You know when you go to someone’s house for dinner and they seem to have it all together? One of the hosts is mixing you a drink and asking your children about camp while the other is sipping a glass of Prosecco, tossing some sort of delicious summery salad, listening intently to what you are saying, and showing no outward sign of doing what I often feel myself doing — which is pretend to listen intently to what you are saying while mostly worrying about the fact that — s#@t! – I forgot to make the g@#$*%n salad dressing! I should probably not admit this in a public space that is accessible by public…people, but I very much aspire to be the confident, nonchalant host who, when cooking for a large group of guests, can wing it without stressing. I’ve been aspiring for about fifteen years now.

But in those fifteen years, I’ve discovered something about myself. I am not a wing-it kind of person. I like to have a plan. This diagnosis probably gets to the root of my dinner diary pathology and my contract-drafting habit. And it is (more…)

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When it comes to summer cooking, we have a pretty strict family policy: Do everything you can to avoid turning on an oven. Which is all well and good except that it clashes with our other family policy: Eat pizza once a week. By pizza, we don’t mean the takeout pie from Tony’s on Main Street or the personal pans the kids get on Fridays at the school cafeteria. We’re talking pizza – made, when possible, with a homemade crust — that may or may not include cheese, is topped with fresh ingredients (potatoes and bacon, arugula and ricotta), and can bring even the most reluctant eater (e.g., Abby) to her little knees with gratitude. In our minds, pizza is the ultimate family dinner – you can have three entirely separate meals on one crust and still, if you close your eyes, pretend that you’re all eating the same thing. But to keep our strict family pizza policy intact this summer, we had to learn how to do it without turning on the oven. We had to learn to cook it outside. This took some doing. We burned a lot of crusts, and yet, we fought on, grilling pizza after pizza after pizza until we got it right. Here is what we learned.

HOW TO GRILL PIZZA: SIX VERY IMPORTANT RULES

1. Oil Everything. If the crust sticks to the grate, you’re done. Avoid this by brushing the grate and both sides of the crust with olive oil. (more…)

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Abby: Mom, what’s for dinner?
Me: Grilled cheese!
Abby: For dinner????
Me: Yes! On the grill!
Abby: What? The grill?
Me: Yes! And without bread!
Abby: What the…let me get this straight. Grilled cheese made outside on the grill with no bread? For…dinner?
Me: You got it. And we’ll have some chicken and vegetables on the side. (more…)

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It’s Mother’s Day morning, and Jenny is standing over me with her iPhone, timing me as I type this. The goal is to write this post in seven and a half minutes or less, which is exactly how long it took us to get this dinner going the other night. So: have you had ramps before? We hadn’t either, as of three or four years ago. Were they the same thing as garlic scapes? Were they spring onions? Did you have to cook them first? All we knew was, they were one of those slightly mysterious things we’d heard serious food types talk about rapturously every spring, but we’d never willingly eaten one, let alone cooked one in the comfort of our own home. Thanks to some generous friends upstate, who happen to have them growing all over their yard, all that has now changed, and we’re here to say: ramps freakin’ rule. They’re a fleeting, fragrant, oniony-garlicky vegetable, also known as the wild leek, that pop ups every spring for a few weeks (if you’re lucky) and then disappears. They look kind of delicate, like green feathers, but don’t be fooled; these things announce themselves, flavor-wise. We’re now among the geeks who look forward to their arrival, spend time tracking them down, and then eat as much of them as humanly possible over their limited engagement in our lives. (Jenny just announced that I am about to pass the five-minute mark. “Hurry,” she says.) Anyway, ramps: They’re embarrassingly (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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We usually do our food shopping once a week, on Sunday afternoons, bolting to Trader Joe’s as soon as the final whistle on the final soccer event of the weekend finally blows. It’s our secular pilgrimage. We genuflect at the altar of dried fruits and granola bars, we load up the cart, we drive home, the kids go upstairs to animate some plastic stuff, and Jenny and I begin the never-gets-less-brutal process of unpacking the groceries… at which point, we realize, as we put the fresh crop of vegetables into the refrigerator, that we haven’t made use of half of what we bought last week. There’s a sad fennel bulb, once crisp and fresh, now yellowish and funky. (A pity, too: I had big plans for that. Look for a roasted fennel recipe one of these days.) There’s a quart of now-slimy mushrooms, and an exhausted hunk of red cabbage. There’s an ominous cluster of tupperware containers, each holding part of an onion, lemon, or red pepper, all of uncertain vintage, all well past their prime. And way in the back, by the sour cream, there’s always a tub of grape tomatoes, now a week old and only 1/3 eaten, and we really want to make use of them, but they’re just this side of too-far-gone to put on our salad.

