Photographs by Jennifer Livingston
Dedication
For Andy, Phoebe, and Abby
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
A Note from Jenny
INTRODUCTION
The Confession: How It All Began
PART 1 • 1998–2001
Rituals, Relationships, Repertoires (or, how we taught ourselves to cook)
PART 2 • 2002–2006
New Parenthood (and the family dinner vow)
PART 3 • 2006–PRESENT
Family Dinner (or, the years the angels began to sing)
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Also by Jenny Rosenstrach
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
A Note from Jenny
Welcome to Dinner: A Love Story, the book that’s all about family meals, however you might define “family” and however you might define “meals.” Before I get down to the business of explaining what you will find in the next three hundred pages, I’d like to tell you a bit about what you won’t find.
You will not find dire warnings that your children are going to become meth addicts if you’re not eating with them five nights a week.
You will not find lyrical musings on the Japanese eggplant or tender odes to the fleeting beauty of beet greens, kabocha squash, or garlic scapes.
You will not be told that family dinner is a problem that can be figured out in three easy steps!!!
You will not hear me describe family dinner as a problem. A problem is a flood in the basement or a bedbug on your pillow or a letter from the IRS saying you owe them $120,000. A problem is something that, once solved, gets you right back to where you started, but poorer or angrier. Preparing your mother’s crispy vinegary pork chops and sharing them with people you love, potentially making your life richer and happier, is, in my opinion, the opposite of a problem.
(Disclaimer: You may, however, catch me referring to certain family dinner scenarios, such as having two working parents and two kids under two, as not merely problematic but also “soul crushing” and “harrowing.”)
You will not read the insidious phrase: “So delicious your kid will love it, too!” Therefore, you will not have the urge to throw this book across the room when your kid tries the kale and decidedly doesn’t love it, too.
You will not hear me suggest, even for one second, that you should do what I have done and document in a dedicated diary every dinner you’ve cooked and eaten for the past fourteen years. (This strategy should be employed only under special circumstances and only after being officially approved by your institution’s chief warden.)
Olives. I’m sorry. I know it’s a major culinary weakness, but I really don’t like olives, so you won’t find them anywhere in these pages.
You will not hear me claim that family dinner is the magic bullet, the answer to your prayers, the only way to raise happy children. But I will say that it has done more to foster togetherness and impart meaning and joy into my family life on a daily basis than just about anything else I can think of.
Dinner: A Love Story
Introduction
The Confession: How It All Began
Two years ago, I went to lunch with my friend Lori at Sam’s, a Jewish deli in New York City’s Garment District. At the time, I was her editor at a parenting magazine, and the goal of the lunch was to come up with story ideas for the next few issues. Lori is that friend you want to follow around with a notebook and pencil. She’s always reading an advance copy of some novel that everyone else is going to be reading in book clubs six months later. She’s the friend who sees the Oscar-winning film before it wins the Oscar and who is constantly sending me links to things she thinks I’ll find interesting—Michael Ruhlman food rants, Gwyneth Paltrow juice diets, George Saunders essays. I’m usually the one jotting down notes and interrupting her to ask things like, “Wait, this Jack White person—you say there is no relation whatsoever to Jack Black?”
When she sat down on this particular afternoon, though, she looked distracted, a little upset. After some small talk, she leaned over and whispered something to me.
“Can I confess something to you?”
“Of course,” I told her, preparing myself for an admission of a passionate affair . . . or drinking while breast-feeding . . . or spanking . . . or, I don’t know, she looked kinda freaked . . . maybe she was in trouble with the law? “You can tell me anything.”
She went on. “Do you want to know the one thing I feel most guilty about as a mother?” She was staring into her matzoh brei, too ashamed to look at me.
Okay, now I was a little frightened. She had two kids, ages five and two. What could be so bad?
“I’ve never once cooked a meal for my children,” she said. She looked up at me with shiny eyes.
I’m not proud to admit it, but my first thought was: So that’s how she manages to read the New York Times every freaking day from cover to cover! Even the Metro section!
My second thought was: How did we get to the point where mothers break down in tears because they don’t know how to cook dinner?
What would Betty Friedan say?
“Lori!” I practically screamed at her. If it weren’t for the gentle-looking Wallace Shawn doppelganger sitting at the table next to us, I would have grabbed her across the sour pickles and yelled “Get a grip!” But all I said was, “That is your confession? That’s all?” She was too upset to answer.
Lori’s shame was probably in high relief that day because she knew she was sitting across from someone who regularly, some might say pathologically, cooked dinner for her family. She knew me well enough to know that since 1998, I’ve written down what I’ve cooked or eaten every night in a “dinner diary” (more on this in a minute). In addition to editing features at Cookie, the parenting magazine, I oversaw the food department and was in the midst of cowriting a family meal cookbook with two colleagues who were equally enthusiastic about cooking for their children. Lori had once told me that her three months in the Cookie office, filling in for someone on maternity leave, were pure torture—everywhere she looked, she said, she was reminded of her culinary shortcomings.
