A few weeks ago our friends Kate and Joel and their three girls came over for dinner. We were all vacationing on the same island together so the menu was as simple and fresh and kid-friendly as we could manage: asparagus salad (without eggs for the kids), campfire potatoes, and grilled chicken sandwiches with homemade slaw. Kate took one bite of her sandwich and, because she is a good guest, immediately started oohing and ahhing and inquiring about how we put the whole thing together. “This is perfect,” she said. “Just what I am in the mood for. Man!! And the slaw!  Mmmm! How did you make it?”

I told her slaw is one of those things I don’t really have a recipe for. I just start whisking things together and keep adding more shredded cabbage and carrots until it looks about right.

“OK, fine, but what exactly are you whisking together?”

“It’s like I’m making any salad dressing. I’ll add a dollop of mayo to the bottom of a large bowl, then add some celery seed, some cider vinegar—-”

She crossed her arms in front of her face and looked away as though I had shined a bright light in her eyes. “OK, stop right there,” she said. “Page turner!”

“What…?” I was confused. (Were we talking about the can’t-put-it-down book Blood, Bones, and Butter again??)

“Cider vinegar?!?” She said. “I don’t know from cider vinegar. As soon as I see it in a recipe I’m turning the page.” Kate is a psychologist, but she has also has a side career as a Second City comedian, so sometimes it can be hard to tell when she’s kidding.

“That’s ridiculous,” I told her. “It’s cider vinegar. It’s right next to the balsamic vinegar in any supermarket.”

“I don’t care. The whole idea of it scares me. The whole idea of someone who knows how to use cider vinegar scares me. It’s like cream of tartar. I mean, what is that? What do you use it for? What kind of people buy cream of tartar?” (more…)

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Last week, Jenny went away for three days to work on her book. I don’t know if anyone else out there finds this to be true, but we have this theory about parenting being easier — not better, mind you, just easier — when the spouse is away. The chain of command is clearer. Movements are more efficient. Decisions are more decisive. With no safety net, I feel like we tend to be a little better about being doers, about making the bed in the morning and mustering the energy to move that dirty juice glass the three feet from the sink into the dishwasher, about not standing around in the kitchen, checking email again and being generally suspended in that maddening state of inertia that sets in when you’re trying to decide what to do and who’s going to go upstairs and get the sweater down from Abby’s closet and who’s going to make sure Phoebe’s teeth are brushed properly, since the dentist put a watch on one of her molars last time we were there and, wait, did we pack any snacks yet?

So I had a big weekend planned. We would be a perpetual motion machine! Saturday morning, we went hiking up at Bear Mountain. We had lunch — burgers with jalapenos and sharp local cheddar, a black-and-white milkshake, and hand-cut fries — at the outrageously tasty Woody’s All-Natural in Cornwall, New York, which, if you live within 100 miles of the place, I implore you to try, for real. We made nine jars of pickles. We played home run derby on the patio. And when it came to dinner, I saw this as an opportunity to do something different and fun, to branch out with a hanger steak or a rack of ribs or one of those silvery whole branzinos I’d been eyeing at the fish market. The best part was, after a death march of a winter, we could even cook outside. The weather was just beginning to turn — a cruel tease, as it turns out — and the grill was on the patio, cleared of snow, practically begging to be fired up. Afterwards, we’d call Jenny and surprise her with our enterprising dinner adventures. There’s nothing she likes more than when we go and expand the family repertoire.

It was late afternoon when we finally got around to planning the menu. I quick-polled the kids to see what they were up for.

They were up for chicken. Chicken, chicken, and more chicken. Chinese chicken, they said. Adam’s crispy chicken. Barbecue chicken! Drumsticks! Chicken! (more…)

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I’d like to interrupt the relentless roll-out of pizzas and stews for an important — maybe even obvious — message. A few nights ago I was reading yet another article regurgitating what we probably all know by now about family dinner. This just in: All kinds of great things will happen if you just sit down with your kids to eat dinner. They will bring home straight As, they will be less likely to suffer from depression or eating disorders. They will beg for second helpings of spinach. And, right on cue, the article ended with this line (I’m paraphrasing): “Don’t worry about making a homemade dinner. Have a bowl of healthy whole grain cereal if you have to. It’s not the food that’s important, it’s being together.”

