Bring Back Sunday Dinner

Goal setting, vision planning....hot topics and a big part of my life for many years. I often think for most of us who set goals, especially for women who are entrepreneurs or working to attain some lofty goal, those achievement markers usually revolve around monetary goals or weight loss or fill in the blank! I'm here to tell you that life is more than $$$ and degrees and certifications and recognition and, and, and....

Today I celebrate a huge dream of mine that is such a normal part of life for so many people but has been missing from my own life for so many years. It almost seems silly to call it a dream or a vision or a goal, because it is so mundane. It is my belief it is the mundane that keeps us going and those things, deeply rooted in tradition, that will keep humanity from plunging to the bottom of the well.

Ready? It's Sunday Dinner!

Growing up, our home was full most Sundays. Mama got up early and began what would be many hours in the kitchen. She began prepping for the afternoon meal but still managed to create the most amazing breakfast spread. It started with a late breakfast. The table was full of her homemade biscuits, bacon, sausage, gravy, scrambled eggs, jams and jellies, molasses, butter. My favorite of these days were the ones where the morning wasn't quite so hot and we took our plates to the ginormous covered patio overlooking my parent's pool. We would finish breakfast and Mama would return to her "work" creating the most delicious dinner that would feed 5, 10, 20 people. We never knew who would turn up. My siblings, their families, aunts and uncles and sometimes mine or my sister's friends. During the summer we would all end up at the pool. In the winter everyone stayed inside and ate and talked. After, the women most congregated in the kitchen to clean up.

I've missed those days and miss my parents and have lamented the loss of Sunday dinner in my life and in my family's life for many years. It was one of those things that in January 2020 I added to my plans for the year, but that plan went somewhat astray!. This ritual is so important to me that it was a huge factor in the type of home we purchased when we moved back to Murfreesboro in 2022. It was also part of our conversations with our kitchen remodel we recently wrapped up.

Yesterday, our dream became our reality and we hosted a handful of family members to feast on locally grown foods I picked up at the Murfreesboro Saturday Market. We had meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans (snapped by Arwyn), fried corn, yeast rolls and homemade blackberry cobber. I didn't do a great job of getting pics, though I took a couple of cobbler shots that will make your mouth water.

Normally, I wouldn't need recipes for Sunday dinner, but I decided to try a couple of new things. Below is a link to the best meatloaf recipe I have ever used and also a link to the cobbler recipe. I was a little hesitant to share the cobbler recipe. I do not want to lose any clout as a Southerner, but I did use a fairly complex recipe for the crust and what a crust it was!!!!

Whatever those secret things that make your heart sing that have little to do with financial goals, weight loss, "living your best life".....do them. Do them today. Those unsung visions just might be the key to flipping on the switch to make those "big dreams" a reality.

Meatloaf Recipe courtesy of Ask Chef Dennis

Cobbler Recipe (crust only) courtesy of the Food Charlatan