“It’s not like I feel bad about it sometimes,” she said. “I feel bad about it at every meal, three times a day, seven days a week.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like you’re feeding your kids antifreeze,” I told her. She was mostly giving them turkey dogs or things from the prepared section at Whole Foods. “And what about Larry?” I said. Larry was her husband, who loved to cook but didn’t get home in time for dinner during the week. “Do you think he is in a coffee shop right now crying into soup with one of his friends? Somehow I doubt it—and I think you should follow his lead.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s pathetic.”
“No, it’s not pathetic. But you say this like you’re the first parent in history to feel handicapped by guilt. No one has it all together.” I thought of my friend Terry, who the week before had pulled her SUV to the curb to say hi while I was walking the dog but before long switched gears to park so she could really get into how awful she felt about missing her daughter’s soccer trophy presentation the weekend before. She wasn’t just talking it through—she was wailing, clearly dealing with some existential parent angst. “And I was just dropping off Max across town,” she said, like Marlon Brando in the last scene of On the Waterfront. “I could’ve been there.”
“I know I’m not the only one,” Lori continued. “But I feel like if I could just get my act together to make dinner for my kids, then everything else would fall into place. The problem i
s I know the kids won’t eat whatever I attempt to make . . . so I end up saying, Well, why even bother trying? Only to wake up hating myself even more, thinking, If I can’t make my kids dinner, what can I do exactly? What kind of mother doesn’t cook for her children?”
I cut her off. “Okay, stop. You’re a good mother! Just look at how guilty you feel! I think that means you care too much.”
She laughed. “I wish I could carry you around with me so I could get a pep talk anytime I need it.”
I thought about that. It wasn’t such a bad idea.
We hatched a plan right there at the table. I would become Lori’s “Dinner Doula.” I’d give her onion-chopping tutorials, interview her children about what they would and wouldn’t eat, plan some menus, deconstruct her family’s weekly schedule, write up shopping lists for her on the weekends, and do lots of good old-fashioned, roll-up-your-sleeves strategizing. But more important, I would hold her hand and give her emotional support. You know how a traditional doula takes care of the mom so mom can take care of the baby? That’s what I wanted to do for her.
The first thing I told her was not to put so much pressure on herself. Lori is like a lot of parents I know. She had it in her head that she was supposed to “cook” in a certain way—insert visions of Donna Reed here—and to do it that way every single night, a scenario more commonly known as Setting Yourself Up for Failure. On top of that, she had read every Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse study and every article about every CASA study, and she was haunted by their message: that kids who eat with their parents do better in school, are less likely to do drugs, etc., etc., etc. I wanted to help Lori (a) stop obsessing over these alarmist studies and (b) learn a few things, take some baby steps in the kitchen.
But a funny thing happened. Over the next few weeks, as I became Lori’s Dinner Doula, she became my muse. In the process of “coaching” her, I realized how many more layers there were to the age-old “what’s for dinner” problem, which had been my beat in lifestyle magazines for more than a decade. Sure, there were all the usual stumbling blocks (not enough time, not enough energy, not enough ideas), but for a lot of parents dinner was no longer the part of the day to unwind and share the family news. In fact, it was often the opposite—it was a major source of psychological stress. Every time mom makes a meal that her kid doesn’t eat or that ends up being devoured hyena-like in thirty seconds flat (without a single word uttered in between bites, let alone a thank you) or eaten while siblings are screaming at each other across the untouched spinach, or if dinner is, God forbid, a frozen pizza that is eaten with the babysitter or with only one parent, she sees it as a referendum on her own self-worth. It’s not much dinner she’s looking at; it’s a giant report card. And Lori wasn’t the only one in the world feeling like she was getting Fs every night.
Lori and I wrote a magazine story about our six-week regimen of basic chicken roasting and picky-eater strategizing, but her breakdown stayed with me long after the story was finished. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a void out there for parents who believed in the importance of family dinner, who, like me, believed dinner went a long way toward helping us connect more with our kids, but who, like Lori and her husband, didn’t have any idea how to make it happen on a regular basis. Maybe I could help them. And, who knows, maybe I could even help people who weren’t parents yet or people whose definition of family might never include children. All I knew was that I had been keeping that dinner diary for twelve years—four years before I even had kids—and I knew I had something to say, maybe even something to teach, about the importance of a shared meal with people you love.
So in March 2010, I launched Dinner: A Love Story, a website devoted to family dinner. The goal was to take what I’d learned as a food editor and a mother and try to be everyone’s doula, providing recipes and strategies, pep talks and encouragement, whenever parents felt like they needed it. What I attempted to do with the website, and what I hope to continue to do with this book, is to change the conversation about dinner and all the dread that came along with it. I had no interest in shaming or scaring anyone into eating with their kids. I wanted the website to feel inviting and homemade, to give real-life-based instruction, to be different. I want it to be like the family dinner table we all aspire to have—a judgment-free zone; a happy, instructive place where you always feel welcome; a place where strategies and parenting philosophies are passed around right along with the Zucchini Fries.
