A Family That Cooks Together Quotes

We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?

Invest in what's real. Clean as you go. Drink while you cook. Make it fun. It doesn't have to be complicated. It will be what it will be.

In fact, people who posses not magic at all can instill their home-cooked meals with love and security and health, transforming ingredients and bringing disparate people together as family and friends. There's a reason that when opening one's home to guests, the first thing you do is offer food and drink. Cooking is a kind of everyday magic.

Looking at you reminds me of the kind of man I should be with." "And what kind of man is that? Drunken, poor, pathetic?" "No. I´ve never met him, but I see him plain as day. He has crinkles around his eyes when he smiles and tanned skin from working outdoors. Honest labor has callused his hands. He and I will hunt together, cook and eat big family meals together. He´ll marry me and love my family, too." Voice gone soft, she said, "He´ll give me a baby boy and a girl.

When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes? When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit's face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end. I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA. Here's a secret: those mothers don't exist. Most of us-even if we'd never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring. I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone. Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping-and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press-seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood. Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's car, and say, "Great. Maybe YOU can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed. If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt. Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they'd chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal. Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they'll be looking and looking for ages. Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

I’m the cook, Seth. I could take a stove apart and put it back together, but dishwashers aren’t my thing.

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house? The tale tells how the Lords of Manva hunted & gathered roots & cooked their suppers while they were camped in exile in the foothills of Sul, but it doesn't say what their wives & children were living on in their city left ruined & desolate by the enemy. They were finding food too, somehow, cleaning house & honoring the gods, the way we did in the siege & under the tyranny of the Alds. When the heroes came back from the mountain, they were welcomed with a feast. I'd like to know what the food was and how the women managed it.

If I had a wish, I would want nothing fancy, just a normal day when all of us could be together as a family; a day where we could just cook, eat, talk, and laugh. I wondered how many people around the world were having such a normal day and didn’t know how special and sacred it was.

In those days food was never just sustenance; the very act of cooking knit our disparate lives together.

A mission-minded family will serve together. Look for needs in your community and brainstorm with your spouse about how you can partner together to meet those needs in a way that works for you. My husband is handy, and I love to cook. My casserole dish and his tool box work well together. Is there a single mom who could use some help with yard work? Is there an elderly couple who needs help hanging their Christmas lights? Look for creative ways you can serve side by side and connect with each other and your neighbors.

Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer were a very notorious couple of cats. As knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians, Tight-rope walkers and acrobats They had an extensive reputation. [...] When the family assembled for Sunday dinner, With their minds made up that they wouldn’t get thinner On Argentine joint, potatoes and greens, And the cook would appear from behind the scenes And say in a voice that was broken with sorrow "I'm afraid you must wait and have dinner tomorrow! For the joint has gone from the oven like that!" Then the family would say: "It's that horrible cat! It was Mungojerrie – or Rumpleteazer!" - And most of the time they left it at that. Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer had a wonderful way of working together. And some of the time you would say it was luck And some of the time you would say it was weather. They would go through the house like a hurricane, And no sober person could take his oath Was it Mungojerrie – or Rumpleteazer? Or could you have sworn that it mightn't be both? And when you heard a dining room smash Or up from the pantry there came a loud crash Or down from the library came a loud ping From a vase which was commonly said to be Ming Then the family would say: "Now which was which cat? It was Mungojerrie! And Rumpleteazer!" And there's nothing at all to be done about that!

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was so sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

Subtle and coy, the cemento at Maalouf's did not speak of war, or frontiers, and the spaces they narrowed, but, rather, grandeur. The tiles returned one to a realm where imagination, artistry, and craftsmanship were not only appreciated but given free reign, where what was unique and striking, or small and perfect, or wrought with care was desired, where gazed-upon objects were the products of peaceful hearts, hands long practiced and trained. War ends the values and traditions that produce such treasures. Nothing is maintained. Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all the things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.

I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for—so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?

Excellent,” says Gray, rubbing his hands together, a gleam in his eye. “The last person to sing gets to buy the drinks.” Ivy grins wide. “You’re on, Cupcake. I’m going to sing the house down.” We all pause, our gazes darting back and forth as a certain sense of terror falls over the table. Ivy sees us and slaps her palm onto the table. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. I know what you twats are thinking! If I suck at dancing, I’ll suck at singing? Well, I don’t. I’m awesome.” Awkward silence ensues, and she snorts. “What? You think I don’t know I suck at dancing? I just don’t give a shit.” She glares at Gray, though there really isn’t any anger in the look. “So you can stop dancing like an ass now.” A strangled sound leaves him. “You knew?” “Of course.” She tosses a lock of her hair over her shoulder. “You’re too coordinated on the field, and you kind of forget to suck when you do those victory dances.” He gapes at her for a long second, then gives a bark of laughter. “I fucking love you, Special Sauce.” With that, he hauls Ivy into his lap and kisses her. Fi, however, finally snaps out of the trance she’s been in since Ivy confessed. “You sneaky shithead,” she shouts over the music. “All these years I’ve been covering for your craptacular dancing, and you knew!” She shakes a fist. “I swear to God, Ivy Weed…” “Oh, please,” Ivy counters. “You pretend you suck at baking so you don’t have to cook for family holidays.” Fi sniffs, looking guilty as hell. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ivy leans in, her eyes narrowed. “Midnight cookie baking ring a bell, Tink?” Fi’s cheeks flush, and she studies her nails with undue interest while muttering something about traitor sisters under her breath. “Those are for PMS cravings and nothing more. I was baking under duress.

Homeschooling can transform your family relationships if you build a calm, peaceful, loving home; every minute you spend together will be more precious than the most brilliant diamond. As far as the benefits of homeschooling goes, this is among the most unexpected and most valuable.

Wanting All Husband, it's fine the way your mind performs Like a circus, sharp As a sword somebody has To swallow, rough as a bear, Complicated as a family of jugglers, Brave as a sequined trapeze Artist, the only boy I ever met Who could beat me in argument Was why I married you, isn't it, And you have beaten me, I've beaten you, We are old polished hands. Or was it your body, I forget, maybe I foresaw the thousands on thousands Of times we have made love Together, mostly meat And potatoes love, but sometimes Higher than wine, Better than medicine. How lately you bite, you baby, How angels record and number Each gesture, and sketch Our spinal columns like professionals. Husband, it's fine how we cook Dinners together while drinking, How we get drunk, how We gossip, work at our desks, dig in the garden, Go to the movies, tell The children to clear the bloody table, How we fit like puzzle pieces. The mind and body satisfy Like windows and furniture in a house. The windows are large, the furniture solid. What more do I want then, why Do I prowl the basement, why Do I reach for your inside Self as you shut it Like a trunkful of treasures? Wait, I cry, as the lid slams on my fingers.

In Vietnamese hoa means 'flower' and the first thing we noticed on the menu was lau hoa, flower hotpot. This was where we were meant to be. Stunning fresh blossoms of squash, daylilies, white so dua flowers, lotus stems and yellow velvetleaf buds made up the floral ingredients in our flower hotpot. All of these were cooked together in a light pineapple soup base that included chunks of salmon. The restaurant's brochure explained why the name had been chosen: 'Chi Hoa, which means "flowers", is a common name of many Vietnamese women who are sophisticated, caring and always bring great love into every meal they cook for their family.

Vary what the child writes in the home: for example, helping to compose a shopping list, writing and rewriting a favourite family story together, writing a recipe to cook together later, keeping a diary, writing in a photo album that records family experiences, poetry, imaginative or personal stories, and writing jokes and cartoons.

December 25, 4:30 p.m. Dear America, It’s been seven hours since you left. Twice now I’ve started to go to your room to ask how you liked your presents and then remembered you weren’t here. I’ve gotten so used to you, it’s strange that you aren’t around, drifting down the halls. I’ve nearly called a few times, but I don’t want to seem possessive. I don’t want you to feel like I’m a cage to you. I remember how you said the palace was just that the first night you came here. I think, over time, you’ve felt freer, and I’d hate to ruin that freedom, I’m going to have to distract myself until you come back. I decided to sit and write to you, hoping maybe it would feel like I was talking to you. It sort of does, I can imagine you sitting here, smiling at my idea, maybe shaking your head at me as if to say I’m being silly. You do that sometimes, did you know? I like that expression on you. You’re the only person who wears it in a way that doesn’t come across like you think I’m completely hopeless. You smile at my idiosyncrasies, accept that they exist, and continue to be my friend. And, in seven short hours, I’ve started to miss that. I’ve wonder what you’ve done in that time. I’m betting by now you’ve flown across the country, made it to your home, and are safe. I hope you are safe. I can’t imagine what a comfort you must be to your family right now. The lovely daughter has finally returned! I keep trying to picture you home. I remember you telling me it was small, that you had a tree house, and that your garage was where you father and sister did all their work. Beyond that I’ve had to resort to my imagination. I imagine you curled up in a hug with you sister or kicking around a ball with your little brother. I remember that, you know? That you said he liked to play ball. I tried to imagine walking into your house with you. I would have liked that, to see you where you grew up. I would love to see you brother run around or be embraced by your mother. I think it would be comforting to sense the presence of people near you, floorboards creaking and doors shutting. I would have liked to sit in one part of the house and still probably be able to smell the kitchen. I’ve always imagined that real homes are full of the aromas of whatever’s being cooked. I wouldn’t do a scrap of work. Nothing having to do with armies or budgets or negotiations. I’d sit with you, maybe try to work on my photography while you played the piano. We’d be Fives together, like you said. I could join your family for dinner, talking over one another in a collection of conversations instead of whispering and waiting our turns. And maybe I’d sleep in a spare bed or on the couch. I’d sleep on the floor beside you if you’d let me. I think about that sometimes. Falling asleep next to you, I mean, like we did in the safe room. It was nice to hear your breaths as they came and went, something quiet and close keeping me from feeling so alone. This letter has gotten foolish, and I think you know how I detest looking like a fool. But still I do. For you. Maxon

Can you imagine how different things would be if our families hated each other? If they were feuding like the First Methodists and the Cavalry Baptists?” “I bet it’d be a whole lot less complicated, to tell you the truth. Heck, we probably would’ve already run off together or something by now.” “Probably so,” I say, a smile tugging at my lips.

That time period is clearly a season of holidays. A holiday season. No matter what faith you belong to or what tradition you follow, everyone is partying. You’re shopping, you’re cooking, you’re getting together with family, you’re eating food that’s bad for you, you’re eating more food that’s bad for you, and of course you’re eating food that’s bad for you.

We always ate with gusto...It would have offended the cook if we had nibbled or picked...Our mothers and zie [aunties] didn't inquire as to the states of our bellies; they just put the food on our plates. 'You only ask sick people if they're hungry,' my mother said. 'Everyone else must eat, eat!' But when Italians say 'Mangia! Mangia!' they're not just talking about food. They're trying to get you to stay with them, to sit by them at the table for as long as possible. The meals that my family ate together- the many courses, the time in between at the table or on the mountain by the sea, the hours spent talking loudly and passionately and unyieldingly and laughing hysterically the way Neapolitans do- were designed to prolong our time together; the food was, of course, meant to nourish us, but it was also meant to satisfy, in some deeper way, our endless hunger for one another.

