Family Style

Setting son and daughter: family meals
Photos by Amelia Zatik Sawyer

Our week as a family begins on Saturday morning at the farmers market. We fill our car with canvas bags and head to the luscious Cuyahoga Valley to collect our bounty. As we drive through the verdant canopy of the valley, we talk about food, what we love, where it comes from, what we want, and what we will eat in the upcoming week. This is our family – a restaurant family – ritual.  

My husband’s hands touch each dish that comes out of The Greenhouse Tavern kitchen. We find ourselves eating in the kitchen three times a week, so the kids can spend time with their dad. Our five-year-old son Catcher enjoys devising potential menu items, such as a soup based on beer, bread and green beans. Our darling daughter Louisiana, who has a fondness for sweets, can usually be found back near the pastry chef. Somehow a macaron always ends up in her belly.  This is how we often do "family dinner."

My husband doesn’t spend a lot of time away from the kitchen, even on his days off. His goal at home is to make sure we are fed. I am not the greatest cook, and he knows this. He spends his free hours scouring the fridge to cook us food for the week. He creates quinoa salads, barley and beans, and cooks whole chickens that will make chicken salad (a favorite of Catcher) or chicken paprikás (a favorite of Louisiana). When he's finished his marathon cooking bender, we settle in for our one true family dinner together: taco night.

Taco night is what each member of our family looks forward to every week. During the summer, we spend taco night outside under the bright Ohio sky.  We pick crunchy lettuce from our garden, we make salsa with fresh garden cilantro, and we roast vegetables. We grill local meat and fish, as well as tofu. Most important, we sit down as a family. 

We talk about our meal and why it is good for us. Our kids know where food comes from because we tell them as we eat. Again, sharing food brings us together as a family.

For the rest of the week, I take on the role of chef. As noted above, I am not the best cook. However, I am good at taking direction, and what better person to take kitchen orders from than a chef? (I sort of lucked on the whole marrying a chef thing.) My kids don’t require as much guidance in the kitchen. Right now, my son’s only aspiration in life is to become a "cooker guy" like his Dad. I encourage his dream, and every day we open a cookbook and decide what we are going to have for dinner.

He cuts the tofu for our miso soup, and he uses a real knife. His father taught him knife skills and already he has mastered it. His eyes gleam with excitement as he finishes his task.  

We move on to the next step in the recipe. He measures out miso and adds it to boiling water. His sister watches from afar, the occasional jealous quip coming from her heart-shaped mouth. She wants to be mommy’s helper, too. I let her pick the basil from the garden and add it just as the soup is finished. Our dinner ready, and although Dad is at work, he is with us because we are creating food just as he does each night in his own kitchen.

We have created a foundation for our children that has been lost in the past 20 years. We are going back to the simplicity of food, and we have invited our children along for the ride. They will grow up eating food from the land, not food from a box.

It is a simple equation that any parent can – and should – follow: eat fresh and eat local. Eat from the earth, and your children shall thrive. Teach your kids where real food comes from and show them how to grow their own food. Food is our life support and should be treated with respect and love, the same way we treat our children.