Food prepared with love has an amazing power to give a special message, to say I love you and I care about you. Home cooking really is better lots better than store bought stuff, and it doesn’t take nearly as long as people think to cook from scratch, especially when you are organized. And you don’t need to cook with lots of sugar and unhealthy fats to make things taste good!
Today we are getting ready for my mom’s birthday. Our family custom is to make a special meal for the person having a birthday, and this will be her first birthday she is spending with us. Sometimes we make a breakfast, sometimes a dinner, sometimes a cake – it depends on the kind of food that the person we are surprising likes.
We will be making creamy vegetable soup, biscuits, baked fish, salad, and lemon meringue pie for a family dinner together. She is dieting so we don’t want to make food she wouldn’t want to have. Not that lemon meringue pie is exactly dieter’s fare, but it’s something that she will enjoy enough to make it worth her ‘points’ (she does Weight Watchers). A friend from overseas will be in town for a couple of days, and is making time in his busy schedule to come by, so we should have some yummy leftovers to serve him when he gets here.
We actually have some other good leftovers from oldest dd’s bas mitzva party on Sunday night. We don’t make yearly parties, and this was a very special event for her – it was a huge success and everyone had a great time. Dd really felt loved and was so happy about how it all went. She spent hours with me in the kitchen preparing for it – we made macaroni and cheese (I have a recipe that her Girl Scout troop raved over several years ago), lasagna, veg. platter with dips, and garlic bread. We made more desserts than we really needed, just to have a nice selection – the visual centerpiece was a chocolate cherry trifle, then pumpkin doodles, peanut butter diamonds (tastes like peanut butter cups), chocolate truffles, and a huge bowl of fresh strawberries. We also had a drink section with flavored seltzers, sparkling juices and a couple of kinds of punch. Actually, everyone helped with getting ready – the cooking, cleaning the room, decorating (she chose a purple and white theme). I love watching my kids work together to do something nice for each other.
We had also put a lot of thought into what activity they girls would do at the party. We wanted something fun but something that would channel all of their energy into doing something productive. I put out a request for suggestions on a homeschooling board I’m on, and someone emailed me offlist with the idea that we used – washcloth bunnies. They were simple to make, but there were lots of potential ways to decorate them, and the girls loved knowing that they will be donated to a local children’s hospital, for the kids to use as toys and for bathing. I have to make some calls to the hospitals this week to set up a time for the kids and I to go and deliver them in person.
We have another birthday for ds coming up in a few days, so we won’t have much of a breather before beginning to prepare for him! Isn’t it nice that there are built in times of the year that we can focus on one person exclusively for a day?
Avivah
