Key Ingredient: Radical Empathy

I have this friend -- let's call her Martha, as in Martha Stewart -- who I've known forever. And when I go to her house, it always looks like it's ready to be shot for a fancy design magazine: immaculate kitchen counters, lovely candle burning, bookshelves styled just so, and an honest-to-goodness glass dome with homemade cookies inside just sitting on her kitchen island. When she hosts us for dinner, she offers an individually mixed cocktail, followed by an interesting salad, followed by a thoughtfully planned and wonderfully executed meal, somehow healthy and indulgent at the same time, and she does it with grace. She's the kind of person who can whip up a meal from scratch while managing a few kids underfoot and still holding up her end of the conversation, who will send you home with some sort of artfully tied favor that you didn't even know you wanted but you love at first sight. When you leave her house, you feel spoiled, nourished, taken care of. 

I have this other friend -- let's call her Kristen, as in Kristen Wiig -- who I've known for a few years. And when I go to her house, the kitchen is charming and tiny, with 1930s cabinets and a whole wall covered with kids' artwork and happy photos. When she hosts us for dinner (or, more likely, an afternoon of football-watching), there's a mishmash of beer in the fridge and a Bloody Mary bar where you help yourself. She offers a veggie tray she bought at the grocery store and you pile take-out pizza onto paper plates before you settle into comfortable couches in the family room. She's the kind of person who has you in stitches half the afternoon, who will bring you a second beer while showing you her favorite SNL skit on YouTube and offering to loan you a necklace for that work thing you have next week, who will send you home with a foil-wrapped plate of leftover pizza for lunch tomorrow. When you leave her house, you feel lighter, relaxed, taken care of.

I was thinking about both these friends last Sunday as I stood in the kitchen (after church, after the soccer game), pounding chicken breasts thin. See, I was making Martha's chicken for Kirsten's family, who was coming over for Sunday supper. The recipe is one that Martha made for me at her house for one of our annual college girlfriend weekends, and, true to form, she whipped it up while the rest of us were standing around the kitchen, drinking wine and being generally unhelpful. It's the kind of dish that seems fancy but really isn't hard to make, and all of us immediately loved it and wanted the recipe, which Martha subsequently printed out on adorable card stock and mailed to each of us.

In the introduction to the book Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed (Go read it. Immediately. Unless you're easily offended by the f-word.), writer Steve Almond says this about Strayed's wide appeal as Dear Sugar, the advice columnist name she'd been hiding behind for some time:

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives — those fountains of inconvenient feeling — and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market.

We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick.

The cure, Almond goes on to say, is Strayed's "radical empathy," the feeling that she gives to those who write in with their difficult situations that, with time or patience or a bit of perspective, things are going to be OK. And, having read the book a few times myself and lent it to several people, I think the way Strayed does it is by opening up her own stories and imperfections to the advice seeker. Instead of maintaining a professional distance from the situation, she shares the messy past of her own life. She says, I went through something like that too, and here's how I got through it. She says, I see you, and you're normal, and you can do this. She writes to these people as though she's talking to them across her kitchen table. She makes them feel taken care of.

So Almond is right, I think, that this kind of connection and radical empathy is the cure to the loneliness that's lurking beneath the fast-paced lives we're living. And it's the reason that, given the choice between spending the evening having a meal with Martha or Kristen, I would happily choose either. It's not about the food, really, or the cleanliness of the kitchen or whether or not the dessert is homemade. It's about spending time with the people who love you best, who welcome you into their homes, and who send you back out into the world again feeling cared for. Nourished. Understood. It's about offering people radical empathy along with whatever you're having for dinner, whether it's take-out pizza or hand-pounded chicken.

To serve eight, I doubled the recipe, swapped Parmesan for Asiago, and served the chicken over a big platter of fettuccine, with the sage sauce on the side.

Chicken with Asiago, Prosciutto, and Sage

• 4 small skinless, boneless chicken breast halves, pounded to 1/4-inch thickness
• all-purpose flour
• 6 T butter, divided
• 1/2 c. finely grated Asiago cheese
• 8 thin slices prosciutto, folded over crosswise
• 2/3 c. dry white wine
• 2 t. minced fresh sage
• 4 whole sage leaves for garnish (optional)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Sprinkle chicken breasts with salt and pepper. Coat both sides with flour, shaking off excess. Melt 4 T. butter in large skillet over medium-high heat. Add chicken breasts and sauté until brown, turning once, about 5 minutes. Transfer chicken to rimmed baking sheet lined with parchment paper; reserve skillet. Sprinkle 2 T. cheese over each chicken breast. Top each with 2 prosciutto slices. Bake until chicken is cooked through, about 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, add wine, minced sage, and 2 T. butter to skillet. Stir, scraping up browned bits, and boil until sauce is reduced to 1/3 cup, about 4 minutes.

Transfer chicken to platter. Top each with sage leave, drizzle pan sauce over, and serve.

Making Time

A few things happened in quick succession this summer and together, they get the credit for inspiring Reclaiming Sunday Supper.

