A few months ago, when we took the girls to see Rango, we settled back in our seats with some popcorn to watch the movie preview marathon. (They’ve gotten  longer, haven’t they?) It was all the usual stuff — Chipmunks and Gnomes, nothing terribly exciting — and then, suddenly, a huge ship plowing through a dark sea. On the side of the ship was written the word UNICORN and I heard Phoebe gasp. TINTIN! She screamed, then shrank back down in her seat when she saw that it wasn’t coming out until December 2011 — an eternity from then. I don’t know how I’m going to wait that long, she kept saying after the movie and seemingly every night at the dinner table since. It’s going to be torture. Phoebe has had a love affair with the adventure stories of the Belgian boy-sleuth, and his sidekick wire fox terrier, Snowy, since we handed her all eighteen volumes back in 2008. For her, waiting for this movie to come out has been much harder than waiting for Christmas morning. (But it’s been great fun for us — nothing makes me happier than watching kids build up their patience muscles, since it seems there are so few opportunities left to do so.) But now she only has to wait a few more days — it’s Number One on our Holiday Break To-Do, To-See, To-Read, To-Cook List. In case we don’t have time to weigh in next week, we thought we’d share the rest of the list, too. (more…)

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I don’t want to be mean about it or anything, but if you don’t make this soup the day after you make a holiday ham, something is wrong with you.

P.S. Tonight’s dinner of atonement: my favorite latkes topped with sour cream and smoked salmon. And for dessert: gelt!

Split Pea Soup with Leftover Ham

In a large stockpot, over medium-low heat, melt 2 tablespoons of butter. Add one onion (chopped), 2 stalks celery (chopped), 3-4 carrots (chopped, about 1 cup). Cook about 8 minutes until vegetables are soft.

Add leftover ham hock (with or without meat still on it), 1 3/4 cup split peas, and 8 cups of water. Bring to a boil, then lower to a simmer, cover, and cook for 1 hour 10 minutes.

Remove ham hock. Using an immersion blender, puree the soup in the stock pot until it’s mostly smooth. Add a little more water if it seems too thick. If there was meat on the hock, pull it off the bone and add back to the soup. Serve with croutons or baguette toasts.

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Do you have certain meals that you make rarely, on special occasions, and then, as soon as you’re done eating them, you say to yourself, Damn, that was good. Why don’t we eat this once a week? I do. Roast turkey with stuffing and gravy is one of those meals — so deeply satisfying, and come on, would it be any less satisfying on a Sunday night in January? Pasta with fresh clams and basil is one of those meals: why do we only make it in the summer, when we love it so much? Our New Year’s lobster is one of those meals and so, I’m not afraid to admit, is the twice-a-year kid birthday staple, Hebrew National pigs-in-blankets, with which I shall never ever dream of arguing. But the biggest heartbreaker for me is our beloved yet marginalized friend, the glazed ham. Why is it that we only eat glazed ham in mid-to-late December, at holiday-themed dinner parties? Who made up that rule? No disrespect to our entertaining stand-bys — short ribs, ragu, pork loin braised in milk — but is there really anything tastier or more dramatic looking or, honestly, easier to pull off than a crispy, sweet, salty, diamond-scored, slightly caramelized, fat-marbled, relatively inexpensive, even-better-the-next-day ham sliced up tableside (more…)

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So we may not be the only ones posting a Holiday Gift Guide this week, but we’d like to argue that DALS is probably going to be the only place you can stop by for a Family Dinner Holiday Gift Guide. Which is another way of saying that every gift, recipe, ritual, moment you see here is either family-related, dinner-related, family-dinner related, or, in keeping with the spirit of the blog, s#$t we like so much we just needed to tell you about it. (See #1 above, Pantone Ornaments from Seletti — for all your design geek friends!) Be sure to read carefully — there’s something in it for you, too. — Happy Holidays from The DALS Team!

