Good morning! Tomorrow we are heading up to Maine for eight days, which I tell you for two reasons. 1) I will most likely not be posting here next week (instagram, another story) and 2) Today’s PPP entry is dedicated to my favorite kind of cooking — using up every possible perishable item in the fridge pre-vacation. Before I get… Read more »
Good morning and welcome to Thursday. Yesterday I wrote recipe headnotes for a chapter of my book. (Headnotes are the little descriptions that introduce the recipe, or tell a story, or give some context and instruction); I went for a long walk; I started a novel I was assigned to review. Lastly, the unsettling news from Minneapolis and Central Park… Read more »
Good afternoon! What’s everyone reading these days? I’m excited about the new Curtis Sittenfeld novel (published today) called Rodham, which imagines what would’ve become of Hillary had she never married Bill; I’m also in the middle of Before the Fall, by the Fargo creator Noah Hawley — it’s a thriller, and not my usual genre, but it’s actually been really… Read more »
I told Andy that yesterday in the kitchen felt like the fabled story of painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Every time I cooked something and cleaned it up, someone was right behind me dirtying up another one hundred dishes. It was mostly my fault, though. I had a bunch of things to test and retest for my book — a… Read more »
Happy Friday Everyone. As of today, we’ve made it exactly four weeks in quarantine, which I will choose to view as a small victory. Yesterday we placed a food order through Baldor, the restaurant wholesale supplier that has pivoted to residential delivery (it looks like they are in the DC, NY, and Boston metropolitan areas), which means hopefully we won’t… Read more »
Good morning! I completely forgot to pick up anything Passover related in my last supermarket shop, so last night was like all other nights in my house, sadly. (Haha.) We did have a Zoom call with my parents, siblings, nieces and nephews for a pre-Seder check-in, but we signed off before my brother-in-law cracked the Haggadah. To all those celebrating,… Read more »
Greetings, DALS family. I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve gotten the nicest notes since I launched the PPP series, and I wanted you to know a) how grateful I am for this community and b) how therapeutic it is for me to produce helpful (read: distracting) content, however Groundhog Day that content is beginning to sound. On that note, yesterday… Read more »
4:00 Drop off daughter at camp in Western Mass; settle in for 3-hour drive home. 4:15 Realize the kitchen waiting for us is basically cobwebs. We have no fresh food except possibly half a red onion. 4:17 Pull over at first farm stand we drive by (I see you Pioneer Valley!); pick up 3 ears corn, a bag of sugar… Read more »
As most of you know, we are big fans of the celebratory birthday breakfast in our house and, thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be changing as the kids get older. In fact, they seem more into the tradition than ever, most recently evidenced by this spread for Andy a few weeks back. Influenced heavily by the All-Day-Cafe aesthetic of some… Read more »
A week ago, I did something I’ve never done before: I loaded up my car with a few groceries, kissed my kids goodbye, and drove a few hours north to attend a five-day artist residency at The Spruceton Inn in the Catskills. As I pulled on to 87 North, I flashbacked to the last time I was away from my… Read more »
Hi, it’s Abby. My mom asked me to write an introduction for this post about our last-minute trip to Seattle a few weeks ago. I was invited to play in a soccer tournament there and this one was different than most because there was only one game a day, which means there was plenty of down time to explore a… Read more »
A few weeks ago, Joanna over at Cup of Jo asked me for some lessons on parenting teenagers. It just so happened I was in the middle of a rough patch and the best I could do without compromising anyone’s privacy was report that I was constantly being reminded of a quote from my friend whose kids have long since left the… Read more »
[This post is sponsored by Whole Foods Market] This should not come to a surprise to anyone who has been reading Dinner: A Love Story for the past few years, but when we are looking for ways to celebrate special occasions, whether that’s a birthday, a return from sleep-away camp, the last day of midterms, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Hump… Read more »
So what’s everyone making for their Memorial Day barbecues? We are splitting up this weekend to travel to various sporting events and tournaments and I’m guessing that my culinary highlight will be the egg and cheese sandwich at whatever Starbucks is closest to the track or field. (Reminder that I am not complaining. I love those sandwiches and would, in… Read more »
I’m a day late on this — sorry! — but a quick update to let you know that I was on Food Network’s “The Kitchen” yesterday (that’s Jeff Mauro and Marcela Valladolid up there!) talking champagne brunch, How to Celebrate Everything, and the ridiculously happy pancake “cake” you are looking at below. If you are like us, with one more day left… Read more »
I’ve worked with a lot of creative people in my life, but right up there at the top of the list is Vanessa Holden, who I met when she was creative director of Real Simple, and who went on to become editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart and creative director at West Elm. Her most impressive credential, though, might be Soul Safari, the conference-slash-revolution… Read more »
I’m so happy to welcome Shauna Niequist to DALS’s guest series on family rituals. You most likely know Shauna from her blog and bestselling books about food, family and faith. Her latest, Present Over Perfect, is a poetic manifesto about slowing down, saying no, choosing messiness over perfection and, as she writes, “turning her life around from the inside out” to make time for what matters. (I’m… Read more »
In his Bon Appetit column this month, dessert guru and Superiority Burger founder, Brooks Headley coined a phrase that I can’t stop thinking about: Good Anxiety. “The impermanence of seasonal produce is one of the joys of cooking,” he wrote. “It gets the blood pumping. It triggers the good anxiety.” It’s exactly the sentiment I experience when I wander the… Read more »
Welcome! I’m Jenny, author of Dinner: A Love Story and Dinner: The Playbook More
Purchase on Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes & Noble
