Those of you who have your Ph.D in D.A.L.S. are already aware of the groundbreaking scientific work we’ve done proving various theories about dinner — the preparing of it, the consumption of it, the enjoyment of it. For instance, this well-worn favorite: When you take three measly minutes in the morning to do something that helps you get the momentum going on dinner prep — chopping vegetables, marinating meat, placing a pot of water on the stovetop  – you will end up saving up to 15 minutes on the other end of the day when you arrive home from work. I can’t pretend to know why this is the case — as backing up our dinner theories with real data tends to take more time than we actually have. Time we would rather spend coming up with more impossible-to-prove wrong theories. Such as:

1. Shredding bagged lettuce makes it taste fresher and better. It doesn’t matter what kind of lettuce — romaine, iceberg, endive — Last night I made some chili-rubbed chicken and placed it on a bed of shredded spinach (pictured above; recipe below), which I usually find chewy in its whole raw form. Not the case with the shred. Along the same lines, the fine chop of anything as it pertains to a saladex summerus will almost always upgrade it.
2. When it comes to entertaining: Each kid under eight years old is the equivalent of five grown-ups in terms of volume and space and mess generating.
3. Heat is the great equalizer when it comes to bagels. I’ll take a just-out-of-the-oven bagel from Missoula over a cold outer-borough bagel any day. (Please do not forward this to my Bronx-born Jewish father.)
4. Dinner will taste twice as good when it’s eaten outside. It will taste three times as good when eaten in an outdoor space surrounded by white string lights. Four times as good when eaten in an outdoor space surrounded by white string lights and with a view of any body of water.
5. Magic Formulas Worth Committing to Memory: Melon + Salt; Mint + Peas; Peanut Butter + Fudge Brownies; Bacon + Brussels Sprouts; Bacon + Eggs; Bacon + Maple; Bacon + Bacon; Bacon + Shoe Leather
6. The quality of dinner at a restaurant is in converse proportion to the number of words on that restaurant’s menu. For instance, Tom Colicchio’s menu at Craft. This is how it reads: Mushrooms. Potatoes. Braised Short Ribs. A menu like that is always going to win out over the one listing Pork chops marinated in brandy and pomegranate juice with sweet potatoes and miso-mango chutney on a bed of shaved salsify and butter lettuces. (Another red flag: the pluralization of lettuce.)
7. Kids are able to tap into deep wells of resourcefulness with remarkable efficiency when it comes to assembling the ice cream, the peanuts, and the chocolate sauce for sundaes.
8. You won’t find a single parenting expert who endorses using bribery to convince a kid to eat.
9. You won’t find a single parenting expert, who is a parent, who hasn’t used bribery to convince her kid to eat.
10. Food eaten on sticks has a 40% higher rate of consumption with kids. Food served in conjunction with dips: 20%.
11. Pop Tarts, Apple Jacks, Toast-R-Cakes, and other usually verboten breakfast foods possess nutritional merits when consumed on vacation.
12. Everything tastes better on vacation. It just does.
13. Anything braised tastes better the next day cold, eaten right out of its leftover dish with a fork, while standing in front of the refrigerator.
14. Be wary of people who say they enjoy radishes dipped in salt.
15. It’s practically the law that the phone call from the client  – the one you’ve been dying to check off your list all day — always comes five minutes before you are leaving the office to make it home in time for dinner. Don’t question it. Don’t fight it. Don’t try to control this phenomenon or — worse — allow it to control you.

Chili-rubbbed Chicken with Shredded Spinach (Rule 1) and Dip (Rule 10)
I generally go with about one medium size chicken breast per diner. You don’t need a lot of chicken if there is enough salad to stretch it. Best part about this meal: totally deconstructible for the kid who doesn’t want anything touching.

For rub: In a small bowl, mix together the following:
1 tablespoon chili powder
pinch cayenne (1/8 tsp)
pinch garlic salt (1/8 tsp)
2 generous pinches salt (1/2 tsp total)
shake or two of dried oregano

For dressing: In a measuring cup, mix together the following:
juice from 1 lime
3 heaping tablespoons sour cream
3 heaping tablespoons salsa
1/4 teaspoon cumin
1/2 – 1 teaspoon of sugar (to taste)

Pound 3 to 4 chicken breasts until about 1/4 inch thick. (As always, the most important thing is that the breasts are of even thickness.) Sprinkle a teaspoon of spice rub on top of each breast and, using your fingers, spread and press into the meat. Add a few tablespoons of olive oil to a skillet set over medium heat. Add chicken, spice-side down and cook 3-5 minutes until chicken looks cooked around the edges. While chicken is cooking, sprinkle and rub spice mixture into the other side of chicken. (Do not outsource this step to your children; there will be spitting oil.) Flip and cook another 3-5 minutes until cooked through. Slice as shown above — or actually however you want.

In a bowl, toss together a few handfuls of baby spinach (shredded with a chef’s knife into confetti), thawed frozen corn, 1/2 can black beans (drained and rinsed), 1 avocado (chopped), grape tomatoes (chopped), 1 bunch scallions (chopped), 1/4 cup cilantro (chopped). Top with chicken and drizzle with dressing.

