Dinner: A Love Story

by Jenny Rosenstrach

  Meanwhile, boil the kale (in water, not in pickling liquid!) for 2 minutes. Remove the kale with tongs, pat it dry with paper towels, and add to the bowl with the pickled onions. (If you feel up to it, you can give the kale an ice bath before you add to the bowl, to stop the cooking and preserve the deep rich color.) Toss the onion and kale with the oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and avocado.

  Kale, Sausage, and White Bean Stew

  This recipe won a quick-meal contest on my website. It has all the hallmarks of a week-night keeper: a quick cook time, a forgiving technique, and . . . sausage! Total time: 30 minutes

  1 onion, chopped

  3 tablespoons olive oil

  2 garlic cloves, minced

  Salt and pepper to taste

  ½ teaspoon red pepper flakes

  4 to 6 links (about 1¼ pounds) Italian chicken or pork sausage, casings removed

  1 32-ounce container chicken broth

  1 14-ounce can diced tomatoes

  2 14-ounce cans cannellini beans, rinsed and drained

  1 large bunch kale, washed, stems removed, and chopped into small pieces

  Drizzle of red wine vinegar (about 2 tablespoons)

  Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

  Sauté the onion in the oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat until softened, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic, salt and pepper, and pepper flakes and cook, stirring 1 minute.

  Add in the sausage, breaking it up with a fork, and brown until cooked through, 4 to 5 minutes. Add the broth (add less if you like your stews more chunky, less brothy), tomatoes, and cannellini beans (rinsed and drained). Bring to a boil. Add the kale, simmer until wilted, about 3 minutes. Stir in a drizzle of red wine vinegar and serve stew with a lot of freshly grated Parmesan and crusty bread.

  THE FAMILY PART OF FAMILY DINNER

  Does this exchange sound familiar to you?

  “What’d you do today?”

  “What?”

  “What’d you do today?”

  “Huh?”

  “What’d you do today?”

  “Mmm, I don’t remember.”

  “How was your day?”

  “Good. I need ketchup. Do we have ketchup?”

  Over the past few years, we’ve devised a few techniques to deal with this situation, ways to prod and cajole Phoebe and Abby into sharing and interacting—or, at the barest minimum, stopping for a moment to look up and acknowledge something beyond the food on their plates. These are our most effective.

  Mad-Sad-Glad

  The most consistently successful of all our methods. Each family member has to share one thing from their day that made them mad, one thing that made them sad, and one thing that made them glad. In addition to initiating some real conversation (we rarely make it all the way around the table, once the kids get going) this has the welcome benefit of clueing you into some things in your kids’ lives—anxieties, accomplishments, mean girls at camp, math difficulties, and the always-telling lunch-table politics—that they might otherwise have locked away in a drawer and let fester.

  The Negative Assertion

  This doesn’t deliver the kind of sustained, substantive conversation you get with Mad-Sad-Glad, but it often helps break the ice and get some dinnertime energy flowing. Kids love to prove their parents wrong—or at least our kids love to prove us wrong—so I’ll offer up an observation that I know is untrue and wait for the kids to set the record straight. Like this one:

  Me: I can’t believe you had to stay inside all day at camp today because of the weather.

  Abby: No we didn’t!

  Me: Man, that must have been so boring.

  Phoebe: We were outside all day! We hiked down to the river, and had lunch under the poison ivy tree, and . . .

  Other options: “Why do you think Ms. Metrano decided to skip math lessons today?” “I can’t believe nobody said a word on the bus on the way home this after-noon.” “Do you guys ever wonder how an ostrich flies?”

  The Misdirection Play

  We hardly ever get an answer when we ask our kids something directly (“What did you do at school today?”). I find it helps to take the pressure off a little by asking them to tell a story about someone else. But maybe don’t phrase it quite so overtly. Phrase it like this: “So, [your kid’s name here], tell me about this new friend of yours, [new friend name here]. Does she have long hair? Does she like watching Boomerang? At recess, is she a cop or a robber?” Bet you anything your kid responds, and when he/she does, you’ve got them right where you want them.

  The Awkward Silence

  Join forces with your spouse and resolve to say nothing, not a word. Kids can’t hack it. They fill the silence. (Only downside: One of them might feel the urge to fill the silence with something like “Poop on a poop on a poop poop poop.”)

  The Nuclear Option

  To be deployed only in truly desperate situations: “Okay, if you guys don’t start telling me about your days, we’re not having s’mores tonight.” This one has never failed—and believe me, we’ve wielded it way more than we should ever admit.

  October 2009

  Control Freak

  At least once a month I’d be sitting in my office when an email from the class mom would ping in my inbox. The subject head would read: “Help!” “Can someone bring juice and paper cups to the First Grade Writer’s Workshop Celebration this afternoon?”

  And then I’d sit there waiting for the “reply-alls” to start pinging.

  “No problem!”

  “I can bring some lemonade!”

  “I’ll bring the cups!”

  “Looks like I’m too late, but if you still need me, I can do either or both!”

