My usual rule of thumb is that there should be one thing on the dinner plate that is fresh, as in a vegetable that is raw, crispy, uncooked, bright. It’s why we eat so much slaw in our house. Nothing cuts the richness of a pork chop quite the way a vinegary pile of cabbage can. But occasionally, we shake… Read more »
Sl0w-cooker evangelists, maybe skip the next few sentences please, because I know how you feel completely betrayed whenever I say something with even the whiff of negativity about your beloved crock pots. And I get it: What’s there not to love about a meal that involves minimal prep and cooks itself all day long freeing you from your dinner shackles… Read more »
It’s a Christmas Miracle: My daughter has come out of retirement just in time for the holidays. Some of you might remember me mentioning Nerd Alert, a blog Phoebe started a few years ago as a way to explore books, comics, graphic novels, and “other essentials,” to quote her tagline. She hasn’t posted in while — which might have something to… Read more »
Ah springtime! Season of magnolia blossoms, standardized tests, and — between recitals, orientations, half-time fundraising, end-of-the-year whatevers — seemingly a bake sale every week. I can’t tell you how many times in the past month a reminder has popped up on my iPhone saying something like “Bake Sale/Lacrosse” or “Recital/Bring Cookies” and all I have to say is…what is wrong… Read more »
I had such buyer’s remorse the other day. But sometimes, that’s a good thing. I’ll start at the beginning. Instead of writing from home last week, I decided to set up shop at the Starbucks that was down the block from my daughter’s camp. That way, I wasn’t wasting any time in the car, I was maximizing my time working,… Read more »
Tuesday night: 5:30 Wrap up work in my home office — even though I meant to wrap up work before kids got home from school two hours earlier. Oh well. 5:40 Realize that Andy is out tonight and it’s Tuesday, which means everyone has their various extracurricular pursuits until almost 9:00. Make radical decision: Let’s eat dinner before practice tonight… Read more »
I don’t know about you, but this is the time when I suddenly look at the calendar, and then at the list of things I’ve bought for family and friends so far, and then at the list of things I still have to buy, and think, “Rut-roh.” How’s it all gonna get done? And how did I let this happen?… Read more »
My mother, an attorney, was the first person to teach me about res ipsa loquitur, a legal term that translates to “The Thing Speaks for Itself.” I will leave it to the lawyers out there to explain the finer points of how it’s used to prove negligence in the courtroom, but as long as I can remember, my mom and… Read more »
O, haricot verts, how it pains me to say this, given all that you have given us (nay, done for us), but I have grown tired of you. For eight years, you — the basic steamed and salted version of you — were there for us, a rock in our rotation, a reliable side dish we could count on. You… Read more »
I had the world’s greatest assignment for the June issue of Bon Appetit. I can’t tell you all the details because it hasn’t hit newsstands yet, but it involves summer and it involves rules and it involves cooking. I was putting the story together in the middle of February — during one of those stretches of bean-soup-making snow days —… Read more »
I know. Bummer. An entire post devoted to salad. Not a BLT salad or a wedge of iceberg with thousand island dripping in and around the crevices. But a yawn-inducing, omega-3-rich, good-for-you, raw bowl of nutrients that falls into the “leafy green” category. Thanks, Jenny! Thanks for the big bowl of homework! Go ahead, leave the page. Go lose yourself… Read more »
Since I think I’ve received a personal (practically perfumed) note from just about every DALS reader telling me how much you love Andy’s pork ragu, I assume you might be interested in some suggestions for how to stretch it out into two meals. Yes, this means that you’ll have to restrain yourself from eating the entire batch on Night One, but… Read more »
When I was little, shrimp did not qualify as seafood. Seafood was the stuff my mom picked up at the dreaded fish market (my twin brother and I used to hold our noses in protest whenever she made us go in with her) and was what she might have made for people coming over for dinner once her bratty brood… Read more »
In spite of this Greek chicken soup (aka avgolemono) being the single most popular dinner we ran in Cookie* and in spite of it being the first on the list of Victoria Granof-written recipes that we knew must be included in the cookbook, and in spite of the fact that it takes 15 minutes to whip up from start to… Read more »
You know how I love my Jim Lahey pizza crust. How it has revolutionized pizza night in our house. How it is so easy to make that even someone who has never baked before can figure it out in about two seconds. Well, sometimes easy doesn’t translate to quick (the crust takes two un-manned hours to rise) and sometimes, revolution… Read more »
Saturday afternoon, week before last, was one of those moments when you think, man, having kids is fun. I mean, it’s almost always fun and it’s not like hanging out with the kids on a sunny weekend afternoon is ever a hardship, but this was different. I feel like last Saturday marked some kind of occasion, a corner turned in… Read more »
I know better than to apply logic to the process of feeding kids, but there I was doing exactly that a few weeks ago when I spied the perfect recipe for “peanut butter sauce” (aka satay, tahini, sesame sauce, etc.) by my friend and mother-of-two Melissa Roberts. The logic went as follows: If Peanut Butter = Surefire Consumption, and Noodles… Read more »
. The first time I wrote about tortilla soup on this blog, the girls were playing cops and robber at recess and were so young I had to call it “taco soup” because tortillas were just so, you know, sophisticated (read: intimidating) sounding. The second time I wrote about it (as an ideal “deconstructable dinner” was May, 2012, a month… Read more »
Welcome! I’m Jenny, author of Dinner: A Love Story and Dinner: The Playbook More
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