Milestone Dinners Through The Years

What we've cooked for Firsts, Lasts, and everything in between.

I remember taking this photo because I wanted to memorialize the first time we tried to have a legitimate sit-down family dinner. Judging from Abby in her little hook-on high chair eating jarred baby food, it was probably mid to late 2004 when the girls were about nine months and two. I didn’t take the photo because the meal was such a success — it was in fact the opposite, look at Andy’s body language — or because I had some prescient notion that one day I’d write a whole blog and book series about family dinner. I took the photo because it was a milestone. Even though it was probably a mad scramble for both of us to commute home from work early enough to make chicken cutlets (I think?), and even though the meal itself probably lasted all of two minutes and sixteen seconds, it was a worthy of a non-digital shutter click on the Canon. It was one of so many milestone dinners that happened at that table in that kitchen.

I bring this up of course because (have you heard? Sorry!) I’m moving in three short weeks and in addition to figuring out how to leave all these memories behind — it seems like it might be physically impossible to just walk out the door?! — I’m also trying to figure out what the last family dinner in that kitchen should be. Naturally, this extremely pressing question led me down another Dinner Diary rabbit hole to see what I had cooked or eaten on other milestones through the years, almost all of them in that same kitchen in the photo. What did we eat the night we brought Phoebe home from the hospital? How about Abby? What did we eat on the first night we moved into our house, on August 15, 2003? What did we cook for our oldest neighborhood friends the first time they came over? What was on the menu for the eighty (!!!) birthdays we celebrated over the course of two decades? Here’s a little taste…