Mealtimes together are great and can mean a lot as a household, but there isn’t one hard and fast rule to a happy family dinner.
A couple of years ago Gordon Ramsay put his name to the campaign to reintroduce the family Sunday roast dinner to the tables of Britain. He was in good company, newspapers and charities like Relate and ChildLine all back the idea of highlighting the value of this regular family get-together.
It’s not hard to see why. Whether that ‘Sunday’ lunch was on the weekend or a Tuesday night, a chance to all sit together for an hour or two enjoying good food will do any family the world of good, and it’s a habit that’s increasingly died off over the past couple of decades.
However, a great family dinner doesn’t have to be one vision of a blissful, Waltons-style roast up. Here are a few golden rules for enjoying meals together…
• Your ‘Sunday’ get together might actually be a Wednesday supper or a Saturday lunchtime – especially if you have teenagers who have part-time jobs half the week. It doesn’t matter when you do it, but trying to keep it to a fairly regular time each week will help you all get back into the family meal habit much more easily.
• If one of you can’t make it, don’t cancel. If for some reason dad is working late, or one of your kids is staying at a friend’s house, that’s no reason to skip a good meal for the rest of you. They can rejoin your weekly nosh-up routine next week.
• Your Sunday roast get-together doesn’t have to look like the perfect celebrity chef has been working in your kitchen since dawn. If you are more confident making a cracking chilli con carne and a rice pudding you know everyone loves, that’s going to be much more relaxing to prepare for you than roast lamb with all the trimmings. However, if you do fancy a challenge once in a while, you will find that occasionally giving something more ‘posh’ a go will give you a real boost.
• Table manners can be improvised. It’s important that everyone respects each other by not being rude or talking over each other at the table – it’s the communicating rather than the eating that’s going to give your family a loving boost! However, you don’t need to be too formal with endless rows of the correct knives and the dessert spoon pointing the right way. Those old rules were invented centuries ago so that guests all knew how to behave, but these days they are more likely to make everyone feel more tense than put them at their ease.
• Try to break out of the once-a-week rut. If you can, try eating together as many times as possible during the week. When the children are small they tend to need to eat earlier than we adults do, and it’s easy to fall into the habit of dinner time being two separate sessions. Whether meals together are weekday breakfasts, or weekend teatimes or Friday nights in front of the family’s favourite TV show, you’ll soon feel the benefit to getting together.