Week 130: Draft Day
Opening up our home for the first time…
Each Sunday, my wife and I cook and eat a meal together — intentionally. Every Friday, I’ll be sharing our experience here in this space. I want to see the growth that will come in our marriage because of this. I hope you enjoy our story. You can find last week’s post here.
There’s a running joke in our house that there isn’t a time throughout the entire year where I’m not playing some version of fantasy sports. Fantasy baseball lasts most of the year — from draft prep and strategy to management during the season it basically lasts from February to October. Then fantasy football overlaps in September and takes us all the way up until January. For any time that doesn’t overlap, my Strat-O-Matic baseball league is there to pick up the slack.
Yeah, I’m a bit of a sports nerd.
But Sarah, in all her loveliness, understands that my sports nerdiness is a part of the man she married. Yes, it’s silly. But each league represents a group of dear friends, and the camaraderie that is built through them is something she knows to be important. That is why, on a Sunday in late August, she agreed to play host to my fantasy football live draft. This would be our first large gathering we hosted at our new house, and we wanted to have a meal to match the occasion. And so, we turned to an old Cooking With Sarah classic for the main dish, and decided to update another favorite for dessert. Lemon Poppyseed Chicken and Blueberry Dump Cake. If you need a refresher, here are the original recipes.
As I said, we made a slight change on the dump cake by substituting blueberries for strawberries. As a die-hard fan of blueberries, I certainly wasn’t complaining.
Everyone came over, and the meal commenced as we all hurriedly made our final draft preparations. It filled me with so much joy to see my friends and my dear wife sharing quality time in our house. The food was a hit, and though my draft didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped, the day was absolutely fantastic. The impact of everything that we had shared didn’t fully set in until later that evening.
Roll the Credits
Last week, we talked about how you don’t always have to do a big production. It may seem like hosting a bunch of friends is exactly the time to go big. But this week, I was struck by something.
Who gets to label what is and isn’t a big production?
What I’m really getting at is this — what may seem like a big production to people on the outside may seem mundane to you. If you’re like me, you don’t always give yourself credit for the things you do well.
Lemon Poppyseed Chicken is a recipe Sarah and I have made many times by now. It’s one of our favorites. The same can be said of the dump cake, even though we made it slightly different this time. But I don’t think either of us would consider them “big productions.”
These are favorite recipes of ours, and it can be easy to write them off as something we’ve done before. It can be easy to forget them amid the rush to chase something big and new. But, at the end of the day, the important thing was sharing quality time with our friends. Well, that and feeding them, I guess. But there’s something even more special about sharing those favorite recipes with them.
On top of that, even though these recipes may not feel like big productions to us, they are productions. I did the shopping (twice, actually, because I didn’t get enough blueberries on my first trip), and Sarah cut up the chicken. We both prepared the food and cleaned up the living room. I set up the extension cords so everyone would have ample charging ports for their computer.
Whether we felt it or not, it was a production.
That’s not to toot our own horns at all. We absolutely loved doing it. I guess my point is this — don’t be so hard on yourself. Give yourself credit for the work you do. Don’t focus so much on whether it seems like a big enough production, whatever you take that term to mean. Give your work intentionality, and take time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
For us this week, that turned out to be a sweet afternoon with dear friends. There are very few things that can top that.