2. Mauviel Copper Roasting Pan ($280, 11 3/4″ x 8 5/8″) A Big Ticket Item for Big Ticket Home Cooks. Copper pots — any size or shape or model — are the gold standard for cookware. This was a present for Jenny last year; amazing what passes for romance in this house. But roasted chicken thighs have never looked so good. – Andy

3. A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector. Let’s put aside the fact that he’s doing life in prison right now: Phil Spector could make music sound good. We pretty much put this album on repeat  for the entire month of December. Even when we’re eating Latkes (see #6). You can hate Christmas records and love (more…)

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New Year’s Eve is so overrated. I realize I’m not breaking any ground with this statement — which became a mantra in our house long before we even had kids who would’ve insisted on playing Dora dollhouse at 5:30 AM with no regard for how much champagne was consumed the night before. All it took was one aggressively mediocre $100 prix fix dinner out — which offered nothing more special than what you’d find on the menu on a Tuesday night in March — to convince us that we’d be much less resentful of the New Year and way better fed if we just stayed home for the night and watched Larry Sanders re-runs.

That doesn’t mean we don’t properly recognize New Year’s Eve. (As my friend Rory noted the other day, my family has never met a ritual or an opportunity to celebrate that we haven’t seized upon.) Before the kids came along and before Andy’s brother, Tony, and his wife Trish had to go and move across the world to Hong Kong, we used to dress up in our holiday best (for me: black velvet Ann Taylor pants, chunky-heeled Nine West loafers, something shiny on top from Banana) and make multi-course dinners in each other’s Brooklyn apartments that almost always included something worth a splurge. Something special.

Something Special could mean just about anything: a bottle of Champagne that was not procured from the sale bin (1995); a tin of beluga caviar that one of us had received as a corporate gift, served on blinis with creme fraiche (1996); a bottle of 1963 Port that Andy’s dad had been saving for a big night (1999!). But if I am to believe my Dinner Diary — and why wouldn’t I? — the “something special” that, as of 2002, began dominating our New Year’s Eve celebrations was… is… lobster.

It might be dipped in Champagne butter. It might be part of a paella or served alongside a wild mushroom risotto or a citrusy salad or horseradish mashed potatoes. Early on in our parenting career, it was usually just the two of us feasting on 1 1/4 pounders after the girls went to sleep; later the lobster dinner became a family affair that would splinter into two teams: The Tail is Better Team (me and Abby) and the Claws are Better Team (Andy and Phoebe). No matter how the lobsters are prepared or who is eating them, there is a 100% chance that they’ll wind up in the family photo album, with Andy or me doing our obligatory imitations of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.

And that’s the plan for this year, too. (more…)

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My guess is that by now, most of you have a pretty good idea what your Thanksgiving menu is going to look like and who’s in charge of what. Or if the menu isn’t set, you might be in the middle of a reply-all marathon with your family like me. Uncle Phil – you’re on cheese duty, right? Grandma’s got the bird. Papa – How about a few bottles of that Norton Ridge Chardonnay again and some of that hummus from the Lebanese place for nibbles? NO ONE BUY BRUSSELS SPROUTS! Andy just bought every sprout harvested in the Hudson Valley last week. Do we have enough butter? Eggs? Olive oil. Aunt Lynn- You’ve got kosher salt in the kitchen right? I love stuffing my face on Thanksgiving, but I think I may love planning and discussing and cooking part of it even more.

So as far as the food goes, you’re probably in good shape. The stuffings and sides are figured out. All the pecan pie ingredients are sitting on the counter, next to the bag of cranberries and the turkey baster and the special serving platter. It’s likely that the contents of the fridge is in precarious balance, and that your kid stood there for five minutes trying to find a place where the milk might fit.

But what about when you sit down? Have you thought about that part? Not the serving pieces and the place settings, or the way you must time the potato gratin to be ready when the turkey is, but the moment everyone’s food is loaded onto the plates, forks perched for consumption. Have you thought about what you’re going to do then?

