Dear American Idol,

First just let me say how happy I am that you’re back. We love writing you into the family schedule with extra exclamation points and stars; already, we’ve spent way too many family dinners in heated discussions about prospective winners. (Phil Phillips: You heard it here first!) We love being part of the national conversation and the fact that we can go almost anywhere — from the soccer sidelines to the conference room to the birthday party  – and have a common currency among adults and kids alike. (“Do you speak American Idol?”) I’m not the first one to say it — but I like you guys a lot! WOW is it a fun show to watch!

But now that you have been around eleven years and now that you’ve made a mockery of all other shows in terms of what counts as ratings, and now that, as 30 Rock once pointed out, you are arguably as powerful as the U.S. government… how about doing something good with all that muscle? Cause you guys can do anything! You had Hulk Hogan stop by the show just because James Durbin happened to mention he liked pro wrestling. Lady GaGa, Beyonce. Josh Turner showed up to sing “I’m Your Man” with a shocked and delighted Scotty McCreery! You can call Carole King and she’ll be there. (Yes she will!) And I don’t even want to talk about what you pull off in the finale.

So my question is: What’s up with Coke as a sponsor? I know they’ve been your advertising bro from the beginning, but don’t you have your (more…)

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There’s a photo we have, in our album from 2002, that captures the exact moment my parents and Jenny’s parents saw Phoebe for the first time. Jenny’s in the hospital bed, all wired up and groggy from surgery, head slightly elevated, and she’s holding Phoebe in her arms. Phoebe is swaddled, purple-faced, about thirty minutes old. Thirty minutes old. All four of our parents are lined up on one side of the bed, leaning in, as though peering off the edge of a cliff. The expression on Jenny’s mom’s face is one of those amazing, ecstatic expressions you see in life’s happiest moments – such as the birth of your daughter’s first child – or on the front page of the New York Times, in the grief-stricken face of the person who has just walked away from some kind of life-altering natural disaster. For real, her expression has that kind of emotional weight to it. Stripped of context, it could be an illustration of the most sublime kind of joy, or the most warping kind of pain. In this case, thank god, it was joy. I remember taking that picture — standing off to the side in my scrubs with my old-fashioned film (!) camera — and the one that came a few seconds after it (above) when all four parents had moved one step closer to Jenny and that primal expression had morphed into something more closely resembling tears of joy. When I think of Phoebe’s birth, I think of that moment, and how little we really understood about, you know, what it all meant.

I have a bunch of these kinds of memories from the day Phoebe was born, flash-frozen moments floating through my head, mostly intact, ten years later – writing a rambling journal entry, as Jenny was in labor, on the Esquire notepad I’d stolen from my place of work, though God, I could never ever bring myself to read it now; standing in the waiting room in my white sterile booties, waiting to be reunited with Jenny as she was being prepped for surgery; being so incredibly confused when we realized Phoebe was a girl because we’d been so firmly convinced that Phoebe was a boy (something about the angle of the bump); I even think I remember what it felt like to hold Phoebe for the first time, though if I really focus on it now and try to conjure it up, I can’t be sure.

If it sounds like I’m protesting too much, that’s probably because I feel some weirdness around the fact that so much of what I remember about those four days in the hospital has to do with food. It’s bizarre – and might point to a larger problem — but I can remember pretty much everything I ate, and how I felt when I ate it. The hamburger and Tanqueray-and-tonic I devoured at the legendary JG Melon’s with my in-laws, six hours after Phoebe’s birth. The bagel (plain, with scallion cream cheese) and coffee I bought at Eli’s, and ate on a bench on Madison Avenue the morning after: the bagel and coffee were average, and I hadn’t slept a wink, what with the baby in the room and my rolled-up jacket as a pillow, but the sky was so incredibly blue and I’d never felt that kind of euphoria before in my life. If someone could bottle that feeling, I would eat it, inject it, and snort it. I would snuggle it to death. I would be king of the… that was a heartbreakingly good morning. The turkey ragu I made when I raced back to our apartment the next afternoon, and froze in batches, to be eaten when we returned home. The O’Henry bar I bought in the gift shop. The bottle of Bordeaux my brother-in-law brought over, and which we took down in short order, with a corkscrew I ran out to buy at a wine store down the block. The chicken consommé and lime jell-o I plucked from Jenny’s hospital tray as the Percocets worked their magic. The dinner we had, on the third night, when my aunt Patty – whom we’ve written about on this blog before – dropped by to see the baby. She brought a white paper bag with her.