Over the weekend, I made my own mayonnaise. You’ll be hearing more about this, but beyond the general feeling of triumph I experienced by my accomplishment, I had to take a step back and say, “I can’t believe I’m making my own mayonnaise. How much will DALS readers of babies and toddlers resent me for having time to do something so indulgent?”  With this in mind, it’s my honor to present today’s guest-poster, writer and editor Rory Evans. In addition to being one of DALS most faithful commenters (your avatar is safe with me!) Rory was one of my first mentors in magazines — we first met at Real Simple in 2001 — and I know I speak for a lot of writers when I say her hand-scribbled line-edits and queries on manuscripts taught me more about writing than almost anyone else I can think of. She is also the mother of a 2-year-old, which means she is more in the guerilla mode of toddler-feeding phase than the homemade mayo-making one. I keep her around for this reason, but also because every year on my birthday, she sends me this, much to the delight of my daughters and my neighbors and whoever else I invite to share in the bounty. Here, Rory shares a few tried-and-true tactics that have worked at her family table including a marinade made from the three ingredients above that I’ve already used a half dozen times since she told me about it last month. Thanks Rory!

A few nights ago, my 2-year-old daughter Evan ate everything off her plate. And then—holy role reversal!—she started picking off mine. The last time I had seen her ingest anything so quickly was when she was six days old, and downed two ounces of formula in a desperate, half-minute suck. (It was, we realized, the first food she had eaten in her 144-hour life—all those endless “breastfeeding” sessions had been a ruse. Nothing had been coming out.)

It will likely be years before she replicates this feat. And it of course made me try to decode what we had put before her. Here’s what she ate: boneless pork chop and a salad made with baby spinach, red onion, and sliced strawberries (North Shore of Boston people: Do they still serve this at every wedding held at Salem Country Club in Peabody?). The common ingredient, I realized? Maple syrup (in the marinade, along with rice vinegar and soy sauce; and in the dressing, with red wine vinegar and olive oil). Oh, “candy pork” and “candy salad,” I thought—remembering my friend Molly’s suggestion years ago to refer to anything even slightly sweet as “candy” and your kids will eat it.

If there is a blessing to having been a dried-up old bag when my daughter was born (I was 18 days shy of turning 40), it’s this: Most of my friends had had their kids years and years before, and I’d heard their stories about willful toddlers and Olympic-level picky eaters (my desk was about 20 feet from Jenny’s during that era when Abby decided to go on her 5-week solid food strike) I remembered a few of their various tricks: like not only Molly’s “candy” modifier, but also her “chicken fish” trick—her son would eat any kind of chicken, so she just started referring to any kind of fish as chicken fish. (See also: Jenny’s “Princess fish,” which I’ve also put to good use.) Since Evan mysteriously loves broccoli, I’ve started calling kale “broccoli salad” and cauliflower “white broccoli” with minimal blowback.

She is also a fan of “salad surprise,” where something we know she loves is hidden under a mound of mulch/greens. As in, the strawberries with the spinach, or the raisins that go into a kale salad. Of course, she’s been known to just push the leaves aside and go for the treat, but she eventually gets to the rest. Naturally, I live in fear of her some day being on to my tricks, when she decides that she’ll only ever eat another vegetable if it’s entirely camouflaged in some kind of Jessica Seinfeld cupcake. So I ask you, dear Jenny’s reader: What worked for you? Is there more dinnertime doublespeak that I should know about?

Maple Candy Pork Chops
Rory said she makes the marinade mostly by feel. Place four boneless center cut pork chops in a zip top bag. Add 1/3 cup of syrup, 2 to 3 tablespoons of canola, a bunch of glugs of soy sauce (about 1/4 cup), and then the same amount of rice vinegar, and a shake or two of powdered garlic (or if you are feeling ambitious, one whole clove, halved). Marinate at least an hour and a half and up to overnight. When ready to cook, place chops on an unlined cookie sheet, which most certainly should be lined with foil, and roast at 450°F for about maybe 15 – 20 minutes, flipping once half way through.

Salad Surprise with Strawberries
Toss 1 bag baby spinach, a handful of sliced strawberries, and a tablespoon or two of super thinly sliced red onion. I tossed it with a dressing made from 1 tablespoon maple syrup, apple cider vinegar (insert kate saying, “page turner!”), and olive oil, a pinch of powdered garlic, and a hint of ground cinnamon.

What the heck? No Mother’s Day post on DALS this year? That’s because I posted on Bon App on Tuesday all about how we don’t really celebrate it. I know, not very helpful. If you are like most normal people and in the market for a kick-ass brunch main dish, check out this baked cinnamony French toast from the always-reliable Deb at Smitten Kitchen. If I celebrated Mother’s Day, that’s definitely what I’d want in the middle of my peony-strewn brunch table. That, and a copy of Dinner: A Love Story, naturally.

Have a great weekend!

That’s one handsome-looking bowl of quinoa, isn’t it? Looks pretty tasty, right? It’s really healthy, too. And so versatile. Have you heard about the extraordinary nutritional properties of quinoa? Amazing stuff. Packed with protein. The Incas survived on it! Now try writing 500 words about this bowl of quinoa, but it can’t be too similar to the 500-word post you wrote about the magic of (sigh) barley a few weeks ago, and it definitely can’t be like the other quinoa post you did about six months ago, the one in which you… extolled its extraordinary nutritional properties (protein, Incas, etc.) and its versatility (feta, pesto, etc.) and the way it goes so well with zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. We want to be clear here: we are not complaining. We love cooking and we love doing this blog, and we’d happily do it for free. (Wait, we already do it for free!) All we’re saying is, posting three or four or five times a week for two and a half years — about things like quinoa — isn’t always easy. There have been nights when Jenny, sitting there in bed with her laptop and trying to write about the raw kale salad we just had for dinner, has turned to me with a look of true despair and said, “I got nothing.” It’s rare, but it happens. I figure you can handle the truth.