Let me first just say that I of course totally agree with most of this statement. The being-together part, after all, is the whole reason I launched this site. DALS is as much a response to all of us wanting to connect more with our children as it is about those succulent, beautiful eight-minute lamb chops.  But if that is all it is about, then there would only be as many posts here as there are brands of nutritious cereal. (Or Trader Joe’s frozen pizzas!) And also, I’m pretty sure we would’ve stopped caring about dinner (cooking it and writing about it) a while ago since a bowl of cereal for dinner is kind of fun if it’s Cereal for Dinner Night. But after too many Cereal For Dinner Nights, it’s just…cereal.

The goal (at least in my house) is to make dinner a ritual, and putting together something that you want to eat — that you are excited to eat — is going to do more for establishing that ritual than just about anything else. If you cook good food, it will build on itself. Your family will look forward to it. You will look forward to it. You will get addicted to eating well and watching your family eat well. (Is it me or do I sound exactly like Amy Chua justifying the self-esteem cycle that results from making your children practice their instruments for three hours a day? You force them to practice, they get better. The better they get the more they want to practice…) Is it essential that you braise an Osso Bucco on a Tuesday night? Of course not! There are all kinds of quick easy recipes on this site that qualify as special. But my point is, I don’t want to dismiss the role of caring about what you cook in this whole equation. The more you care, the more you’ll cook, and the more you cook, the more firmly the family dinner ritual will take hold. It’s probably going to be a long time before my kids recognize in a conscious way that eating a meal with someone who loves them satisfies some deep psychological need. But for now I’m pretty sure they’re psyched to show up just for the noodles.  And I don’t have any problem with that.

Thai Chicken with Noodles from Martha Stewart: Killer. Illustration up top is by M. Hafner, from the March 1960 issue of Good Housekeeping.

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Here are a few of the dishes you might find in my Someday File: An authentic lasagna from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy (Someday I’ll have time to make pasta from scratch); That Post-it tagged lobster pot pie recipe from one of the Barefoot Contessa books (Someday I’ll be able to justify spending $25/pound on shellfish that gets lost in an ocean of butter and cream); A spicy chicken dish from the New York Times that calls for tamarind paste (Three Somedays here: Someday my kids might be able to handle the hot stuff, Someday I’ll have time to hunt down tamarind paste, and Someday someone will tell me if tamarind paste is the same thing as tamarind concentrate.) My Someday file is not buried on the MacBook or on my epi App. It’s not in a box on a shelf lined up in my kitchen’s Command Central. The file is in my brain and, miraculously, includes an interactive slide show function that has run on a loop ever since 2002, when Phoebe was born. When we were in the middle of The Great Pizza-Pasta-Nugget Rut of 2005, I’d close my eyes and picture the full-page color photos of dahl and turmeric and chilies in Maya Kaimal’s Savoring the Spice Coast of (more…)

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Last Thursday, I started hating myself a full hour before my morning coffee. If you must know, I started hating myself at precisely 8:04, which was the first time I yelled at my kids who were in danger of missing the 8:09 bus. Yelling Where are your shoes and yelling Where are your gloves and Did you brush your teeth and — haven’t we gone through this, like, 720* times already? Wouldn’t you think that by now a second and third grader would pick up on the catch-the-bus urgency vibe? Wouldn’t you think that by now I’d have figured out a way to make them move a little faster without turning into Miss Hannigan? Sadly, I haven’t, and I gotta say, starting the day with screaming followed by self-loathing is no way to start a day at all. And mediating a tearful fight between siblings who both laid claim to a light-up sticker album — triggering more screaming as well as the thought “How am I going to deal with this when they are 13” — is no way to spend an afternoon either.

No, Thursday wasn’t my best day ever.

The good news was: we had planned for “Chicken Pizza” (aka Chicken Parm) that night for dinner. The dredging thing can be kind of a drag on a weeknight, but I didn’t care. Because it’s everybody’s favorite and sometimes you just need a meal you can count on not to incite a riot.

*4 years of school x 180 school days

Chicken Pizza (more…)

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On any given winter day in my house, if I ask the innocent question cooks across the earth are asking — i.e. What should we have for dinner tonight? — I can pretty much always count on Andy suggesting some kind of healthy, simple seafood; I would bet the house on Abby requesting – please, Mom, puh-leeeeeeze, I’ll kiss you 99 trillion zillion times – Trader Joe’s frozen pork or chicken shumai (infinitely more exciting for her than the homemade kind); and for Phoebe to suggest chili. It doesn’t matter what kind of chili — vegetarian, beef, white, chicken, spicy, mild — she has had a love affair with the dish ever since we gave her a bowl of the turkey version (plus toppings, of course!) when she was about four or five. And so this past Saturday morning — after a long week off from school, a week where she lounged around patiently reading all the Babysitter’s Club books she got for her birthday, a week where her sister had Taylor’s Swift’s “Umbrella” on repeat for all our waking hours, a week where her mom promised her a trip to the ice rink every day staring Monday but somehow failed to make it happen — when I asked the dinner question, I knew exactly what the answer had to be. (more…)