Many of the silliest ambiguities in the Internet memes come from newspaper headlines and magazine tag lines precisely because they have been stripped of all punctuation. Two of my favorites are MAN EATING PIRANHA MISTAKENLY SOLD AS PET FISH and RACHAEL RAY FINDS INSPIRATION IN COOKING HER FAMILY AND HER DOG. The first is missing the hyphen that bolts together the pieces of the compound word that was supposed to remind readers of the problem with piranhas, man-eating. The second is missing the commas that delimit the phrases making up the list of inspirations: cooking, her family, and her dog.

I have no way to tell him of the cacophonous emotions jangling within me - to feel wired for others yet irrelevant; to need community but equally to be unable to find one; that cleaning, cooking, and caring for my family is a pleasure and a blessing, but it isn't the same as feeling connected to them; to do things for others isn't the same as being with them; that watching television side by side isn't always "spending an evening together." And that each year I feel gravity pull at my face, my breasts, my soul, and I wonder... I wonder what within me is compelling enough that anyone would stay with me.

Strong, good smells clash with each other, garlic against cinnamon, savory against sweet. Two dressings, Ma's traditional corn bread version as well as the stuffing she made last year for a change of pace, a buttery version with cherries and sausage and hazelnuts. The herb-brined turkey, probably larger than we need, and a challenge to manhandle into and out of the refrigerator. A deep dish of creamy, smooth mashed potatoes, riced and dried to make them thirsty, then plumped back up with warmed cream and butter. For dessert, a mocha cake I came up with one day. In the batter is barely sweetened chocolate and dark, strong coffee. The layers are sealed together with more chocolate, warmed up with a hint of ancho powder.

What is word for good together living? Nobody shits in the well?" I laughed. "Civilization?" He nodded, splaying his fingers: amusement. "Yes," he said. "Speaking with hands is civilization." "But smiling is natural," I protested. "Everyone smiles." "Natural is not civilization," Tempi said. "Cooking meat is civilization. Washing off stink is civilization." "So in Ademre you always smile with hands?" I wished I knew the gesture for dismay. "No. Smiling with face good with family. Good with some friend." "Why only family?" Tempi repeated his thumb-on-collarbone gesture again. "When you make this." He pressed his palm to the side of his face and blew air into it, making a great flatulent noise. "That is natural, but you do not make it near others. Rude. With family..." He shrugged. Amusement. "...civilization not important. More natural with family.

So,” John said, “I’ll meet you at your place at eight, and we can walk over together?” “What? For what?” “The vigil.” “I’m not going to that.” I tried to ignore his surprise, his dogged faith. “Of course you are.” “I don’t know this person.” John continued to stand there, arms hanging down. The knife skidded so much I lost my grip and had to pick it up again. “It could’ve been you,” he said finally. “No,” I said, chopping bluntly, breaking more than slicing the lettuce, “it couldn’t. I’ve worked my whole life so that it couldn’t be me.” White flash of a face. Where did they go, those boys, after they left us behind? “Last night,” John began. He paused, still looking wounded. “You were so happy.” I gathered the lettuce into a bin and held it against my stomach like a barrier. “If it had been me, it would’ve been your fault.” John reeled as though I’d struck him. “You’re a coward,” he said. “You’ve worked your whole life because you’re a coward.” “What do you know? What do you know about anything?” His family moved for him. The hormones. The surgery he was allowed to accept or reject. I waved my arm around the kitchen, at the stunned cooks watching us. “Nobody has to know about you! You can blend in whenever you want!” “You honestly believe that? You think my life’s been easy?” “Yes, I think it’s been fucking easy!” I screamed. “They don’t know! I didn’t know! I wish I still didn’t know!” I tried to shove past him. He touched my back. I remembered Humphrey Bogart’s hand, I remembered dancing, I remembered the gown twirling, I remembered the boy who complimented my ass, I remembered being told I was beautiful. I remembered the woman staring back at me in the Métro windows, her wink. I tried to pull away. John embraced me with my arms pinned to my sides, the lettuce bin between us, its raw, wet smell pushed toward our faces. In full view of the entire kitchen, he kissed me. A kiss that made me think of the woefully few people I had kissed in my life. A kiss that reminded me I had never been loved. A kiss that said I could not be John unless I risked being Dana.   My

pick Maddy and Josh up from Mum’s house no later than six each day, and we’re always home around ten minutes later. I thought that was enough to qualify me as a good mother, a parent who is there for her children. Yet I feel a niggle deep down that tells me he’s right. Once I get through the door each evening, I simply set my laptop up on the kitchen counter and carry on working. I often cook the children’s tea around updating the InsideOut4Kids website. The reality is, I’m there… but I’m not really there. Not all of me. For the first time, I consider the echoes of my own childhood, when Mum spent so much time in her bedroom. I can’t remember the last time we all sat down and ate together, or watched TV as a family. We often stay in different rooms until it’s time for bed. And the outings to the park or the cinema we used to plan and enjoy at weekends? I seriously can’t remember the last time we did that. I thought I was being Superwoman, and it turns out I’m struggling to tick all the boxes like any other mere mortal. The realisation renders me speechless, and it doesn’t take Tom long to

I cooked with so many of the greats: Tom Colicchio, Eric Ripert, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz. Rick Bayless taught me not one but two amazing mole sauces, the whole time bemoaning that he never seemed to know what to cook for his teenage daughter. Jose Andres made me a classic Spanish tortilla, shocking me with the sheer volume of viridian olive oil he put into that simple dish of potatoes, onions, and eggs. Graham Elliot Bowles and I made gourmet Jell-O shots together, and ate leftover cheddar risotto with Cheez-Its crumbled on top right out of the pan. Lucky for me, Maria still includes me in special evenings like this, usually giving me the option of joining the guests at table, or helping in the kitchen. I always choose the kitchen, because passing up the opportunity to see these chefs in action is something only an idiot would do. Susan Spicer flew up from New Orleans shortly after the BP oil spill to do an extraordinary menu of all Gulf seafood for a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner Maria hosted to help the families of Gulf fishermen. Local geniuses Gil Langlois and Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard joined forces with Gale Gand for a seven-course dinner none of us will ever forget, due in no small part to Gil's hoisin oxtail with smoked Gouda mac 'n' cheese, Stephanie's roasted cauliflower with pine nuts and light-as-air chickpea fritters, and Gale's honey panna cotta with rhubarb compote and insane little chocolate cookies. Stephanie and I bonded over hair products, since we have the same thick brown curls with a tendency to frizz, and the general dumbness of boys, and ended up giggling over glasses of bourbon till nearly two in the morning. She is even more awesome, funny, sweet, and genuine in person than she was on her rock-star winning season on Bravo. Plus, her food is spectacular all day. I sort of wish she would go into food television and steal me from Patrick. Allen Sternweiler did a game menu with all local proteins he had hunted himself, including a pheasant breast over caramelized brussels sprouts and mushrooms that melted in your mouth (despite the occasional bit of buckshot). Michelle Bernstein came up from Miami and taught me her white gazpacho, which I have since made a gajillion times, as it is probably one of the world's perfect foods.

I want you to want something for once. Something that nobody told you to want. I want. I do. Want things. Like what princess? I want something that will make this all worth it; I want the good stuff. I’m ready for the goddamn silver lining. I want to have sisters who live down the street, I want a family; I want a mother to call when I need to know the right temperature to cook a goddamn chicken. I want Sunday suppers and summer barbecues at lake houses. I want to stop second-guessing every tiny detail of every single day, every word that comes out of my mouth. I want to be brave. I want to jump without looking down all the time. I want to be able to watch a TV show without seeing things that remind me about my sisters, about the could-have-been family. I want us to push tables together in restaurants so we all fit, I want to fill benches and rows of bleachers with us, I want the world to make room. I want to laugh too loud and make people wish they were us. I want them to feel it. Those perfect families, those perfect packages, those smug titles for everyone- mother father sister brother, step-this and half-that. They all have words for what they are. And we don’t. I want that.

The problem is, we don’t exercise that control. Under normal circumstances, our state of openness is left to psychological factors. Basically, we are programmed to open or close based upon our past experiences. Impressions from the past are still inside of us, and they get stimulated by different events. If they were negative impressions, we tend to close. If they were positive impressions, we tend to open. Let’s say you smell a certain scent that reminds you of what it was like when you were young and somebody was cooking dinner. How you react to this scent depends upon the impressions left by your past experiences. Did you enjoy having dinner with the family? Was the food good? If so, then the smell of that scent warms you and opens you. If it wasn’t so much fun eating together, or if you had to eat food you didn’t like, then you tighten up and close. It really is that sensitive. A smell can make you open or close, and so can seeing a car of a certain color, or even the type of shoes a person is wearing. We are programmed based upon our past impressions such that all kinds of things can cause us to open and close. If you pay attention, you will see it happen regularly throughout each day.

A grown woman tasting a spoonful of Georgia's Mousse au Citron at a late afternoon lunch, then suddenly standing and announcing that she needed to reconcile with her estranged sister before it was too late. She'd hastened away, leaving her coat, one hundred euros to pay the bill, and the mostly uneaten mousse at the table. After devouring Georgia's beet and goat cheese tart one bitter winter evening, an American man with an engagement ring nestled on top of a slice of Georgia's cherry clafoutis looked across the table at his girlfriend and said later that he could suddenly see clearly that she was not the love of his life. He'd hastened back to the kitchen to remove the ring from the dessert where it was waiting to be served at the right moment. They left the restaurant with the ring in his pocket and his girlfriend in tears. There had been others. Many others, now that she thought of it. It had been a bit of a joke among the kitchen staff, that Georgia's dishes could cause more breakups and engagements and family feuds and reconciliations than the restaurant had ever seen. She'd never really put it all together before, but now that she thought of it... "I think my cooking might give people clarity somehow," Georgia said in surprise.

