Mother's Day is around the corner. So while there is still time send your mom flowers or drop a greeting card in the mail, spending time together will likely be more treasured than any trinket or gift.

Recently, I asked the Meals Matter Moms and our colleagues at Dairy Council of California to share what role milk played in their favorite memories of their moms and of being a mom. As you may imagine, many of the responses revolved around time spent together in the kitchen, preparing dishes or lingering over a delicious family meal as they reflected on how they grew up with milk as an irreplaceable food in their homes. While this is a longer-than-usual blog post, we hope you enjoy these stories of lasting memories of mother's love.

Meals Matter Mom and Registered Dietitian Maureen Bligh was one of five kids growing up and she still recalls twice-weekly milk deliveries. "The wire container sat beside our back door and had six slots that fit half-gallon bottles. We had milk every night at dinner, and we never wasted a drop of milk. Pretty much the whole top shelf of our fridge was milk! Sometimes I don't know how my mom did it," says Maureen. "With two teenage boys of my own, my fridge pretty much looks the same as it did growing up! I'm happy to keep up her tradition as we still have milk every night with dinner."

Suzy O. Macatiag, M.P.H. and Dairy Council of California Territory Manager recalls her bedtime tradition fondly. "My mom would prepare a semi-warm glass of milk concocted with chocolate flavored Ovaltine. I remember pretending to be sleepy at 4 p.m. just so I could get my flavored chocolate milk already!" A mom herself, Suzy now keeps a close eye on the clock as she prepares the same warm milk for her son each night. "I want to continue that legacy, minus the pretending part!"

"Milk was a main staple in our household growing up, and with three brothers, you can imagine how much we went through," recalls Kim Beach, Administrative Support for Dairy Council of California. "When the local dairy stopped delivering milk door-to-door, they accommodated customers at the drive-through dairy. My mother would pile the four of us in the family station wagon and we would hit the drive-through to purchase at least four gallons of milk a week. Whoever was lucky enough to sit in the front seat got to order the milk and pay- we did fight for this position!"

According to a recently-published Thomson Reuters-NPR Health Poll, 51 percent of Americans have set New Year's resolutions to excercise more and 35 percent have promised to lose weight. I've already read countless Facebook posts about friends throwing out piles "unhealthy" food, complaining of hunger pangs on a starvation diet and icing sore muscles after overdoing it in the gym.

Eat Better, Eat Together is a blog series by registered dietitians and parents whose stories and advice help families start or strengthen a commitment to balanced family meals and create healthy, successful families. Take the Eat Better, Eat Together Family Meal Pledge at Facebook.com/MealsMatter.org.

Happy Hanukah, Merry Christmas and Happy Kwanzaa to you all! The Meals Matter Moms are getting ready for a holiday break and will return in the new year. Before we do, I’ve compiled some of our favorite holiday activities, traditions and recipes to share with you.

Music makes the season bright for Meals Matter Mom Maureen Bligh and her family.

We’ve had fun the past few years learning holiday Christmas carols and playing them as a family band. My husband plays the guitar and sings, I play the piano, son Brian plays the drums and son Andy plays electric guitar. After practicing our parts, we have a few families over for dinner and a “concert.” We won’t be going on tour any time soon, but we have fun!

Mom of toddler twins LeAnne Ruzzamenti makes sure to work physical activity into her family’s holiday traditions.

We gather with a few other families to go get our Christmas trees. We spend the day in the foothills taking advantage of the recreation (hiking through the tree farms) and good eating (a picnic lunch with fresh apple pastries.) Then we meet back at one friend’s home for a wonderful spaghetti dinner. It is my most favorite day of the year!

Food is also central to Trina Robertson’s traditions.

Before Christmas my boys and I make Pizzelles, a thin Italian cookie baked in a waffle-like press. One batch takes about two hours to make over 100 cookies (read more about Trina’s Pizzelle tradition at Adventures in Eating.) Other holiday baking traditions include “See’s" fudge  and  Grandma’s fudge filled cookies.  On Christmas Eve we celebrate with the same Italian fish dinner with pasta. Then we set out milk and cookies for Santa and raw oats for the reindeer.

Making sure the reindeer are well-cared for is a common theme.  Registered dietitian Tracy Witmer and I both have fond memories of setting out carrots for the reindeer.  I’m not sure what happened to our carrots but Tracy figures hers ended up with her horses.

Thinking of others is also a time-honored tradition for Tracy and her family.

Every year before Christmas, my sister and I would go shopping with my mom to pick out warm coats and gloves for needy children. At the time I thought it was nice, but I can now really appreciate what a great learning experience it was and what great memories I have from spending this time together. The first year I went on my own, I cried sentimental tears!

For me, it’s just not Christmas without Rubens and Potato Soup made in double batches so they will last almost to New Year's Eve. Leftovers are also at the heart of Ashley Rosales' post Christmas tradition. She uses the left over Roasted Chicken to make her late grandmother's famous Chicken and Dumplings. 

