This Instagram Foodie Is Bringing Back Your Mom's '90s Meals

Family dinner was one of the things I always looked forward to the most about having my own family. In so many of my favorite sitcoms and movies and books, big conversations and life moments happened around the dinner table, and I wanted so much for my kids to have these huge food memories and to feel all the stress and worries of the day melt when we all sat down together. I wanted the Norman Rockwell family dinner, the quality time, the coziness — I wanted to be the mom who managed to get it all done every day and still put a good meal on the table. I wanted to be my mom.

Then I actually had kids.

It’s not that my kids fully prevent me from being this mom (except for when they kind of do... no, you don’t need a snack, I’m literally cooking dinner!), but motherhood doesn’t always look like it does in our dreams. Certain things I wanted in motherhood — bedtime stories, walks to the park, rocking my babies to sleep — look exactly as I imagined them, but cooking dinner never quite got to the magical feeling I wanted. I felt overwhelmed trying to meal plan; I felt stressed trying to bring it all together before bedtime; I felt irritated that my kids turned their noses up at whatever new recipe I wanted to try.

But now, I truly believe I was just making dinner more complicated. If I wanted to be the mom who got dinner on the table every night, if I wanted to be my mom, I needed to cook like her. And that meant getting off the fancy food ideas (I love chickpeas, but I really need to stop trying to make them work on a busy Wednesday night for three little kids) and going back to the basics.

Food writer and cook Melissa Tate, @melissatatetx on Instagram, 100% gets it.

When I speak with her on the phone, I am fully ready to gush about all of the incredible things she cooks on Instagram — especially her "It's 1993, and Mom is cooking dinner" series — but she's equally ready to gush about any and all food along with me. As a mom who had her first baby young and then became a stepmom when she married her husband, she fully gets the harried stress of dinnertime.

But she doesn't want that for any of us. "We can make things easier," she tells me on the phone. "Plain and simple, we can make things easier."

As a food writer who pens a column titled "Cooking With Ease" (she took over after her mother-in-law, the column's original writer, passed) for her Rockwall, Texas hometown newspaper, Tate knows a thing or two about cooking. Her column consists of "easy, simple meals," she says, but also the story behind them.

"These are meals that literally sort of shaped me into who I am. Then I married my husband, whose brother was a trained chef ... his mom owned a cafe in town, and we live on and work on our family farm where we raise grass-fed beef and pasture-raised pork and farm-fresh eggs. We host a co-op here, and all of that is how I learned more about where food comes from and how to cook in a trained way," she adds.

But while she's always said that she learned cooking from her mom and considered her mom a great cook, she now realizes it's more the love of food she got from her mom. "I would say for the past 10, 12 years, I've been trying to meld the two — easy cooking and more refined cooking techniques — because I was so in love with the idea of learning to cook from my mom. But then I realized my mom wasn't teaching me that much. Like, she was peeling potatoes with a dull knife, you know?"

This realization is what made Tate want to start her Instagram series of '90s mom cooking videos.

"The nostalgic meals series is part of me coming to this love of how I did learn to cook, which was not fancy. So when I make these videos, I make them just as my mom made them," she says. "I have a potato peeler, but I use a very dull kitchen knife. I have an electric can opener and I have a sh*t-ton of seasonings, but I open green beans with a manual can opener and pour them in a pot with nothing in them. That's not how I cook green beans now, but that is how she cooked. And it's who made me who I am now."

I tell Tate that her vintage recipes really did flip a switch in my brain. It hadn't occurred to me to just make a simple dinner for my kids, and I wasn't sure why. Maybe I got too caught up in all of the things we should be feeding our kids or all the Instagram accounts with lentils and quinoa and making toddler-friendly salmon. Those meals can be simple, too, and kids can love them just as much, but when I think about the family dinners I loved when I was little, I see shepherd's pie. I see macaroni and cheese and hot dogs. I see canned green beans.

And I see a whole lot of love.

It's something Tate hopes everyone, especially parents, can see in their own cooking. It's not meant to be stressful or this big, terrible task to do every night. You're just feeding your family, and if ground beef in a packet of brown gravy does that, then that's just fine. More than fine — it's pure love.

"Cooking was something that my mom did for me. It was this act of service, I guess, that she did for our family every night. So, my relationship with food is that I just truly love the idea of feeding people, nourishing people. I don't think it has to be fancy. I don't think you have to have a culinary degree because I've seen both sides of it. And honestly, there's just so much heart in what my mom did for us," she says.

Food isn't just for nourishment. Food is meant to taste good, to bring comfort, to connect memories. As Tate tells me, eating is one of the few things we do that engages all five senses. Why wouldn't we want to lean into that?

In response to her video of making Hamburger Helper, Tate says she received a comment that read, "My whole body just immediately felt loved and safe with this meal combo." She immediately screenshotted it and sent it to her friends. "We're feeling warm and fuzzy from such basic food, but it's not the food. It's like everything around it."

So, if you feel like your family is in a dinner rut or you need to uncomplicate one aspect of your life, let it be this. Because Tate's '90s dinner videos are the ultimate comfort food tutorials. Highly recommend hot dogs for dinner one night and turning leftover buns into garlic bread the next. If Tate's Instagram comments are to be believed, your kids will remember it forever.

And you will, too.