The biggest fear for homeschooled children is that they will be unable to relate to their peers, will not have friends, or that they will otherwise be unable to interact with people in a normal way. Consider this: How many of your daily interactions with people are solely with people of your own birth year?  We’re not considering interactions with people who are a year or two older or a year or two younger, but specifically people who were born within a few months of your birthday. In society, it would be very odd to section people at work by their birth year and allow you to interact only with persons your same age. This artificial constraint would limit your understanding of people and society across a broader range of ages. In traditional schools, children are placed in grades artificially constrained by the child’s birth date and an arbitrary cut-off day on a school calendar. Every student is taught the same thing as everyone else of the same age primarily because it is a convenient way to manage a large number of students. Students are not grouped that way because there is any inherent special socialization that occurs when grouping children in such a manner. Sectioning off children into narrow bands of same-age peers does not make them better able to interact with society at large. In fact, sectioning off children in this way does just the opposite—it restricts their ability to practice interacting with a wide variety of people. So why do we worry about homeschooled children’s socialization?  The erroneous assumption is that the child will be homeschooled and will be at home, schooling in the house, all day every day, with no interactions with other people. Unless a family is remotely located in a desolate place away from any form of civilization, social isolation is highly unlikely. Every homeschooling family I know involves their children in daily life—going to the grocery store or the bank, running errands, volunteering in the community, or participating in sports, arts, or community classes. Within the homeschooled community, sports, arts, drama, co-op classes, etc., are usually sectioned by elementary, pre-teen, and teen groupings. This allows students to interact with a wider range of children, and the interactions usually enhance a child’s ability to interact well with a wider age-range of students. Additionally, being out in the community provides many opportunities for children to interact with people of all ages. When homeschooling groups plan field trips, there are sometimes constraints on the age range, depending upon the destination, but many times the trip is open to children of all ages. As an example, when our group went on a field trip to the Federal Reserve Bank, all ages of children attended. The tour and information were of interest to all of the children in one way or another. After the tour, our group dined at a nearby food court. The parents sat together to chat and the children all sat with each other, with kids of all ages talking and having fun with each other. When interacting with society, exposure to a wider variety of people makes for better overall socialization. Many homeschooling groups also have park days, game days, or play days that allow all of the children in the homeschooled community to come together and play. Usually such social opportunities last for two, three, or four hours. Our group used to have Friday afternoon “Park Day.”  After our morning studies, we would pack a picnic lunch, drive to the park, and spend the rest of the afternoon letting the kids run and play. Older kids would organize games and play with younger kids, which let them practice great leadership skills. The younger kids truly looked up to and enjoyed being included in games with the older kids.

What if I took the picture books that my grandmother made and snapped open the rings in every binder, let the plastic pages spill out onto the floor, and then attacked them with my scissors? Those books, pasted together by my grandmother, year after year, replaced the cognitive exercise of memory for me. Sitting on a section of wall-to-wall carpeting, drinking the bubbling red birch beer from a tinted brown glass, I reestablished my relationships with the members of my family. This is where I put it all together and perpetuated the lies. Not malicious lies, but lies with so many years to develop that we forgot the truth because nobody rehearsed it. When Mark was sentence to sixty days in a twelve-step rehab program in 1991, he wrote an inventory of his experiences with drugs and alcohol that filled a whole notebook, and then he gave it to us to read, It was in those pages that I learned he had once tapped the powder out of horse tranquilizer capsules, melted it down, and shot it into his veins for a high that lasted fourteen days. My God, I thought, Oh my God. This is Mark's story? Okay, now put the cooked-down shot-up horse tranquilizer against the pictures in the album. What do you get? Collage. Dry made wet and introduced into the body. Cut cut cut. It's not so radical.

I take a cue from the list I made on my first night here alone and make soup. I chop vegetables and boil pasta, pour a carton of chicken stock into a pot. Once I’ve combined all the ingredients and it’s time to wait while they cook, I turn to the second essay in the solitude book, but my mind is too full of different versions of the last summer’s story. There’s one where I fail him. Where I stop coming home so he stops making dinner, and I’m not around to see how much he needs me. And then there’s one where he fails me. Where I feel it—that he doesn’t want me there, that I’m in the way. So I stay away, for him and for me. So that I never face his rejection. So that I get to pretend I’m the most important thing to him, the way he is to me. Because if we have any sense of self-preservation, we do the best with what we’re given. I was given cakes and cookies and rides to school. I was given songs and dinners at a table with brass candlesticks. I was given a man with a sensitive heart and a devious sense of humor and enough skill at cards to win me a year of private college—tuition and room and board—and I took all of those good things and told myself they made us special. Told myself they meant we were a family the way Mabel and Ana and Javier were, told myself that we weren’t missing anything. We were masters of collusion, Gramps and I. In that, at least, we were together.

Fish at breakfast is sometimes himono (semi-dried fish, intensely flavored and chewy, the Japanese equivalent of a breakfast of kippered herring or smoked salmon) and sometimes a small fillet of rich, well-salted broiled fish. Japanese cooks are expert at cutting and preparing fish with nothing but salt and high heat to produce deep flavor and a variety of textures: a little crispy over here, melting and juicy there. Some of this is technique and some is the result of a turbo-charged supply chain that scoops small, flavorful fish out of the ocean and deposits them on breakfast tables with only the briefest pause at Tsukiji fish market and a salt cure in the kitchen. By now, I've finished my fish and am drinking miso soup. Where you find a bowl of rice, miso shiru is likely lurking somewhere nearby. It is most often just like the soup you've had at the beginning of a sushi meal in the West, with wakame seaweed and bits of tofu, but Iris and I were always excited when our soup bowls were filled with the shells of tiny shijimi clams. Clams and miso are one of those predestined culinary combos- what clams and chorizo are to Spain, clams and miso are to Japan. Shijimi clams are fingernail-sized, and they are eaten for the briny essence they release into the broth, not for what Mario Batali has called "the little bit of snot" in the shell. Miso-clam broth is among the most complex soup bases you'll ever taste, but it comes together in minutes, not the hours of simmering and skimming involved in making European stocks. As Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explain in their book Japanese Hot Pots, this is because so many fermented Japanese ingredients are, in a sense, already "cooked" through beneficial bacterial and fungal actions. Japanese food has a reputation for crossing the line from subtlety into blandness, but a good miso-clam soup is an umami bomb that begins with dashi made from kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes) or niboshi (a school of tiny dried sardines), adds rich miso pressed through a strainer for smoothness, and is then enriched with the salty clam essence.

We had a second date that night, then a third, and then a fourth. And after each date, my new romance novel protagonist called me, just to seal the date with a sweet word. For date five, he invited me to his house on the ranch. We were clearly on some kind of a roll, and now he wanted me to see where he lived. I was in no position to say no. Since I knew his ranch was somewhat remote and likely didn’t have many restaurants nearby, I offered to bring groceries and cook him dinner. I agonized for hours over what I could possibly cook for this strapping new man in my life; clearly, no mediocre cuisine would do. I reviewed all the dishes in my sophisticated, city-girl arsenal, many of which I’d picked up during my years in Los Angeles. I finally settled on a non-vegetarian winner: Linguine with Clam Sauce--a favorite from our family vacations in Hilton Head. I made the delicious, aromatic masterpiece of butter, garlic, clams, lemon, wine, and cream in Marlboro Man’s kitchen in the country, which was lined with old pine cabinetry. And as I stood there, sipping some of the leftover white wine and admiring the fruits of my culinary labor, I was utterly confident it would be a hit. I had no idea who I was dealing with. I had no idea that this fourth-generation cattle rancher doesn’t eat minced-up little clams, let alone minced-up little clams bathed in wine and cream and tossed with long, unwieldy noodles that are difficult to negotiate. Still, he ate it. And lucky for him, his phone rang when he was more than halfway through our meal together. He’d been expecting an important call, he said, and excused himself for a good ten minutes. I didn’t want him to go away hungry--big, strong rancher and all--so when I sensed he was close to getting off the phone, I took his plate to the stove and heaped another steaming pile of fishy noodles onto his plate. And when Marlboro Man returned to the table he smiled politely, sat down, and polished off over half of his second helping before finally pushing away from the table and announcing, “Boy, am I stuffed!” I didn’t realize at the time just how romantic a gesture that had been.

As Japan recovered from the post-war depression, okonomiyaki became the cornerstone of Hiroshima's nascent restaurant culture. And with new variables- noodles, protein, fishy powders- added to the equation, it became an increasingly fungible concept. Half a century later it still defies easy description. Okonomi means "whatever you like," yaki means "grill," but smashed together they do little to paint a clear picture. Invariably, writers, cooks, and oko officials revert to analogies: some call it a cabbage crepe; others a savory pancake or an omelet. Guidebooks, unhelpfully, refer to it as Japanese pizza, though okonomiyaki looks and tastes nothing like pizza. Otafuku, for its part, does little to clarify the situation, comparing okonomiyaki in turn to Turkish pide, Indian chapati, and Mexican tacos. There are two overarching categories of okonomiyaki Hiroshima style, with a layer of noodles and a heavy cabbage presence, and Osaka or Kansai style, made with a base of eggs, flour, dashi, and grated nagaimo, sticky mountain yam. More than the ingredients themselves, the difference lies in the structure: whereas okonomiyaki in Hiroshima is carefully layered, a savory circle with five or six distinct layers, the ingredients in Osaka-style okonomiyaki are mixed together before cooking. The latter is so simple to cook that many restaurants let you do it yourself on table side teppans. Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is complicated enough that even the cooks who dedicate their lives to its construction still don't get it right most of the time. (Some people consider monjayaki, a runny mass of meat and vegetables popularized in Tokyo's Tsukishima district, to be part of the okonomiyaki family, but if so, it's no more than a distant cousin.) Otafuku entered the picture in 1938 as a rice vinegar manufacturer. Their original factory near Yokogawa Station burned down in the nuclear attack, but in 1946 they started making vinegar again. In 1950 Otafuku began production of Worcestershire sauce, but local cooks complained that it was too spicy and too thin, that it didn't cling to okonomiyaki, which was becoming the nutritional staple of Hiroshima life. So Otafuku used fruit- originally orange and peach, later Middle Eastern dates- to thicken and sweeten the sauce, and added the now-iconic Otafuku label with the six virtues that the chubby-cheeked lady of Otafuku, a traditional character from Japanese folklore, is supposed to represent, including a little nose for modesty, big ears for good listening, and a large forehead for wisdom.