We’re not proud to admit this, but we often end up throwing too much of this stuff away. It’s a lot of food, and a lot of money, to go to waste.

Last weekend, though, we may have solved the grape tomato problem. Since they were already starting to turn, we embraced the shrivel. We doubled down on the decay. We slow-roasted them, until they were all wrinkly and intense and sweet, and then we tossed them into a quinoa salad. Roasted tomatoes are so easy, very hard to mess up, and versatile as they wanna be: you can put these over pasta with olive oil and cheese, on bruschetta with garlic and basil, on top of fish or chicken. Or, as we ended up doing, you can use them to add a whole new hearty dimension to a salad. Tomato problem: solved. I don’t know why it took us so long.* – Andy

* Very important note: I highly recommend listening to this while you cook. And maybe follow it up with this. Or this. Or just buy the whole album. It’s in heavy DALS rotation. (more…)

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I know. Bummer. An entire post devoted to salad. Not a BLT salad or a wedge of iceberg with thousand island dripping in and around the crevices. But a yawn-inducing, omega-3-rich, good-for-you, raw bowl of nutrients that falls into the “leafy green” category. Thanks, Jenny! Thanks for the big bowl of homework!

Go ahead, leave the page. Go lose yourself in some duck confit fried in lard. Cause then the secret of the salad’s hidden superpowers is still somewhat secure. You see, this concoction above may look like a dutiful mound of kale with grated ricotta salata and thinly shaved red onions, but it’s actually more than that. A lot more. I’m telling you, if you can get your kids to eat it, all kinds of amazingly freaky things start to happen. Like for starters, I think I can actually see Abby growing before my eyes, her shirt bursting at the buttons, Lou Ferrigno-style, right at the dinner table. And about three minutes after Phoebe inhaled her salty ribboned kale last Sunday, she had a sudden impulse to recite the quadratic formula, even though, as far as I know, trigonometry is not part of New York State’s third grade curriculum. (Yet.)

But the real magic is a little more subtle. When you — as in you mom and dad! — get up from the table you’ll suddenly notice that the guilt you have been carrying around with you all day about missing “parent observation day” at tennis has been replaced by a rush of happiness endorphins. And you know how you’ve been beating yourself up over the fact that your eight-year-old still can’t tell time? For at least a few days after you have served your children this salad, that hardly seems to register on the guilt-o-meter either. The remorse over the fried-in-butter beef-veal-pork double hot dog with spicy curly fries from Walter’s*? Gone. Completely cancelled out.

I’m telling you, this stuff is powerful. And, sadly, its applications of guilt-erasing possibilities: endless.

*Whattup MHS Tigers?!

Kale Salad with Ricotta Salata
The credit for this salad goes to my superhero friend Naria, who first made it for me for lunch last summer, then again last week at a delicious dinner party.

Wash and trim the stems off two large handfuls of kale. Chop into confetti-like strands as shown. Shred a boatload of ricotta salata on top, add about 1 tablespoon of red onion that has been sliced to the point of transparency. Add a few glugs of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, and freshly ground pepper.

To feel really virtuous, serve with fish presents.

