I can’t remember ever making this Official Family Policy, but Jenny and I are completely powerless against a kid — our kid — who asks us to buy her a book. (Full disclosure: We love books and are happy to encourage as much reading as possible in our house, but if we’re honest, there’s also an element of self-preservation at work here. I’m in the book business as an editor, and Jenny is in the book business as a writer, and I guess we see this as doing our part to keep the ol’ boat afloat.) I’m not about to revoke this policy, but I can’t pretend it doesn’t have its drawbacks, either: It isn’t cheap with Phoebe around. Her graphic novel and comic book obsession continues apace, and now seems to be infecting her little sister, Abby. We’ve spent many dinners lately — and many car trips, including one to Virginia over the holidays where Abby was so deeply immersed that she ended up actually puking on the book — talking about Raina Telgemeir’s latest book, Smile. The girls seem to connect to this one on some primal level –in no small part because they’ve both racked up crushing dental bills in the past month, and this seems to offer some measure of comfort. We’ll be ordering Raina’s other books within the week, I’m sure. (You’re welcome, Amazon. I could have paid for a semester at Bennington with all the one-clicking I’ve done in the past few years.)

We couldn’t vet all of the following books on our own — I haven’t read a word of some of them, as Phoebe is impossible to keep up with and I have, you know, a life — so it only seems fair to cede the floor to the third grader herself (with some help from her second grade sister, Abby), and let them tell you why they like them. Rankings are from 1 (not good) to 10 (the best ever). I suspect there’s some grade inflation at work here, as always, but these kids are enthusiasts. What can we say?

Smile by Raina Telgemeir ”This is a true story about a girl named Raina who has an overbite and a little bit of gum damage and she knocks her permanent two front teeth out. She goes through a lot of trouble at the dentist and her friends make fun of her. It takes place a long time ago, when the author was little. In the book, she’s in sixth grade. Boys might like this, but it depends on their style.”

Phoebe rating: 10.

Abby rating: 11 (And, yes, that’s out of 10. As Abby says, “I love it because I’m lucky not to have that tooth accident.” This coming from someone who had two molars yanked yesterday.)

Parents note: We realized before it was too late (Abby had already devoured the book 3 times) that there was a page or two of teen talk (body changes, boy crazy girls, etc)  that might have been confusing and maybe a tad inappropriate for a seven-year-old. So just be warned.

Lunch Lady by Jarrett J. Krosoczka: “I totally grew out of this last year. But I liked this series. It’s about a lunch lady who is really a superhero but she pretends to be a lunch lady. She has all kinds of cool gadgets and an assistant who makes the gadgets and will go in disguise so she can distract the person they’re fighting. Is it funny? No, not very. But you always want to know what’s happening next. Boys might like it. It’s probably good for seven year olds. On the back of each book, it says, ‘Serving Justice and Serving Lunch.’”

Phoebe rating: 7. (more…)

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Ever since my friend Liz told me about that documentary Race to Nowhere, I have been panting like a dog at a dinner table waiting for news of a screening in my community. For those of you not familiar with the movie, it was made by a first-time filmmaker, Vicki Abeles, who takes a look at what kind of toll all this overscheduling — i.e. relentless academic and athletic pressure  - is taking on our kids. She decided to make the film after her own daughter, then 12 years old, was diagnosed with a stress-induced stomach illness.“I was determined to find out how we had gotten to a place where our family had so little time together,” Abeles told the New York Times last week. “Where our kids were physically sick because of the pressures they were under.” I think I literally licked my lips when I read that quote. This was going to offer some prime family dinner fodder.

Until Sunday, that is. Which was the day we took the girls and a few cousins and friends to the New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker and where we somehow managed to know someone (Thanks Nick!) who knew someone who knew someone who gave us a backstage tour before the show. The show that is basically synonymous with Holidays in New York. The show that Phoebe has now seen the NYCB perform five times and Abby four. (That includes the time she was asleep before Drosselmeyer even showed up.) The show that is the subject of one of my most formative books from childhood: Jill Krementz’s A Very Young Dancer. And now: I’m thinking of shutting down this site and devoting every shred of my being to making sure my daughters become professional ballerinas like Stephanie in AVYD. I will sacrifice dinner. I will sacrifice my career. I will sacrifice my children’s childhoods and their stressed-out stomachs. Just let me somehow live out my own fantasy of being Stephanie and I won’t ask for anything ever again. Ever.

