In my next book — which you’ll be hearing about shortly — there’s a whole section on recipes I call “Keep the Spark Alive” dinners. These meals are the opposite of what we make on, say, a Tuesday night, when efficiency and convenience are the most important ingredients. In some ways, they are the opposite of the DALS mission in general. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t every bit as
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Do you ever wonder what your dinner guests say about you when they walk out your door? Do they marvel at your hosting abilities and wonder when they’ll get invited back? Do they praise the food but slag the company? Do they praise the company but slag the food? Do they judge your glassware? Do they climb into their car, sit for a second in the darkness, and say, Never again? That
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There was a time, when the girls were two and three, that we dreamed of the day when they’d be 10 and 11, able to sit at the table and place food in their own mouths while filling us in on their days. Now that we’re finally here—avert your eyes, new parents—we realize that our dream was a mirage, that life finds a way of constantly moving the goalposts on
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Jenny called me at work a couple of weeks ago, on one of those gray afternoons when the temperature never rises much above 10 degrees and the dog refuses to go outside. “I’m freezing,” she said. “How do I turn up the heat?” “In the house, you mean?” We’d lived in this house for ten years. This was not our first winter there. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay, do you see
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My sister called me the other morning. We were both in our cars — bluetoothing and dropping off our various charges — and figuring out a possible cousin sleepover when she said, with some urgency, “Oh! Did you get my message?” “No, what message.” “I left you a voice-mail with a lot of questions, but I really want to tell you about the chicken.” “What chicken?” “My friend Trish had a
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So I got this nice note from a reader the other day: I have to tell you I did my first real deconstructed meal the other night where I was not catering to the kids. It was so easy, such an epiphany! My husband and I made Chicken Tikka Masala with browned cauliflower and frozen peas in it. Before adding the (jarred) sauce, I loaded up plates with juicy sauteed
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.. Please? Try holding your nose. See how the fish is pink? Princesses love pink. Salmon is what princesses eat! It’s princess food! Yay princesses!!! If you don’t eat this, I will take the dog for a walk and never come home. You know how sometimes a needle is so sharp you don’t even feel it? That’s what this chili is like. It’s so spicy that you won’t even taste
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For a lot of people, the phrase “Apres Ski” conjures a certain image — a group of  ruddy-faced J. Crew models wearing Uggs and sipping red wine around a rough-hewn coffee table; a cold beer soothing burning muscles in front of a roaring fire; and (for Phoebe) reading a comic book under a blanket in her pajamas. For me, it means one thing: Skiing is over. I survived another day and
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“Okay, I think we have a plan,” my friend Jeff said. “Why don’t you and Jenny come over on Friday at six, we’ll have a quick drink at our house, and then head out to dinner. Sound good?” Given that Jeff and his wife, Kirsten, live in Washington, DC, which is only 20 miles from my parents’ house, and given that we’d been trying in vain to set up a
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Is there anything more annoying than spending time and money on a recipe that falls short, or doesn’t brown right, or takes hours instead of minutes, or doesn’t look anywhere close to the freaking picture? Never again! Herewith eight questions to ask before you decide to make a new recipe for the family. Is there a recipe buried within your recipe? If a recipe calls for an ingredient that in and
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I just did a run-down of last year’s New Year’s Resolutions and — shocker — I barely batted 200. Still don’t drink enough water, still eat too many “incidental” French Fries off the girls’ plates, haven’t gotten any better at forcing myself to call friends instead of text them, never read The Hobbit, which was going to earn me big fun Mom points with Phoebe, which at the time was her
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. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that every time we go on a trip — whether it’s Santa Fe, Austin, San Francisco, Paris — we tell you what we’ve done, where we’ve eaten, what our kids loved the most. And yet, in the four years we’ve been writing this blog, we’ve given you hints and peeks into Our New York, but have yet to deliver a family
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This month’s Providers column for Bon Appetit: It’s Beginning to Taste a Lot Like Christmas (Photo credit above: Columbia/Kobal) Dear Holderness Family, Please adopt me. Thanks! Love, Jenny. If I can’t make this Animated World Film Festival (which I first learned about here) I will definitely make a point to put some of these kids’ movies on my 2014 T0-See list. A book you will be hearing about a lot in 2014. (Gonna get going on my advanced copy
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Welcome to our annual guide for everything we want, covet, crave, and, yes need this holiday. (I don’t know about you, but in my world, coffee qualifies as an essential.)  As always, the round-up was compiled with cooks, kids, and parents in mind (again, coffee), as well as for those of you who have already bought Dinner: A Love Story for everyone on your list. For those of you who have not:
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Who: Frank T. Age: 44 Lives in: New York, NY Kids: Daughter Julia, Age 7 Marital Status: Divorced Custody Situation: Joint; Weekends + 1 Weeknight Dinner Dilemma: In Frank’s words: “My daughter is finally starting to expand her repertoire — it’s not only Mac ‘n Cheese and nuggets anymore. On the nights she’s with me, I want to stop relying on takeout and learn how to make a few really basic
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. Today’s guest poster is Maria Braeckel, an excellent colleague of mine in the book world, and a true walker-of-the-walk when it comes to Sam Sifton’s Thanksgiving. For the past couple of years, Maria has cooked her through (and sent me photographs of) a large portion of the recipes in this book. Now, with an assist from Sam, she tells us how to handle the morning after — and to
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We put a lot of stock in the idea that families — whatever form “family” might take — create meaning, and identity, through ritual. When the kids are little, that might mean reading to them in bed every night for twenty minutes, or going for long bike rides on Saturday afternoons and talking about life its ownself. It can be something as simple cranking some AC/DC (aka “pump-up” music) on
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Sometimes I think the most necessary characteristic a cook should possess is restraint — in other words, the ability to stay out of the way of something delicious. (Think summer corn, a farm-fresh egg, homemade pasta.) In this case, that rule happens to apply to food blogging as well, and the something delicious happens to be the most beautiful book I’ve seen all winter: The Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie
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