It doesn’t feel right. Not now.” “But you’re the same, Jemma. You haven’t changed. This is what you want, remember?” “See, that’s where you’re wrong. I have changed. And”--I shake my head--“I don’t even know what I want anymore.” He opens his mouth as if he’s about to say something, but closes it just as quickly. A muscle in his haw flexes as he eyes me sharply, his brow furrowed. “I thought you were stronger than this,” he says at last. “Braver.” I start to protest, but he cuts me off. “When I get home, I’m going to e-mail you these video files. I don’t know anything about making films, but if you need any help, well…” He shrugs. “You know my number.” With that, he turns and walks away. I leap to the ground. “Ryder, wait!” He stops and turns to face me. “Yeah?” “I…about Patrick. And then…you and me. I feel awful about it. Things were so crazy during the storm, like it wasn’t real life or something.” I take a deep, gulping breath, my cheeks burning now. “I don’t want you think that I’m, you know, some kind of--” “Just stop right there.” He holds out one hand. “I don’t think anything like that, okay? It was…” He trails off, shaking his head. “Shit, Jemma. I’m not going to lie to you. It was nice. I’m glad I kissed you. I’m pretty sure I’ve been wanting to for…well, a long time now.” “You did a pretty good job hiding it, that’s for sure.” “It’s just that…well, I’ve had to listen to seventeen years’ worth of how you’re the perfect girl for me. And goddamn, Jem. My mom already controls enough in my life. What food I eat. What clothes I wear. Hell, even my underwear. You wouldn’t believe the fight she put up a few years back when I wanted to switch to boxer briefs instead of regular boxers.” I swallow hard, remembering the sight of him wearing the underwear in question. Yeah, I’m glad he won that particular battle. “Anyway, if my parents want it for me, it must be wrong. So I convinced myself that you were wrong for me. You had to be.” His gaze sweeps across my face, and I swear I feel it linger on my lips. “No matter what I felt every single time I looked at you.” Oh my God. I did the exact same thing--thinking he had to be wrong for me just because Mama insisted we were a perfect match. Now I don’t know what to think. What to feel. What’s real and what’s a trying-to-prove-something fabrication. But Ryder…he gets it. He’s lived it too. I let out a sigh. “Can you imagine how different things would be if our families hated each other? If they were feuding like the First Methodists and the Cavalry Baptists?” “I bet it’d be a whole lot less complicated, to tell you the truth. Heck, we probably would’ve already run off together or something by now.” “Probably so,” I say, a smile tugging at my lips.

Boy Lost Picture a sunset in a small port town by the sea. Two teenaged boys sitting on the docks watching the ships as they fly across the water. One reaches out and takes the other’s hand. In this brush of skin for skin, a thousand unspoken promises erupt between them, and both are determined to keep them. This is what youth is. The sheer belief that you will be able to keep every promise you made to someone else. That you will be able to love someone into a forever when you do not even understand what forever means. An evening spent in the headiness of love, they go back to their respective homes. One boy helps his mother with cooking and cleaning and looking after his little sister. His father is a good man, a sailor who brings home with him meagre wages, but a heart full of love and a quicksilver tongue that tells stories of faraway lands to enthral them all. But this boy, despite his blessings, is not happy. He may have been blessed with a loving family, but that faraway look is made of unrest and wanderlust, something about him says fae, changeling, wearing the skin of a boy who was always destined to fly, to leave.   The other boy returns home to a father who drinks and a mother who works so hard that she is never there. He is the unwanted creature in this home, a beating waiting for him at every corner. His father’s temper is a beast so powerful that a boy made of paper bones barely held together cannot fight him. He hides in his room. He lives for a boy at sunset, hope made into a human being. Now picture this. This boy of paper bones alone at the docks the next sunset. And this boy alone on the docks again on a rainy day. And this boy alone on the docks every day after, waiting for someone who promised him forevers he never intended to keep. This boy becoming a man, a heart wounded so young in youth that it never quite healed right. Imagine him becoming a sailor, searching land after land for a boy he once loved, thinking he was hurt, or stolen, just needing to know what happened to him. Now see him finally finding out that the boy he loved in his boyhood ran away to a magical land where he never grew up. That without a second glance, he just forgot every promise of forever. Imagine his rage, that ancient pain turning to a terrible anger and escaping from the forgotten attic of his mangled heart. Think of what happens when immense love turns into immense hate. An anger so intense it cannot be controlled. What he would give up to avenge the boy he once was, paper-boned, standing on the docks, broken without a single person to love him, simply all alone. A hand is a small price to pay for a magical ship that will take him to Neverland, a place that lives on a star. Becoming a villain called Captain Hook is a small exchange to show Peter Pan that you cannot throw away love and think you will get away unscarred.

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

A friend named Nate boarded with them and he was the cook for the family. He was a very interesting soul. Upon introduction he said he learned that man and earth were 2/3 water and composed of similar layers of vitamins and minerals. So he prepared very delicious meals which contained all of the vitamins needed for a healthy existence. He professed that, Beautiful food builds… Beautiful bodies… Beautiful thoughts build… Beautiful souls all elements working together develop… Beautiful minds for a higher purpose.

Okonomiyaki, meanwhile, is to American pancakes what Japanese wrestling is to American wrestling. The basic batter contains flour and water, grated nagaimo (that big slimy yam again), eggs, and diced cabbage. You then augment this base by ordering little bits and nibbles a la carte to be added to the batter. We could not figure out the ordering system, but we listed off ingredients we liked and ended up with two pancakes' worth of batter teeming with squid, octopus, sliced negi, and pickled ginger. The waiter dropped off a big bowl of unmixed pancake fixings and a couple of spatulas and assumed we would know how to do the rest. Every time we did something wrong, he sucked in his breath (a very common sound in Japan, at least in my presence) and intervened. Every time we did something right, he gave the thumbs-up and a Fonzie-like grunt of approval. Now that I've cooked two okonomiyaki and am certified by the Vera Okonomiyaki Napoletana Association, I can tell you how it's done. If your okonomiyaki has a large featured ingredient like strips of pork belly, set it aside to go on top; don't mix it in. Stir everything else together really well. Pour some oil onto the griddle and smooth it out into a thin film with a spatula. Dump the batter onto the griddle and shape it into a pancake about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. If you have pork strips, lay them over the top now like you're making bacon-wrapped meatloaf. Now wait. And wait. And wait. If little bits of egg seep out around the edge of your pancake, coax them back in. It takes at least five minutes to cook the first side of an okonomiyaki. Maybe ten. Maybe thirty. If you're not hungry enough to drink a tureen of raw batter, it's not ready. Finally, when it's brown on the bottom, slide two spatulas underneath and flip with confidence. Now wait again. When the center is set and the meat is crispy, cut it into wedges and serve with okonomiyaki sauce, mayo, nori, and fish flakes. If you haven't had okonomiyaki sauce, it's a lot like takoyaki sauce. Sorry, just kidding around. It's a lot like tonkatsu sauce.

After finishing their main course and dessert, she and Cady prepared her extra dish. Sophia had decided to make the girls' favorite dinner- beef tenderloin with peppercorn sauce. Soon enough they were plating and rushing back and forth to the huge banquet table set up in the courtyard. Pouring wine and adjusting garnishes and offering smiles to the judges. The ambience of this meal was Sophia's idea of romance. The table was draped with ivory linen and topped with glass jars of flowers. Bouquets of Rosa rugosa and Queen Anne's lace were nestled among votives and bottles of wine. The local glassblower had provided an assortment of pottery dishes and hand-blown goblets. Strands of white lights dangled from the surrounding trees. She and Elliott and the girls plated together, having reached some sort of exhausted Zen state. Emilia scooped the risotto, Elliott placed the salmon on top, Sophia added the three tiny sides shaped with a round cookie cutter. Elliott drizzled his sauce onto the final product. He brushed his shoulder against Sophia each time, needing that physical connection. The plates looked exquisite, artistic. Perfect. She tried to ignore the overwhelming stress of the moment and focus on the food. Cady and Emilia added garnishes- fresh herbs and flowers. And Cady had a whole sheet of candied violets ready to sprinkle on their dessert. It made Elliott laugh and tease them all about being a family of garden sprites. When they finally got to the head of the table and faced a sea of critics, Sophia felt confident about their choices. They'd prepared a beautiful meal that successfully showcased Elliott's love for Scottish tradition, local Vermont products, and the Brown family's love of fresh vegetables and herbs. All the components meshed together into one cohesive meal.

After several hours of preparing, cooking, eating, and laughing together, the kitchen was now lit by the glow of candlelight, and the entire house filled with the glorious aroma of freshly roasted heritage turkey. While Dylan had readied the bird with a few sprigs of chopped rosemary, ground black peppercorn, and a splash of maple syrup, Grace and Carter gathered fall beans and bush squash and a few little sugar pie pumpkins, and cooked the vegetables along with the sweet corn that Carter had brought home.

You’re shopping, you’re cooking, you’re getting together with family, you’re eating food that’s bad for you, you’re eating more food that’s bad for you, and of course you’re eating food that’s bad for you. Holidays are also an opportunity for

I’ll write the recipe down for you.” “I’ll just screw it up, anyway.” Gram laughed. “All you do is mix the ingredients together, pour it in a bag with the salmon and half an hour later give it to Sean to throw on the grill. He cooked the salmon to perfection tonight.” Of course he did. As he’d told her earlier, she had nothing to worry about because the Y chromosome came with an innate ability to master the barbecue grill. “The salad was good, too,” Sean said. “Thanks,” Emma muttered. “Even I can’t screw up shredding lettuce.” The man looked incredibly relaxed for somebody who'd probably been raked over the coals by his aunt and was now relaxing with two women he barely knew. She, on the other hand, felt as if she was detoxing. Jumpy. Twitching. A trickle of sweat at the small of her back. Sean stood and started gathering dishes, but held out a hand when Emma started to get up. “You ladies sit and visit. I’ll take care of the cleanup.” Once he was inside, Gram smiled and raised her eyebrows. “He does dishes, too? No wonder you snapped him up.” It was tempting to point out a few of his less attractive traits, like the fact that he was a sexist baboon who wouldn’t let her drive. But he was doing a good job of convincing Gram he was Emma’s Prince Charming, which was the whole point, so she bit back her annoyance with the Saint Sean routine. “He’s a keeper.

Black Bean Burgers My husband and I have been married for many years, and I’d say as marriages go, ours is pretty darn good. We have four kids, work pretty hard, and spend a lot of time together, which is just fine with us since we really like each other and all that. Now, I will confess that there has been one steady source of marital conflict through the years, and that is the fact that I gosh darn love a good meatless burger. I can’t really explain it. It must be a throwback to my vegetarian days. I don’t know…I just love them. I’ll never, ever forget the time, very early in our marriage, that Ladd and I went out to eat and I ordered--gasp--a veggie burger from the menu. The look on his face--it is etched in my memory. From where he stood, he didn’t even know burgers without meat existed. In his experience, a burger was meat, much like rain was water. It sent shockwaves through his being, and rattled the very foundation of our marriage. Over the years, I’ve tried to help my beloved cattle rancher husband understand my position: that my love of meatless burgers has no hidden meaning. It doesn’t mean I don’t also love big, beefy burgers. It doesn’t mean I’m going to start making the family drink shots of wheatgrass juice every morning. I just like the taste of weird, mushy concoctions meant to resemble hamburger patties. Call me wacky! I love you, Ladd. But I also love meatless burgers. And I know in my heart that those two things can coexist.

Sometimes I feel like there are two of me. One who is a good hija. She helps Mom cook. She does what she’s told. She gets perfect grades. She is going to be a nurse just like Mom. I think of the picture of me in my white First Communion dress. The other me is bold and queer. He has hair dyed red. He wraps himself in a trans flag. He doesn’t care what his family thinks. I don’t know who I am sometimes between the two of me or what it would look like for those two mes to come together.