We didn’t even meet any of the dancers on the tour, but just being able to stand on the storied (surprisingly spongy) stage and look out at the grand jewel box that is Lincoln Center’s David Koch Theater was enough to make me both giddy…and despondent over the realization that neither I, nor my children, will ever be on that stage dancing with a Cavalier. Is it weird that I’m almost 40 yet still felt like I somehow had a shot at this?

I’m going to assume that you guys grew up obsessing over A Very Young Dancer just like me. When I gave it to Phoebe for Christmas in 2004, I remembered every photograph, every facial expression (Stephanie didn’t even look nervous when the stage manager called from a backstage phone to tell her it was showtime!), the way all the young ballerinas stood so beautifully on their toes even when they were doing something as quotidian as fixing their hair. I read the other books in the series (A Very Young Skater…Rider…Gymnast) but none resonated quite like this one.

Who’s so lucky? My daughters with their friends and cousins on stage at Lincoln Center about 45 minutes before the curtain rose. (more…)

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It’s hard to wait for Christmas. Why? Because it might just be the only thing in the world kids are forced to wait for. Herewith, a timeline chronicling the demise of excitement, suspense and the simple pleasure of looking forward to something. (First published in Cookie; Text by me; illustrations by Brian Rea.)

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In the console between the front seats of our family vee-hicle is a stack of the CDs we keep on hand to entertain the kids while driving. Most rotate through after a few months, or get thrown out, either because we – the parents – get so incredibly sick of them (see: Thriller, Free to Be), or because they – the kids – never quite warm up to the stuff we’re selling (see: Bettye LaVette and, god, it pains me to say it, Exile on Main Street). There’s one CD, though, that has been with us for four, maybe five, years. It’s all banged up now, and it skips like crazy, and I’m constantly having to breathe on it and buff it with my t-shirt to get it to play at all. It says “Storm King” in red Sharpie across the top, in honor of the beautiful Storm King sculpture garden about an hour north of us, in the Hudson Valley up near West Point, where I took the kids one cold fall morning just after burning this disc. “Storm King” is not a mix, though: this disc contains one album,The Children’s Album, recorded in 1975 by Johnny Cash. Here’s one of those rare records that we can all agree on, pretty much all the way through. We’ve listened to it on road trips, we’ve played it during birthday parties, I’ve even been known to put it when it’s just me, and the dog Iris, changing lightbulbs and emptying the dishwasher on a Saturday afternoon. It’s great, solid music and storytelling – performed by a variety-show-era, leather-jacketed Johnny Cash — and, seriously, what could ever be wrong with that?

It’s also the perfect Thanksgiving playlist. Good for kids, good for parents, good for grandparents, nice and mellow and funny and happy, just the thing to have on in the car on the way there or in the kitchen while you cook and the kids mill about, just the thing to mask the sounds of bickering cousins or cursing cooks or plastic dump trucks being dragged across hardwood floors. I can listen to Johnny Cash any time, and I do, but that voice is particularly suited to fall afternoons, big, messy gatherings, glasses of bourbon, football on the tv. Once your kids are fully on board – do me a favor and play them “Tiger Whitehead” or “Call of the Wild” and tell me they aren’t in love – you can move on to this. — Andy

Related: Graphic novels for kids.

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…to have family dinner: When my kids are 16 and 15 (instead of 8 and 7) and we are dealing with friendship dramas, SATs, sexting episodes, and God only knows what else (Parents of teen-agers: please refrain from telling me what else) dinner will be so firmly established as my family’s 6:30 Magnetic North, that my kids’ hormone-raging, eye-rolling, parent-resenting bodies will be hardwired to come home, sit down, and talk to me anyway. In other words, I will have them right where I want them. (more…)

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I think it’s so awesome when readers come up to me and say “I love your blog. You sound like you have the greatest life.” This conclusion is based on the fact that I regularly…eat porcupine meatballs? That’s a joke, but it’s also kind of serious.