I guess you could go ahead and eat. But then a day’s worth of cooking, a week’s worth of planning and reply-all-ing, is gone in 15 minutes. Twenty tops. The question is: Have you thought about how you might get the kids — and everyone for that matter — to participate in the moment and to appreciate what the holiday is about?

With six kids under 10 at our family’s Thanksgiving table, we are not always so good at this. Toasts can be hard. We’ve tried to go around the table and say what we’re thankful for, but by the time you’re at the 16th speech, the gravy has gummed up and the toddlers are gearing up for holiday-level tantrums. So this year, if I can get my act together, I might try to do what Andy did for me one birthday I was celebrating without the kids. Since they weren’t going to be with us — it was going to be a late night — before the meal he had them fill out short fill-in-the-blank questionnaires about me (“The most important thing she told me about life was…” or “Three adjectives to describe Mom are…”) then placed the results on my dinner plate. I got some nice gifts that birthday, but their words on those pages were right up at the top. Something about the specific prompting and the act of writing down (as opposed to speaking in front of a large group) made them write with abandon and express things I can’t imagine they would have told me in the backseat on the way to ballet. Or even at the dinner table for that matter. Here are a few examples:

So what kind of questions would I write for my nephews and nieces on a Thanksgiving questionnaire? Here’s what I’m thinking:

The moment I felt luckiest this year was when….
If I had to pick three adjectives to describe this meal it would be….
When I’m really old and 35, I hope my Thanksgiving table is…
If I could invite anyone to sit with our family this Thanksgiving it would be……because….
If I could write a note to the cook (or cooks) thanking them for what’s in front of me, the first line would be…

If I can get a few answers out of them and then read convince them to read one or two aloud at the table, my guess is that it will be like waving a magic wand across the plate. The food will no longer be Turkey with Sides. It will be Thanksgiving Dinner. (more…)

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Proposed Chocolate Pudding Pie (From Scratch)*

Preheat oven to 350°F. In a food processor fitted with a metal blade, process 2 packages honey graham crackers (total: 2 1/4 cups) until they resemble fine crumbs. Add 5 tablespoons sugar and 10 tablespoons melted butter (unsalted) and pulse to combine. Using your fingers, press the mixture into a 9-inch pie dish. Bake for 10 minutes. Cool. Make this chocolate pudding, then pour into prepared crust. Chill for at least 3 hours (and up to 24) and top with freshly whipped cream.

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Day Before the Eighth Birthday

Abby: Mom, I don’t want it to be my birthday.

Mom: What? Why not?

Abby: Because then it will be over and I’ll have to wait a whole ‘nother year for it to come again.

We have this same conversation every year — which is amazing to me, because between the classroom doughnuts, the annual restaurant-picking ritual, the party with friends, and the cousins-and-grandparents get-together, we seem to be celebrating Abby’s birthday all year long. All year long, it’s on her mind. “Where should my party be this year?” she’ll ask on New Year’s. “What restaurant are we going to on the night of my birthday?” she’ll ask in the middle of her sister’s February birthday dinner. “What should the theme of my party be?” She asked when I picked her up from camp one day in July.

I don’t want to pretend that this is hard work. All of us got into picking the theme this time, submitting our best proposals to the Birthday Boss.

How about an “almost-sleepover” party?
Too babyish.
An upside down party?
Naaah.
A British tea party?
Too girly.
A soccer party?
Not all my friends play soccer.
A secret agent party, like Phoebe’s 9th?
We did that already.
A Drive-by Truckers party?
Daaaad.

We wracked our brains. What did Abby love more than anything else in the world. More than her LaLaLoopsy dolls, more than Lemony Snicket, more than flying down a soccer sideline?

Once Andy threw out Japan as a theme we wondered what took us so long to get there. Abby’s idea of happiness has always been miso soup, shrimp shumai, and chicken teriyaki, followed by a private screening of Totoro.