So here’s a question: how would you like to guest post on DALS? If you’re interested, here’s what we need from you, by midnight, May 14:

• A presentable photo of something you’ve cooked.
• A story (not more than 500 words) about that something you cooked.
• A recipe that works.*

Once all the entries are in, we’ll pick a winner and you (or your food blog, if you have one) will be a featured – and tweeted-about, and commented-upon — guest poster on a day, tbd, in June. Not only that, there’s a prize in it for you, too: the winner gets a free, personally inscribed copy of Jenny’s book when it is published a few weeks from now OR a call-in from both of us for your book club if you select Dinner: A Love Story as your group’s next pick. Up to you. Essie, mek, Amanda, Julia, Kendra, Cecilia, Carolyn, Melissa, June, Caitlin, Jan, Minty Pea Todd, Torie, MommyLisa, Auntie, 654Carroll, A Plum By Any Other Name, the Russian Guy Who’s Always Spamming Us About Cheap Cialis: I’m talkin’ to you, people! Start writing. Help us out. Win a book. – Andy

* And to be clear, the post doesn’t have to be about quinoa. Send all entries to: jenny AT dinneralovestory.com with the subject “Guest Post Contest.” Many of you have asked if you can still submit something if it’s not your own recipe. This contest is going to be focused more on the writing and the story than the recipe. You can still submit with someone else’s recipe, but please credit the source and embed the link to that source in the post. If it’s a recipe from a cookbook, please send us a link to the cookbook.

I was at a party last week where a friend introduced me to someone as “Jenny. You know…She’s the one who writes about how we need to eat dinner with our families every night.” This is the point when I sort of look at the ground and try to kick an imaginary stubborn rock out of the dirt. “Uh, nice to meet you,” I cough up to my poor new aquaintance, who, for all I know, has a job with completely inflexible hours and a spouse who works the night shift and who, for all the family dinner desire in the world, would not be able to make a nightly meal happen with any kind of regularity.

I know this person introducing me doesn’t deconstruct these things the way I do, and I know this person is proud of what I do and in a million years wouldn’t mean to make anyone feel bad about their dinner situation, but here’s the thing: I have never once said on my blog or in my book that you need to eat dinner with your family every night. And, as long as I’m on the topic, I have never once “emphasized my strong belief that the family that eats together stays together,” as one book reviewer recently wrote in round-up of the year’s cookbooks. Who am I to say you need do anything with your family?

It’s so hard not to sound like a sanctimonious finger-wagger when you write about anything under the parenting umbrella, but I would like to just take a minute today to emphasize my strong belief that family dinner has been a huge and meaningful ritual in my life — and that I, personally, need to eat dinner with my kids as often as possible because we depend on it for our home’s sanity and well-being  – but I never mean to infer that this is the one-size-fits-all solution to ensuring connectedness and togetherness in a family. Or, that, conversely if you don’t eat with your kids every night you might as well kiss your kids’ emotional health, their college degrees and their futures goodbye.  (In my opinion, there are already enough studies out there shaming us at every turn.) A friend was just telling me how she, her husband and two teenage sons barely see each other during the week, but always converge and recharge on the weekend. “The weekend is family time and it’s non-negotiable,” she said. Another friend, Sara, a mother of three, who grew up in a family that skied every weekend, and who still today is a major badass on the slopes, told me that those winter trips were when the bonding happened. In her words: “We always got it done on the chairlift.”

We get it done at the dinner table — and for those of you out there who agree with me and feel as though this is the logical place to get it done, or might be the most logical place for you to get it done or even every now and then might be the place to get it done….well, then, by all means, stop by for some inspiration. But if you’re just in it for a tasty grilled hoisin burger recipe that I’m hoping your family will love next time you all sit down together? I’m not going to stop you or tell you need to do anything more. That part is up to you.

Poison Burgers

“Daddy, did you just say we’re having poison burgers tonight?

“Hoisin burgers, Abby. Hoisin burgers.”

1 lb ground turkey or chicken
juice from 1/2 lime
1 tablespoon chopped scallions
1 tablespoon fresh ginger, minced
1 tablespoon chinese 5-spice
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
1 tablespoon cilantro, chopped finely
salt and pepper

Mix the above ingredients, shape into patties, and grill over hot coals, flipping frequently for a total of 10-12 minutes, until firm but not rock hard. Serve on buns with extra hoisin sauce. Hoisin is available in better supermarkets and Asian specialty stores.

Also: If you replace the ground turkey/chicken with ground pork (in Abby’s words): “It’s not like it’s going to be bad.”

I was driving Phoebe to school on Wednesday morning – she had to be at her desk by 7:30 for a field trip to Ellis Island or else – when I told her that Shaun Tan had sent us a guest post about his formative books for kids. What do you want me to tell people about Shaun’s books, I asked her. What should they know?

His pictures have a lot of feeling, she said.

Okay, I said. But what do they make you feel?

I think about them when I’m daydreaming, she said. Can you stop asking me questions now?

If you got a copy of 121 Books last week — the little book that Jenny and I gave away here last week — you might have seen Shaun’s book, Tales From Outer Suburbia, sitting there at #91. What you didn’t see was what the book actually looks like. I’ll start with the cover, which is as evocative and alluring an image as I can recall on the cover of a book. I remember seeing a review of this one in the New York Times Book Review a few years ago and looking at that cover, and thinking: I want to climb inside that book. And once you do, a similarly strange, exquisite, odd, absurd, whimsical, mysterious world awaits. Tales From Outer Suburbia is a collection of stories about, well, about a lot of things, including: a stoic water buffalo who lives in a vacant lot; a tiny stick figure-ish, possibly alien foreign exchange student who sleeps in a teacup and asks to be called, perfectly, Eric; two brothers who argue over whether the earth simply ends at the edge of the map, and then set out on a journey to find out who’s right; and a story with the stunningly great title, “Broken Toys,” that contains the following two stunningly great sentences: “Well, we’d certainly seen crazy people before — ‘shell-shocked by life’ as you once put it. But something pretty strange must have happened to this guy to make him wander about in a spacesuit on a dead-quiet public holiday.” How do you not want to read that?