“What’s in the bag?” I asked.

“William Poll,” she said.

“What’s William Poll?” I asked.

“Jesus, nephew,” she said. “It’s only the best deli ON THE PLANET.”

Out of the bag came two neatly-wrapped sandwiches: chicken salad with bacon on pumpernickel bread that had been sliced about ¼ inch thick. “These things cost a fortune,” Patty said.

“How much?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know,” she said.

We sat there in the hospital room, by flourescent light, and ate. I’d had a lot of chicken salad in my life, but this was insane.  I was in a heightened state (more…)

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Do you guys know that story about Robert Rauschenberg? The one where the interviewer asked him “How do you know when you are finished with a painting?”  and he responded “When I sell it.” Meaning, he’s never finished, and as long as the work is in his possession he will keep reworking it forever. This is what came into mind the other night as I stared at the galley of my book, which, in one form or another, has been sitting on my dining room table for the past six months, as I go back and forth from the kitchen tweaking and replacing and reworking and driving my editor and designer crazy. But I had just made this dinner — salmon and brussels sprouts with a ginger scallion sauce — and I began to leaf through the pages looking for a place to squeeze it in. It’s so quintessentially DALS — simple, weeknight-friendly, tasty — how could it not be in the book?!! And not that I’m in any way comparing my writing to a Rauschenberg Combine painting, but I do believe it’s just the element that would turn my book from cookbook to masterpiece. It’s so good! It’s so easy! But alas, my deadline was for real this time (I said goodbye to the galley forever — terrifying) so I have no choice but to give you the recipe here and now. (more…)

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Recipe writing can be such a buzzkill sometimes. Last week, as I was making this classic skillet meal — Chicken with Spinach and Warm Bacon Vinaigrette — I was, as always, amazed by how fast it came together.  While I was whisking in the wine, I was mulling over the angle I wanted to take when I would eventually write it up for DALS. (I make a lot of things that never end up on this site, but there wasn’t even a question about this one.) The angle could be about bacon being the magic ingredient — a little goes a long way, especially with kids.  It could be a “quick classic” — who doesn’t love a quick classic? It could be a five-ingredient dinner, i.e. “money in the bank” for working parents. The only problem was — it’s not a five ingredient dinner. But it was so easy and fast that I didn’t even realize that until I started writing the recipe. Suddenly I’m noticing that there was some flour in there for the dredge and that there was not only vinegar, but wine and also — I forgot — there was olive oil after the bacon fat got used up. When I described the recipe to my friend Todd on the train the other day it took about 10 seconds. (“Fry some chicken in a little bacon fat, then add shallots, wine and vinegar and toss in spinach until it’s slightly wilted.”) But when I wrote it out below, it suddenly seemed so much more involved. Trust me, though. It’s not. It’s quick and easy and even if there are eight ingredients in it (as opposed to the magic five), it’s likely you have all of them in your pantry or fridge right now.

Chicken with Spinach and Warm Bacon and Shallot Vinaigrette

2 slices thick-cut bacon
4 boneless chicken breasts, pounded thin (and halved if they are large and unwieldy)
3/4 cup flour, salted and peppered
olive oil, as necessary
1 small shallot, chopped (I know, that’s an onion up there, it’s all I had, so I used about 1/4 cup chopped onion)
2 tablespoons-ish vinegar (I used tarragon vinegar, but red wine or white wine would be fine, too)
1/3 cup dry white wine
1 large bunch or bag of baby spinach

In a large skillet over medium heat, fry bacon until crispy. Remove, cool, and crumble.