I need to back up for a second. My first job out of college was at a financial consulting firm. The people in my office were very nice (especially my friend Han who called me over to his Sun computer one morning to show me this cool new thing called “The Net”) but I had no idea what I was doing and kept my phone on the “direct-to-voicemail” function all day because I was too nervous to talk to clients. It is a miracle I lasted 14 months there — I hated it. But since I was raised in a certain way (aka TriState Ashkenazi) I was programmed to think of these kinds of jobs (law, medicine, business) as the real jobs. And when you are in a real job, you aren’t necessarily happy all the time. “That’s why it’s called a job,” said one jerky associate (Dartmouth ’92) when I made the mistake of saying that I wasn’t 100% fulfilled compiling Strategic Action Reports for Lazard Freres. (At least I think that’s what I was doing.) I will always remember that conversation, as well as the “informational interview” I had later that year with the mother of a friend of mine who was like the Don Draper of the 80′s. She asked me what made me happy. A lot of things made me happy, but I had just put together a recipe book for my best friend for her birthday (crafted from stolen office supplies!) so I answered “Food.” Ha ha ha. (more…)

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Last week I forced myself to put together an iPhoto album from my massive file of summer vacation pictures. I try to do this once a season and enlist the girls help with caption-writing — the final product could rival a John Irving novel for how many exclamation points they make me use – and usually this is all I need to do to feel like I’ve sufficiently locked away the memories for safekeeping. But this time, I added a new album to the mix. It’s a collection of our “car quizzes” (above) which we’ve relied on as road trip boredom busters for the past few years. The quizzes are exactly as they sound: an assortment of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or true or false questions about wherever we’re headed or returning from. My initial goal for the 828-mile trip back from South Carolina was to write a straightforward list of 100 things we did on vacation, but the girls, who have a sixth sense for dutiful, linear, decidedly un-fun games, of course refused, instead begging for quiz after quiz after quiz after quiz. It wasn’t until I got home and looked through all the questions that I realized I had a keepsake that was every bit as revealing as a boring old list.

The quizzes reminded me of so many moments that have already been pushed aside to make mental space for less lovely thoughts, such as Don’t Forget to Call the Oral Surgeon. Like the fishing trip (above) where the girls reeled in some sea trout (below). It was so fresh that all Andy had to do to make it memorable was add a little olive oil, salt, pepper and lemon before grilling to perfection.

Needless to say, more than a few questions end up being about food and dinner.

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Last year, after hearing the news in a filled-to-capacity conference room on the 8th floor of the Conde Nast building that Cookie was folding, I went back to my office to begin the painful task of dismantling my bulletin board. The board (which I also called “my brain”) filled an entire wall in my office and was covered with about 200 index cards, each one representing a story idea that was in the works (white card) or that I wanted to be in the works soon (pink card). A “Morning-Duty Constitution” written up between parents (pink)…Recipes that don’t grease up the stovetop on “Cleaning Day” (white)…Some hilarious cartoons from Amy Krouse Rosenthal (white)…and then, scribbled on a pink card, “Deb Perelman.” Perelman, as you probably know already, is the creator of SmittenKitchen, the website that has become synonymous with food porn, and all the editors at Cookie (which only profiled parents) had been on bumpwatch with Perelman for years, waiting to descend upon her like a bunch of vultures once she had something to contribute to the family food conversation. Because we read the site pretty regularly, we knew she was due any day…A day, it turned out, we’d never be able to celebrate in the pages of Cookie. (more…)

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I’m not so good with remembering the everyday details of my life. I can’t tell you the name of my eighth grade math teacher, or my freshman year dorm room number, or my cholesterol reading from my last checkup, or even who I had lunch with last Thursday (without checking my calendar first). Just last week, I’m not proud to admit, I forgot my parents’ 48th wedding anniversary. Compared to Jenny, whose institutional memory for every moment and triumph and hiccup of her life is downright scary photographic, I’m like the amnesiac guy from Memento: I should probably start tattooing every inch of my body with the little stuff — i.e., the important stuff — before it fades away forever. You know what I do remember, though, with almost perfect clarity? Finishing The Trumpet of the Swan when I was a kid. (I was eight. Or maybe nine. I forget!) I remember turning that last page, and not wanting it to end, thinking this was the best book I’d ever read, and having this vague sense that something was going on here that I didn’t quite understand — at least, not enough to articulate it — except maybe to say that the words on the page, and the way way they made me feel, were a whole lot more powerful than what I was getting from Strange But True Sports Stories. The last paragraph still crushes me:

On the pond where the swans were, Louis put his trumpet away. The cygnets crept under their mother’s wings. Darkness settled on woods and field and marsh. A loon called its wild night cry. As Louis relaxed and prepared for sleep, all his thoughts were of how lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth, how lucky he had been to solve his problems with music, and how pleasant it was to look forward to another night of sleep and another day tomorrow, and the fresh morning, and the light that returns with the day.

