Bringing the Family Together

Growing up, one of the things that I always remember is our family meals.  Every night we would sit down together as a family for dinner.  Each of the children had a chore; be it setting the table, clearing the table or feeding the dog.  And every evening my mom would come home from work and cook us a very nice, simple meal.  We would sit down, talk about our day, enjoy a little bit of family time without the television on, and inevitably laugh as my youngest sister always seemed to get up having sat on something (Jello seemed to be the most common).  It's been almost ten years since I officially left home, and while some things have changed, one remains the same: we always sit down to family meals together, though the meal itself has evolved.

In the years past, it would always be my mom making dinner, with my dad occasionally do some cooking if it involved the grill.  But the past few times, as I've gotten more into cooking (and also one of my sisters), the preparation of the meal has become a much more family oriented affair.  Take this recent trip home.  We decided that we were going to cook dinner, and that the main protein would be trout.  This meant my dad would take on the grilling duties.  For a vegetable we opted for asparagus because it is in season.   I volunteered to work on the asparagus because I had a couple of Michael Chiarello recipes in mind (pesto for the fish, roasted bundles for the vegetable).  And my mom took on the dessert and the cornbread, pretty much a staple in our house when serving trout.  Plus, it gave her an opportunity to try a new recipe as she continues her search for the best cornbread recipe ever.  

About an hour before dinner, we all set to work.  I got started on the bread crumbs for the roasted asparagus as well as the pesto while my mom worked on the dessert.  We were able to talk about different flavor combinations, techniques and recipes that she had never done (or had the time to do) while we were at home.  Then we poured ourselves a glass of wine and just talked about food; different chefs, different recipes, different nutritional facts that we'd learned and different places that we'd eaten.  The entire prep time dedicated to talking about food (and giving my grandma a little bit of a hard time being that she's less adventurous than the rest of us), and not once did we feel bored.  As dinner time approached, my dad fired up the grill.  We had talked about different fish cooking techniques, and decided to give low and slow a try this time.  Previously we had both cooked fish at medium, but after a recent fish taco party with friends where I had referred to a Bobby Flay recipe, I had dropped the heat even further in an attempt to maintain the moisture in the fish.  To go with the fish, he whipped up a little lemon butter sauce, and seasoned the fish simply with salt and pepper.

While my dad was grilling the fish, I put the roasted asparagus in and pulled out the cornbread (in our talking we let it go about two minutes too long; whoops!).  We also sauteed up some regular asparagus for Grandma just to make sure that everyone was happy.  About this time, my dad brought in the first of the trout to see how it was, and we decided it just needed a minute or so more on the grill, assuming he could keep it lit in the wind (one of the disadvantages of gas).  When he brought in the second batch, it was perfect.  Instead of really have to peel it off the bone, I simply had to start it, and it just fell off onto the plate (and I'm not just saying this because I know he's reading my post).  It was very moist and tender, quite possibly the best trout I've had.

In the end, our timing was a little off, having finished the pesto and the roasted asparagus a little ahead of the fish, and having to reheat the pesto, but all in all everything came together.  My mom commented that if I had decided I'd liked to cook (and learned about different foods) earlier in life, we definitely would have eaten "better".  I don't think it was necessarily better, but we definitely ate differently than we had when growing up, with things like asparagus pesto, roasted asparagus bundles, cornbread muffins from scratch and slowly grilled rainbow trout.  Though, I don't know if any of us picky kids would have been interested anyway.  But when it was all said and done, no matter what food was put out, we all once again sat down at the table together, and shared a wonderful meal.