How Alyson Richardson, Mom of Six, Celebrates Mother's Day in Tulsa

Growing up in the Bay Area, Alyson Richardson was constantly surrounded by family—grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins from both sides. A “small” backyard barbecue was anything but tiny.

“It was like, oh, we're just gonna throw a few steaks on the grill, and the next thing you know, there's 30 or 40 people here,” she recalls. “When you have big families, everyone knows where everyone lives, so people just pop up.”

Richardson is now the matriarch and designated party host for her own big family. As a mom of six—five daughters and one son ranging from the ages of 9 to 20—she’s always thinking about their next meal and their next celebration. Though she now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, far away from her extended family, she continues to carry on many of her favorite traditions.

“Sunday dinners, that's big in our home. I absolutely love doing that because I grew up that way. I was always helping my mom or my aunts, my grandmother, and even my great-grandmother when she was alive.”

It’s no surprise that Richardson always has cooking and hosting on the mind. When we reached out to the Allrecipes Allstar, she had just wrapped up a birthday dinner for one of her daughters and was already thinking about her next celebration.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You come from a family that does a lot of hosting. What party-planning wisdom have you picked up from them?

Plan ahead and make a list. First of all, you have to know what you are going to cook. It's never a good idea to go into any grocery store blind because that's how you will break your budget. And sometimes you have to do stuff ahead of time, like meat has to marinate. This way, you won't get stressed because nothing worse than being stressed with people looking at you when they're hungry.

It’s true, no one ever wants a stressed out host. How do you keep calm in the kitchen on special occasions?

I like to do theme cooking. I’ll decide that I wanna do a bolognese sauce because making pasta sounds fun. Maybe I'll do some garlic bread and then for dessert, I have to do a tiramisu. I also do music too with my theme.

What’s on your playlist?

If I’m doing African food, I have African music. If I'm doing food from my childhood, some soul food, then I'll put on my hip hop playlist or something like. I go all out, including the aprons. I have an apron obsession.

Mother’s Day is almost here. Do you usually have a theme or big plans for that?

It’s just always chilling out at home. We don't make a big to-do about it. Sometimes, my husband will surprise me with flowers or candy. But he does not know how to cook, so it's typically me even on Mother's Day. I actually really enjoy it. Now that my girls are older, they will help. They will go look up a recipe and go “Mom, we got it, just sit down.”

It sounds like a nice, low-key Sunday. Are there any other upcoming celebrations you’re excited for?

I'm always excited about birthdays. My birthday week has turned into the whole month of January, so I kind of do that with my kids. We do six of them a year and there's one every other month.

Wow, that’s a lot of planning! Food is obviously an important part of parties—let’s talk about your go-to recipes as the weather warms up. 

The party app you know everyone will love:

There's not one specific thing. You can throw something out there and then I can just make it happen, which is sometimes bad for me because I do get requests. My parents or my siblings will go “Oh, I saw you posted a dish. Yeah, I want that.” But that took like five hours! I can't just whip it up and they're looking like, “Well, we gonna be here. We have time.”

A dessert that’ll have everyone going back for seconds:

A quick dessert that I tend to do because I have the recipe off the top of my head is pound cake. I call mine the “lighter” side of pound cake because I use Greek yogurt instead of cream cheese. I'll take the basic recipe and I might make a lemon pound cake, but because I'm extra, I make my own lemon extract. Or if I have some mangoes that my kids requested, but they're just sitting there getting overly ripe, I’ll puree it and make a mango pound cake.

The one drink you always serve at a warm-weather gathering:

For guests, I do kombucha. My husband buys a lot of kombucha, but he drinks it as soon as he gets it. Kombucha can get expensive, especially when everyone in the house drinks it. So I make my own now, which is kind of great because kombucha is the gift that keeps on giving. One scoby turns the two, two turns into four, so now my pantry is like a science fermentation experiment on one side. It’s crazy!