Turn up heat slightly to medium-high. Dredge chicken breasts in flour, then add to bacon fat, frying on both sides until cooked through. Cook in batches, tenting finished chicken with foil on a separate plate. If necessary, add a little more olive oil to the pan before adding more chicken.

Once all chicken has cooked, add a bit more olive oil, then shallots and cook about one minute. Add vinegar and wine, whisking gently until warmed through. Add spinach and toss until it wilts slightly. (You do not want it to shrivel to nothing.) Toss in bacon crumbles.

Add warm spinach to four plates along with chicken, drizzling any sauce that remains in pan on top of each. Serve with rice or those cool par-baked Trader Joe’s dinner rolls that my children are officially addicted to.

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If I had a nickel for every email in my inbox saying I’m making Andy’s Pork Ragu this weekend for guests. What should I serve with it?…I would’ve shut down this site by now and built my dream house in Block Island overlooking Mohegan Bluffs. But since I seem to have mastered the art of working my tail off for no money*, I will just give you the quick answer: This salad. Herby, easy, wintery-not-pretending-to-be-summery. You can shave an apple in here, too, but the sweetness in the vinaigrette will suffice as a counterpoint to the pork.

Herby Greens with Fennel and Cider Vinaigrette

In a large bowl, add the following:

Fresh greens (or as fresh as you can find in the winter)
1/2 bulb fennel, shaved into slices with a mandoline
handful of chopped mixed herbs such as cilantro, chives, parsley

Make this vinaigrette:

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
squeeze of fresh lemon juice
salt and pepper
1/2 cup good quality olive oil

Toss vinaigrette into salad.

*shameless, thinly-veiled attempt to guilt you into pre-ordering my book.

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We could not have been luckier to find Ali, our current babysitter who comes twice a week in the afternoons while I attempt to piece together a freelance career. Beyond the fact that Ali has a clean driving record, always shows up on time, texts me with we’re-at-piano status updates all day long (no such thing as TMI in my house), and is generally great with the girls, she is from a family of professional educators and she herself is a student, getting her masters in special education. If homework hour with her at the helm is any indication, she is well on her way to graduating summa cum laude.

But here’s where my luck is ratcheted up to I-won-the-lottery levels: She is in her 20s and wants to learn how to cook! Well, at least I think she wants to learn how to cook. It’s also entirely possible that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with cooking and is merely humoring me because what choice does she have when her new employer  a) leaves the Jim Lahey pizza crust recipe for her to assemble on her first day of work b) gives her a box set of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks for a holiday gift and c) thrusts a Dinner: A Love Story galley in her backpack with the instructions that I need her feedback — good and bad — immediately.

Whether she wants to learn or not, she’s proving to be as good a student as she is a homework tutor. She mastered that life-changing Lahey crust on her first try. After the holiday she reported back with praise for Ina Garten, in particular the super simple zucchini with Parmesan recipe in Barefoot Contessa: Family Style. And — always the hallmark of a star student — she asks a lot of questions. Like: Is it OK to use parsley in guacamole instead of cilantro since they look so similar? (Not OK) Or: If I want to make sugar cookies, do I just leave out the chocolate chips in my chocolate chip cookie recipe? (No.) And, perhaps my favorite, the answer to which she figured out on her own: Is it OK if I use an American oven instead of a Dutch Oven called for in so many of the recipes in the DALS book?

I can write this without feeling mean because all of these questions are exactly the kind of questions I asked when I was her age, when I wouldn’t have ever been able to identify a Dutch Oven; when I bypassed recipes in my Silver Palate because they called for an exotic ingredient called chicken stock; When I went to Chanterelle in downtown Manhattan and almost ordered sweetbreads thinking they were some form of glazed pastries.