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I think the surest way to ring the death knell on family dinner is to cook something different for every party present. It’s hard enough to get one dinner on the table let alone four, each of which may be greeted with groans or, worse, no comment at all. But considering that children (green-fearing, sauce-o-phobic, generally annoying children) are often the defining variable in the term “family dinner,” this can be a hard thing to get around. Luckily you are here, in the care of a family dinner expert, the author of not one, but (almost) two family dinner cookbooks, so pay careful attention to the hard-won, time-honored advice you are about to receive. The trick, I’ve decided, is to lock yourself into a state of extreme denial and then psyche yourself out with careful inner rationalizing every step of the cooking process in order to convince yourself that you are making one thing when in fact you are doing nothing of the sort. Behold last night’s dinner. I wanted — no, needed — my favorite ace-in-the-hole pasta: Whole wheat spaghetti with caramelized onions, spinach, and Parmesan. Even though Phoebe won’t touch pasta. Even though Abby loves pasta, but generally won’t eat this pasta unless it has a hint of sauce on it. (“Pink!” she commands.) But I plowed ahead anyway. Let me show you how it’s done.

Psyche-out Moment 1: I set four identical plates in a grid. This immediately creates the promise (illusion?) of uniformity and order.

Psyche-out Moment 2: I earmark the lower right bowl as Abby’s and spoon in just the right amount of spaghetti sauce — and a couple hunks of butter. This can barely be called “customizing” since it takes under 10 seconds.

Psyche-out Moment 3: I earmark the lower left bowl as Phoebe’s. And while, yes, the baked potato is not exactly the same thing as whole wheat spaghetti, it’s not like it took sooo much extra effort for me to chuck the thing in the oven at 400°F as soon as I walked in the door from work at 6:00. If I was editing this recipe for a magazine, I told myself rather convincingly, I would’ve just have to replace one word: “Pasta with Caramelized Onions, Spinach, and Parmesan” would be “Potatoes with Caramelized Onions, Spinach, and Parmesan.” And Sour Cream.

Psyche-out Moment 4: Pasta is done and plated in three out of four bowls. Onions and spinach are done and plated in three out of four bowls. Three out of four! Even though the two kids’ bowls are barely related to each other, each can lay claim to having one major component in common with the grown-up version. Right? Right? Right? Who’s the April Fool? Not me! (more…)

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I’m not quite sure how this happened, but last Friday night, Andy and I managed to have a nice quiet dinner at home — just the two of us — even though there were six girls under nine years old in our house as we did so. It was Dinner-and-a-Movie night — P and A were allowed to invite a few friends over for pizza, ice cream sundaes, and a screening of Despicable Me — and it was pure madness until we pressed play on the DVD player. At that point, we 2.0′ed the kids’ basic mozzarella-and-marinara pizza and made this arugula-and-ricotta version, then poured a glass of Pinot and had an actual, audible conversation.

White Pizza with Arugula

Preheat oven to 500°F. Using your fingers, flatten and “push” 1 ball of pizza dough (preferably Jim Lahey’s homemade) as thin as you can on an olive-oiled cookie sheet. Cover dough with slices of fresh mozzarella (about 1 ball) and brush exposed edge of crust with a little olive oil. Bake for 15 minutes until crust is crispy and cheese is bubbly. (If cheese starts to bubble before crust looks done, cover center of pizza with foil.) While pizza bakes, toss together a few handfuls of arugula with 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan, 1/3 cup olive oil and a generous squeeze of lemon. Top pizza with salad and dollops of fresh ricotta. Finish with a few grinds of black pepper and a few leaves of fresh oregano if you have it.

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Before kids we were mushroom-stuffers and tomato-scoopers. Before kids we weren’t afraid of the adjective “hot” before the word “appetizer.” I think when we lived in Brooklyn — when the girls were as distant on the horizon as the suburbs were — we might have even served a chilled avocado and cucumber soup as an amuse bouche for our friends Jeni and Ben. We don’t do the amuse bouche anymore when we are entertaining. In fact, we don’t use the word “entertain” anymore. These days, it’s more like we have friends over or we have what you might just call “giant family playdates.” All of which is to say that the cheese plate has never been more vital a move in the married-with-children culinary repertoire. Cause when you’re at the point that we’re at, you just want to buy a bunch of crowdpleasers — cheeses that are somewhere between Kraft twisted bi-color sticks and aged Stilton, things you don’t have to cook or carve or stick toothpicks into — and then be done with it.

Crowdpleaser Cheese Plate
You can find most of these at Murrays, Dean & DeLuca, or Whole Foods.