  Before I knew it, my inbox was jammed with displays of selfless party supply heroism. When the offers were all stacked up that way, one on top of the other with the same subject line—Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!—it was easy to imagine that they were, collectively, saying, Why are you just sitting there in your office, Jenny? Do something, would you?

  I loved my office. On one wall there was an enormous bulletin board (I called it “my brain”) that was covered with inspiring photographs and story layouts, plus about a hundred index cards, each one representing a story idea that was in the works (white card) or that I wanted to be in the works soon (pink card). On another wall were three framed original sketches by a Swedish illustrator named Lisbeth Svarling, whose regular contributions to the magazine made me inexplicably happy. In another corner by the door was a pile of new cookbooks and novels that were delivered daily for my consideration. Next to that were two large jars—one with lightly salted almonds and another with dried cherries—that ensured I’d have visitors all day long. (We called it “friend bait.”) Then there was my computer. I think if someone came into my office and offered me a vintage Mercedes in exchange for my iMac, I would’ve laughed in dismissal. I can’t remember the exact model, but let me just say that this thing was big, fast, and—the best part—came with a free tech team only a few floors away. When I’d arrive in the office on Monday morning, after spending the weekend cramming in errands and food shopping and back-to-back birthday parties, nothing made me happier than turning on my lightning-fast Mac with its LED backlit monitor and seeing all my color-coded files lined up one on top of the other. To this day, I associate Apple’s signature organ chord—the one that sounds like a meditative Ommmm when you press the on button—with feeling in control.

  But on days when I’d receive all these cry-for-help emails, I didn’t want to be in that office. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be five minutes away from school so I could be the paper cup hero. While I was there, maybe I could volunteer to chaperone a class trip and help out with the mosaic art project in the spring? I was still working full-time, and even with my one day off—now moved to Fridays—I still had the most awful habit of romanticizing whatever was happening on the domestic front in my absence. Beyond the classroom stuff were the play-dates and after-school activitie
s. I felt especially guilt-stricken by the fact that I couldn’t pick up the girls at ballet or pottery and hear the teachers proclaim how gifted my daughters were at pirouetting and glazing.

  One year I scheduled a tennis class for the girls on Monday night at a facility consistently referred to as “second best” next to the nicer program across town. The reason I chose it was because they offered a class that ended at six thirty, and it was a walkable distance from a station on my train line. If I timed things right, I could catch the last fifteen minutes of the class. In my mind, those fifteen minutes were different from regular fifteen minutes. They were quality-time minutes. Minutes that I imagined would register in my daughters’ impressionable psyches as: “Even though Mom is never ever the paper cup hero, she did just take an early train to a different train station and walk here—all so she could watch me practice my serving toss. That’s how much she loves me.”

  After those quality fifteen minutes, though, the girls would usually dump their short-throated Prince rackets into my arms and one of them would ask, “Mom, how come you can never come in time for the whole lesson?”

  I didn’t give up, though. To be a working parent was to sign up for a lifelong game of fuzzy math. It always seemed like I was crunching numbers or counting minutes as though the answer to raising happy children lay somewhere in a magical, logical, predictable formula. When Phoebe and Abby were little, I wrote an essay for the New York Times about the imaginary Quality Time spreadsheet I kept in my head. On this spreadsheet, I detailed how many hours a week I spent with my kids, with the goal being to have as many or more hours than Devika. (I always “won” this little exercise because I reasoned that hours spent driving the kids places—a big part of Devika’s job—were not worth as much as hours at the dinner table or on the floor acting out Three Billy Goat’s Gruff.) I don’t necessarily think this obsessiveness is limited to delusional, emotionally insecure mothers. I’ve noticed that when Andy has to work late closing a story and misses dinner and bedtime, he’s almost always on an earlier train the next night, as though those few extra minutes of eating chips and salsa with the girls before dinner will cancel out his absence from the night before. Though I’ve never asked him, I’m pretty sure he’s trying to make his numbers come out even, too.

  As the girls got older, though, the quality-time equation got more complicated. Being around more was no longer just about doing drop-off and pickup or showing up at the classroom party with a stack of paper plates. I found that the problems of a second-grader—even the most garden-variety kinds like “Fill-in-the-blank doesn’t want to play with me anymore”—were exponentially more stressful to deal with when I realized that, for the first time in my tenure as a parent, I could do nothing to solve the problem. The only thing I could think of doing in order to feel more in control (or to delude myself into feeling more in control) was be around more to talk about the problem.

  This was about the time I found myself doing a different kind of math. If I was around more . . . if I left my job, could we make it work financially? If I could figure out a way to work only three days a week (a prize that usually comes with a round-trip ticket to Disneyworld) could I make the hours at work and the hours at home come out even? If I left my job to go totally freelance, how many hours would I have between 8:09 a.m. (when the girls got on the bus) until 2:57 p.m. (when they got off)? And most important: How much would my very own iMac set me back?

  But then I’d go to work and get wrapped up in developing one of those ideas on the pink index cards. Or the friend bait would reel in another working mom with the same issues as me and we’d end up saying how happy we were to have each other’s support and friendship. Or I’d look around my organized office, where I always felt in control, and think, How could I ever leave this? There was always an excuse. After this issue closes, I’ll decide. After I write this story, I’ll decide. After the book project wraps, I’ll decide. And on and on.

