Union Square Cafe - Family table: favorite staff meals from our restaurants to your home

I was fortunate enough to grow up eating one or two meals a day with my family: breakfast at 7:15 each morning and dinner at 7:00 each night.

It was a good day when my mom poached or scrambled eggs for us, and an exceptional one when she served fried eggs along with toasted Jewish rye with corn tzitzela specialty of St. Louis delicatessens, in which the bread crust is dusted with coarse cornmeal. And it was a perfect day when she buttered our toast with butter, not margarine. Cereal days meant my mom didnt feel like cooking, or that she didnt think we should eat so many eggs in one week. Fresh doughnut and bagel runs were generally reserved for weekends.

Even in that simpler era, breakfast was a hurried affair. We fed the dog, pored over the sports section, and watched the Today showthe scant twenty minutes allocated to breakfast meant that not much was discussed. Everyone was on a slightly different biorhythm at that hour. Some of us were wide-eyed and ready to grab the world, some were tired and closemouthed. Yet even on those days when scarcely a word was spoken, we affirmed our family-ness simply by following the ritual of sitting around the same table.

Evening meals were different. The moment we came home from school, the first question invariably was, Whats for dinner? Learning that it would be something good helped provide the impetus to get cracking on our homework. Most of our family dinners were cooked by my mom. Most were delicious and varied, and I cant recall a meal when I didnt ask for secondsexcept on those (fortunately) rare occasions when she served calves liver or fish sticks. Mom had a fairly broad rotation of dishes that were drawn from those she had eaten at her own family dinners in suburban Chicago, others were picked up along the way from my St. Louis grandmother and friends, and some were from her travels with my dad in France, where theyd lived for the first two years of their marriage and often dined in family homes.

The family meal was where my brother and sister and I learned to cook. When we reached a certain age, we were expected to contribute something to the dinner. We developed our own specialties. My brother and I loved making Tupperware salads, prepared and shaken in the containers; grilling burgers and ribs on our outdoor pit, often with our father; stirring up chili; and preparing homemade pizza and tacos. My sister became an accomplished baker, turning out quiches, bread, cookies, and cakes.

But its the conversations at the dinner table I remember more than anything else. We discussed and debated the issues of the day (often with more heat than light, since we were all at different points along the political spectrum). We talked about our accomplishments (or lack thereof) at school, my dads business, and our favorite sports teams. We decided where to go on our next vacation, caught up on news of our relatives, updated one another on the activities of our friends, and occasionally discussed ethics and values. Often our family meal was joyous with laughter.