Mom’s Table Delivers Delicious Meals, Quality Family Time

publication date: Jul 31, 2008

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author/source: Jamie Woodhead / STAFF

By Jamie Woodhead / STAFF

Joanne Rooks cooks her peach crisp perfectly.

These days, eating a home cooked meal at the dinner table seems more like a myth than a reality. Mom does not have time to whip up meatloaf or homemade biscuits. She is off shuttling her son to baseball practice, her daughter to soccer practice and trying desperately to put the little one down for a nap. Seriously, who has time to make a meal from scratch?

Well, Joanne Rooks of Mom’s Table has that time. With Mom’s Table, Rooks creates delicious home cooked meals and delivers them right to your door, allowing you to sit down with your family and savor both good food and quality time.

Rooks caught the cooking bug at age 12 when she took her first home economics class. She instantly fell in love with cooking and took every home economics class she could find. “I took it for the cooking, not just because I needed an easy class like most other kids,” she said.

Rooks finds cooking to be relaxing and cathartic. “I lose myself in the kitchen,” she explained. “I just love to create things. Being in the kitchen also brings back a lot of memories cooking with my mom.”

She credits her mother as one of the inspirations for her dishes. “My mom was a great meat and potatoes Midwestern cook. I took what she taught me and expanded.” She expanded her cooking so much that now she makes a living off of it.

Mom’s Table opened in 2006. The idea for Mom’s Table sprang from Rooks cooking for her children’s friends. “My kids would always bring their friends over around dinner time. We all sat down to eat together. They were surprised that dinner came out of the oven and that we all ate together.”

She finds it sad that people do not sit down and have a home-cooked meal with each other and converse. She explained that, “Dinnertime is often the only time a family comes together and connects. There’s nothing like food to bring people together.”

Bringing people together with tastier and more convenient food is exactly Rooks’ goal. And she makes ordering the food easy. Customers can either order from her menu online at www.momstableonline.com or call 770-552-7515 from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Don’t expect to find any sushi on the menu, however. “All of our recipes hearken back to the 50s through the 70s. There’s no noueveau cuisine. We serve things like pot roast, spaghetti pie and meatloaf.” She believes that there is a real movement back to comfort foods, and she finds that people really miss those types of dishes.

Rooks, who just signed a lease for a building on Canton Street, is thrilled to expand Mom’s Table to beyond the kitchen of Christ United Methodist Church, her current kitchen for the business. “We are aiming to open the store sometime in August. I am really excited.”

As the smell of Rooks’ homemade peach crisp wafted through the air, she did not seem to notice, “Sometimes, I just get numb to the smells of my cooking,” she stated.

Luckily, I am not.