My Uncle Mike, a loyal reader of this blog (as well as a recipient of a 2011 Dolly Award), emailed Andy and me last week to tell us a story about how, back in the early 80s, when he was teaching himself how to cook, he decided to make a whole fish with coriander from his brand new Time-Life Middle Eastern cookbook. For a dinner party. “Of course, I had no idea that there was such a thing as fresh coriander/cilantro,” he wrote. “Not even sure I could have found it then, but the recipe called for a cup of coriander.  So I went out and bought three bottles of dried coriander leaves and used it on top of the fish while it cooked.”  No one at the dinner party commented.  ”Maybe they didn’t know better, and since the fish was not skinned, you could kinda push the mass away with the skin, but still a frightening memory.”

I could hear stories about these frightening memories all day long, and in the interest of teaching Ali the most important lesson — that you can only learn how to cook by actually cooking, even if it means you feel lost or screw up every now and then — how about you guys share a few?

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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 made us feel better about ourselves, because our children loved you, too, and you were healthier than tater tots. But eight years is a long time, and I have grown weary. I have grown bored. Whatever the opposite of leaping is, that’s what my heart does when it sees you. My heart, I suppose, squats when it sees you. It sinks into the floor. But I am also loyal, and I do not want to banish your crunchy, svelte little self from our family table forever. I can’t do that to the kids and besides: I don’t want anyone else. What I want is a slight upgrade. I want to see you in a new light. I want you to impress me again. I want you to try. And that is why I am going to pair you with some toasted almonds and mint, and shower you in fresh lemon juice. Ah, yes. That’s better. What are you doing later? As a great poet once wrote — paraphrasing slightly here — your tastiness balks account! I sing you electric! And you only take four and one half minutes to prepare, which I know because I timed you, and which makes me love you even more. Consider yourself upgraded, old friend, and consider our love rekindled. – Andy

Green Beans with Toasted Almonds and Mint

2 cups haricot verts
1/4 cups roasted almonds, roughly chopped
One handful chopped fresh mint
Juice of one half lemon
Salt, to taste
A few glugs of olive oil
One small pat of butter (about as much as you’d put on a piece of toast)

In a large frying pan, heat olive oil and butter over medium heat until butter is melted. Add almonds and cook 2 minutes, letting them darken slightly in color. Add haricot verts and cook for two minutes, stirring occasionally. Add lemon juice, a few pinches of salt, and remove to platter. Sprinkle with mint. Serve.

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Like a lot of people I know, I returned from my first trip to Italy in 1993 determined to teach myself how to cook. The eating in Florence, where Andy was “studying” art for the summer, was so revelatory that I didn’t waste a whole lot of time once the wheels touched down Stateside. On the way home from the airport, I stopped by our local bookstore and found my friend Matt behind the counter. I asked if he could recommend a good Italian cookbook that might offer even just a hint of what I had just experienced across the Atlantic. As far as I know, Matt never cooked a thing in his life, but he will forever hold a special place in my heart because he handed me The Classic Italian Cookbook, by Marcella Hazan, and, with the understatement of the decade, told me, “People seem to really like her.”

The name was familiar — Andy’s Aunt Patty had already introduced us to Marcella’s milk-braised pork loin — so I plunked down my five bucks for the mass market-y looking paperback, started flipping through it, and for almost twenty years have not stopped. That’s probably why the book, held together by masking tape, now looks like this:

It’s sort of like looking at Luca Bear, my daughter’s dingy teddy-bear lovey with the frayed bowtie that she has been sleeping with since she was 13 months. One look at him and you know that thing has been on the receiving end of some serious love.

