I knew becoming a mom would change things, I just didn’t know completely how. Time really disappears when you’re raising children, and finding places to save time is essential to balancing everything.

We could all probably agree on two things as true: new parents need to eat and new parents are tired. Early in pregnancy, I decided to create freezer meals to have on hand to ease the transition from childless. The night before our first daughter was born, we popped the final meal in the last spot of our upright freezer. 

Those meals saved us for the next months, and the day we popped the last one into our oven offered a bitter sweet realization: if we wanted home cooked food, we’d have to do all the work from here out.

That was 2014. We spent the next years learning about, creating and implementing different meal prep systems because … it’s just the only way we can possibly manage getting real food on the table, with now two little kids!

Relish and Roots is about helping others access this simply good food with ease.

Three days after becoming parents, we learned that Lyssa’s then 3-year-old nephew had stage 4 Neuroblastoma. Cancer. That fueled a mission to start a nonprofit, Positive Every Day Cancer Foundation, with a similar mission: to enable WI families with a child battling cancer to spend more time together. One way? Through pre-made monthly meal kits. 

Rhonda, a family member, was seeking to share her love of food with others and had a desire to further support the PED Foundation. A conversation was had and Relish and Roots was created.

Relish and Roots is an important tool for all of us to contribute to the Positive Every Day Cancer Foundation while also helping other families in the process to make dinner simply, good.