Anyway, if you want to see what Phoebe was talking about re: the emotional punch — the feeling — of Shaun’s art, check out some of his work. He did a wordless book, The Arrival, whose soulful beauty kind of defies description. He did a picture book, The Lost Thing, which he then turned into a fifteen minute short film, which then won a little known prize called AN ACADEMY FREAKING AWARD. (You can see it here.) The pleasure of having someone this talented on Dinner: A Love Story never gets old — for us, at least — and I hope you enjoy Shaun’s recommendations. What I love, in particular, is that Shaun – being an Australian, and an artist — has so many books below that I’d never heard of, and have now ordered. That, and I also love his use of the word “carnage.” Enjoy. — Andy

I should begin this list with an early “mistake” made by my mother when it came to bedtime reading. She herself did not grow up in a literary household: in fact, as a kid, I was fascinated by the sheer absence of books, or even paper and pencils, in my grandparents’ house – books just weren’t part of their world. Perhaps for this reason, our Mum felt her own children should be exposed to as many books as possible, but at the same time was not guided by (a) experience, or (b) the kinds of lists you find on websites like this. If it looked vaguely interesting, Mum would read it to my brother and me at bedtime. One such title, read to us when I was 7 or 8, was an apparently charming fairytale by some guy named George Orwell: “Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes…”

We were all hooked (and, frankly, a bit unsettled) from the outset, so there was no turning back. My brother and I looked forward to each progressively disturbing chapter: conniving pigs, brainwashed sheep, a horse carted off to something called a “knackers” – poor Mum, having to field all of our questions. I asked her recently about this, and she remembers being increasingly anxious about how the story “might affect your young minds” – yet we voted to keep going (bedtime reading should always be democratic). Of course, the book ends with the pigs celebrating their triumphant depravity, and Mum was very worried about that. As for me, I just thought it was terrific. And it was no more disturbing than stuff I witnessed at school every day, with our occasionally cruel kids and less-than-perfect teachers – I thought Orwell was right on the money. I’d never thought about a story so much after it was read. From then on, I began to appreciate unresolved endings, and to grow tired of the less-convincing, moralizing stuff that kids were being fed in suburban Australia, where I grew up. I realized books weren’t just for entertainment, that they could say something. Animal Farm – along with Watership Down and Gulliver’s Travels –profoundly influenced my development as an author and illustrator. Most specifically, The Rabbits, an allegory about colonization written by John Marsden and illustrated by me. That was quite a controversial book when it was published — and was even banned in some Australian schools – yet very young children seem to enjoy and understand it quite deeply; they grasp, somehow, the hidden optimism that adults often miss. That continues to surprise and delight me, the ability of children to find silver linings in grim stories.

I don’t have children, and don’t specifically write/paint for them. Maybe that’s why kids like my work! I just think of them as smallish people who are smart and creative, and honest in their opinions. So when I think about what makes a great children’s book, I tend to think of books that achieve universality, the widest possible readership – books that appeal to us, from toddlers to geriatrics, in a primal way, and can be understood on many different levels. Picture books are particularly great for this, because they’re concise and easily re-read; they often invent their own narrative grammar, as if you are learning how to read all over again.

My interest in picture books only came about later, as an adult artist, as I was moving from painting into commercial illustration and looking for interesting work. The book that really got me interested in picture books — professionally, I mean, in that “Hmmm, I’d really love to do something like that one day” kind of way –was A Fish in the Sky, written by George Mendoza and illustrated by Milton Glaser. (Even if you don’t know Glaser’s work, you almost certainly do. He’s a legendary graphic designer. This book is not easily found, but I urge you to try. I stumbled upon it while doing “research” as a Fine Arts undergrad.) It’s a series of poetic metaphors — “a fish is not just a fish,” “a walk is the woods is not just being alone” – illustrated in an indirect, slightly surrealist way. An image of a big yellow flower floating in the middle of a room is particularly resonant for me, as the book is about both the power and fragility of sensory memory – there no particular narrative as such. This approach had a huge impact on me as a “visual writer,” and A Fish in the Sky strongly influenced my own picture book about depression, The Red Tree.

Another book I love along these lines is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg. Originally published in 1984, I came across a copy in my outer suburban library in Western Australia, flipped through it, and thought “this is weird – where’s the story?” before putting it back. But my curiosity kept me returning, and the genius of Van Allsburg’s approach to storytelling gradually dawned on me: let the reader do the work! Mysteries is a series of fragments, stories that might have been, each represented by a singular image, a title, and a dislocated sentence. The absence of color only adds to the allure of each quiet enigma: a nun floating on an airborne chair, a lump under the carpet, an ocean liner forcing its way into a tiny canal. In each case, you can’t help but imagine your own story: it’s impossible not to think creatively. Van Allsburg reminds us of what is so special about books – that the reader is a co-creator of the world, not just a recipient; they are the principal director of an author’s screenplay and illustrator’s concept art. That’s a key to being a good writer or illustrator, I think – creative humility. You should never feel smarter than your audience.

