Making Food Memories

This post is sponsored by Nuffnang.

“Tradition. A belief, custom, story, or practice handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth or demonstration.” ~ About.com

For most families food plays an important role in family tradition. From Sunday roasts to birthday cakes, hot cross buns to Christmas puddings, visiting restaurants for family celebrations to cooking together at home; whatever your cultural background it is likely that food plays an important part in the way your family spends time together and how they celebrate holidays and celebrations. These experiences with food form an important part of a family’s unique identity. Many of these experiences are passed on down through the generations, others grow as a new family comes together and finds their own place at the table, combining two unique histories into one.

Traditions provide children with a strong sense of belonging. Their repetition makes them memorable in the minds (and hearts) of children from a young age, and traditions are usually strongly associated with the values important to a family.

Family food traditions are not only important to celebrations, such as birthdays and Christmas, but also in everyday family life – anything that is fun and brings family members together regularly could be considered a tradition. The expectation that everyone will be home to sit down and eat dinner together, a regular time in the week spent cooking with children or heading out for beach picnics during summer are all everyday family food traditions.

One of our current family food traditions is making pizza together for lunch on the weekend. We all pitch in to prepare the toppings, make our own individual pizza and sit down to eat together (outside on the picnic blanket if the weather is good!) Pizza making is a great way to involve young children in preparing food, involving many simple processes just right for small helpers – kneading, chopping, grating, spreading, and the selection of toppings make pizzas easy to personalise according to individual tastes.

This week we tried a new way of making our weekend pizzas, using the Pizza Scrolls recipe found in the Cooking for Kids section of the Coles website. The dough was easy to make (Immy led the way) and it would be easy to substitute your own choice of toppings. The process was fun and the end result tasty

Another food that Immy and I often cook together is pikelets so it made sense to give the Muesli Pikelets recipe a try. I like the idea of adding rolled oats as traditional pikelet recipes don’t offer much in the way of nutritional goodness, and thanks to the sultanas and coconut these are really good all on their own, though we may have enjoyed one or two with jam and cream for afternoon tea 😉

Check out the dedicated Cooking for Kids section of the Coles recipe catalogue for more memory making inspiration for your family.

What food-related traditions are important to your family’s everyday life?