Here’s what we ended up doing…

Candy Sushi! For twelve girls I made two sheets of Rice Krispie Treats, cutting them into round and square sushi-size pieces. Then I proceeded to load two trays (one for each side of the table) with some world-class junk: Swedish fish, gummy worms, jelly beans, Airhead Extremes (the rainbows), Dots, chewy Now-and-Laters, green Fruit-by-the-Foot (which stood in for the seaweed and is truly, hideously repulsive), and sour peach strips that were a dead ringer for ginger. (I think as I type this a week and a half later, the girls are just now coming off their sugar rush.) To make things a little easier for everyone — I chopped up a bunch of the candy into bite size pieces so they’d fit nicely on or around the rice patties. (more…)

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Year of the Cyclops Pumpkin.

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I really do believe that there are two kinds of people in this world: the bakers and the cooks (or “cookers” as Abby once called them.) Me — with my absolute inability to pay attention to amounts and rules and, you know, crucial details (last week I applied Athlete’s Foot cream on Phoebe’s rash instead of hydrocortisone — I fall squarely into the cooker category. I love nothing more than coming across an instruction like “mix until you reach desired consistency” in a recipe. In other words, there’s no wrong answer! This is why, in my hours of need (aka Halloween), I turn to my friend and ICE graduate, Sara of Sara Bakes Cakes, who, now that I think of it, is actually neither a baker nor a cook, but a true artist. I asked her to give me one easy, creepy treat that would see me through Halloween bake sales and fairs and parties along with one instruction: No fondant, which may scare me more than the bloodshot eyeball cupcakes themselves. They are made with bloody red velvet cake and a foolproof vanilla buttercream frosting, both of which I’m thinking will be nice to have on hand throughout the year. And as soon as I get the guts up to try making them, I’ll let you know how they are.

Sara’s Red Velvet Cupcakes (more…)

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…where my grand plan to make Deb’s Best Birthday Cake, devolves into this instead.

But Abby will forgive me when she opens these and this. (We’ve already exhausted Season 1.)

I’m thinking of having a third child, if only so I can dress him or her in this for Halloween.

Why can’t it be October 25 right exactly now?

I always knew Reese was a smart one. (Please note her choice of reading material.)

A good reminder: Who’s David and who’s Goliath in the battle between book publishers and Amazon?

I’ve accepted the fact that I will never have handwriting like Marion Deuchars, but now I can at least have her book. (Be sure to play the “How to Draw a Simple Bird” video for your kids.)

How fun is this menu planning? And I’m totally making the lemon-garlic-anchovy potatoes this weekend.

And now a few things from Andy:

One upside to the kids growing up: Abby is one year closer to appreciate this kind of writing.

Can’t stop listening to this, and the rest of the family can’t stop listening to me listen to it, either.

This could be my Halloween costume this year.

An amazing piece of old-school reporting.

Want to get the kids excited to go play some soccer/take a spelling test/go to a piano/just go out and kick some butt in general? Try this. How fun does that look?

Thank you, New York Times, for showing me that I am doing everything wrong in the kitchen.

Of all the things I love about All Things Must Pass, the album cover is right up there at the top. Here’s the obituary of the man who shot it, along with a bunch of other iconic covers.

If The New Yorker would only post their articles for free, I could link here to the  latest David Sedaris essay, Memory Laps. But they don’t, so I can’t. If you get the magazine, though, it’s a good one. We read aloud it to the kids, in our best public radio voices – for real — and they loved it.

Happy weekend!