1. There was a hilarious Facebook meme going around, which began, "I'm so West Michigan, I . . ." and had people filling in the blank with stories about back in the day, when you could ride your bike to the corner store for cheap candy -- and buy your mom's smokes with a note signed by her. Someone in my feed, who grew up here, moved away, and is now a local media professional, wrote, "I'm so West Michigan, I can remember when you got in trouble for washing your car and mowing your lawn on Sunday." It triggered predictably fascinating comments, with those who are new to town expressing curiosity and amusement that Sundays used to be so strict around here, and those who grew up here chiming in with their own sets of antiquated Sunday rules. 

2. Our family went to the cabin for a weekend, and I brought along Shauna Niequist's wonderful book, Bread and Wine, to re-read. We invited another family with two little girls to join us, and one morning, after I'd just read Shauna's chapter about House Church (a small group of exquisitely close friends who gathered weekly in each other's homes for meals and friendship), I started a conversation about it with our friends. Was Shauna's experience really true? (They knew her tangentially, and said indeed it was.) Was this kind of committed community even possible these days, with every family we know scheduled to the minute? After we did the dishes that morning, I dangled my toes in the Little Manistee River, and I wondered.

3. A couple of weeks later, the website I manage published a fun profile of a very successful local businesswoman. She's a savvy realtor, a mother, an active community member, and a triathlete. How, the writer asked, does she do it all? Simple, she replied; if it isn't in her calendar, it doesn't happen. She explained how she schedules her life very intentionally, prioritizing time for family, exercise, and travel, then fills in what's available with work. It's not the first time I'd heard this philosophy, but somehow this time everything clicked: the memories of childhood Sundays, with their rejoinder against work; the moving description of House Church, with its unique ability to nourish and support; and the reminder that it's the busiest people who get the most done because they're so intentional with their time.

"There is NO time" is a text I sent my sister-in-law at one point this summer, and it often seems that it's true. At one point last month, I woke up at 4 a.m., looking at the ceiling and worrying in advance about what had become an insanely complicated soccer carpool schedule. (I think it's safe to say the moment you cross over from "a parent with some kids who play some sports" to "a soccer mom" is when you have more than one color-coded Google Drive spreadsheet open on your laptop and you've spent the better part of a week trying to make sense of hundreds of texts and emails about camps, tournaments, practices, and game schedules. But that's neither here nor there.) 

Nonetheless, it's September, which is the best month of the year, if you ask me, to begin again. New school year, new schedules, fresh pencils and shoes, and a renewed commitment, after the haze of summer, to bring a little more order to life. To make time for what's important.

It's true; there is still "NO time" -- or, at least, no more than there was before. But our family has been largely having Sunday supper most weeks for the last year or so. We've cobbled together some little traditions around it (all the best traditions are cobbled together ones, no?), involving the lighting of a very ugly blue glass votive candle that one of the girls chose from TJ Maxx a couple years ago and the writing in a gratitude journal about things that we're thankful for on that particular week.

And since we're cooking anyway, we may as well get some people to come sit down and eat with us. Coming off the unscheduled chaos of late summer, when things tend to fall apart and I hardly knew which day it was, not much sounds better than carving out Sundays as a day for heading to church (or, let's be honest, probably the occasional kids' soccer game), coming home to change into elastic waistband pants, and spending the afternoon reading, watching football, hiking, or playing outside while something cooks slowly in the oven. We'll see.

Why Sunday Supper?

Why decide, in September of 2014, to begin a family experiment in rest and connection around the table by committing to hosting a rotating cast of any and all interested friends and family at our Sunday suppers for a year?

Well, because we found, as our girls got older (they're seven and days-away-from-ten), our calendar was filling up with piano lessons and soccer practices, editorial meetings and dental appointments, work obligations and school open houses, and we had the strong feeling that we needed to balance six days of go-go-go with at least one day of eat, pray, love.

Because we found ourselves missing our nieces, even though they live just half an hour away, and we caught ourselves doing that thing where you see some favorite friends and yell, "Let's catch up soon!" as you're jogging past one another in the hallway or on the sidewalk.

Because we had memories of the long, lazy Sundays of our childhood, filled with only church, pot roast, and naps, and it sounded kind of dreamy.

Because we were doing plenty of the get-dinner-on-the-table-in-30-minutes kind of cooking, but hardly any of the inspired-by-a-great-new-recipe kind of cooking, and we needed a nudge to do more of the second kind, which we really enjoy.

Because we started to notice a connection between how often we checked email on our phones on the weekend and how ill-prepared we felt to plunge into another work week come Monday morning.

Because we wanted an excuse to get our girls in the kitchen more, learning to chop, stir, and measure with us.

Because so many great moments happen around the table.

Because we wanted to make more space for rest, joy, and gratitude in our lives.

Because we love to eat good food with great people.

Want in?

Good, because we want to see you at our table on a Sunday this year. If we've been meaning to "grab that drink" or "get coffee soon" -- Sunday supper. If we've been trying - and failing - to find a night to ditch the kids and have a great meal out -- Sunday supper. (Bring the kids.) If you're tired of cooking but up for telling stories around our big farm table -- Sunday supper. Pick a Sunday, invite yourself over, and bring some wine.