The second I start making her recipe I instantly feel like she is with me. She was an amazing woman and Christmas was her favorite time of year. My family is from Kentucky and I live in California, so making this recipe is like buying a plane ticket back home. 

From all the Meals Matter Moms and everyone at Dairy Council of California, we wish you and your families
Healthy Eating to All, and to All a Good Bite!

Sara Floor Miller 

Subscribe to the Meals Matter blog, follow @MealsMatter and #EatBetter2Gether on Twitter for more tips, recipes and family meal inspiration.

Eat, Play, Love: Raising Healthy Eaters is a blog series by parents and dietitians whose stories and advice reminds us that we can overcome the challenges of feeding children. Subscribe to find ways to build lifelong healthy eating habits for your children.

Growing up, my sister and I were given two choices at the dinner table—eat the food in front of us or go without. Preparing individual dishes based on our likes or dislikes was never an option in our household.

Mom’s job was to prepare one nutritious, balanced meal for the entire family and our job was to eat at least a tablespoon-sized “no-thank-you” helping of each dish.

We were also raised to eat first and ask questions later. By not always knowing what was in a dish, we were far more likely to accept and eat different foods. This was a very wise strategy, because we learned that what tastes good to the tongue does not always sound good to the ear.

Our friends would cringe as we described our delicious dinners of venison stew, freshwater fish like smelt, perch, walleye or pike and cauliflower with cheese and sour cream- a dish we playfully called “brains.”

This take-it-or-leave-it, eat-first-ask-questions-later approach to food may seem a little extreme, but it taught me to approach food with a sense of adventure lacking in many families today. More often than not, I see friends asking their children what they want to eat and catering to their wishes instead of setting the tone and serving one meal for the entire family.

No-thank-you helpings ensured that we tasted foods multiple times, increasing the likelihood that we would begin to enjoy something previously rejected. Looking back, I realize that mom would pair favorite entrees with less desired side dishes, or vice versa, so she knew we’d never go too hungry.

Trying new foods was a big part of my childhood and I continue to be an adventuresome eater as an adult. “I’ll try anything twice” is my food motto. How do you encourage adventuresome eating in your family?

Subscribe to our Eat, Play, Love: Raising Healthy Eaters blog series to find ways to build lifelong healthy eating habits for your children.

For more tips and information on raising healthy eaters, follow @mealsmatter and the #eatplaylove hashtag on Twitter.

Sara Miller

We recently compiled Spanish-language resources and promoted them around Día de los Muertos tohelp Latino families celebrate their culture and family food traditions by eating more like their ancestors, and it got me to thinking about my own family’s food traditions.

From the silly, like sticking black olives on our fingers during Thanksgiving, to the sacred, like decorating loaves of Easter Bread (Paska) with signs of our faith, my family’s food traditions cemented key values that remain with me today. Istrongly believe that no matter your background, family food traditions: 

• introduce children to cooking at a young age,

• help children experience a wide variety of flavors and tastes,

• reinforce the benefits of eating meals together as a family, and

• help instill personal values 

Growing up, we spent every Easter with my step-grandmother, whose family was from Eastern Europe. Kneading the Paska (EasterBread) dough under Grandma Emily’s watchful eye is my earliest memory of cooking. Covered in flour, even the youngest cousin could roll out long ropes of dough to braid in intricate designs or mop the loaveswith egg whites before baking. The whole family looked forward to the thickslices of yeasty bread slathered with butter that were the fruits of our labor.

Paska was just one of the traditional foods we enjoyedwith Grandma Emily. She introducedus to kielbasa, golumpkis, pierogis and other previously unknown dishes. Kielbasa remains one of my veryfavorite foods, especially when cooked with sauerkraut or red cabbage. Iappreciate that our family food traditions exposed me to these different dishes, as itinstilled in me an enthusiasm for trying new foods.

The rest of my childhood revolved around my paternal grandparents, and the several generations who would converge upon Grandma Floor’s house for Sunday dinner.(The black olive on the finger Thanksgiving tradition started with this group.) On Sundays, we’d eat pot roast, bakedchicken, stew or barbeque with carrots and broccoli, potato salad and icedteafor dinner. We’d always have chocolate chip cookies and milk for dessert.

These meat-and-potato meals were far less adventurous when compared to Grandma Emily’s, but no less influential. From sharing with others to table manners andteamwork while doing the dishes, our Sunday dinner family food tradition taught me endless lessons on the value of eating together as a family.  

Many years have passed since I was able to share Thanksgiving with my family or bake Paska with my cousins, but these family food traditions have instilled lifelong personal values. I often enjoy Sunday dinner here in California with my husband’s family and we’re always trying new foods like lumpia and paneer, but it’s just not Thanksgiving without black olives or Easterwithout kielbasa.

What family food traditions do you remember from childhood? How are you sharing your culture and getting your children involved with family meals?

SaraFloor Miller
Communications Manager