Rosenstrach - Dinner The Playbook A 30-Day Plan

Dinner: The Playbook

Dinner: A Love Story

A Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Original

Copyright 2014 by Jenny Rosenstrach

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

B ALLANTINE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosenstrach, Jenny.
Dinner: The Playbook:
a 30-day plan for mastering the art of the family meal/Jenny Rosenstrach.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-345-54980-8
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-54981-5
1. Cooking. 2. Dinners and dining. 3. Families. I. Title.
TX714.R6735 2014
642dc23 2013033023

www.ballantinebooks.com

Design by Kristina DiMatteo

v3.1

For
Dinner: A Love Story
blog readers
and stressed-out parents everywhere.
You are my people!

A few years ago, I started a blog called Dinner: A Love Story. I started it because, well, because I had lost my job and I needed something to do with myself. But I also started it because I felt like dinnerspecifically family dinnerwas getting a bad rap. Instead of being a ritual to look forward to, a gathering place where everyone could swap stories and reconnect with each other after a jam-packed day, eating dinner together had become a source of stress for a lot of us, a thousand-piece puzzle that couldnt be solved. Even though most parents want to make it happen regularly, and even though most parents know how many good things can come from sitting down with their kids at the end of the day, its just too hard to organize a homemade meal, too overwhelming to figure out what to cook, too impossible to coordinate schedules, too frustrating to feed picky eaters. And, hey, why bother when its so easy to just crank the oven to 400F and heat up any one of the pizzas, tacos, or boxes of chicken nuggets in the freezer?

I called my blog a love story becausewith the exception of a few harrowing years when my two daughters were toddlersfamily dinner has, for the most part, been a romance, a haven, a magnetic north, the direction I am headed every day, no matter what chaos is going on outside the four walls of my kitchen. I was lucky enough to work as a food editor in magazines for many years, so Id amassed a pretty solid archive of family-friendly recipes and organizing strategies. I launched the blog with the idea that I could take all that I had learned and help people turn dinner into their own love story. I went live on March 18, 2010, with a post called Weaning Them Off the Nugget.

Four years, one book, and millions of readers later, Ive written nearly nine hundred posts covering family dinner from every angle imaginable: from easy recipes to pep talks to shopping tutorials to entertaining with kids to vacation dinners to holiday dinners to convincing the kids to talk at the table to cookbook reviews to kitchen gear recommendations to storieshundreds and hundreds of stories about how a real family makes it work every day. I even make a point to periodically show images of family dinner in popular culturefrom The Incredibles to Annie Hall to Fantastic Mr. Fox. You might say Ive drilled deep on the topic.

In spite of this, what question do you think I get asked most by my readers?

It isnt What should I make tonight? or What is your favorite dinner? or You sure this is the best use of a college degree?

Its this: Where do I start?

And after four years, I finally have an answer: You start with a calendar, a strategy, a well-considered batch of simple recipes, and a monthlong commitment to making dinner happen.

Thats where I started: With 30 days and 30 dinners. Simple dinnerslike the ones in this book. A decade later, though work and extracurriculars threaten to destabilize our busy, fragile atom of a household every day of the week, were still sitting down together every night and, unless Im in major denial, still reaping the rewards.

Heres how we got there.

Long before I launched the blog, and even before I started keeping my Dinner Diary (in which Ive recorded every meal Ive cooked since February 22, 1998. For real!), sitting down to a meal together had always played a disproportionately large role in my relationship with my husband, A ndy. It had started during our courtship in college, when wed celebrate finishing a paper on early Pequot Indian poetry by treating ourselves to a dinner out at the fancy Italian placethe place that introduced us to a strange cheese called Gorgonzola (whats up, early 90s?) and served a tiramis that was about as delicate as a four-by-four. Dinner remained the bright spot of our day when we first got married and had entire weekends to devote to expanding our recipe repertoires, subwaying it all over Brooklyn, where we lived at the time, and the outer boroughs of New York City hunting down tamarind concentrate for some New York Times recipe that we really had no business attempting, given our limited culinary chops. Dinner was especially sacred for us when our two babies were babies and wed sink into our kitchen chairs after their bedtime to a ritual that was simple, delicious, and kind of magical in its replenishing power. Wed sit down, just the two of us, and have our first conversation of the day that wasnt about Pablo the Backyardigan, then clean up the table without Dustbustering the Cheerios under the hulking, space-eating high chair. Until that point in my life, I never knew how much my identity as a grown-up was wrapped up in a homemade spinach omelet and a glass of Chardonnay.

But as our daughters grew their way through the toddler phase seemingly in unison (they are only twenty months apart), we started to feel like our adult-only dinners after the kids went to bed were a form of cheating. We had both been raised in families where dinnertime was a command performance, where everyone sat down together. Why werent we at least trying to do the same thing? Maybe, we thought over a quick Bolognese one night, maybe we should try folding our actual family into family dinner?

This didnt go quite as smoothly as we had hoped.