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I remember when I was a little girl and my grandmother would spend all day in the kitchen on Sunday, making dinner and dessert from scratch. She taught me how to bake before the advent of ready made cake and cookie mixes, and the kitchen was the heart of our home. It was the room that brought everyone together, sampling the fixings, working together to create great culinary treats, and once the meal was prepared we would sit down as a family and share what was happening in our lives over dinner.

No longer do we sit down for dinner as a family, and I believe that it’s not just because of hectic schedules, television watching, and having two working parents in the home. I think much of it has to do with the fact that we have begun to lose the art of cooking from scratch.

We live in an instant gratification society. We have everything we could possibly want or need at our fingertips. Drive-thru windows provide us with ready made meals for our families, as do boxes of “instant” mixes, cans of vegetables have replaced fresh on many dinner tables, and if you’re anything like most people, cooking means going from freezer to oven with very little muss or fuss.

I admit it. I’m one of the worst offenders. Somehow, after my grandmother died, instead of continuing her traditions of cooking from scratch, I chose to give in to the easy way to cook. I went to the box, the jar, the can, and the frozen foods. The only person who does any scratch cooking in my house is my husband, and that’s only on the weekends. We still eat in front of the television however, because that’s the way we’ve conditioned ourselves.

I suppose if I want to go back to family meals and recapture the family feeling of my youth, I’m going to have to bite the bullet and go back to cooking from scratch once again to truly make the kitchen the heart of my home.