The cygnets crept under their mother’s wings! Such a beautiful earth! The light that returns with the day! Dear, dear god. I would never forget this one. The Trumpet of the Swan was the book I would always think about when I thought about books from my youth, the book I would use to forge an identity apart from the big brother I revered (he was a devoted Stuart Little guy), the book I always imagined reading aloud to kids of my own. Which, thirty years later, I did.

Not only that, but I now push this book on my friends, too. Whenever someone has a baby, I go immediately to amazon and order up a copy — in hardcover, to ensure its longevity – secretly hoping that their kids will love it one day, too. But I also order other books — books for infants and toddlers and four-year-olds and eight- year-olds. Over the past few years, this has become our standard baby present, seven or eight books we’ve come to think of as a starter kit for the library we’d want, a gift that will keep on giving for years to come; a collection of books that will inspire some meaningful dinner table conversation. The list is always a little different, as I tailor it to the friend in question, but I generally pull from a list of books that I loved as a child, or came to love as a parent. I thought I’d write this list down here in case you need some good baby gift ideas…and so I won’t forget them. — Andy

Bruno Munari’s ABC by Bruno Munari (above)
Ages: 1+
What You’ll Remember About It: The extremely beautiful, graphic watercolors on a stark white background from this legendary artist and designer, and the fly that appears on every page.

I am A Bunny by Ole Rison, illlustrations by Richard Scarry
Ages: 1+
What You’ll Remember About It: The gorgeous, very un-Busytown illustrations from the great Richard Scarry, and the simple, tender story chronicling a year in the life of a bunny named Nicholas, who sleeps in a hollow tree and dreams of spring. (more…)

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When we renovated our kitchen a few years ago I was so psyched to build in my “Command Central,” a desk with a bulletin board to keep track of schedules, birthday parties, class lists, and emergency numbers. And of course, the crown jewel of Command Central would be my MacBook laptop — right there at my fingertips whenever I needed it. It would be great! I’d always be only a few feet away should I ever want to check my email or look up a recipe or read my facebook news feed, or see who is being skewered on gawker, or look up a phone number, or order that book Funny Frank Abby has been begging for, or google the woman I’m interviewing with the next morning, or open the soccer schedule that is saved in an Excel file to see if we can indeed plan on a road trip Saturday without missing a game, or see what the weather is tomorrow —  in Hong Kong, too! Where my brother- and sister-in-law live! — or check the traffic on DALS, or the comments on DALS, or see what time Ramona and Beezus is playing or the flight is landing or 30 Rock is premiering….

God. Damn. I spend too much time on the computer. And I hate myself for it. The thing is, when I look at this list, most of the things up there are family-related. Searches and purchases and general organizing meant to make children happier and jam-packed days smoother. But, of course, this is not how my daughter sees it.

“Mom, stop working! Turn off the computer!”

I’m not working! Don’t you understand? I am booking your pottery lessons! And your vacation tickets! And by the way, kiddo, even if I was working, this computer allows me to do it from home so that I may greet you and your sister at the bus stop every day at 3:00. So that I may accompany you to ballet, so that I am free to read Amos and Boris to your class in the middle of the day, so that I may accompany you to doctor’s appointments without destabilizing the fragile atom that is the dual-working-parent calendar.

But all this is gray area stuff. And with kids there ain’t no gray area. To them, I’m either on the computer and disengaged or I’m off the computer and engaged.

So for the next two weeks, while I head down south for vacation, I’m engaging. I’m keeping the laptop closed during my children’s waking hours. (Notice the way that is phrased. If it was closed for the entire vacation this post would be called “My Digital Detox.” What I am attempting here is more like a Daytime Diet.)

This doesn’t mean there won’t be DALS posts. There will be lots of them. Andy and I will be chiming in sporadically, but over the next ten days, you’ll be hearing from some new voices, too — some of my favorite people, writers, muses, and kitchen heroes — all of them parents attempting to do the most primal of duties: feed their young.

If you are not detoxing yourself, I hope you’ll check in to hear what they have to say.

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There’s a girl, all 42 inches of her stretched out on the family room couch, reading a comic book. There’s a dad or a mom, standing over her, failing to get her get her attention.

“Phoebe.”

No response.

“Phoebe?”

Not a muscle moves.

“Phoebe. Come on. It’s time for dinner.”

Crickets.

“Phoebe! Put the book down. Time to eat!”

