Chicken Salad for the Soul

How Food Reminds Me of Days Gone By

We celebrated my father-in-law’s 70th birthday this past week, down with our North Carolina and Georgia family.

Being around these loved ones I’ve known so long, I was once again reminded of the relentlessness of time tumbling forward.

Ten years ago, we all gathered in a cabin to celebrate his 60th birthday. I was still nursing my third baby, Sir William as we called him then, and would soon find out that I was pregnant with my fourth.

This birthday, only Stuart and I made the journey down South while our four (much larger now) children filled their week back home full of jiu jitsu lessons, play dates, birthday parties, and feeding chores (my parents being kind enough to orchestrate their time).

Our faces show ten more years of wrinkles, our hair ten more years of grey.

So perhaps it is with a bit of nostalgia that I’m planning this week’s menu, feeling the need for foods that remind me of being a young mother to babies, when the future was tied into nap times and diaper changes… like chicken salad on homemade bread.