While we’re on the subject of influence, I’ll list a few other notables that really hooked me when I was an unemployed freelancer, looking for inspiration: Lane Smith’s incredible illustrations for The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Stories, When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs, The Starry Messenger by Peter Sis, and Free Lunch by Vivian Walsh and J. Otto Siebold. These books opened my mind to the sophistication and potential – and, yes, craziness – of picture books. They were intriguing, original, funny, and as complex as any real work of art.

It’s worth mentioning that Australia has a particularly strong picture book culture, and there’s some really amazing work for US readers to check out. Ron Brooks is one of my favorite illustrators, and I’d recommend his book Fox (written by Margaret Wild, a terrific picture book writer not afraid to tackle big subjects). This is a fable with a touch of Orwell about it: a half-blind Dog rescues a crippled Magpie, and together they help each other survive in the bush – until lonely Fox comes along to lure Magpie away. Yet Fox doesn’t want to befriend her or even eat her; he just wants her and Dog to “know what it’s like to be truly alone.” It’s gut-wrenching stuff, and could only ever achieve full impact as a short, seemingly innocent-looking picture book. Children, of course, know all about this kind of social carnage, and no doubt appreciate seeing it represented honestly as much as adults do.

I’d also recommend Armin Greder’s The Island, about a stranger washed ashore on an island of gossipy villagers. They take him in, but become increasingly afraid of his “ominous” presence, even though the man does not say or do anything ominous. This book cuts to the core of all our debates about refugees, particularly here in Australia, a big island with a checkered history when it comes to immigration. Greder’s drawings convey a crucial part of the story through a quiet and expressive style, one I’d call ”ugly beauty.”

Okay, I realize these are all fairly dark books, which I suppose is a pretty cear reflection of my particular inclinations – e.g., loving Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies (an alphabet book, containing illustrations of Victorian children meeting their end in novel ways!), and the book I checked out the most than any other at my local library as a kid, The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight by Jack Prelutsky and Arnold Lobel. So to balance things out a bit – to inject a little light – I’d recommend Leigh Hobbs’ absurd and hilarious Mr. Chicken Goes to Paris. Hobbs’s drawings look very much like dinner-napkin doodles, with all their attendant disregard for continuity or finesse. Our hero, Mr. Chicken, looks a little like a defrosted supermarket chicken with an angry face, fangs and, as described in his passport, “everything yellow.” He’s gigantic, a monster with a parson’s nose – as an actual nose. He has a friend named Yvonne in Paris, a happy little girl who takes him on a sightseeing tour… and that’s pretty much it! What makes Hobbs’s work so fun, though, is that everything is understated and matter of fact; there’s something quite Australian about this sort of surreal, laconic humour. It’s a quality also present in another of my favorite picture books, The Great Escape from City Zoo, which is about four animals on the run who manage to hold regular jobs and apartments in a city much like New York, where people are likely to overlook the fact that you are actually a flamingo or anteater, so long as you keep your clothes on and pay your taxes. Just don’t fall on your back if you’re a turtle, or faint outside a taxidermist’s shop window!

Lately, my own work has been drifting into that wonderful gray area between picture books and comic books, so I’ve been reading a lot of graphic novels, which are also, in turn, informing my work as a film-maker. I say “gray” partly because of blurry definition boundaries – panels, pages, word bubbles – but also because the audience for graphic novels can be hard to pin down, though these books are often more “young adult” than “children’s.” But again, the best ones are those that cross over and appeal widely, and here I would include, once again, the work of Raymond Briggs, particularly The Snowman (which greatly influenced by own book, The Arrival) and the biography of his parents, Ethel and Ernest. Then there’s American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, which was personally very resonant for me: as an Australian-born half-Chinese growing up in a very non-Asian place, I recognize a lot of Yang’s neuroses (also dealt with in the work of Adrian Tomine, who’s very faulty protagonists look, eerily, just like me!). Skim by Canadian cousins Jillian and Mariko Tamaki deals with some similar themes from a female perspective, plus a whole lot of other teenage angst, perfectly pitched. A big theme of many graphic novels, of course, is marginality – where the medium and message have a bit in common. Stitches by David Small, Blankets by Craig Thompson, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi: they’re all about individuals looking for meaning in a confusing, troubled world – which could be said about my own work, too.

I’m sure we’ll be seeing interesting things very soon in the world of e-books, but I do believe that the traditional picture book – words and images printed on pieces of paper – is hard to beat. Books are actually objects, and that’s a big part of their appeal. Their physical limitations inspire creative problem solving – I find that my best work grows out of formal restrictions. I’ve dabbled with a lot of other things, but always seem to come back to picture books as the perfect vehicle for creating simple, complex little worlds that everyone can enjoy, and revisit at different times in their life.

When I first typed out the recipe for this very forgiving flatbread pizza, I added the word “optional” after “freshly grated nutmeg” and “fresh thyme” and then thought long and hard about why. For as long as I’ve been editing recipes I’ve been using “optional” as a way to say “I realize this is an ingredient you might not have on hand” or “I realize this is an extra step you might not want to take on a night that allows for not a single extra step” or “If this is the ingredient that makes dinner a deal-breaker with your kid, by all means omit!”  Have you noticed that you don’t ever come across “optional” in a serious recipe collection? (A quick flip through The Essential New York Times Cookbook, The Babbo Cookbook, and The Classic Italian Cookbook just confirmed this.) I’m guessing their philosophy is: If you’re going to do it, DO it. I love and embrace this philosophy. But I love and embrace it mostly on the weekend.