The comic book is slowly, reluctantly lowered to her chest, and the face of an eight year old girl is revealed. “Do I have to?” says Phoebe. “Just a few more minutes.”

Some variation on this scene has played out pretty much every night before dinner in our house for the past two years, with one of us trying to pry Phoebe away from her book as dinner sits on the table, growing colder, and Phoebe so deep into her world of comic book heroes that her ears seemingly cease to function. It’s the good kind of problem, but still: it’s a problem.

And it all started with Jules Feiffer.

In the summer before first grade, Phoebe discovered a book at our local library called Meanwhile… by the great Jules Feiffer, which is about a boy who loves comic books – loves them so much that he dreams he is living inside of one, fighting pirates and running from mountain lions and floating weightless through outer space. From there, it was a short trip to Phoebe trying to draw her own comic books (called “Mini Man,” which drew, um, heavily from Feiffer), and then from there, onto The Adventures of Tintin. We bought her all six volumes, eighteen stories in all, and she read them non-stop for the next few months, over and over and over again, until she practically had them memorized. When that phase ended, she looked around like, “So anyway, that was fun. What’s next?” We needed some new material. Not knowing where to turn, I asked my much smarter and comic-savvy former colleagues at GQ, Alex P and Raha, for some cool suggestions – comics that were girl-friendly but not princessy, challenging but not too adult, not likely to cause nightmares. Raha actually (more…)

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I’ve been a runner for over two decades now. That doesn’t mean I’ve been a runner consistently for two decades. Or that I’ve run marathons or get up early to run the Central Park loop every morning like my best friend and mother of three (including twins) has done for most of her adult life. Since I was a teenager, I have gone in and out of intense phases of jogging addiction — when I was 16, I remember deciding I would run four miles every day for the entire month of August. (Perhaps because my Central Park Loop friend had done it for the entire month of July.) The problem with that kind of regimen, of course, is that it’s not psychologically sustainable. Even for my younger psychologically-robust self. I can’t remember exactly, but it’s likely I didn’t lace up my Nikes for six months after reaching that July goal.

The same feast-or-famine scenario played out year after year until 1994 when my then-boyfriend, now-husband told me that he was going to come up with a realistic exercise plan for himself — to run every other day. Trying to do it every day was just setting himself up for failure. I remember the exact corner of Brooklyn where we were standing when he said this — Carroll and Smith Streets — probably because it was so unlike the pep talks I was reading in Mademoiselle (1994, remember?) about sticking with a fitness plan (“Grab a running buddy!” “Sleep in your sports bra so you’re ready to go first thing in the morning!”) that didn’t seem to address the bigger problem: How am I going to keep this up for the rest of my life? Andy’s strategy was the first to feel like real advice. It required no cockamamie scheming. No fancy head games or running partners or special gear. Like most of the best strategies, it was simple. And in the 15 years since — with the exception of two pregnancies — I’ve managed to (mostly) stick with the plan.

You know where I’m going, right? Take the pressure off. Don’t set yourself up for failure. Think about the long-term. No fancy gear or trickery. Sounds a lot like…hey, how about that?…Family Dinner. Simplify the routine and simplify the psychology behind the routine. It’s summer. With camp and later bedtimes and Tivo’d World Cup semis that demand your entire family’s presence in the TV room instead of the dinner table, allow yourself some nights off from the grind. Allow yourself to order in a pizza tonight if it means later in the week you’ll be excited to spin those vegetables into gold. Allow yourself a night where your son’s vegetable serving is the oregano on the Trader Joe’s frozen pizza. Chances are you’ll be more likely to stay in the race and go the distance.

Related pep talks: How to Have Family Dinner, Ingalls-Style Family Dinner

BTW: Photo courtesy of DALS reader Cory J. of Brooklyn. The family dinner they are eating here is Curried chickpeas with spinach, a vegetarian adaptation of a DALS favorite. Thanks, Cory. Hope the kids enjoyed it!

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From The Cricket in the Thicket, by Aileen Fisher (1963), a book given to me by my best friend’s mom, Rosa*, when Abby was born. It was my friend’s favorite book when she was little.

Shall we all work on our nodding and cooing?

*Yes! Rosa of Rosa’s Mud Cake!