The summer I first bought CIC, I tried out a few of the recognizable recipes — Tomato Sauce 1, Tomato Cream Sauce, Blender Pesto — making some real knucklehead comments in the margin as I went along. “Too garlicky” I wrote after adding three cloves of garlic to a tomato sauce that didn’t call for any garlic at all. Improvising with a Marcella recipe, I’ve since learned, is not something one does, unless one does not want to learn how to cook. You make the dish exactly the way she tells you to. In a nod to her shortcut-obsessed American audience, her headnotes are studded with phrases like “if you insist” and “if you are so inclined” (Fettucine with Gorgonzola Sauce: “You can try substituting domestic gorgonzola or other blue cheeses, if you are so inclined, but you will never achieve the perfectly balanced texture and flavor of this sauce with any cheese but choice Italian gorgonzola”), but the effect is the opposite of liberating. It makes you desperate to not disappoint her. (There are also many less passive instructions such as this one, under Mayonnaise: “I can’t imagine anyone with a serious interest in food using anything but homemade mayonnaise.”) The ingredients she uses in her recipes are all basic staples of any kitchen — butter, ground beef, salt, onions — which means that in order to yield the kinds of dishes that have earned her exalted status in the food world, it is absolutely imperative that you do not deviate from what’s written. For Hazan, who was trained as a biologist and went on to teach cooking classes in her New York apartment, it’s all about technique. When I do what I am told (literally leveling off two tablespoons of chopped onions), not only do I find  myself with insanely delicious dinners I’d be proud to serve to Grandmas Turano and Catrino, but I find myself a little smarter in the kitchen. Her bolognese, which you are looking at above, was the first Hazan recipe that we fell in love with for this reason. “It must be cooked in milk before the tomatoes are added,” she wrote. “This keeps the meat creamier and sweeter tasting.” And then: “It must cook at the merest simmer for a long, long time. The minimum is 3 1/2 hours; 5 is better.” We, of course, always do five. (more…)

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It’s almost irresponsible of me to tell you about the way I served this meal to my kids — because it’s exactly the way that, if practiced often enough, will drive you to swear off family dinner forever. I love fried rice. Before Andy and I had kids we’d make it with shrimp and pork and chicken all the time. Or at least we’d always make it when we had leftover rice from sushi or Chinese takeout, which was surprisingly often. Nowadays, though, with Trader Joe’s frozen cooked rice (which I highly recommend) we can, in theory make fried rice meals as the main event instead of the spinoff. But we don’t. That’s because, as most of you know by now, we have two miniature egg-o-thropes in the house. And one rice-hater to boot. I’ve spent more hours that I should probably admit, thinking about how to deconstruct this old favorite so that we can all enjoy it in one form or another as a family meal. But as I found out yesterday, some things are just not meant to be. Even quick and easy and cheap and deLISHous meals like this one. Abby ended up having her version as you see below — with pork, rice, and peas that were tossed with soy sauce tableside. Phoebe ended up having…a barbecue pork sandwich on a biscuit and a butter lettuce salad with tomatoes and onions on the side. What was supposed to be quick and easy and delicious became drawn-out and complicated and…delicious. In spite of the drama, I’m giving you the recipe anyway — it’s pretty clear I won’t make it again until the girls are college-bound, but it’s too good a recipe to not share with families who might have better children luck. Who says I don’t do anything nice for you? (more…)

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I was at a dinner party with two other couples last year when the host approached me discreetly in the living room. “Can you come here?” she whispered, motioning towards the kitchen. She led me to the oven, pulled out a roasting pan filled with eight split chicken breasts whose skin were all a nice caramel-ly brown. “They’re ready, right?” she asked. I always get nervous with thick chicken breasts, too, so I asked her how long they’d been in. “About an hour,” she told me. I had a feeling they weren’t done yet. “Can I touch one?” I asked. I poked one of them in the thickest part. It felt too soft. The rule for doneness with chicken, I told her, is that it should feel firm to the touch but not rock hard. “It needs more time.” Andy walked in and I pulled him over for his opinion. Along with his tight spiral and his general kindness towards humanity, gauging meat doneness is one of his greatest qualities. He poked the chicken once, and with a conviction I envied, declared, “Five more minutes.”

Five minutes later we were sitting down to a delicious, well-cooked herby chicken with market-fresh greens.