I’ve spent a lot of my time alone, and I have learned to treat myself as if I were a family. I give myself dinner at night. I give myself breakfast in the morning. I like the process of deciding what to eat and putting it together and seeing how it works, and I like to experiment, and I like to eat. There’s nothing lonelier than some guy alone in the kitchen eating Chinese food out of the carton. “But cooking yourself a meal,” Susan said, “and sitting down to eat it with the table set, and maybe a fire in the fireplace . . .” “And a ball game on . . .” “And a half bottle of wine, perhaps.” I nodded. Susan smiled, the way she does when her face seems to get brighter. “You are the most self-sufficient man I have ever known,” she said.

Dad got a serious look on his face. “Well, I am just going to have to go down to that pond and deal with it, then aren't I? Water zombie or not, no one messes with my kids.”  Mom smiled. She loved when Dad was a fierce protector. “Thank you dear,” she said and kissed him on the cheek.  Dad nodded at her. “Right after my meat is done cooking.”  “What!?” Mom and Kate said together, both standing in front of him with hands on their hips.  Dad looked back. “It’s barbecue! I can't overcook it!”  Jack fell to the floor he was laughing so hard.

The classroom was too tidy. I missed the texture of the weather, the smell of cooking, the jostle of shoulders and elbows on a crowded sidewalk. In the congregation, by contrast, everything was going on at once, random, unscheduled, accompanied too much of the time by undisciplined and trivializing small talk. Babies born squalling, people dying neglected, and in between the parenthesis of birth and death, lifetimes of ambiguity: adolescents making an unholy mess of growing up and their parents muddling through as guilty bystanders. Also, of course, heroic holiness, stunningly beautiful prayers, sacrificial love surfacing from the tangled emotions in a difficult family, a song in the night, glimpses of glory, the sullen betrayal of a bored spouse quietly redeemed from years of self-imprisoned self-worship by forgiveness and grace: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And all of this mixed together. In this world, sin was not a word defined in a lexicon. Salvation was not a reference traced down in a concordance. Every act of sin and every event of salvation involved a personal name in a grammar of imperatives and promises in a messy community of friends and neighbors, parents and grandparents, none of whom fit a stereotype.

Winnie and Big Leo Chao were serving scallion pancakes decades before you could find them outside of a home kitchen. Leo, thirty-five years ago, winning his first poker game against the owners of a local poultry farm, exchanged his chips for birds that Winnie transformed into the shining, chestnut-colored duck dishes of far-off cities. Dear Winnie, rolling out her bing the homemade way, two pats of dough together with a seal of oil in between, letting them rise to a steaming bubble in the piping pan. Leo, bargaining for hard-to-get ingredients; Winnie subbing wax beans for yard-long beans, plus home-growing the garlic greens, chives, and hot peppers you used to never find in Haven. Their garden giving off a glorious smell.

It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song - all of it cooked together in the color of my skin.

Lottie's cake is last. This one is layered three deep, impressive for a moist, snacking-style cake, which normally couldn't be stacked. The bottom layers are bound together by a thick cream cheese icing, while the top is coated with a thick streusel crumble held in place by a circle of decorative piping. "It's a layered blueberry buckle," Lottie says, looking at Betsy hopefully. "Now that is another unconventional choice from you," Betsy says, eyeing the streusel topping, an odd choice for a layer cake. A buckle is a humble sort of cake--- old-fashioned in its simplicity--- that she hasn't seen around in years. Nowadays most prefer a thick layer of icing, buttercream they can decorate, or the scraped edge of a naked cake. Something meant to impress on a table or in a photograph rather than just be eaten at a family dinner or on a picnic. Secretly it's kind of a relief to see such a normal person's cake given its due. "The decoration is lacking," Betsy tells her flatly, though the completely bare sides show an even sprinkling of blueberries, which is impressive. It can be difficult to keep berries from falling to the bottom of a cake, but these are evenly distributed throughout. The knife glides into the cake, which has a springy sort of give to it. She cleaves a slice away, leaving a small avalanche of streusel crumbs in its wake. The cake inside is plump and golden, studded with juicy blueberries. Betsy can tell before she even takes a bite that it has been cooked to perfection. The flavors hit her tongue and bring on a wave of nostalgia so strong that she has to steady herself against the table. It is heavenly, the sweet and sour of the blueberries wrapped in the soft vanilla-y cake. She is instantly transported back in time, back to her childhood. It is unquestionably the best cake of the bunch, simple and satisfying, the kind that if you were to bake it at home would leave you wanting more, taking secret trips to the kitchen to cut another slice.

Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven. The choreography of many people working in one kitchen is, by itself, a certain definition of family, after people have made their separate ways home to be together.

When a family of grandparents, the sons and wives, their grandsons who may also be married, live together, perhaps under the same roof and sharing the same hearth and kitchen, it is important that its members should be compatible to the greatest possible degree. Suppose a young man from a rural area went to agricultural college in Ludhiana and somehow met a medical student who, it may be adduced, came from a well-to-do urban family with servants who did the cooking and cleaning. They fall in love and marry. She gives up her training, as would normally be expected, to live with her husband’s family where she is expected to cook, clean, help on the farm and perhaps even lay a cow dung floor. This may be an extreme example but hopefully it demonstrates the importance of arranged marriages in an extended family culture and the sense of marrying within the occupational group. Even in a less contrasting situation a girl has to fit in with her mother-in-law who rules the kitchen, and with existing and therefore senior sisters-in-law.

The Romance Some couples only live together as roommates, which is bad. All the wife does is just cook, take care of the house etc, all the husband does is provide for the house, act like the boss of the house ask for sex whenever he feels like it. Some even only ask for sex from their wife when they feel like it's time to have another baby and women thought it is taboo to ask their husbands for sex when they feel horny, whereas, some are shy to do so. Hmmm!! In some Marriages, there is nothing like gisting, romancing, going on dates, attending events together, praying together, studying the word together apart from the general family retreat. This has led many women to the arms of strange men, although that is not an excuse to commit adultery. It was even recorded in the Scripture that Father Isaac caressed his beloved wife Rebekah. Spoil each other with romance. Write love letters to your spouse and put them in his or her pocket or handbag

While I was in Poland,’ she said, ‘I vowed to develop a less sentimental view of life, and if there is something I regret in my novel, it is that the material circumstances of the characters are so comfortable. It would be a more serious book, I believe, if that were not the case. Spending time with Olga,’ she said, ‘certain things came to light for me, as objects under water come to light when the water drains away. I realised that our whole sense of life as a romance – even our conception of love itself – was a vision in which material things played far too great a role, and that without those things we might find that certain feelings diminished while others became accentuated. I was very attracted to the hardness of Olga,’ she said, ‘to the hardness of her life. When she spoke about her relationship with her husband it was as though she were speaking about the parts of an engine, explaining how they worked or did not work. There was no romance in it, no place that was covered up and that you weren’t allowed to see. ... I started to feel more sympathetic towards the husband, being treated like a car engine; and then she told me that for a period of time he had left, had left the family, unable to bear this lack of sentimentality any longer, and had gone and lived in a flat on his own. When he returned, they resumed their life as before. Was she not angry with him, I said, for deserting her and leaving her to take care of the children alone? No, on the contrary, she was pleased to see him. We are completely honest with one another, she said, and so I knew when he came back that it was because he had accepted the way things were. I tried to imagine,’ Angeliki said, ‘what this marriage was like, in which nobody had to make promises or apologise, in which you didn’t have to buy flowers for the other person or cook them a special meal or light the candles to make a flattering atmosphere, or book a holiday to help you get over your problems; or rather, in which you were made to do without those things and live together so honestly and nakedly.

We spent the day at the house with the architect, the engineer, the landscapers. I am very excited about the prospect of creating a home where we can spend time together as a family, where friends and extended family can come for long weekends, where I can build an art studio and an auxiliary kitchen in which to film a cooking show that has been percolating in my hungry mind for a while now, where we can plant a vegetable garden and a small orchard and put the benefits of them to good use every season, where my daughters, or sons, can get married, where Felicity can bring her lover(s), where my proctologist(s) can visit, and where our grandchildren can spend time with their cousins for years to come when I am no longer here.

When it comes to caring for, loving and making time for a new little person, anybody who has children knows that two parents are less than ideal. On the other hand, three or four would be just about right. Then there would always someone around while the rest are catching up on sleep, making love, cooking, cleaning, shopping, working. If you ignore the oppression gay people experience, I think the rainbow families, the dykes and the fags, who get together and become parents, in many ways feel much better than straight people who just keep on struggling.

I was outed by accident when I was seventeen years old. I had a whole elaborate plan how I was going to tell my parents I was gay. I was going to decorate my family’s living room with rainbow-colored flags, cook up some rainbow Jell-O, and have a Cher CD playing. I didn’t even like Cher, but from what I heard, she was a gay idol. My outing was going to be the baddest bitch of a coming-out party known to man. Even

Before long, something unexpected happened to test my newfound faith. Mom had to go in for a simple, twenty-minute surgery. I went with Dad to the hospital, and we waited while she was in the operating room. Forty-five minutes went by, and no one came out to tell us anything. Then a nurse came out, and one look at her face told me the news was not good. “Look, there’s a problem,” she said. “We haven’t been able to wake her up. She’s gone into a coma. We have a machine breathing for her, and we think she’s going to be okay, but she needs to wake up.” Dad looked at me, his face white and his eyes big and scared. We had no idea what was going on, but we knew it was bad. Really bad. He grabbed my shoulder and said through tears, “We’re fixin’ to pray for your mom right now.” I’d never heard him pray as fervently. He was frantic and telling God about how much we needed Mom in our family. We knew her life was at stake, and we both were scared she would never wake up. The rest of the family came to the hospital, and we gathered, praying our hearts out. We finally got in to see her, and the sight of Mom on a respirator, her chest rising and falling with the help of the machine, freaked us all out. Eventually, we found out what had happened. There had been a mistake, and Mom had been given too much anesthetic, sending her into a serious coma. Two days later, after many tears and huddles with family and desperate prayers, Mom came out of it, woke up, and started breathing on her own. I knew deep in my heart that she could have died, but God had chosen to answer our prayers, and that really built my faith. I was such a new Christian that I’m not sure how I would have reacted if something would have happened to my mom. I also felt like it drew me closer to my dad, as we had been the first ones to hear the news and to pray for her together. I saw a side of him I didn’t see very often, how much he loved and needed my mom and how much he trusted God to help him in a very bad situation. No matter whose fault it was, we were just relieved Mom made it out alive. She recovered from the experience, and with her cooking during those months, my appetite came back, and I gained fifty pounds. I even got a little chunky, so I started working out so I could look and feel better. Those three months of house arrest were probably the best days of my life. My thinking had changed, my heart’s desires were back on track, and I had hope for the future.