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About fifteen years ago, Aunt Patty scribbled her recipe for chicken wings on an index card and clutched it into my hands with the urgent instruction Don’t Lose This. The way she said it and the way those wings tasted, I figured it was some secret family recipe that went back generations. I didn’t lose the recipe, but I never made the wings either. Somehow I had a sense that this was one of those things that wouldn’t have tasted the same had anyone else attempted to cook them for me. The title of the recipe was “La Brea Tar Pit Chicken Wings” so named because they were dark, sticky, and gooey and I had pretty much forgotten about them until a few weeks ago when I was flipping through my Gourmet Cookbook in search of a dinner we could eat with our fingers in front of the Super Bowl. Turns out Patty’s wings hadn’t quite earned the secret family recipe status I had conferred upon them all these years, because they were! Right there on page 55! (And submitted by some imposter in Boston named Metta Miller! What??) I felt a little better when I finally read the recipe and saw how easy it was, how perfect it was for the kind of meal I craved that night: minimal hands-on time, and something that worked equally well with chocolate milk and Guinness. (more…)

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It’s a good weekend when the worst thing you can say about it is that you sliced your blood oranges on the same cutting board as your onions, potentially ruining all prospects for turning out a perfect version of Melissa Clark’s blood orange olive oil cake. But since I had gone through all the trouble of supreme-ing the things (Do you guys know this verb? To “supreme” an orange? To remove the fruit from the peel and pith?) I wasn’t about to toss them. My only hope of salvation was pairing the Vidalia-tinged fruits with something savory, so I tupperwared them away and waited for inspiration to strike. The opportunity presented itself in the form of this dinner salad — redemption in a bowl after a birthday party at my parents’ house for Phoebe that included two cakes. (What was I supposed to do, try just one of them?) I did the Deconstructed thing (like I did with my cobb salad) plating each salad ingredient (oranges, avocado, blue cheese, sauteed cubed chicken) in its own “stripe” on a platter so the girls could pick what they wanted (See below for Abby’s result) then we tossed the whole thing with greens and a citrusy vinaigrette. (more…)

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A few months ago, I got this email from reader Rebecca:

“I have no idea what to give to new parents or the bereaved–you know, those occasions in life when a casserole is all but mandatory.  I want so badly to show that I care by offering simple nourishment, and all I have in my repertoire are a tired lasagna or straight-out-of-the-1950′s tuna-noodle casserole, which I’m almost embarrassed to offer to friends with even a moderately discriminating palate.  Do you have any recipes that can be thrown in the oven for an easy dinner during life’s transitions, but are fresh, modern and tasty enough that I can feel proud to offer them to friends?”

I get this question all the time, and it’s taken me this long to respond because I have been stuck in the lasagna rut, too. Until the other night, when I was flipping through my second favorite quick meal cookbook*, Great Food Fast. I was looking for something to bring over to my friend and mother-of-three Teresa, who is recovering from back surgery, and came upon a recipe for Tortilla Pie. By merely plating it in a beautiful pie dish (and not my grease-streaked Pyrex baking dish) it was transformed into a modern, tasty upgrade from the more tired Mexican lasagna. I made it for my own family last weekend (the “A” is for “Abby,” since her wedge of the pie was not to include black beans. Another option: “A for Are you kidding me?”) and man oh man was it spirit-lifting, aka delicious.

Another thought: Time for Dinner owners might want to try the “personal pan” lasagna recipes on page 166 in this situation. (Easy to customize for kids, since they are crafted out of ravioli, so can be made with half cheese, half…pumpkin?)

Please comment below or on the DALS facebook page if you have a go-to Show-You-Care Casserole. I think we can all use these.

