Rachel Hollis - Real Life Dinners: Fun, Fresh, Fast Dinners from the Creator of The Chic Site

Your commitment to flavor is just one of your many legacies.

Ive promised to meet my husband later tonight for a date, a special supper to commemorate the fifteen-year anniversary of our first date. Ive promised my four-year-old that well play Candy Land on Friday after pizza. And Ive promised my daughters birth mother that I will be there to hold her hand while she labors to bring this baby I have prayed for for five years into the world. The truth is that while figuring out the recipes and concept for this book was easy (because I can talk to you about food literally all day without once growing bored), dreaming up an opening chapter felt elusive. What more could I tell you about how much I love cooking, and how important I think it is for a family to cook and eat together, that I havent told you already? Ive grappled with it for weeks in between Googling newborn adoption birth photography approximately ten thousand times over the last two months. Between the writing of this book and the running of my company, there is karate practice, baseball and T-ball practice, and rehearsals for West Side Story (my oldest has four whole lines!).

Theres church on Sunday and date night on Thursday and our puppy still acts like the leash is a torture device rather than the key factor in our taking long strolls together some enchanted evening. The majority of the time, it feels a little crazy, the idea that Im spending every waking moment I can writing recipe intros and figuring out the right containers to hold a dish in the kid-friendly chapter, while also trying to keep up with my very real and hectic life. Sometimes Im so busy working on ways to help other women live a better life that I run out of time and my kids eat turkey sandwichesor worse, just straight-up turkey rolled around a piece of string cheesefor dinner. And in the midst of it all, were (hopefully) adopting our daughter next week. I say hopefully because we are at the end of four-plus years of trying to adopt. There were the two years we tried in Ethiopia before the country closed down its adoption program with the United States.

There was the next year, when we mourned and tried to find another way. There was the year we spent getting certified to do foster-to-adopt in Los Angeles, where we live. There was the summer when we fostered two sisters and then managed the grief when they transitioned back. Then there was the early fall when we were placed with newborn twin girls we thought would be ours forevertruly one of the happiest experiences of my whole life. And then came the time after, when they, too, left because of a reconciliation with their birth family. I know that God has a plan for their lives and this was always meant to be it but I mourned the loss as if someone had died.

Now I find myself here, in this small coffee shop, trying to finish this book so I can fly to Nebraska to be with the birth mom who has chosen us to be her babys parents. Hopefully. Hopefully, because this could all change in a moment. No part of adoption is ever easy or guaranteed. She could change her mind. I remind myself to use caution, to temper my enthusiasm in case it doesnt work out like I hope it will. I remind myself to use caution, to temper my enthusiasm in case it doesnt work out like I hope it will.

I have a long history of reminders that life isnt often kind or even fair. Not fair to a family like ours with so many failed adoptions. Not fair to the mamas who must make the brave but brutal decision to give up their babies in the first place. Life is often hard and rarely is it fair. But what does any of this have to do with a cookbook full of dinner recipes? Because real life isnt a series of stylized air-brushed photos. Real life is crazy, chaotic, hard, beautiful, funny, weird, shocking, devastating, and it can knock you right off balance.

But for me, cooking and eating as a family (even those turkey sandwiches) has always brought me back to center. My dinner table is a touchstone. My dinner table is the cornerstone of my life. No matter how crazy my life gets, a good dinner makes me feel like were going to be okay. Making sure my family is fed is a success, but truly taking the time to give them something wholesome and delicious is me at my best. Not delicious and served on china.

Not wholesome and produced by a mom with full makeup and hair. Not dinner made in a clean kitchen. Just made, with love and care, by me thats the bar I set for myself. I dont get there every daynot even closebut its my pursuit to cook and eat great food with my family and friends, and any day I get there feels like a day where Im winning. In my real life, both my husband and I work and we have three people to feed other than ourselves. Real life means creating dinner cant take hours.

Real life means theres no way I can marinate or prep a day in advance unless its a special occasion. Real life means nothing is from a starter. Real life means I want to know what is actually in the food Im eating . It may not be low calorie or organic, but I want to use wholesome ingredients. Real life means the dish needs to work for all of us. So Im sitting here in this coffee shop trying to figure out this opening chapter, and I thought,