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For the next installment in DALS’s How I Buy Meat series, we hear from Alexandra Zissu, author of The Conscious Kitchen, and the “Ask an Organic Mom” columnist at TheDailyGreen.com. The goal of the HIBM series is to share exact meat-buying strategies and philosophies from food industry insiders, environmentalists, public health officials, etc. who also happen to be parents. Last time we heard from food-safety expert Doug Powell from KSU’s Dept. of Diagnostic Medicine/Pathobiology. Today,  Zissu weighs in with her own thoughtful strategy.

Though I devote an entire chapter to meat in The Conscious Kitchen and am currently writing a book with Josh and Jessica Applestone of Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, New York, I don’t eat much meat. Never have. Not compared to the average American, anyway. I eat more since my daughter was born because I think it’s important for her growing body. But left to my own devices, I might even eat less. And at this point, after this many years of research, if it isn’t pastured and local, I’m eating vegetarian that night. I don’t eat much because I don’t particularly crave it on a regular basis.

Don’t get me wrong, there are things I devour — usually involving pork (chops, bacon, stew meat — I love it all), or a perfect roast chicken. I avoided beef for years though the flavor of what Fleisher’s sources and sells has returned me to the realm of great steak and juicy burgers. But as much as I enjoy these, I don’t feel the need for them daily. Which, as it turns out, is a great thing. Livestock aren’t wild animals. They’re not part of the natural carbon cycle. We raise them to eat them. And their environmental impact, much like that of our ever-growing population, is monumental. Eating less means less impact – especially if we do it collectively. It adds up. Animals raised free-roaming on pasture are less destructive than their factory-farmed counterparts. Though of course they still have quite the footprint. They’re also not treated (for the most part) inhumanely, kept in cages, hopped up on drugs (scary hormones and antibiotics), and fed the most horrible genetically modified crap imaginable. It is amazing to me that the general public knows so little about what they eat, and yet willingly dines on — and feeds their children — meat from truly unhealthy animals containing residues of these drugs and this feed. We are what we eat. We are also what the thing we ate…ate, too. Right? If I served you a plate of chicken shit, would you puree it and spoon-feed it to your baby? No. But this is considered acceptable cattle feed, according to our government. And we offer those cattle to our families. (more…)

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Is it clear yet how I feel about the dinner table? I think it’s kind of a big deal. And I don’t mean that it’s a big deal in the way all those studies tell us it is. Because for every study claiming that kids who eat with their parents do better in school and are less likely to be depressed or on drugs, there is research that questions it. (It’s the self-selecting theory — researchers argue that the kinds of parents who are more attuned to these issues in the first place are the ones more likely to organize quality family time around the table.) For me, it’s much more important to impart how meaningful it can be to sit down to good food with your family. Meaningful in both a micro way, i.e. the tangible, primal satisfaction you get from watching your kids eat well. And meaningful in the macro way, i.e. how what is on that dinner plate can be an entree to larger discussions about the environment, about nutrition, and other such lighthearted topics like the tyranny of mega-corporations and the food processed industry. It’s the macro way I have in mind as I launch what will hopefully be a regular column here at DALS. In it, you’ll hear what books, movies, articles, obsessions my family is talking about when we sit down to eat. Often, you’ll notice, we are not just talking around the dinner table, but about the food on our dinner table. And I guess that’s sort of the point. So with no further ado introducing…

Kitchenlightenment
Around and about the dinner table, June 14, 2010

What I’m watching: King of Corn, the documentary about the two college grads who go about planting, harvesting, and selling an acre of corn in Iowa with no farming experience whatsoever.

What I’m looking forward to watching: A screening of What’s Organic About Organic, followed by a panel discussion with Marion Nestle, June 27.

What the whole family is watching: The World Cup 2010. In my mind, it’s like the Olympics — it doesn’t count as Screen Time. It’s just something the kids need be a part of.

What I’m cooking from: Simple, Fresh, Southern, by Matt Lee and Ted Lee. The fact that I was heading into summer 2010 without this cookbook by the James Beard Award-winning team is frightening. Some of their recipes will be turning up on DALS this week.

What I’m somewhat surprised by: Gourmet‘s Next Life.

What words of wisdom from Jimmy Dean, Sausage King (1928-2010) I plan on quoting to my kids tonight: “You can’t take rejection personally. You have to say, ‘Well, that dumbass just didn’t know any better.’” (From the always brilliant What I’ve Learned column in Esquire.)

What I’m reading: The Unhealthy Truth, by Robyn O’Brien, Taste of Civilization, by Janet Flammang

What I’m supposed to be reading (for book club): Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

What Andy is reading: Manuscripts that will soon be books, proposals for books. But no books. (Though, he did just acquire a book by the Pulitzer-Prize winning Michael Moss tentatively titled Salt, Sugar, Fat.)

