Dinners with Dad are a weekly tradition that I began earlier this year, and which I consider to be a mindfulness practice of sorts. Every Wednesday, I go after work and cook a dinner for (you guessed it) my Dad, who is disabled with Multiple Sclerosis. It is a commitment I have made that has provided my Dad, who doesn’t work and just sits at home most days and watches sports and soaps, with a lot of joy and has helped improve our relationship. But Dad isn’t the only beneficiary of our weekly dinners- I have reaped benefits from them in many ways as well.
Before I started Dinners with Dad, I was getting fast food frequently on the way home from work and not cooking for myself as I should. This practice has helped me curb my fast food habit. Being used to cooking at least once a week during the week and once on the weekend with my boyfriend, I am now more in the habit of cooking. I have also learned many techniques and skills that make it easy to improvise good meals on the fly. For example, I can now make amazing fish and chicken using the broiler, and I frequently bake muffins and banana bread and bread pudding. I am a firm believer in the value of making your own food from scratch, from fresh, whole ingredients, both from a nutritional standpoint and a mindfulness standpoint. As they say, easy come, easy go. With food, the more easily you acquire it (fast food, convenience food, frozen and canned foods), the less you appreciate it and the less it actually satisfies you. And I figure that with baked goods, some of the calories consumed eating them are burned in the process of making them, am I right? (maybe just wishful thinking here)
In any case, I plan to post weekly on my Dinners with Dad. Hopefully, this will inspire me to keep up the practice and if I ever get any readers, it will inspire them, too!