*You didn’t really just wonder which one was my first favorite, did you? (more…)

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How did we celebrate our re-entry into the meat world? With a classic roast chicken dinner. (Oh, and there also might have been a bite or two or five of roasted pork at Roberta’s the other day.) We ate the chicken last night, which was Thursday, which is also known in our house as “Big Fat Nothing Day.” No activities, no mom going to work. No scheduled plans. So I could take my time in the kitchen, and in the end, our dinner felt more like one we’d eat on Sunday. Which was a really nice way to head into the long weekend. (more…)

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I got the nicest email from a reader this week. His name is Marc and he just discovered DALS. This is what he wrote:

So much happens at the Dinner Table. I came out to my parents at the dinner table, my brother and his girlfriend told our family they were engaged at our dinner table. Normally I eat in front of the TV, but last night I decided to have a proper dinner at the table with my boyfriend, which I am going to try to do at least twice a week, because your blog inspired me. So thank you for that.

My favorite thing about this note…well I have a lot of favorite things about this note. I love that he capitalized Dinner Table. Like it’s a proper noun, a destination, an official movement. And obviously, I love how he remembers the Dinner Table as the place where the big moments happen. But mostly, I love that he got inspired, figured out a realistic game plan (twice a week!) and then got started on that game plan immediately. I don’t have any idea what he cooked that night, but since it was a Monday, my guess is that it wasn’t Osso Bucco or ricotta gnocchi with a quail egg cooked sous vide. It doesn’t have to be gourmet to be special. And it doesn’t have to be every night to be family dinner.

Want to launch the ritual tonight? This is a good recipe to start with.

Roast Chicken with Baby Brussels Sprouts

Preheat oven to 450°F. Toss baby brussels sprouts in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Add to a baking dish. Coat drumsticks with mustard and then coat them in breadcrumbs. Add chicken to another lightly oiled baking dish. Bake both dishes for 25 minutes, turning chicken once and tossing brussels once halfway.

We served it with a salad made from butter lettuce, grape tomatoes, snipped chives, and the buttermilk dressing from our favorite soybean and cherry tomato salad.

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Rachael Ray would call a recipe like this a 30-minute meal. Cooking Light would call it “Superfast.” Gourmet (RIP) would have called it “Gourmet Everyday.” But when I was working on the food pages in magazines, I used to call it a classic Tuesday Night Dinner. Because in my mind, Tuesday is the night when you need the surefire shot of confidence the most. Tuesday is not Monday, when you either have a stash of leftovers to build on from Sunday’s meal or feel pumped up about the idea of dinner since it’s only Day 1 of the 5-day grind. Tuesday is when you need a dinner that is quick-and-dirty, down-home-and-delicious, and if at all possible, universally praised tableside. And then, when you nail Tuesday, the rest of the week is cake.

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A few weeks ago my friend Vanessa invited my family to her house for dinner. She and her husband cooked the most delicious meal — not to mention presented a perfect starter plate (prosciutto-wrapped bocconcini and halved fresh figs) that I’ve already stolen and passed off as mine in my own house. Twice. But the real highlight of the evening was watching my kids (and four others) devour her creamy-tomatoey baked chicken before they headed to the basement for a Scooby Doo screening. Because my kids had never eaten it before, I was all ready to give them the usual song-and-dance – It’s like Chicken Parm, but the cheese is in the sauce instead of on top of the chicken! But none was needed. They ate every last bite and I found myself sneaking a spoonful of what remained in the pot when Vanessa was in the other room setting the table for the “grown-up” meal. My favorite thing about the recipe, which of course I made Vanessa email me the next day, was that it reads like a tweet. It is that simple. It requires only six basic ingredients and (after some technique tweaking) only one pot. You’re welcome.

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The first time I made this chicken and broccoli for Abby she bestowed upon me the highest form of praise: Mom, how’d you get this to taste like the one we order from the Chinese restaurant? Now, granted, this is no fancy Chinese restaurant. It’s so not fancy, actually, that we’ve never even seen the inside of the place. But their chicken and broccoli dish is one of the first I can remember that Abby ate without any “eat-this-or-you-won’t-get-that” nonsense that dominated our dinner table conversation for so many years. So naturally, I set about trying to replicate it — minus whatever mystery ingredients made the leftovers coagulate in the takeout container the next day. I found success by riffing on a Cashew Chicken recipe in the fantastic Great Food Fast cookbook that Everyday Food published a few years ago. What struck me about this version was the hoisin — I knew Abby was a sucker for the sweet and spicy Chinese barbecue sauce and I had a jar of it in the fridge just begging to be used. You can find hoisin in the Asian department of pretty much any supermarket, but I find that most of those are too sweet. If you can swing it, try to pick up a jar at an Asian specialty market.

And by the way, on page 113 of the cookbook, we replicate three more kid-menu VIPs: chicken fingers, salmon teriyaki, and popcorn shrimp.