  The decision I never had the guts to make was made for me. In October 2009, I showed up at my desk, coffee in hand, only to be ushered into a filled-to-capacity conference room and told by two sweating Ralph Lauren–clad execs that Cookie was folding (apparently, their numbers weren’t adding up) and my services were no longer needed. We weren’t the only ones to lose our jobs. The company also folded Gourmet and two other magazines that day, and across the country the recession was driving the unemployment rate up to record numbers. In the scheme of things, I was lucky. Andy was employed. We had insurance through his job. Life would go on.

  After the announcement, I went back to my office—the one where I always felt in control—and began the dreaded task of boxing up my four-year career at Cookie. One by one I removed each index card that held an idea now belonging to someone else. In another corner was a pile of proofs for the cookbook we had been working on for two years. Nothing in that pile—not a recipe, not a word, not a photograph—belonged to me either. I started responding to the outpouring of emails from friends and colleagues who had heard the bad news and said they would keep their ears open for jobs. I thanked them for the support and said I’d be in touch when I figured out what I wanted my next step to be. I don’t remember my exact words, but the subtext of each reply was something like: Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!

  I thought a lot about what my next step could be. I could get another full-time magazine job. Or maybe a cookbook editing job? I could write. I could edit. I could fill in for people on maternity leave until I figured something out. I could also . . . go for a jog in the middle of the day. I could go to Fairway in the middle of the week. I could make a weeknight dinner that took longer than thirty minutes. I could be at the bus stop every day after school. I could start thinking about family dinner around lunchtime. I could. . . I could . . . start doing what 14 percent of American mothers were already doing: I could start one of those blog things. I could blog about something I really believed in. Something that made me happy. I could blog about family dinner.

  It wasn’t just that I needed a way to fill my days. I knew other parents were struggling to find more time to connect with their kids, too. I heard about the connection problem at school board meetings, at the bus stop, and on the soccer sidelines from working mothers sitting in my friend-bait chair, from Lori (my Dinner Doula guinea pig), from an esteemed guest with multiple degrees and academic chairs on NPR. There was always a trendy culprit to blame for the problem—the omnipresence of cell phones and kids’ pathological addiction to social media, the overscheduled child (tennis on Monday, pottery on Tuesday, ice skating Wednesday—you get the idea), the standardized test-driven curriculum in our schools (which results in homework overload but intellectual starvation), our expected 24/7 connectivity with the office—but all of them felt similarly overwhelming, unfixable, seemingly out of our control.

  Family dinner was something I could control.

  I spent an embarrassing amount of time on GoDaddy.com, the website that tells you if the name you want for your website has already been taken. My first choice was TheProvider.com, which a “squatter” (someone who buys domain names for nothing knowing someone else will buy them from him for much more later) said I could buy it from him for the low price of ten thousand dollars. (I offered him eighty dollars, but he wouldn’t budge.) I didn’t have a second choice. In spite of the eight thousand options Andy and I came up with over the next month, I couldn’t commit to any of them. It had to be perfect. If I learned anything in my magazine career, it was that the title and subtitle can sometimes be the most important part of the story—the part that convinces you to read the story. It had to be strong. It had to communicate exactly what the site was about. It had to be broad enough so I could write about things that happened at the table, not just what we ate at the table. It had to be unintimidating. For search reasons, it had to have the words dinner and family in it, but it couldn’t sound like a holier-than-thou family values website. It had to instantly telegraph the idea that dinner was something that had the pote
ntial to make you and your family really happy, that dinner had the potential to change your life.

  Was that too much to ask for?

  It was Andy who finally came up with Dinner: A Love Story (and the tagline: It all begins at the family table). We were driving south on I-95 on our way to his parents’ house for Thanksgiving. As soon as he said it, I knew it was the right one. From the backseat, Abby told me to stop screaming because she couldn’t hear Ratatouille on the DVD player. GoDaddy.com told me the name was mine if I wanted it. I wanted it!

  Dinner: A Love Story, the blog, was born six months after I lost my job and quickly became the emotional bread-and-butter (as opposed to the financial bread-and-butter) of my new life as a freelancer. And so now, instead of obsessing about the number of hours I was away from my children, or the number of minutes I managed to catch of the tennis lesson, or how many lost opportunities there were to be the paper cup hero, I began obsessing over different numbers.

  I began obsessing over my Google Analytics numbers. Google Analytics is the application that tells you everything you could ever want to know about your website readers except their names: how many there are, which posts they read, which website sent them, what country they live in, how many minutes and seconds they stay, how many pages they visited, what keywords and phrases they Googled to find me (my favorite: “jenny rosenstrach gin and tonic”) and a lot more stuff that I haven’t figured out yet. Needless to say, my GA page with its charts and graphs and beautifully precise measurements on things like “bounce rate percentages” was bookmarked as a favorite. Andy would come in the kitchen, catch me poring over my numbers and ask, “Looking in the mirror again?”