As I was reading, I started thinking about Jessica and the idea of getting married. We could be doing this--reading our Bibles, cooking our own food, hanging out--at our own house. Suddenly, I was excited about the idea of leaving Mom and Dad’s house and starting my own family with Jessica. All my brothers had gotten married before they were twenty, and here I was twenty-two, and not married. I knew Jess was the one. I’m not going to look at any more girls, I thought, still reading through Scripture out loud. I just want to get married to the woman I love. There was a deep sense of knowing inside of me. I didn’t want to overthink it anymore; I just wanted to do it. If we knew we wanted to be married, why wait? So all of a sudden I just burst out, “We should get married.” Jessica looked up from her Bible, surprised. I wasn’t down on my knees, and I didn’t have champagne or a ring, so she wasn’t exactly expecting a marriage proposal. But that’s what it was. A random impulse of a marriage proposal. I looked in her eyes and said it again. “Let’s get married. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” There were hugs and tears, and then we ran out to tell Mom and Dad the news. More hugs, more tears. And wedding plans started right away. “We’ll just elope,” I said, “or get Dad to marry us.” We didn’t want to waste a second. Now that we knew, we wanted to get married as soon as possible and start our lives together. But Mom had a fit. “No,” she said in a loud voice. “We have to have a wedding. I’ve always dreamed about your wedding, Jep.” I didn’t want a big wedding, and I knew it would take time and cost a lot of money. “Mom, I just think it would be better this way.” “Look, just some family,” she argued back, “and maybe some of my best friends. I’ll help get everything together. It won’t be hard. You’ll see.” Then she tilted her head and smiled that big smile; how could I say no? We finally gave in because we could see how important it was for her, but we made it clear we wanted to get married as soon as possible, so we set a date for two weeks away. We don’t waste much time down here in Louisiana.

The show is a part of our lives, but it’s just a part. Our lives are more about our faith in God, our love for each other, and the family we are raising together. You know, if God wasn’t for us, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Because we love God more than we love each other, we’ve been able to overcome the hurts and the scars of our younger lives and build a new life, centered on Him, focused on faith and family rather than on ourselves. And even though we sometimes fly here and there and do things famous people do--to do our part to support the show--in the end, I love being at home. Most of the time I wish I could just sit in my house all day, with a quilt on my lap, enjoying Jep’s cooking, catching a rerun of Golden Girls or Murder, She Wrote, playing cards with the kids, and enjoying my family. Fame is fleeting, but family is forever.

Steve and I watched the dingo family play out its drama for a long time. Then we edged our way down to the dam and hopped in. The water was cold, but it felt good. “This is great,” I said, as we swam together. “I’ve been coming here since I was just a little tacker,” Steve said. Bob had brought his young son with him on his research trips, studying the snakes of the region. As I walked in and out of the water, washing up, shampooing my hair, and relishing the chance to clean off some of the desert dust, I noticed something hard underfoot. “Steve, I stepped on something here,” I said. He immediately started clearing the bottom of the pond, tugging on what I had felt beneath the murky water. “Tree limb,” I guessed. “Look around,” Steve said, yanking at the mired object. “No trees here at all.” He couldn’t budge whatever it was, but he didn’t give up. He went back to camp, drove to the dam in his Ute, and tied a chain to the obstacle. As he backed up the truck, the chain tightened. Slowly a cow’s pelvis emerged from the muck. I watched with horror as Steve dislodged an entire cow carcass that had been decomposing right where I had been enjoying my refreshing dip. I must have been poking among its rib cage while I brushed my teeth and washed my hair. Steve dragged the carcass a good distance off. “Do you think we should tell the crew?” he asked me when he came back. “Maybe what they don’t know won’t hurt them,” I said. Steve nodded. “They probably won’t brush their teeth in there, anyway.” “Probably not,” I said, pondering the possibility of future romantic dips with Steve, and what might lurk under the water at the next dam. When we returned to camp, Steve insisted I sit down and not lift a finger while he cooked me a real Aussie breakfast: bacon and sausage with eggs, and toast with Vegemite. This last treat was a paste-like spread that’s an Australian tradition. For an Oregon girl, it was a hard sell. I always thought Vegemite tasted like a salty B vitamin. I chowed down, though, determined to learn to love it. As the sun rose in full, Steve began to get bored. He was antsy. He wanted to go wrangle something, discover something, film anything. Finally, at midmorning, the crew showed up. “Let’s go,” Steve said. “There’s an eagle’s nest my dad showed me when I was just a billy lid. I want to see if it might still be there.” Right, I thought, a nest you saw with Bob years ago. What are the chances we’re going to find that? John looked longingly at the dam. “Thought we might have a tub first,” he said. The grime of the desert covered all of them. “Oh, I think we should go,” I said hastily, the cow carcass fresh in my mind. “You don’t need a bath, do you, guys?” “Come on,” Steve urged. “Wedge-tailed eagles!” No rest for the weary.

After they left, Emma returned to her Jasper-burger consumption with gusto. She’d asked Lisa once to find out the recipe for their seasoning mix, but Kevin wouldn’t give it up. Plus, as Lisa had pointed out, it wouldn’t do Emma any good to have it since she couldn’t cook worth a damn, anyway. “So about what I said before,” Sean said after he’d wolfed down his food, “about not wanting them to know we’ve had sex. It’s not that I’m trying to hide it, I just…” “Don’t want them to know.” “Yeah.” “That makes sense.” His face brightened. “Really?” “No.” “Damn.” He’d finished his beer, so he took a swig off the glass of water she’d requested with her meal. “Under normal circumstances, I’d want everybody to know we’re sleeping together. Trust me. I’d put a sign on my front lawn.” “But these aren’t normal circumstances.” “Not even in the ballpark. I have this bet with my brothers I’d last the whole month and I don’t want to listen to them gloat.” Of course he’d have a bet with his brothers. Such a guy thing to do. “But it’s more about the women.” “The women?” “In my family, I mean. Aunt Mary, especially. They might start thinking it’s more than it is. Getting ideas about us, if you know what I mean.” Emma ate her last French fry and pushed her plate away. “So we have to pretend we’re madly in love and engaged…while pretending we’re not having sex.” “Told you it complicates things.” “I’m going to need a color-coded chart to keep track of who thinks what.” He grinned and pulled his Sharpie out of his pocket. “I could make Sticky notes.” The man loved sticky notes. He stuck them on everything. A note on the front of the microwave complaining about the disappearance of the last bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. (Emma had discovered during a particularly rough self-pity party that any chips will do, even if they burn your tongue.) A note on the back of the toilet lid telling her she used girlie toilet paper, whatever that meant. He liked leaving them on the bathroom mirror, too. Stop cleaning my sneakers. I’m trying to break them in. Her personal favorite was If you buy that cheap beer because it’s on sale again, I’ll piss in your mulch pile. But sometimes they were sweet. Thank you for doing my laundry. And…You make really good grilled cheese sandwiches. That one had almost made her cry.

Hash Brown Casserole Servings: 10-12   What you need: 32 oz bag of frozen hash browns 8 oz sour cream 10.5 oz cream of mushroom soup ¼ cup finely chopped onion 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese ½ cup butter, melted Salt and pepper, to taste   What to do: Slightly break apart the frozen hash browns. Spray your slow cooker with non-stick spray. In your slow cooker, mix together the hash browns, sour cream, cream of mushroom soup, onion, cheese, and melted butter. Sprinkle the mixture with salt and pepper and cook for 4-5 hours on low.

And then, on the final day, it was time for the faux Underground Railroad. This is the part that no one believes. "No adult would ever do that," they say. "You can't be remembering that right." I am, in fact, remembering it perfectly. The counselors "shackled" us together with jump ropes so we were "like slave families" and then released us into the woods. We were given a map with a route to "freedom" in "the North", which must have been only three or four hundred feet but felt like much more. Then a counselor on horseback followed ten minutes later, acting as a bounty hunter. Hearing hooves, I crouched being a rock with Jason Baujelais and Sari Brooker, begging them to be quiet so we weren't caught and "whipped." I was too young, self-involved, and dissociated to wonder what kind of impact this had on my black classmates. All I knew was that I was miserable. We heard the sound of hooves growing closer and Max Kitnick's light asthma wheezes from beind an oak tree. "Shut up," Jason hissed, and I knew we were cooked. When the counselor appeared, Sari started to cry.

He’d stopped talking about bonding her to him forever and had apparently decided to concentrate on being charming instead. Liv never would have believed that such an intensely alpha male could be light and playful but she had been seeing an entirely different side of Baird lately. Aside from the sushi class, he’d also taken her to an alien petting zoo where she was able to see and touch animals that were native to the three home worlds of the Kindred and they’d been twice to the Kindred version of a movie theater where the seats were wired to make the viewer feel whatever was happening on the screen. He’d also taken her to a musical performance where the musicians played giant drums bigger than themselves and tiny flutes smaller than her pinky finger. The music had been surprisingly beautiful—the melodies sweet and haunting and Liv had been moved. But it was the evenings they spent alone together in the suite that made Liv really believe she was in danger of feeling too much. Baird cooked for her—sometimes strange but delicious alien dishes and once Earth food, when she’d taught him how to make cheeseburgers. They ate in the dim, romantic light of some candle-like glow sticks he’d placed on the table and there was always very good wine or the potent fireflower juice to go with the meal. Liv was very careful not to over-imbibe because she needed every ounce of willpower she had to remember why she was holding out. For dessert Baird always made sure there was some kind of chocolate because he’d learned from his dreams how much she loved it. Liv had been thinking lately that she might really be in trouble if she didn’t get away from him soon. If all he’d had going for him was his muscular good looks she could have resisted easily enough. But he was thoughtful too and endlessly interested in her—asking her all kinds of questions about her past and friends and family as well as people he’d seen while they were “dream-sharing” as he called it. Liv found herself talking to him like an old friend, actually feeling comfortable with him instead of being constantly on her guard. She knew that Baird was actively wooing her, doing everything he could to earn her affection, but even knowing that couldn’t stop her from liking him. She had never been so ardently pursued in her life and she was finding that she actually liked it. Baird had taken her more places and paid her more attention in the past week than Mitch had for their entire relationship. It was intoxicating to always be the center of the big warrior’s attention, to know that he was focused exclusively on her needs and wants. But attention and attraction aside, there was another factor that was making Liv desperate to get away. Just as he had predicted, the physical attraction she felt for Baird seemed to be growing exponentially. She only had to be in the same room with him for a minute or two, breathing in his warm, spicy scent, and she was instantly ready to jump his bones. The need was growing every day and Liv didn’t know how much longer she could fight it.