Here’s what you need to know about any of the Quick recipes on this site: Within reason, almost all the ingredients in any recipe are optional — or at the very least replaceable. This is especially true if not having the ingredient in question derails your plans for what was going to be a home-cooked dinner. The other night I was craving a meatless Monday kind of pizza on a Jim Lahey kind of pizza crust. But I had neither a Jim Lahey crust nor a ball of mozzarella, which, for my kids, is about as “optional” an ingredient for pizza as potatoes are for French Fries. I did have a ball of storebought dough, though, and it turns out, if you use the Jim Lahey thinning-out method on any old dough, well, it’s not Jim Lahey, but it’s still pretty damn tasty. Instead of the mozz, I used a generous scattering of shaved Parmesan and the overall effect was so much lighter and way more flavorful. Turns out, I actually like this version better. No matter that the kids wouldn’t eat the mushrooms on something called mushroom pizza. The point is: in spite of the ill-equipped pantry and refrigerator, we were still sitting down and eating something together. I’m trying to make sure that part is not optional.

PS: Dinner: A Love Story isn’t on sale until June 5, but you can still order it now as a Mother’s Day Gift and get special extras as placeholder gifts like a signed bookplate or a “Make Dinner Not War” bumper sticker. Click here for all the details. Offer is good through May 10.

Flatbread Pizza with Mushrooms & Arugula
You already know about the salad pizza half (the kids’ favorite, though here we replaced the mozzarella with Parm), but the mushroom arugula is new and inspired by one we tried at Boqueria this past weekend. Well, I didn’t actually try it. Everyone else at the table inhaled it (including my five-year-old mushroom-hating nephew) before I could steal a bite. And this post, in large part, is an attempt to make up for that regrettable fact. This recipe makes one full mushroom & arugula pizza. If you are going halvsies, divide all the toppings by two.

1 8-to-12 ounce ball storebought pizza dough
1 1/2 cups grated Parmesan
1 shallot, chopped finely
1 shake red pepper flakes
olive oil
2 cups mushrooms (such as cremini), chopped into fine dice
pinch freshly grated nutmeg
2 large handfuls arugula
olive oil and a splash of red wine vinegar whisked together
fresh thyme
broccoli flowers (procured over the weekend at the Greenmarket in Union Square with the girls and, in spite of everything I wrote above, I feel the need to point out that these are particularly and ridiculously and extremely optional)

Preheat oven to 500°F. Brush a rectangular cookie sheet with a little olive oil and, using your fingers, press down on pizza dough until it’s about as thin as it can be. Sprinkle Parmesan evenly on top of dough.

In a skillet set over medium heat, cook onions and red pepper flakes in olive oil, about 2 minutes until onions soften. Stir in mushrooms and cook until they release their liquid, about 2-3 more minutes. Add nutmeg and remove from heat.

Bake pizza for 8 minutes, then scatter mushroom mixture on top. Cook another 5 minutes until crust is golden around the edges. While pizza is cooking, toss arugula with a little olive oil and vinegar, salt, and pepper. Remove pizza from oven, top with arugula, and, um, broccoli flowers. Cut into wedges and serve.

When I was growing up, my mom made the best Swedish meatballs. And chicken Milanese. And lasagna with locally made sweet Italian sausages and old-school red sauce. (None of that fancy béchamel stuff.) These days, when I drag my family for dinner at my parents’ house, I beg her to make one of these dishes for me. How could I not? They were the tent-poles of my culinary upbringing — the family dinner rotation — and I must’ve had each of them once a week for eighteen years. If there were other things worth eating out there, I didn’t care to know about them.

I can’t believe how different the dinner situation is in my own house today. My kids never have any idea what’s going to be on the menu. Like all kids, they have their crazy-making aversions (as you know by now, one won’t eat pasta; neither will touch eggs), but their strengths are in the adventure department. They approach the table (mostly) game for just about anything else. Not because they are superior children, but because they have no choice. When you are a food blogger and cookbook writer, you have to keep up with the schedule. You have to keep things interesting.

Unfortunately, “interesting” to me and Andy, often translates to “annoying” for an 8- or 10-year old. As if my little lab rats are not already starving enough when they sit down to eat, they have to live in a test kitchen. They have to wait for the clouds to diffuse the sun just enough to create optimum photographic conditions to shoot what’s set before them. They have to hear their parents earnestly discuss things like acidity in their freaking salad dressing. And God forbid they love something as much as I loved my mom’s meatballs; they might never see it again. For months now, my 10-year-old has been begging for a reprise of the baked lemony chicken dish I debuted it at the table a year ago. The Lemon Chicken! Of course! I promise her. But first we have to retest the fish cakes for the cookbook, and after that we have to turn in our copy for Bon Appetit, so we need to double check that the marinade is getting the right flavor on the grilled flank steak. And remember how we were going to taste-test all those frozen pizzas? Sorry, sweetie, maybe next week?

Family dinner illustration by William Steig, from Abby’s new favorite: When Everybody Wore a Hat.

PS: This is what we are eating tonight. Or some version of it.

Twice a year, every year, for the past ten years, we drive 850 miles from New York to South Carolina to spend a week at the beach. It’s a long drive. With two kids in the back, singing Adele a capella, it’s a really long drive. We try to do it in one shot with just one stop: Sally Bell’s Kitchen, two minutes off the highway in Richmond, Virginia. Their famous lunchboxes, which they’ve been packing since the ’50s, are almost worth the trip alone. We buy four, then walk to a park nearby to sit in the sun, stretch our legs a bit, and eat.