Now, back to that diary . . . I would understand if this is where I lose you. Seriously. What kind of person, you’d like to know, writes down every dinner she cooks for fourteen years straight? My response to that is (a) Please don’t give up on me before you get to the Pork Shoulder Ragù and (b) please know that while keeping a diary in the early days of cooking was instrumental in getting the ball rolling on family dinner, I’d like to make it very clear that there are plenty of less troublesome ways to achieve the same result. This is the way I did it because I am one of those sad, deluded people who still believe that the mere act of writing something down will give me some sense of control over it. I will go into more detail about the diary system in a few pages, but you should know that there are several dozen other strategies in this book that will help you get into a rhythm with family dinner, and not a single one of them will make you question your obsessive tendencies.
How Do You Use This Book?
Those of you already familiar with my blog know that, for the most part, my focus is on family dinner with my husband, Andy, and my two elementary-school-aged daughters, Abby and Phoebe, who are capable of sitting upright in a chair, using a fork semicorrectly, not spilling their milk all over the chicken I just spent a half hour making, and occasionally even participating in a conversation. Also, most of the time they are eating a meal that resembles (or is at least related to) the meal on their parents’ plates. This description may sound like an idyllic little picture of a foreign land you hope to visit someday, but in fact each milestone listed above—as well as many not listed, such as “Not Pinching Nose at the Mention of the Word Egg,” which we are still working on—was hard-earned and generally helped along by the simple phenomenon of children growing up. It took years to get to the point where we could execute a regular old weeknight meal in a way that was relaxing for everyone. Years! In fact, knowing what I know now, I don’t even recommend attempting a sit-down meal with your kids until your youngest is at least three (more on that in Part 3). Before my youngest turned three, we were in survival mode at dinner hour. And before that—I can’t remember . . . What exactly did I do before I had kids?
I think of our dinner narrative as being divided into three distinct phases, which also happens to be how this book is organized:
Phase 1: Just Married, or the years Andy and I were establishing a dinner routine, building a repertoire and a relationship in the kitchen.
Phase 2: New Parenthood, or the years it felt like a bomb exploded any semblance of routine and normalcy in the kitchen.
Phase 3: Family Dinner, or the years the angels began to sing.
This book will cover all three of these phases of family dinner—the charming parts, the messy parts, the really annoying parts, the crazy-fun parts. Every meal that you read about in the next three hundred or so pages is a real meal. And I don’t mean “real” in the way the real food movement folks mean “real” (i.e., wholesome and unprocessed, though they are that, too). I mean that these meals really happened. These are the meals and menus we have served up for family dinners, romantic dinners, dinners for bosses, dinners for friends, dinners for one, dinners for two, dinners for food snobs, dinners for seven five-year-olds, and five seven-year-olds, ski house vacation dinners, beach house vacation dinners, quick Tuesday night dinners, long, luxurious Sunday night dinners, engagement dinners, birthday dinners, outdoor dinners, dinners after the soccer game, dinners before trick-or-treating, picnic dinners, patio dinners, snow-day dinners, potluck dinners, date-night dinners, and
dinners for just about any occasion that can happen in the span of saying “I do” (or “I do want to sign that lease with you”) to sending your two kids off to UNC with a full scholarship to play soccer (she says hopefully). Though there weren’t enough pages in this book to flesh out all four thousand dinners I’ve recorded in my diary, you’ll be getting a “greatest hits” in chronological order beginning in 1998 and ending in 2011. Nothing has been engineered, nothing has been reimagined and refined by a test kitchen staffed with culinary school graduates. On a few occasions, I’ve enlisted some help wrangling an unwritten family favorite into conventional format or tweaked some recipes that were in desperate need of updating. (Trust me, the gloppy baked pasta I made for dinner guests in 1998 wouldn’t fly in 2012.) But other than that, every meal you see here has been cooked and eaten at least a half dozen times by someone in my house. And in my house, we eat well.
My hope is that this collection of recipes and stories might offer a game plan, or at least a little inspiration, for any home cook at any level. It is as much for the novice who doesn’t know where to start as it is for the gourmand who doesn’t know how to start over when she suddenly finds herself feeding an intractable toddler stuck in a white-food-only phase. This book is for the person who never thought too hard about home-cooked meals until the moment he or she became a parent. It’s for mothers and fathers—working, staying home, single, divorced, any kind—who crave more quality time with their children and have a sneaking suspicion that the answer may lie in the ritual of family dinner, in the ritual of sitting down together at the end of the day to slow down and listen to each other. This book is, in fact, for anyone interested in learning how to execute a meal to be shared with someone they love and discovering how so many good, happy things can trickle down from doing so.
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