Today was a day to face that very temptation. A family who had become dear friends had left the church with no warning or explanation. Not even good bye. When they were missing on that first Sunday, we didn’t realize that they had removed themselves from our church. We thought maybe someone was sick or an alarm clock didn’t go off or something simple. If it had been something serious, they would have called us, of course. We had done so much for them and with them. We rejoiced when they rejoiced, we cried when they cried, we prayed with them, we prayed for them, we loved them and felt as if they loved us in return. Of course, one Sunday turned to two, and then three. I mentioned to Michael that I had called and left a message. He told me that he had the same thought as well. He had left a message and sent a card. We felt sad as the realization sank in: they had left the church. People don’t know how to leave a church, and many pastors don’t take such a loss graciously. In all our determinations about pastoring, we had considered the possibility of losing members, but this family was the first. It was time for a lesson for all of us, and I felt the Lord tugging at my spirit. I was to take the first step. Sunday afternoon, Michael taking a nap, kids playing games in their room... Now was as good a time as any. I got into my car and headed toward their house. Suddenly nervous, I sat in the driveway for a minute at first. What was I doing here again? Pastor’s wives don’t do this. I had been around pastor’s wives all my life. Since sensing my call to full time ministry at eighteen, I had been paying close attention to them, and I had never seen one of them do this. I got my words together. I needed an eloquent prayer for such a moment as this one: “Lord, help” (okay, so it wasn’t eloquent). I remembered a verse in Jeremiah: “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give every man according to his ways, According to the fruit of his doings” (17:10). The Lord knew my heart, and He understood. In this situation, I knew that I had opened myself up to Him. In this situation, I knew that my heart was pure before Him. All of a sudden, my courage returned. I opened the car door and willed myself toward the front porch. As I walked up the driveway, I also thought about Paul’s warning which I had read earlier that morning: “they failed to reach their goal... because their minds were fixed on what they achieved instead of what they believed” (Romans 9:31-32). This family was not my achievement; they were the Lord’s creation. What I believed was that I had been right in opening my heart to them. What I believed was that Michael and I had been faithful to the Lord and that we had helped this family while they were in our flock. I had not failed to reach my goal thus far, and I felt determined not to fail now. This front porch was not unfamiliar to me. I had been here before on many occasions, with my husband and children. Happy times: dinners, cook-outs, birthdays, engagement announcements, births.... Sad times as well: teenaged child rebelling, financial struggles, hospital stays or even death .... We had been invited to share heartache and joy alike. No, “invited” is the wrong word. We were needed. We were family, and family comes together at such times. This afternoon, however, was different. I was standing on this familiar front porch for a reason that had never brought me here before: I came to say good bye. On this front porch, I knocked on the door. This family had been with us for years, and we had been with them. Remembering how this family had helped and blessed our congregation, I quietly smiled. Remembering how they had enriched our personal lives with their friendship and encouragement, I could feel the tears burning behind my eyes. We would miss them. Remembering all that we had done for them, I wondered how they could leave with no word or even warning. Just stopped coming. Just

Imagine what you can give in these areas of the Twelve Areas of Balance: 9.​YOUR CAREER. What are your visions for your career? What level of competence do you want to achieve and why? How would you like to improve your workplace or company? What contribution to your field would you like to make? If your career does not currently seem to contribute anything meaningful to the world, take a closer look—is that because the work is truly meaningless or does it just not have meaning to you? What career would you like to get into? 10.​YOUR CREATIVE LIFE. What creative activities do you love to do or what would you like to learn? It could be anything from cooking to singing to photography (my own passion) to painting to writing poetry to developing software. What are some ways you can share your creative self with the world? 11.​YOUR FAMILY LIFE. Picture yourself being with your family not as you think you “should” be but in ways that fill you with happiness. What are you doing and saying? What wonderful experiences are you having together? What values do you want to embody and pass along? What can you contribute to your family that is unique to you? Keep in mind that your family doesn’t have to be a traditional family—ideas along those lines are often Brules. “Family” may be cohabiting partners, a same-sex partner, a marriage where you decided not to have children, or a single life where you consider a few close friends as family. Don’t fall into society’s definition of family. Instead, create a new model of reality and think of family as those whom you truly love and want to spend time with. 12.​YOUR COMMUNITY LIFE. This could be your friends, your neighborhood, your city, state, nation, religious community, or the world community. How would you like to contribute to your community? Looking at all of your abilities, all of your ideas, all of the unique experiences you’ve had that make you the person you are, what is the mark you want to leave on the world that excites and deeply satisfies you? For me, it’s reforming global education for our children. What is it for you? This brings us to Law 8. Law 8: Create a vision for your future. Extraordinary minds create a vision for their future that is decidedly their own and free from expectations of the culturescape. Their vision is focused on end goals that strike a direct chord with their happiness.

They talked about the lives they had left behind in Calcutta: your mother's beautiful home in Jodhpur Park, with hibiscus and rosebushes blooming on the rooftop, and my mother's modest flat in Maniktala, above a grimy Punjabi restaurant, where seven people existed in three small rooms. In Calcutta they would probably have had little occasion to meet. Your mother went to a convent school and was the daughter of one of Calcutta's most prominent lawyers, a pipe-smoking Anglophile and a member of the Saturday Club. My mother's father was a clerk in the General Post Office, and she had neither eaten at a table nor sat on a commode before coming to America. Those differences were irrelevant in Cambridge, where they were both equally alone. Here they shopped together for groceries and complained about their husbands and cooked either our stove or yours, dividing up the dishes for our respective families when they were done. They knitted together, switching projects when one of them got bored. When I was born, your parents were the only friends to visit the hospital. I was fed in your old high chair, pushed along the streets in your old pram.

Book Review for Where's Grandma? "Jordyn looks for her grandma, but cannot find her anywhere. Her bed is empty, her wheelchair is abandoned, and her place at the table unoccupied. Jordyn’s mommy tells her that her grandma has ‘transitioned’, but Jordyn does not know what that means. Her mommy explains that Grandma is now in heaven with other family members. Jordyn misses her grandma and remembers good times spent with her, singing and dancing for her, watching movies together, and playing games. She remembers how her grandma like to spend time with the family, and cook big family dinners. Jordyn’s mommy encourages her to focus on happy memories of her grandma and turn tears of sadness into tears of joy. Jordyn knows that whenever she misses her grandma, she can look back at old pictures and videos, and remember the fun times they spent together." "Where's Grandma? A Child's View on Loss, Grief and Bereavement is a heartfelt and touching picture book by Tracey Smith about a little girl named Jordyn who faces the loss of her beloved grandma. Struggling with sadness, Jordyn finds it difficult to understand where her grandma has gone. Her mom helps her to cope by gently remembering the happy times they shared. Through these memories, Jordyn discovers that although grandma is no longer there, her love will remain in her heart forever. The author handles the subject of death in a sensitive way that is suitable for young readers. The book includes helpful notes to help parents talk to children about their grief." Star rating: 5 Stars Summary: A heartfelt and touching story about grief, and a valuable resource for families who may have experienced the death of a loved one.  --Reader's Choice Book Awards

Charmula is one of numerous Tunisian examples of salt and sweet being used together. But Tunisians say that all these salt-and-sweet dishes are foreign imports brought from Spain in 1492 by expelled Muslims. The Affes family, which owns one of the two largest couscous factories in the world—the other is in Marseilles—is from Sfax. Here is Latifa Affes’s recipe for charmula: Salt any large fish. Poach it and serve with the following sauce: 1 kilo red onion, 1 kilo raisins, ½ liter olive oil, salt, black pepper (some use coriander powder but I do not). Mince onions and cook them slowly in olive oil for about two hours. Soften raisins in water and pass through a sieve to remove seeds. Add to olive oil mixture and cook on low heat for two days. Add salt and pepper.

Ming searches through the family kitchen for supplies. Winnie left them overstocked with canned and dried goods, but the Chao men don't buy groceries. The fridge is stuffed with take-out containers. While Katherine pretends to catch up on emails from work, Ming digs out from the piled-up counter a sprouting yellow onion and some aged potatoes. He dices the onion, and, after digging the eyes out of the potatoes, he cubes them. He watches Katherine's reflection in the picture window. She studies his wiry hands moving with confidence from knife to bowl to pan handle. (At home, he won't use the wok.) He cracks some eggs deftly, showing off his dexterousness perhaps, and makes a savory Spanish omelet. Dagou isn't the only talented cook among the Chao brothers. The aging cabbage and the carrots from the fridge become, with a few flicks of magic, a salad, dressed with sesame oil and sweetened rice vinegar, sprinkled with sesame seeds. Ming and Katherine sit down at the cluttered kitchen table and eat together, not talking. Although doubtless Katherine would've preferred something "more authentic"----fried rice with eggs, green onions instead of yellow, and stir-fried cabbage instead of salad---the dinner leaves her curiously softened.

The technological magic that gives us washing machines, dryers and non-ironed shirts can easily seem like a harmless improvement. But when the art of cooking is replaced by meals warmed up in the microwave - something a five-year-old can do as well as a fifty-five-year-old, then children no longer see their fathers and mothers doing something challenging, fruitful, admirable, and ultimately enjoyable. Instead, the family's life together is reduced to mere consumption, the result of others work or toil. No wonder the children at the peak leisure stage of the 1960's and the 1970's topped admiring their parents, they no longer saw their parents doing anything worth admiring.

when you ask what she does she says: “You know how most families hardly eat together anymore and when they do, they don’t eat as healthy as they should? I’m a private chef . . .” The second chef is way more interesting. In fact, as she talks, you start picturing her in your home, cooking meals for your family.

Maria’s man Guri was the immediately recognizable king of the sandwich bar, lord of all the sausages. The man was big and swarthy, with waved dark hair parted like a razor slash. He was broad and thick-faced and violent, with pressed-together lips and a patriarch’s paunch. The Georgian wore a stained cook’s apron and barked orders to the waitresses as though to junior members of his extended family.

Mediterranean Beef Casserole Serves 6 Ingredients: 2 lb lean steak, cut into large pieces 3 onions, sliced 4 garlic cloves, cut 2 red peppers, cut 1 green pepper, cut 1 zucchini, peeled and cut 3 tomatoes, quartered 2 tbsp tomato paste or purée 1/2 cup green olives, pitted 1/2 cup dry red wine 1/2 cup of water 1 tsp dried oregano salt and black pepper, to taste Directions: Heat olive oil in a deep ovenproof casserole and seal the beef. Add vegetables and stir to combine. Dilute the tomato paste in half a cup of water and pour it over the meat mixture together with the wine. Season with salt and pepper and bake, stirring halfway through, in a preheated to 350 F for one hour.

Beef and Broccoli Stir Fry Serves 4 Ingredients: 1/2 lb flank steak, cut in strips 3 cups broccoli florets 1 onion, chopped 1 cup white button mushrooms, chopped 1 cup beef broth 1/3 cup cashew nuts 2 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp honey 1 tsp lemon zest 1 tsp grated ginger 3 tbsp olive oil 1 tsp cornstarch Directions: Place the meat in the freezer for 20 minutes then cut it in thin slices. Place it in a bowl together with soy sauce, honey, lemon zest and ginger. Stir to coat well and set aside for 30 minutes. Stir fry steak in olive oil over high heat for 2-3 minutes until cooked through. Add and stir fry broccoli, onion, mushrooms and cashews. Stir in spice. Dilute cornstarch into beef broth and add it to the meat mixture. Stir until thickened.