I can’t tell you how many times I have been in the same situation as my chicken-roasting host. Or I should say, how many times I used to be in that situation. It’s not that I’ve become so confident when face-to-face with, say, a lamb shoulder, or a $20/pound Christmas filet mignon or a bacon-spinach-stuffed ribeye, but I don’t stress about cooking meat to proper doneness nearly as much as I used to. Part of the reason for this — OK most of the reason for this — is that Andy is so preternaturally gifted with meat that it just makes sense to cede the floor to him when a Porterhouse or a flank steak is on the menu. But the other reason is that I’ve discovered a whole bunch of ways to prepare meaty main dishes that involve absolutely no stressing about doneness at all. These are the strategies I tend to fall back on when I’m having people over for dinner and there’s a 100% chance that I would be filling a sippy cup at the exact moment a meat thermometer would hit the point of no return.

1. Put Away the Meat Thermometer and Braise. Large hunks of meat become much more friendly when you braise them. This basically means you are cooking a loin or a shoulder in liquid in the oven or on the stovetop for a few hours at a low temperature. Beyond the fact that this technique makes it impossible to overcook or undercook, it magically transforms cheap cuts of meat into melty tenderness and is almost always just the thing for a warm-your-bones winter meal. See: Marcella’s Milk-braised Pork Loin; Braised Short Ribs; Pork Ragu; Baked Chicken with Mascarpone. (That last one is less braising than submerging, but it’s equally effective and takes much less time.)

2. Think Small. It’s much easier to gauge the doneness of small pieces of meat and fish than it is to make the call on larger pieces. Just think — if you’re not sure, you can break open a small piece of chicken in a stir-fry to check for the telltale shiny pink and the dish won’t be any worse for the wear. You can’t really do this with a whole roast chicken without releasing the trapped juices that make a perfectly roasted chicken so tasty. See: Chicken with Broccoli; Pan-seared Scallops; Beef with Broccoli.

3. Hack! One of the reasons I fell in love with salmon salad was because after a fillet was roasted or grilled you had to shred it into pieces and toss it with the vegetables and vinaigrette.  This meant that if you weren’t sure the salmon was cooked to proper doneness you could definitely take a peak in the middle with a knife or a fork or a pick axe — and if it wasn’t ready, just send it back for another few. Who cares what the thing looked like if you were going to eventually hack it all up, right? See: Salmon Salad.

4. Make Clams. Every time I prepare Andy’s clams — which, as you can gather by the name, is not that often — I am amazed at how easy they are. This meal is a bonanza for people who fret about whether something has cooked through or not. Think about how beautifully unequivocal it is that clams, when cooked properly, will open up their shells to tell you that they are done. It’s like they have little mouths. I’m done! Take me out! Eat me! To me this is as much of a miracle of nature as the Blue Footed Booby. See: Spaghetti and Clams; Steamed Little Necks (more…)

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I’ve been so good. Seriously. On Friday I took one last bite of an oatmeal-brownie-butterscotch sundae (true story) and vowed That’s it. That was the last piece of junk that was going down the hatch until…when? That’s always the question, isn’t it? Does it speak to my pathological optimism or my deep-seeded denial that every year I vow to tweak my dietary habits — not the kind that involve a piece of homemade apple pie with the family; the really bad kind that involve shaking the kids’ carseat to unleash the last few nickels I need in order to uncoil the Milky Way Midnight from the vending machine. And every year, I come up short. As in, after few short days, I am right back to my I-hate-myself habits. I mean, how is it that I am already a little less excited by the whole-grain-packed cookbook that arrived on my doorstep today, which I one-clicked in a fit of steely resolve only five days ago. I was going to do it this time! I really really was! (Charlie Duhigg! Where are you when I need you?) This is not to say I have given up…entirely. All of this is merely an attempt to stay one step ahead of my worst self. This year, I’m embracing her instead of pretending she doesn’t exist — keeping my enemy close and all that. In the meantime, my best self has been enjoying some majorly healthy dinners — like this incredibly flavorful shredded salad with chicken that was spiked with a clean Asian-ish vinaigrette. I thought your pathologically optimistic selves might appreciate too. At least for the next few days. (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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Our poor side dishes. Always getting buried at the bottom of a post that stars some showstopping piece of meat. But as anyone who is putting together her holiday party outfit knows, it’s all in the accessories, and so herewith, a round-up of some of our favorite unsung sidedish heroes.