Restaurant-style Chinese Chicken and Broccoli

In a large skillet set over medium-high heat, brown 3 or 4 chicken breasts (cut into bite-sized pieces, tossed in a little cornstarch if you have time) in a few tablespoons of vegetable oil. After a few minutes, push all the chicken to one side and turn down heat to medium-low. Add 2 cloves garlic (minced) and 1/2 large onion (chopped) and cook about 2 minutes until onions are soft. Mix together with the chicken, then add about 2 tablespoons of rice wine vinegar, turn up the heat, and stir. Add 2 heaping tablespoons hoisin, 1/4 cup water and cook until chicken is heated through. Add steamed broccoli and cashews (my kids like it without cashews) and serve with rice.

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My friend and Time for Dinner co-author Pilar Guzman has a theory about cooking from recipes (as opposed to improvising with what you’ve got in front of you). She calls it the Wax-On/Wax-Off theory. Remember how the Karate Kid had no idea he was developing muscle memory for defensive blocks until Mr. Miyagi took away the car-waxing cloth???  Pilar believes that there is a whole world of capable cooks out there who are still waxing cars…I mean, still relying on recipes even though their highly developed culinary muscles have fully prepared them to start winging it in the kitchen.

That person was me until a few years ago. I remember the recipe that turned it around for me — Chicken with Bacon and Brussels Sprouts. I had eaten some version of the dish in a restaurant and for whatever reason decided that this was the meal that was going to be my Crane Kick. I had probably cooked and edited 4200 skillet meals by that point in my life so I knew the basic technique was…

Brown meat in fat. Remove meat. Add vegetables. Add meat back to pan with some form of liquid. Simmer until meat is cooked through.

So I thought about the ingredients I needed, thought about the technique, then tested myself. The exercise not only yielded the most delicious dinner that even the girls inhaled like wolves, but ignited a little flicker of confidence that I knew would just keep growing. And it has. I think it’s a huge reason why I’ve been able to keep the family dinner thing going. (Is there anything less appealing than bobbing back and forth between a pot and a cookbook during the six-o’clock scramble?) So now, it’s your turn to test yourself. Up there in the picture are all the ingredients you need (chicken, bacon, brussels, onion, wine…forgot to show salt & pepper) to create Chicken with Bacon and Brussels (finished dish pictured below). See how you do…and let me know how it turns out.

Can I tell you how much I love this dinner? Not only is the bacon/ brussels combo genius, but the whole meal takes about a half hour and uses only one pot. (more…)

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OK, Valerie….I mean Readers….Meet Turkey Bolognese. This recipe has been in the rotation in our house for almost two decades. It was the sauce we cooked together in Andy’s first apartment (in 1994, in Brooklyn, when the only restaurant on Smith Street was The Red Rose) and the same one he made when we first came home from the hospital with a new baby — which we then stored in freezer bags alongside bags of expressed breastmilk. It is not only forgiving with measurements, but with schedules, too. It’s workable on a weeknight if you have a 40-45 minute window (about half that is hands-on time) or, if you wake up on a Sunday feeling particularly SuperMommish, you can cook up a batch to freeze and cash in on later in the week. (more…)

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I think our “Grilled Chicken for People Who Hate Grilled Chicken” recipe has been the breakout dish of the season. And not only in your house as so many of you have mentioned — but in mine, too. I’d say we’ve served up some version of it at least once a week since June.

Which troubles me. I’m worried that it might become the Maque Choux of 2010. Maque Choux was this crazy delicious summer stew I found in Gourmet. It’s made with chicken and sausage and sweet corn, and if you haven’t ever made it, you should definitely remedy that matter as soon as possible. (Especially since fresh, sweet corn is disappearing rapidly.) When I met Maque Choux, I fell hard. We spent practically every Saturday night together for six weeks in the summer of 2002. With friends, with family, over candlelight. And then — you know how it goes — we flamed out. I look at Maque Choux’s photo now and feel nothing. Nothing except a deep sense of sadness and loss. We were so close once. What happened?? (more…)

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Lemony Roast Chicken and Beans

I mentioned my dinner-in-the-morning strategy last spring when I asked you to marinate drumsticks in buttermilk before heading off for the day. (Meanwhile, if Abby had her druthers, she would subsist on that buttermilk “fried” chicken and that buttermilk “fried” chicken alone for the rest of her life.) The strange science behind the idea is this: If you take one or two minutes in the morning to chop an onion or wash some salad greens in preparation for your meal that night, it will inexplicably end up saving you 20 minutes of prep time on the other end of the day. (more…)

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