Oh! But here! I brought some Chinese recipes I found that I thought might be useful." "Huh? Wait a sec, Tadokoro. Aren't you going to help out at the booth the Polaris crew is putting together? Isshiki Senpai must have invited you." "Hmm? Yeah, he did. The Home-Cooking Society is going to have a booth too. But I turned both of them down." "Huh? Why?" "Well, because I thought you could use the help, of course... ... AH! Oh! Um! I-I-I know that I'll probably just get in the way! I mean, i-it's me, right? I'm so sorry I just assumed that I could be helpful to you! B-but, um! I-I did use to help with the customers at my family's little inn... and during the Stagiare Challenge, I did have the chance to learn a little bit about customer service, so I kinda think I might not be totally useless, and... and, um! S-so, um, y-you see... if you happen to need a little help with your booth, I, um... I'd be happy to..." "Tadokoro. You... ... are the best." "R-really?" "Okay! Let's do this! Let's cook something up, Tadokoro!" "Okay!

Come here; let me look at you.” Mum gestured imperiously, and after a moment’s hesitation, Shinobu bent down so that she could cup his face in her small, delicate fingers. She stared up at him, dark gaze piercing. He stayed still, but behind his back I saw his hands find each other and his fingers lace together, as if it was an effort not to fidget. I didn’t blame him.   “Rachel also says that you helped save her and did a lot of other heroic things. I think you must have a great deal of character to have survived everything that’s happened to you, Shinobu, and I’m very grateful for all that you’ve done for my family. But I’m fully aware that you’ve been hanging out in my house with my underage daughter completely unsupervised the whole time I’ve been gone. I will be keeping my eye on you from now on.”   Shinobu nodded respectfully, not moving out of my mother’s grasp. I couldn’t stand it.   “Mum! Shinobu’s been a − a perfect gentleman!”   “And I was there at least some of the time,” my father put in.   “There is no such thing as a perfect gentleman, Mio. And you don’t count, Takashi. You can never tell when Mio’s lying about anything.” She fixed her eyes back on Shinobu. “I’m not saying that I don't approve. But if you’re the sort of young man that I want for my daughter – and I think you are – you won’t have a problem with me looking out for her. When this mess is sorted out, we can get to know each other properly.”   Shinobu nodded again. Mum smiled at him and slid her hands down to pat his shoulders, and he smiled back, his expression a little dazed. Damn. Dazzled by Mum Power.   “‘This mess’ being … the imminent apocalypse?” my dad asked, apparently unable to leave well enough alone.   Mum ignored his tone magnificently. “Yes, that. Now, could anyone else murder a sandwich and a cup of tea? Because I’ve had a heck of a day.”   Jack and Hikaru, who’d retreated to the till area with Ebisu during the family drama, crept out. Jack raised her hand. “I’m starving.”   “Me too,” Hikaru said.   “Ah, the appetites of the young,” Ebisu said, smiling serenely as he limped towards my mother and offered her his hand. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mrs Yamato. You are almost exactly as I had imagined. Let’s go upstairs to my flat and see what we can find to eat, yes?”   “You might want to put me in charge of that,” my dad said, hurrying after them. “She’s a terrible cook.”   “Stuff it,” my mum retorted as Ebisu led her away. “I’m still not talking to you.”   And just like that, our motley crew had another member. My mum.   Sweet baby Jebus, how did this happen?

Because for all my massive appetite, I cannot cook to save my life. When Grant came to my old house for the first time, he became almost apoplectic at the contents of my fridge and cupboards. I ate like a deranged college frat boy midfinals. My fridge was full of packages of bologna and Budding luncheon meats, plastic-wrapped processed cheese slices, and little tubs of pudding. My cabinets held such bounty as cases of chicken-flavored instant ramen noodles, ten kinds of sugary cereals, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and cheap canned tuna. My freezer was well stocked with frozen dinners, heavy on the Stouffer's lasagna and bags of chicken tenders. My garbage can was a wasteland of take-out containers and pizza boxes. In my defense, there was also always really good beer and a couple of bottles of decent wine. My eating habits have done a pretty solid turnaround since we moved in together three years ago. Grant always leaved me something set up for breakfast: a parfait of Greek yogurt and homemade granola with fresh berries, oatmeal that just needs a quick reheat and a drizzle of cinnamon honey butter, baked French toast lingering in a warm oven. He almost always brings me leftovers from the restaurant's family meal for me to take for lunch the next day. I still indulge in greasy takeout when I'm on a job site, as much for the camaraderie with the guys as the food itself; doesn't look good to be noshing on slow-roasted pork shoulder and caramelized root vegetables when everyone else is elbow-deep in a two-pound brick of Ricobene's breaded steak sandwich dripping marinara.

Simple words can make a big difference You should start doing this at home. It’s great to serve people when you’re out in public, but don’t forget to serve your own family. Husbands should serve their wives. “Honey, I’m going in the kitchen. Can I bring you anything?” “Let me run and fill up your car’s gas tank so you won’t have to do it tomorrow.” “I’ll help the kids with their homework. You take a break.” Be a blessing to your spouse. If we all had this servant’s attitude toward our spouses, more marriages could stay together. I know men who expect their wives to do everything for them. “I’m not going to serve her, I expect her to serve me: cook, clean, bring my dinner, make sure my clothes are washed. Keep this house straightened up.” That’s not a wife, that’s a maid! You can hire somebody to do that. If you want a wife--if you want a friend, a lover, and someone to make your life great--then you have to be willing to serve her. Bring her breakfast in bed. Pick up your own dirty clothes. Help with the children. Make her feel special. Marriage is not a dictatorship. It’s a partnership!

If I had a wish, I would want nothing fancy, just a normal day when all of us could be together as a family; a day where we could just cook, eat, talk, and laugh.

Exercise 1: How to Invigorate Your Relationship with Your Romantic Partner STEP 1: Privately, each person should think about time spent with their partner. Without talking about it, each of you should make a list of the shared times together that could best be described as “very pleasant” or “exciting.” Think about things you do at home, for work, in the community, for leisure, on vacation, or anywhere else where you did something with your partner that made you feel excited. For instance, think about when the two of you: Went to a concert or a club Played or watched a sport or games of some kind Shopped Learned a new skill Talked Volunteered Solved a problem Took care of other people, animals, or things Went to a spiritual or religious event/workshop/meeting Played music Had sex (the more details, the better) Worked out Relaxed Spent time in a different environment than you are usually in (beach versus mountains, suburbs versus city, noisy versus quiet, teeming with people versus sparsely populated) Engaged in strenuous physical and/or mental exercise Joined an organization that you both believed in Pursued a hobby Worked on the house, the yard, the car, the boat Cooked new recipes Went to the movies Sat in the same room and did your own thing, like read, did needlework, or worked crossword puzzles Planned the family budget Took a class Something else (the sky is the limit—add any activities that fueled you)

He was in a room filled with people, and it was warm, with firelight glowing on a hearth. He could see through a window that outside it was night, and snowing. There were colored lights: red and green and yellow, twinkling from a tree which was, oddly, inside the room. On a table, lighted candles stood in a polished golden holder and cast a soft, flickering glow. He could smell things cooking, and he heard soft laughter. A golden-haired dog lay sleeping on the floor. On the floor there were packages wrapped in brightly colored paper and tied with gleaming ribbons. As Jonas watched, a small child began to pick up the packages and pass them around the room: to other children, to adults who were obviously parents, and to an older, quiet couple, man and woman, who sat smiling together on a couch. While Jonas watched, the people began one by one to untie the ribbons on the packages, to unwrap the bright papers, open the boxes and reveal toys and clothing and books. There were cries of delight. They hugged one another. The small child went and sat on the lap of the old woman, and she rocked him and rubbed her cheek against his. Jonas opened his eyes and lay contentedly on the bed, still luxuriating in the warm and comforting memory. It had all been there, all the things he had learned to treasure. “What did you perceive?” The Giver asked. “Warmth,” Jonas replied, “and happiness. And—let me think. Family. That it was a celebration of some sort, a holiday. And something else—I can’t quite get the word for

While I’m out working with Tommy Quinn, we get chatting about a session, a few nights previous, in a local pub called The Hill. It gets its name from the plain fact that it sits on top of a hill. The conversation moves on to the state of rural Ireland, and rural everywhere for that matter. He’s lived here in Knockmoyle for all of his life, so his opinions on the subject hold weight with me. He asks me what technology I think had the most dramatic impact on life here when he was growing up. I state what I feel are obvious: the television, the motor car and computers. Or electricity in general. Tommy smiles. The flask, he says. I ask him to explain. When he was growing up in the 1960s, he and his family would go to the bog, along with most of the other families of the parish, to cut turf for fuel for the following winter. They would all help each other out in any way they could, even if they didn’t always fully get on. Cutting turf in the old ways, using a sleán, is hard but convivial work, so each day one family would make a campfire to boil the kettle on. But the campfire had a more significant role than just hydrating the workers. As well as keeping the midges away, it was a focal point that brought folk together during important seasonal events. During the day people would have the craic around it as the tea brewed, and in the evenings food would be cooked on it. By nightfall, with the day’s work behind them, the campfire became the place where music, song and dance would spontaneously happen. Before the night was out, one of the old boys would hide one of the young lads’ wheelbarrows, providing no end of banter the following morning.

When we were taking classes, we’d come home between classes and eat lunch together every day. We would cook lunch and then watch Matlock together and see who could guess the killer. Willie bought a little white truck from one of our professors for seven hundred dollars. The best part about the truck was it still had a faculty parking sticker on the windshield. We were so excited we could park the truck in the faculty lots when we went to class. Because we were married, we could even write excuses for each other when we were sick. Willie always seemed to catch a cold during March Madness and on the opening day of baseball season.

The days of September passed, one after the other, much the same. Annemarie and Ellen walked to school together, and home again, always now taking the longer way, avoiding the tall soldier and his partner. Kirsti dawdled just behind them or scampered ahead, never out of their sight. The two mothers still had their “coffee” together in the afternoons. They began to knit mittens as the days grew slightly shorter and the first leaves began to fall from the trees, because another winter was coming. Everyone remembered the last one. There was no fuel now for the homes and apartments in Copenhagen, and the winter nights were terribly cold. Like the other families in their building, the Johansens had opened the old chimney and installed a little stove to use for heat when they could find coal to burn. Mama used it too, sometimes, for cooking, because electricity was rationed now. At night they used candles for light. Sometimes Ellen’s father, a teacher, complained in frustration because he couldn’t see in the dim light to correct his students’ papers. “Soon we will have to add another blanket to your bed,” Mama said one morning as she and Annemarie tidied the bedroom. “Kirsti and I are lucky to have each other for warmth in the winter,” Annemarie said. “Poor Ellen, to have no sisters.” “She will have to snuggle in with her mama and papa when it gets cold,” Mama said, smiling.