits. It can get discouraging, and it can be difficult to find the time and energy to create a meal. With all the corporate services available to us today to help ease meal planning and cooking, we sometimes forget that we also have each other as a resource.
At The Shared Plate, we want to be generous and brave enough to share a meal with a friend - to ease their burden of cooking a meal, to develop new skills or hone the ones we already have in the kitchen, to show them that you care with a thoughtful gesture. Amy and I have created The Shared Plate to help ourselves, help each other, and help others. We want to explore all of the ways food can be shared in our communities, between family and friends. We aim to provide approachable, wholesome, family friendly recipes. And we hope to encourage people to cook for one another with an open and vulnerable heart - and in turn, receive similar acts of love graciously.
The idea for the blog came as Thanksgiving approached, and I was simultaneously dreaming and dreading all of the shopping, preparing and cooking that a Thanksgiving feast entails. I asked Amy if she would be interested in swapping pies for the holiday, so we’d be able to serve two pies while only doing the work of baking one type of pie each. (Without a second thought, she replied, “YES!”) We set a mom-date to bake together, and it was one of the most enjoyable and relaxing days I’ve had. Which, might have been because three of our four kids were not there while we cooked, but that’s besides the point! Cooking together allowed us to enjoy the moment and spend quality time with each other, while creating something special for our families to share.
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