Inside each box is a happy meal from another, better time: a Smithfield ham-and-iceberg sandwich on a roll, a paprika-dusted deviled egg wrapped in parchment paper, a two-bite cupcake (You get three choices: chocolate, almond, or caramel) that is frosted on three sides, a cheese crisp, a packet of Duke’s mayonnaise and, best of all, a small paper cup filled with super-eggy potato salad and topped with a lone sweet pickle chip. Hot damn!

While the girls love the salty ham with mayo and the novelty of a cupcake that’s more frosting than it is cake, it’s the whole package—and the act of unwrapping of it—that blows their small minds. The white cardboard boxes, tied with bakery twine and lined with checkerboard tissue paper, are prizes they’ve earned by enduring four hundred miles lashed to their booster seats, watching I-95 roll by, and being force-fed Dad’s music. The food is real and great and they love it, but they also love what it represents: the trip is halfway done, and the next time we stop, they’ll be in vacation land, with all its attendant promise.

Occasionally, we try to replicate the lunchbox at home. The tangy potato salad in particular is a mainstay at our summer barbecues, and goes perfectly with a well-cooked burger and a salad. The kids eat up a (slightly less eggy) version as eagerly as ever. For them, it’s a little taste of vacation — but from the comfort of their own home

This is our “Providers” column from the May 2012 issue (The Travel Issue!) of Bon Appetit — on newsstands today. Please head over to their site for the Eggy Potato Salad with Pickles recipe and to access the entire Providers Archive. Photo by the amazing Marcus Nilsson for BonApp.

And by free we mean, um, sort of free. Here’s the deal: We like dinner. We also like books. And while Jenny’s upcoming book, on its every (“masterful,” says her husband) page, honors the meals we’ve made together for the past fifteen years, there is not a single word in it devoted to books — our love for them, or they way they inform our daily lives. What better way to fix that than to produce another book, devoted solely to the things we read and write about so frequently on this site. In some ways, we’ve spent the past two weeks months years pulling this project together*, and it was only a matter of time. We finally decided to turn it into a proper book of its own because we realized not long ago that (a) we’d already written more than 20,000 words’ worth of reviews since DALS was born, and (b) a big list of great, enduring books (for kids ages 0 to 10) might be something parents — as well as aunts, uncles, friends of pregnant people, husbands looking for point-scoring Mother’s Day presents, and good readers everywhere — could really use.

And now, for the fine print: If you pre-order Dinner: A Love Story, we’ll send you our new book of kid books FOR FREE. It only exists for now as a pdf, which means it’s easily forwarded and shared and copied, but we know you guys are decent, upstanding people and we trust you so deeply and know you would never send this around, all indiscriminately, since we spent so much time and effort putting it together FOR FREE.  If you want one, all you have to do is email thebook@dinneralovestory.com, tell us you ordered a copy of Dinner: A Love Story, and we’ll send you all 25 pages of our book, in beautiful color, FOR FREE. Jenny’s whizbangy technical consultant has figured out a way to prompt every fifth email with a one-step request for proof of purchase. And yes, we know this means there’s an 80% chance you can lie and get this book without pre-ordering, but, well…see above re: decent, upstanding people.

One last thing: This offer is only good through Thursday, April 26 at midnight. So let’s do this thing. – Andy

*A huge, huge thank you to the supremely talented Chelsea Cardinal – magazine genius, illustrator, book cover designer, clothing designer (for real), seriously solid person — who turned our pile of disjointed text into something that makes us so happy to look at. We are convinced Chelsea will be famous one day, and we are grateful to have worked with her. 

UPDATE: This offer has now expired. Thank you to everyone for the nice response and the even nicer notes that came along with the pre-orders. There’s a chance the offer might resurface on Facebook in the next few weeks, so if you missed it, be sure to follow DALS there.

I bought the perfect black blazer earlier this spring. I had been looking for one forever — it’s such a basic wardrobe staple that it had to be exactly right — and as soon I brought it home, I headed straight to my closet and started pulling out different tops and pants I could wear it with. I tried it on with jeans and Bensimons. With wedges and a skirt I hadn’t seen in ages. Then with jeans and flats. And then with those white jeans that had been buried way at the bottom of the trunk. And the dress jammed in the back of the closet. (Hello old friend!! Where have you been?) Does this happen to you? When you are excited about a new piece of clothing does it somehow make you see everything else in your closet with brand new eyes?

Well, last week, I think a pack of chicken chorizo sausage had a similar effect on the contents of my refrigerator.  Whenever I have a few links in my kitchen, opening the fridge door on a weeknight at 6:30 seems  somehow rich with potential — instead of fraught with peril. This week it was all excitement and experimenting: What should I wear my chorizo with? Last week I sliced up some links for a frittata with kale, potatoes, manchego, onions, and tomato. This week, I browned some slices and stuffed them in a tortilla with spinach, avocado, and a creamy cilantro dressing — a riff on a salad I order all the time at the local Tex-Mex joint. It almost feels like cheating, this having chorizo around. Like I need to suffer more for my dinner somehow. Oh well. There’s always tomorrow.

Chicken Chorizo Taco with Spinach and Avocado
Serves 4

1/2 cup plain yogurt
1/2 cup cilantro
juice from 1/2 lime
1/4 teaspoon cumin
salt
2 links smoked chicken chorizo sausage, sliced into rounds (or 1/2 link per eater)
4 whole wheat tortillas
4 handfuls fresh spinach, cleaned and chopped
1 avocado, chopped

Make creamy cilantro dressing: Using a small food processor, blend together yogurt, cilantro,lime, cumin, and salt.*

In a small skillet (preferably cast-iron), fry chorizo rounds until crispy on both sides, about 2 minutes a side. Remove from skillet. Turn heat to medium-high and cook each tortilla until brown, about 30 seconds per side. Top each with a handful of spinach, chorizo rounds, avocado and a drizzle of cilantro dressing.

