Week 131: A Seat at the Table
Baked nachos and dinner with my best friend…
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.
Sarah and I love nachos but, to my surprise, we’ve never made them for Cooking With Sarah before. Sure, we made Nacho Soup and Totchos, but we’ve never actually made nachos. So we decided to do that this week…with a slight twist. Instead of making all the ingredients separately, we decided to put the meat and cheese on and bake everything together before putting the rest of the toppings on at the end. Sounds good, right? Well, the food wasn’t even the best part…
Quality Time
Sarah often reminds me that her love language is quality time. That’s a big reason we started Cooking With Sarah in the first place. We wanted to have a time set aside each week when we would spend intentional time together that didn’t involve being on screens.
This week, I went to the store and bought all our ingredients. You might be wondering why we didn’t do this together. Well, I’ve learned that part of marriage is understanding one another’s likes and dislikes and not pushing your partner too far. Sarah isn’t a big fan of grocery shopping. She comes along sometimes, but not every time. Tonight, she didn’t feel like shopping. No biggie. She was getting the kitchen prepped back at the house while I did the shopping. She also had been prepping the chicken for hours, so she certainly did her fair share of the work!
Then, when I got home, Sarah went into overdrive. She chopped up the onions and tomatoes and made sure everything was good to go. Finally, it was all ready.
We layed out the tortilla chips on a pan and put on the ingredients. Then we let it bake. I’m not the most patient person, so letting the food cook is always the toughest part for me. I just want it to be done! But if you cut this stage short, there will be major consequences. I think there’s a life lesson in there somewhere.
Finally, the food was ready. And that’s when the best part came.
A Change of Scenery
Sarah and I often eat dinner in the living room while watching a show on Netflix. Right now, we’re going through Grey’s Anatomy (my first time). But once we pulled the baked nachos out of the oven, we realized that this was a meal that would be difficult to eat in our carpeted living room. And so, we decided to make room at the dining table.
The other interesting part of this meal was that it would be difficult to eat any other way than with our hands. The cheese had melted the tortilla chips together, and it would just be easier to eat everything by hand.
So we sat down at the table and dived in together.
The food was sooooooo good! I tore through those nachos so fast that I barely had time to look up. But when I did, I was overcome with happiness.
There, right across from me, sat my beautiful wife. We were eating a meal that we had made together. We were sitting at our dining table in *our house*. We have such a good life together. Is it perfect? No, of course not. Things tend to get messy, just like the nachos. But the messiness is a lot easier to take when you have a partner to go through it all right along with you.
I’m so thankful for my partner. My love. My sweet Sarah.