La Tur (pictured, above) This is an airy, mild cow-milk-goat blend — probably too mild for hardcore cheese afficionados, but kids will eat it like it’s cream cheese.
Point Reyes Blue – Award-winning blue from the family-run northern California dairy farm. For the kids, it’s a good introduction to stinky. For the grown-ups, it’s just plain good.
Humboldt Fog – The bougie staple. It’s a tangy, but not too tangy goat that’s chalky in the middle and creamy around the rind.  I don’t think I’ve been to a party in the last decade where this wasn’t on the cheese board. The kids love it because little layer of ash down the middle makes it look like a piece of cake.
Trader Joe’s Cheese Twists (not pictured, sorry!) Not the actual sticks made of cheese, but the sharp cheddar baked twists, which I usually shove in a jam jar to give the plate some height.
Aged Manchego Aged is operative word. You want something with some bite. My friend Joyce was the first one to tell me to go ahead and pair it with fig or quince paste on a baguette slice. PER.FECT.
Quince or Fig Jam Such an easy way to elevate the spread. And did I mention so delicious with aged Manchego or Parm?
Baguette, preferably fresh, preferably skinny, cut into thin slices. No need to toast.
Halved pomegranate Purely decorative unless my 7-year-old attends your party — she will decimate it in about 3 seconds.

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Since I think I’ve received a personal (practically perfumed) note from just about every DALS reader telling me how much you love Andy’s pork ragu, I assume you might be interested in some suggestions for how to stretch it out into two meals. Yes, this means that you’ll have to restrain yourself from eating the entire batch on Night One, but if you have the promise of enjoying it a second time around with a minimal amount of revival effort on a weeknight…wouldn’t that make it just a little easier to get through the week? You could do what my friend Todd suggests — dump your thawed ragu in a pie dish, cover with mashed potatoes, and bake (covered with foil) for…hmmm….20 minutes at 350° for a quick shepherd’s pie. Or you could do what I did last week: Make tortellini. I don’t think of tortellini as a vehicle for leftovers as often as I should.  Wonton wrappers make it so easy! And if you don’t have leftover ragu — or if you have kids who might turn their noses up at ragu tortellini — then you can always do a straight ricotta and top it with tomato sauce like the one I used for Chicken Parm the other day.

10-Minute Tortellini

Since you’ve been storing it in the freezer in a flattened ziploc (right?) first you thaw your frozen ragu under running water (since you’ve stored it in a flattened ziploc this should only take about 30 seconds). Stir your leftovers with a few dollops of fresh ricotta and freshly grated Parmesan in a small bowl. (You don’t want it to be very liquidy, so scooping ragu out of the ziploc with a slotted spoon might help.) If you are making ricotta ravioli, mix up another bowl with ricotta, Parmesan, and a few pinches of chopped spinach. Measurements are basically to taste.

Place a teaspoon of either mixture on top of a single wonton noodle. Fold into a triangle (you’ll need to paint the inside edges with a fingertip dipped in water to seal) and join bottom two corners to form tortellini shapes shown above. Repeat as many times as necessary. (I generally plan for 8 to 10 per grown-up, and 6 per kid.) For the ragu tortellini, you don’t need to do much else after you’ve boiled them for three minutes (your sauce is basically inside the pasta) so just swirl around in garlic and olive oil in the same pot they boiled in. But do this last step gently, wonton noodles are not as sturdy as traditional pasta. Serve ricotta tortellini with the sauce written up here.

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One of the perks of writing a food blog — besides the not-getting-paid part – is that, when friends visit us now, they tend to really bring it, and I mean that literally. In the past month, we’ve had guests show up with: brownies baked in a crazy-ass, s-shaped, all-edges pan; a bottle of dark, rich homemade red wine vinegar; extra virgin olive oil carted all the way back from Buenos Aires; purple basil-infused simple syrup (forreal!); and a still-warm batch of gluten-free, dairy-free, lemon-iced blueberry scones. All were amazing, and all were totally appreciated, but if I’m being honest here, I’m not sure any can compete with what my friend and work bro, Kendra H., brought a couple of weeks ago. Kendra, you should know: you have firmly established yourself as the early front-runner for this year’s Most Valuable Dinner Guest award. Two weeks ago — on a frigid weeknight, no less — Kendra came over for dinner, and she brought goodies. Specifically, she brought a nice bottle of red for the grown-ups, a couple dozen beautifully wrapped and presented (she’s crafty like that) cookies for the family, and, for the kids… a recipe for making garlic and dill pickles, along with a pair of jar tongs. She set up shop in our kitchen, with Abby and Phoebe, and spent an hour (more…)