1. Gingered Green Beans Add a couple handfuls of green beans (about 2 cups or what’s shown above) to boiling water that has been salted. Cook 2 minutes then immediately plunge into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking and preserve the beans’ bright green color. After a minute, drain and pat dry with a paper towel. In a medium skillet set over medium heat, add a tablespoon of vegetable oil with a drop or two of sesame oil. Add 1 tablespoon minced, peeled, fresh ginger, 1 large garlic clove (minced), and cook 1 minute. Add beans, a little kosher salt, and toss everything until beans are coated. Raise heat a bit and stir in a teaspoon of rice wine vinegar and a teaspoon and a half soy sauce. Cook another minute then serve.

Roast Potatoes with Chutney and Yogurt Chop 6 to 8 red or Yukon gold potatoes a few handfuls of fingerlings and toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roast for 30-35 minutes until potatoes are golden and crispy. Toss in a dollop of fruity chutney (increasingly the only ones I ever use are Pomegranate or Plum from Bombay Emerald) a few chopped chives, and serve topped with another dollop of plain yogurt.

Roasted Beets with Honey, Feta, and Thyme Wrap 4 to 5 beets in foil and Roast at 425°F for 40 minutes. Remove and cool. Peel and chop them into a fine dice then toss with a squeeze of honey, a drizzle of olive oil, salt and freshly ground pepper. Sprinkle with crumbled feta and some fresh thyme. (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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The pork loin I braised in red wine last Tuesday night was pretty freaking delicious. I can say this because most of the credit goes to my coworker — remember the one who was plotting her own pork and lentil stew in the slow-cooker while I was plotting drumsticks? After she told me that one, it was on the brain for 24 hours and I knew the only way to get it off the brain would be to try out a version of the pork stew for myself. The problem? I didn’t own a slow cooker. (Well, not true. I own one, but it is in a box deep in the bowels of our basement, and last time I remember using it, I think it was missing a crucial piece, like a lid.) I was working from home the day I decided to tackle the recipe in my Dutch Oven and began cooking just as the girls were scattering their math workbooks on the kitchen table to start homework.

What’s for dinner? asked Abby as soon as she heard the loin hit in the oil.

This can be such a loaded question. When I’m making something new for the girls — which is fairly often — and there’s a good chance that the unfamiliar name of this dinner will set off some whining, sometimes I just lie and say I don’t know yet. But other times, when dinner is simmering away on the stovetop, and an oniony aroma is in the air, I opt for the truth.

Some sort of pork with beans…and maybe kale, I told her.

I don’t like beans! And then, for the next two hours, it was all Do we have to have pork with beans? and Can’t you make those chicken wings again? and Can you make me something else if I don’t like it?

I hate this scenario. The whole point of dinner — the whole point of this site actually — is to get people excited about sitting down to eat. And what killed me is that I knew Abby would love this meal if she had the right attitude. But she couldn’t picture it, so it scared her. I get it  – for the longest time, that’s exactly how I felt about J.Lo on American Idol.

I needed a game changer. I needed Tater Tots.

Abby had hand-selected a bag of them from Whole Foods a few weekends earlier and hardly a day had gone by when she hadn’t begged to have them for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It was just the psychological latch she needed on the plate to adjust the way she was approaching the table. I piled a mountain of them next to her pork, which she ate absent-mindedly, and which, when deconstructed and cut into pieces, was not all that much different looking than the Pork braised in Pomegranate Juice and Marcella’s Milk-braised Pork she’s had (and loved) a hundred times before.

And I know this is not exactly breaking news, but Holy Christ Tater Tots taste good! The rest of us were pretty excited about dinner that night, too.

REMINDER: Advanced Recipe Search is now up and running.

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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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