How to Make Dinner and Feel Like Nobility
Yesterday morning I spent an hour making sausage potato bites for my guys. I found the recipe in the 2012 Celebrate magazine, and Matt and Caleb got tears of joy in their eyes when they tried them for the first time. A combination of Jimmy Dean, hashbrowns, and Parmesan, these little babies are what Montana men should eat for breakfast.
But you need to know that I never would have made these if God had not been transforming my heart over the last few months.
It’s a long story that I’ll tell you sometime, but I had come to the place where I despised cooking and felt like a complete failure to my family when it came to food. It was a place of shame for me, but through several events toward the end of 2014, God spoke personally with me, healed some broken places, and began renewing my joy in providing food for my family.
The day before I made sausage potato bites, I had been reading. (Like I would be doing anything else.)
I read an article in the National Geographic, December 2014 edition, about an impoverished community in Mexico where the kids grow up and never leave because the food and family time around the table is so binding.
I learned about the “sobremesa”, which is an extended time of talking around the table after the meal is over.
Later that day, I read an article about a woman who had been rescued by American soldiers from a Nazi death camp. She weighed 68 pounds when they found her and was literally almost starved to death.
Food is important. It’s not everything there is to life, but it is important.
God has been wrapping around my heart the truth about food and cooking, the way Matt hugs his just-out-of-bed warm body around me when he wakes up in the morning.
(Truth is something warm, and sometimes you don’t even know how cold you’ve become until it touches you.)
What I learned from the Mexicans, who are poor in money but rich in community, is that food has to do with love, and it is something almost sacred that brings us together every day.
“Cooking must be done with love,” says María, stopping to tie her braids together. “There are women who cook without love, and it really doesn’t turn out well. If I feel preoccupied, I tell myself, Lock up the problem. And then I cook with love.”
So I paid $2 for fresh sage, and what a heavenly smell. I lovingly cut up that sage, stopping to worship the God who created herbs, and then tossed it in with the sausage mixture.
Because there is a message I need to give to my boys, a message I’ve been neglecting for a long time.
You are important to me. Let me feed you good food.
The wife of noble character…provides food for her family… (Proverbs 31:15 NIV)
To cook a meal for your family is to do something noble in character.
So set the table, put simple food on it that has your love stirred into it, and teach your family the word “sobremesa”.
Now off I go, to make a homemade marinade for a beautiful salmon fillet we’ll eat for dinner tonight.
What’s for dinner at your house?
Hi Christy,
Happy Birthday, thanks for getting me back on track with the cooking encouragement!!
Have an awesome day!
we eat around the table as often as I can get them there, almost nightly. I will think about the prep time in a new way. Some days it is one more thing on the to do list. I have to remember they are at the top of my list and put some love into it. And we need that recipe too, I bet our guys would love it as well.
That’s where my huge change has come -in seeing meal making as a service of love instead of a to-do that I don’t have “time” for.
Dear Christy,
Your posts continue to be such a sweet source of brokenness, truth, wisdom, and real, down-to-earth-transparency from your own life–such great encouragement! Though we have never met, and only the Lord knows if it will be, “here, there, or in-the-air,” I experience such a kindred-spirit with you, and even though not much of us is similar–hubby Keith and I live on his family’s farm in the flatlands of SW AR,; we have two daughters; he and I gave each other a Jersey milk cow for Christmas; chickens to arrive the first week of February, with the hope of some piggies in the near future (
Oh, how sweet that you would say “kindred spirit”, since I’m in the middle of listening to Anne of Green Gables on audio book. 🙂 We definitely don’t do cows and chickens, but I’m glad to find a friend in you. Thank you for this precious encouragement!
Oh, our greatly beloved “bosom-friend, Anne of Green Gables!”
She has been my girls and my life-time inspiration of saying, “kindred spirits!”
You are beautiful and God has made you so. Thank you for sharing His beauty of serving what our families like with joy, with love, and with warmth.
Thank you!
I love to cook. My guys often lobby for dinner around the television, instead of around the table. The difference in the meal around the table is stunning. We sit and talk and dream around the table. We even enjoy the food more. Eating together around the table is a family building act, without question.
That brings up a good point that guys really push for eating in front of the TV. It takes a strong woman to set the table and insist on the family eating there. Wow are there a lot of subtle forces working against the family.