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There are other benefits to keeping a dinner diary besides the fact that it offers daily meal inspiration as well as tangible, Pilot-Pen-V5 documented evidence of my obsessive-compulsive behavior. And that added benefit is this: It tells a story. It tells the story of how much my cooking has changed from the pre-Michael Pollan days of the 90s (asparagus is constantly showing up in the winter and butternut squash in the spring) and the pre-kid days (Andy and I would spend entire afternoons tracking down obscure ingredients so we could experiment with, say, a lamb kibbeh. Can you imagine having that kind of time?) But, I realized this week as we celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary, the diary also tells a short story of New York. By now it’s probably clear how much we like to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries in our house in a big way, and to that end, we almost always try to snag a restaurant reservation somewhere special. And special can be defined in a few ways: It can be personally sentimental (like our first one, with the view you see above, was); it can be trendy (as our 8th in 2005 was) or it can just be classically, insanely awesome (as Le Bernardin at 9 months pregnant was). No matter where we went, though, the dining room always seems be charged with the energy that only a special night out in New York seems to offer. Here’s the list…

First Anniversary (1998) River Café, Brooklyn (shown above)

We had our rehearsal dinner here (and got married right down the street), so it was the obvious first choice for our first anniversary. After our wedding, TRC would subsequently become the go-to spot for our extended family for celebrating big occasions like engagements and important birthdays. But the tables for two that seat both people on the same side  (so no one gets cheated of the view of Downtown Manhattan) was always my favorite way to eat there. (more…)

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Last week, when my Mom and I were dreaming up red-white-and-blue treats for our Fourth of July celebration, I talked a big game. There would be a flag cake, of course. But not just your garden-variety flag sheet cake. I was imagining cross-sectioned flag cakes, maybe even horizontally slicing a pound cake and re-assembling using red frosting or jam. Maybe I’d bake different sections in different colors and then re-assemble? But would the yellow cake be white enough for a flag cake? Was that unpatriotic? I know! I would bake a white, fluffy angel food cake. And maybe I would use a fresh strawberry sauce to paint stripes on each serving and then top with blueberries? The kids would love that. (more…)

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As a kid, the perfect ending to a good day was when I’d walk into the kitchen at about six o’clock, after a long afternoon of backyard pyromania and brain-melting Q*bert sessions, and see the big Pyrex baking dish on the counter. Inside that dish were four or five or six pork chops — bone in, sourced from our local Safeway — marinating in white vinegar. This meant one thing: breaded pork chops for dinner. My mom, who was usually in her room with her “feet up,” would let the chops soak for an hour or two. After my dad came home and poured himself some medicine, we’d get to work on what passed for mise en place in my house in 1983. My mom would fire up her ancient electric frying pan and pour in some olive oil, and I’d help her dredge, coating each chop with flour, egg, and — this is key — Italian bread crumbs. (more…)

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I often look at my daughters and ask myself “Whose children are these? How did they get here?” Sometimes this happens when I’m overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of parenting and the fact that I’ve brought two actual live human beings into this world. But most of the time it happens when I show up at the kitchen table with an egg and they recoil in disgust, as though I’ve just served up the family pet. Who are these children? How can they be mine and not like eggs? (Occasionally they will contest this fact and say they like eggs as long as they are baked in to a cake.) I think I could eat an egg every day for the rest of my life and not get sick of them. The day I first tried an organic one – a real, golden-yolked, eggy tasting egg – would be on the timeline of my life along with the day I got into college, the day I got married, and the day I became a mother.

The kids’ whole Heisman routine gets particularly annoying around this time of year when we have a dozen or so pastel-dyed hard-boiled Easter eggs lying around begging to be repurposed for dinner. But it doesn’t stop me. Last year I introduced you to our post-Easter cobb salad. This year, it’s a killer side — chilled asparagus salad with chopped up eggs and drizzled with mustardy vinaigrette. It’s the kind of side dish that elevates any old boring chicken dish. Remember the Gap Clothes, Prada Accessories Theory? Add this one to the list.