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Have you seen Black Swan? I haven’t. True Grit? Nope. And, god, wasn’t Colin Firth mind-blowingly good in The King’s Speech? Actually, I wouldn’t know, because I haven’t seen a second of it. Not even a preview. The sad truth is, we haven’t seen a single one of the movies nominated for an Oscar this year. It pains me to admit this, but in the nine years that have hurtled by since Phoebe was born, Jenny and I have been inside of a movie theater fewer than five times — once, in our first month of parenthood, when I went to Jackass and Jenny went to Sweet Home Alabama, and once when we both went to Avatar, which I’m not really counting, since it felt more like an endless video game than a movie to me, and Jenny slept through half of it, and we both came away wondering why we’d wasted a rare and beautiful movie date watching stuff blow up. We never thought we’d be these people, the kind with passports that hadn’t been stamped in a decade and who puttered around in bathrobes and still quoted George Costanza. (Seinfeld! Such a great show!) I remember back in the days before we had kids, when Jenny was pregnant with Phoebe, and other parents would tell us, knowingly — almost gleefully — to enjoy our remaining days of childless independence, since having kids meant The End of Restaurants, Movies, Grooming, Sleep, Privacy, Exercise, Vacations to Anywhere Other Than Orlando, and Sunday Mornings Spent Drinking Coffee and Reading the New York Times. (Hell, even reading Bob Herbert!) They’d tell us to enjoy that 9:45 showing of Gosford Park, because once kids arrived, we’d never ever find a babysitter willing to stay after midnight. They’d tell us to savor every last bite of that pistachio semi-freddo at Gramercy Tavern, because man, they really hated to break it to us, but once we had kids and discovered how brutal it was paying for a fancy restaurant meal and a babysitter, we’d never go out again. (Going rate for babysitting, in 2002: ten bucks an hour!) (more…)

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I get the feeling, judging by the comments section on certain posts, that family dinner is not always a family affair. That, you know, some of us aren’t so good at pulling our weight. Luckily, there’s a new book — full disclosure: I edited it — that just might help take a little of the resentment out of the equation. Here, to give us a whole new way of thinking about the division of labor around the house (i.e. stop focusing so much on 50/50!) is DALS guest-poster Paula Szuchman, Wall Street Journal editor and co-author, with Jenny Anderson, of Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage & Dirty Dishes. You can also read their excellent and funny blog here. — Andy

My husband and I both cook, and we both loved being cooked for. There are few things more luxurious than lying on the couch after a long day, the smell of sautéed onions wafting through the living room, secure in the knowledge that at any minute, your favorite person is going to walk over and put a plate of food in front of you—and if you’re really lucky, also a glass of wine, a remote control, and license to watch reruns of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills until you pass out.

Others aren’t so lucky. From what I hear, there are plenty of readers of this blog whose spouses don’t cook, can’t cook or never come home on time to cook. You guys are wondering if there’s a secret to reprogramming such spouses. I have two suggestions.

First, accept and overcome. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but let me explain. Each person in a relationship has things he or she does better, relative to other things. So sure, your spouse could fry an egg if someone had a gun to his head, but in terms of skill and efficiency, he’s way better at changing light bulbs. He has what an economist might call the comparative advantage in light-bulb changing. You have the comparative advantage in cooking. (more…)

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One of my biggest pet peeves about a lot of recipes and cookbooks supposedly geared towards families, is the multiple appearances by this sentence: “And your kids will love it, too!” It is usually tacked on to the end of a recipe intro as though the phrase alone will make the scrumptious looking Crab and Kale Cakes (with Rouille!) magically appealing to your children. I always want to ask, How do you know this exactly?? Have you ever met my kid? Have you ever met my neighbor’s son who subsisted solely on oil-cured black-olives for the entire third year of his life? When I started Dinner: A Love Story, I made a vow to myself — having, of course, written this same sentence several times before in my various magazine jobs: I would never presume any other kid likes something that my kid likes or pretend to understand the way kids palates are programmed. I would merely write about the foods that my kids eat and hope that this would inspire parents to experiment at their own dinner tables. I would never ever write “And your kids will love it, too!” I promise!

