Journaling #2.

In the next several weeks, I will be sharing some of the journaling exercises from Sara Avant Stover’s The Way of the Happy Woman: Living the Best Year of Your Life, a guide to returning to “daily, seasonal, and yearly rhythms of nature” in order to regain a healthy body and spirit. 

Exercise #2 (page 56)

1. My favorite childhood foods were: linguine with clam sauce, chicken with Dad’s barbecue sauce, asparagus, cherries, homemade pizza.
2. A typical family meal felt slow and deliberate.
3. Three things we often talked about were: school, family news, current events.
4. The main lessons I learned about growing food, cooking it, and eating it when I was young were: food grown in the backyard tasted fresher than anything at the store; food made at home tasted better than anything in a jar or a package.
5. My two most positive childhood memories regarding food are: helping my parents in the kitchen; large family gatherings with traditional family recipes.
6. My two most disturbing childhood memories regarding food are: getting a piece of bratwurst stuck in my throat at ten or eleven; the distaste for food (disordered eating?) that occurred in my early teens due to internalizing problems with peers at school.
7. Three words that characterize my mother’s relationship with food and cooking are: traditional, nourishing, recipe-driven.