Asparagus with Chopped Egg and Onion

Add 1 bunch asparagus (trimmed) to boiling water and cook three minutes. Drain and immediately plunge spears in ice water to stop cooking and preserve their bright green color. Meanwhile, chop 2 hard-boiled eggs into small pieces as shown and sprinkle over chilled asparagus (or over half the asparagus if you have egg haters in the house) along with 1 tablespoon finely minced red onion (I used scallions in the photo above) and drizzle with a mustardy vinaigrette. Serve with creamy baked chicken or buttermilk oven-fried chicken.

I’m taking my spring break a little late this year, so see you guys in about a week!

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When the girls were little, my idea of celebrating a birthday was an 8:00 dinner reservation and a babysitter booked by Andy. It didn’t matter what restaurant we were headed to, so long as I didn’t spend half the meal kneeling under the table looking for a Polly Pockets shoe. But in the past few years, as the girls have gotten older and wiser (though somehow no less clumsy in the small-parts dropping department) it’s a different story. I find it’s not nearly as fun to blow out the candles without the two of them inserting their “cha-cha-chas” in the birthday serenade, and begging for the slice with the flower.

My birthday is still a few weeks off, but I’m proud to announce that DALS turned one this week. (Can you believe??) And in the spirit of including the whole family in the celebration, I’m offering gifts to you guys, my faithful DALS readers, who on a daily basis make this space so much more rich and so much more fun. Anyone who leaves a comment below is eligible for his or her choice of various goodies I’ve been collecting from generous vendors, including Laurie David’s cookbook The Family Dinner and a pile of food-related notepads from the always entertaining Knock, Knock. (I’m just going to assume you all have the DALS signature “Make Dinner Not War” bumper sticker already, but if you don’t, you can select that for your prize as well.) As usual, the selection process will be highly scientific — Phoebe and Abby will be picking three winners at random. So keep the comments clean. (That means you 654!)

I’ve also included some fun year-in-review stats, gleaned from the all-powerful Google Analytics and then a few personal faves from Andy and me. Thought they might help as you head into the weekend.

Ten Most Clicked Posts of the Year (in order): Letter of Agreement, The Recipe Door, Instant Dinner Party, Salad Pizza, Lemon-Pepper Chicken, Picky Eater Taxonomy, Dinner: A Love Story, The Book, Time for Dinner The Cookbook, Green French Fries, Vegetable Hater Special.

Most Popular Category (no surprise): Chicken
Most Popular Pep Talk: My Real Food Movement
Most Popular Chicken Recipe: Baked Chicken with Tomatoes and Mascarpone
Most Popular Pasta Recipe: Rigatoni with Back-pocket Bolognese
Most Popular Beef Recipe: Belgian Beef Stew (more…)

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I didn’t make this cake for my nine-year-old’s Secret Agent Party. I had the local bakery write the birthday message in “code” (see if you can crack it!) but that’s where my confectionary contribution ended. I opted to buy the cake instead of bake one from scratch because by the time I was thinking about this last piece of the party puzzle, Reasonable Mom (Secret Code Name: Make-it-Easy-on-Yourself Mom) was losing to Unreasonable Mom (Secret Code Name: Who-Exactly-Are-You-Trying-To-Impress Mom). In fact, for this particular party  – with its three-floor, ten-clue scavenger hunt, hand-stenciled tablecloth, and late-night phone consultations with my friend Marcie, who threw her own spy party a few years ago — Unreasonable Mom was crushing Reasonable Mom. For this party, Unreasonable Mom was leaving it all on the field.

It was Unreasonable Mom who, two weeks earlier, forced me spend an hour designing the invitation for the party on my computer, even though the 9-year-old honoree herself was downstairs playing Angry Birds on the iPad. (A major violation in our house! Reasonable Mom always makes sure the birthday girls are as involved in the process whenever possible. Reasonable Mom does everything in her power to protect me from being on the other end of the silent accusation: Who’s this party for anyway? The mom or the kid? ) (more…)

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Mad Lib Valentines from Jenny and Andy.

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