What Abby, 6, is reading: A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning (with Mom), Little House in the Big Woods (with Dad)

What Phoebe, 8, is reading: Athena, the graphic novel by George O’Connor, via Myles at You Know, For Kids

Have a good week.

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Question for you: Have you spent your entire tenure as a parent attempting to recreate the cozy, happy life of Charles, Caroline, Laura, Mary, and Carrie Ingalls? Their togetherness, their resourcefulness, their graciousness — their family dinners followed by Pa’s raucous fiddling?! (Please don’t forward me the New Yorker profile of Laura’s libertarian daughter, Rose, who, we know now, did most of the Little House writing for her mom, and also added the rosy hue to her family’s story in the name of commercial romanticism.) I’ve been reading one or another of the seven books in the series to my girls for the last three years and in addition to providing beautiful (more…)

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No, not fish tacos with roasted marshmallows, though I have a feeling that wouldn’t be too hard a sell on the kids. But before I even get to this simple, fresh, crowd-pleaser, I want to say something about the corn in these tacos, or more generally, about cooking with local, seasonal ingredients.

My good friend and neighbor (and fabulous home cook) logged on to my website last Friday. The photo, which of course you all remember, showed a few ears of corn on the grill. This was his comment:

Corn? In May?

And here is the second-by-second playback of the ruminating that took place in my brain over the course of the next minute. Why am I even bothering to do this website? I am a complete fraud. What kind of food expert would eat corn in May? What kind of food person would have that corn-filled May photo be the one to announce grilling season for all her readers? [Pause. Lightbulb flickers somewhere in darkness of cerebrum.] I know what kind of food person. The kind of food person who has children. A mom food person who knows that a kernel of corn on her six-year-old’s plate is culinary gold. The kind of mom food person who knows what a difference it makes to always have something on the plate that her children feel comfortable with.

But I didn’t tell him all that. Because he certainly wasn’t saying it to make me feel bad. (He had apparently mistaken me for an emotionally secure person.) This is what I replied:

If my kids eat it, it’s always in season!

OK listen, you won’t find anyone happier than me when farmer’s market season rolls around. Our local market opens June 5, and that day that has been marked on my mental calendar (real estate that not many events are capable of securing these days) for months now because it means a guaranteed 1-mile family walk (including the dog) to the market every Saturday. It means reconnecting with people in the community I (more…)

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The pre-dinner scramble. (Photo by Jenny Livingston.)

Last week on my Babble blog I asked readers what they thought of Michael Ruhlman’s HuffPo rant about parents being too “busy” to cook for their kids. Actually, that was only a subset of the rant. Most of Ruhlman’s anger was directed at food editors, cookbook authors, and Food Network stars (even Jamie!) for giving rise to the 30-minute-meal industrial complex…thereby validating the message that parents are too busy to cook, thereby placing those busy, unimaginative parents at the mercy of the convenient, pre-packaged, get-it-to-the-table-fast world of processed food.  (Really? You want to bring Jamie Oliver into this?) I wasn’t surprised that it touched a lot of nerves — and I encourage you to read the entire post as well as the comments that piled up over on Babble — but here on DALS, I feel compelled to write a little more it; or, more specifically, about these two quotes because I can’t stop thinking about them:

“Maybe you don’t like to cook, maybe you’re too lazy to cook, maybe you’d rather watch television or garden, I don’t know and I don’t care, but don’t tell me you’re too busy to cook. We all have the same hours every day, and we all choose how to use them. Working 12-hour days is a choice.”

AND

“..[T]he processed food companies make it easy to blow off cooking for ourselves. And we do so at our peril…. America is too stupid to question whether something is good for it or not (‘Marge, it says snack well right on the box!’). And in the very same way we believe that idiocy, we believe these very same companies telling us how wonderful our lives will be if we buy this low-fat Lean Cuisine because it will save us so much time, only 3 minutes! Used to take seven! You’ve got four extra minutes to play with!”

I’m not crazy about the scolding tone he uses here (parents feel guilty enough without a professionally trained chef rubbing it in, not to mention single parents for whom twelve hour days are actually not a choice) and the assumption that cooking for your family is a categorically pleasant, life-affirming experience is oversimplified to say the least. BUT. BUT. BUT. There was something resonant about the message to me. And (more…)

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