The Celebrating Table

The table is a meeting place, a gatherina around, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, society, and satisfaction. -LAURIE COLWIN

Whether we're single, married, with or without children, we all have to eat dinner. The evening meal should be the highlight of the day. If the day has been peaceful, pleasurable, and profitable, it's time to celebrate. If the day has been difficult and discouraging, it's time for comfort and consolation-blessings by themselves and reason to celebrate. Either way, the celebrating table bids.

Just as there are different food categories, there are different types of dining in: make-do, carryout, home-style, and feasts. All of us make do sometimes, but as a lifestyle choice, a crust of French bread and a heel of salami can quickly lead to psychic starvation and dietary deprivation. Carryout meals can cut corners miraculously, but are extremely expensive, and a steady diet of restaurant food will make you feel as if you've been on the road too long. Home-style is what I call Monday-to-Friday suppers, which, with planning, can be easy, fast, and delicious. Weekends call for your favorite meal one night and a culinary feast the next.

There was a time when I wouldn't begin to think about what to have for dinner each day until four 0' clock that afternoon. Today this thought makes me shudder. Planning, shopping, and cooking in the space of an hour is self-abuse, pure and simple. Fear not, there's a great resource for planning your meals and weekly grocery shopping. It's the Monday to Friday Cookbook by Michele Urvater. Michele's a professional chef who created this cookbook because, at the end of a long day cooking for other people, she wanted simple but savory, no-fuss suppers for her family. She'll teach you how to stock the pantry with staples, what to fix when schedules clash, and how to avoid the Mother Hubbard's empty cupbord syndrome with style.

"We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just-; in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us," Laurie Colwin reminds us. "We must turn off the television and the telephone, hunker down in front of our hearths, and leave our briefcases at the office, if for only one night. We must march into the kitchen, en famille or with a friend, and find some easy, heartwarming things to make from scratch, and even if it is,but once a week, we must gather at the table, alone or with friends or with lots of friends or with one friend, and eat a meal together. We know that without food we would die. Without fellowship life is not worth living.

Come, the celebrating table bids.