But now, I’m afraid, I’m going to have to break this promise. Because, really, I have yet to meet a kid that doesn’t at least tolerate these French fries, or as they’re known in our house, these “Mega Fries.” I realize this is not such a giant risk to take — even if they are a somewhat healthy version of French fries, they are, after all, still French fries. But then again, my daughter does not like pasta, which is every bit as universally loved as a fry. And my nephew doesn’t like pizza. And last weekend, Phoebe’s friend, who won’t drink a glass of orange juice, took a big spoonful of fermented beans at the Korean restaurant — I think that’s what they were — even though she didn’t have any idea what they were.

Ok, forget it. I give up. I have no idea if your kid will love these. But it’s certainly worth a shot. (more…)

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I have two fall-back meals that I can always count on when my imagination fails me: There are my tacos (quick shrimp, or shredded pork) and there’s my risotto. Risotto, sadly, has gotten a bad rap because it requires you to hover and be attentive for the entire time you are cooking. (Sound like someone else you know? Who is possibly hanging on your apron as you read this?) In my opinion, though, this flaw is cancelled out by the fact that risotto falls in the hard-to-screw-up category (along with that braised pork loin I wrote about last month) and can be open to interpretation as soon as you nail the fundamentals of its preparation. Not to mention the fact that having a stash of leftovers in the fridge is money in the bank for dinner the next night, too, in the form of golden, crispy, melty-cheesy risotto cakes. My suggestion: Save your apron-hanger’s dedicated screen time til dinner prep hour then turn on one episode of The Backyardigans while you stir the rice and get Zen.

I was so happy when Trader Joe’s started selling organic string cheese. We always have a stash of them in the fridge, which came in handy on risotto cake night. (more…)

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This could not be easier. Well, that’s not true. It could not be easier for most families. But since I still have a 47-inch pasta-hater in my house, this under-30-minute, 2-pot dinner is….OK, hold on. Can I just vent here for a second? How it is even physically possible to dislike pasta? Especially when you regularly enjoy things like raw oysters on the half shell and duck curry that is so spicy even mom can’t eat it. How does this happen? Will someone please enlighten? (more…)

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Careful readers may have picked up in yesterday’s post that we have decided to cut back on meat for at least the first two weeks of January in our house. (I say “at least” because secretly I really want to do it for the whole month, but to the girls, that’s like saying to them that they won’t eat a burger for 100 years.) It wasn’t that this holiday season was so much more indulgent than any others — though there was that party with the giant pig’s leg that might as well still have had the hoof on it —  it’s just that limiting meat is sometimes the easiest way for me to feel healthy and inspired about cooking again. I know this sounds strange, but when I leave meat out of the equation, it forces me flex other culinary muscles a bit more. I have to work a little harder to make things taste good and usually I end up discovering some random ingredient like, say, tamarind paste that I can’t believe I’ve lived almost four decades without. (Also, invariably, I end up eating too much coconut and avocado.)

As always, there are exceptions to our rules. We will eat fish. And if we are served meat at someone’s house, we would never for one second breathe word of our challenge to a single soul present. Oh, and there’s the lunch packing. As we all know, this endeavor is brutal enough already without worrying about restrictions, so we’re green-lighting the turkey sandwiches. So far, so good. As mentioned yesterday, we launched the year with Bon App’s cover recipe (replacing the chicken with shrimp); then Night Two we went with this basic mushroom and onion pizza. I experimented a bit with the whole wheat flour in our trusty Jim Lahey crust, and we couldn’t believe how good it was. As usual, the girls drew a line down the center of the dough with a knife and chose to adorn their side with marinara and mozz. Which was just fine with us. (more…)

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