*If you are pressed for time and can’t deal with a food processor, you can skip the dressing and just garnish your taco with cilantro, lime, and yogurt (or sour cream).

Chorizo and Kale Frittata

1 link chorizo, sliced into coins
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons chopped onions or shallots
Handful of fingerling potatoes, thinly sliced into “coins” like thick potato chips (about 1⁄2 cup)
8 to 10 grape tomatoes, chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1 handful washed and roughly chopped kale
4 eggs
1/3 cup shredded Manchego cheese (or cheddar or Jack)
1 tablespoon chopped fresh herbs, such as parsley or chives

Preheat the broiler. In a cast-iron (or oven-proof) skillet, fry the chorizo over medium-high heat until brown and crispy, 3 -5 minutes. Remove from pan.

Add oil and cook onions about 1 minute.

Push onions to side of the pan and add the potatoes in a single layer. Cook another 5 minutes, until the potatoes are crispy and mostly cooked through. Add tomatoes and cook, stirring for 1 minute. Add the kale to the pan and stir until the leaves wilt. Add chorizo.

Whisk together the eggs, cheese, and herbs in a small bowl. Pour the egg mixture into the pan and stir lightly to make sure the spinach and potatoes are evenly distributed.

Let cook without stirring for about 2 minutes. When eggs are mostly cooked around the edges, transfer to the oven. Broil for 1 to 2 minutes, until eggs are cooked and top is slightly golden. Cut into pizza-like wedges and serve.

The subject of the email was “High Levels of Arsenic…” and the first sentence, written by Ali, my babysitter, was “Did you see this?” (Never a good sign.)  Attached was a link to an ABC News story telling us to watch out for elevated levels of aresenic in organic powdered formula, cereal bars, energy bars, or anything that listed “organic brown rice syrup” as the first ingredient — like, for instance, the granola bars from Trader Joe’s that our children had been consuming five days a week for three years now.

Awesome!

I googled a bit more to see what else I could find  – for whatever reason, it makes me feel better in these situations when an alarmist title like “Arsenic in Baby Formula” doesn’t spread like wildfire. I like to convince myself that the media is more savvy about these things, so they don’t fall for sensational health stories the way I do. But in this particular case, the lack of info about the organic brown rice syrup out there might have had something to do with the fact that the media was consumed by pink slime. Or the E Coli outbreak with spinach. Or the filthy conditions uncovered at Kreiders, our country’s largest factory-farmed egg producer. Or any number of terrifying food safety issues we are almost de-sensitized to by this point. I mean, it’s organic brown rice syrup for chrissakes. Isn’t buying organic supposed to protect us from this kind of stuff? Or am I just buying into a false sense of security.

The question for me, as always, is: How do you know what to believe? And once you decide what to believe how do you apply that belief in your own kitchen. Remember how devastating it was to hear about BPA in baby bottles? I think it was more devastating for me because we were past that stage. There was literally nothing that could be done about all those leaching plastic bottles we ran through the steaming hot dishwasher and nuked in the microwave. (It hurts just to type that.) The BPA bottle situation was completely and utterly beyond our control.

This is in the back of my head during situations like this. (And also when I pack school lunches in BPA-free containers like these.) I decided to stop buying the Trader Joe’s granola bars because it was — somewhat — in my control. If the bars had been something our kids ate every now and then, I don’t know if we would’ve cared too much. But they were VIPS in the lunch box and on the afterschool snack plate. I even had a box of them under the armrest in the Mazda for those days I end up going right from the train station to soccer to ballet to soccer to…you get it. It seemed we had to at least cut back. But it’s not like I feel better about anything. It’s not like I don’t feel like I’m stuck in a giant game of whack-a-mole when it comes to this stuff.

If it is about control, though, I don’t think there’s a better solution to this problem than cooking from Alana Chernila’s beautiful new book, The Homemade Pantry. You may know Alana. She writes about food and family on her blog Eating From the Ground Up. She has two daughters. She is married to a guy who loves books. She lives for her Saturday farmer’s market. (Is this sounding familiar?) And she’s spent the last few years figuring out how to make basic things at home that she once thought only the supermarket provided. Things like jam, pickles, cheese, hummus, pop tarts (!!), mayo, chicken nuggets, veggie burgers and….GRANOLA BARS!

I told her she was my hero for getting this book out there, and this is how she responded. “Making this stuff does give us the power. If we feel freaked out by brown rice syrup in a recipe, we can keep the ratio, and mess around with some other sticky stuff, and then- voila!- we have a bar that we can feel good about giving our children.” That’s the beauty of this book, the control part. “When we get into the kitchen, and we see the components that make up, say, a snack bar, we just make it like we want it. And then we are all heroes.”

The Nutty Granola Bar (or “Car Snack 3″) 

From The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying & Start Making, by Alana Chernila
Note from Alana: Although there are a lot of ingredients, putting the bars together only takes a few minutes. Makes sixteen 2 1/4 by 3 1/4-inch bars

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1/4 cup coconut oil (or butter)
3/4 cup Nut Butter (homemade — it’s in her book — or storebought)
1/2 cup  packed light brown sugar (homemade or storebought)
2 tablespoons Vanilla Extract (homemade or storebought)
1/3 cup honey
2 1/2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
1 1/2 cups raw sliced almonds
1/2 cup shredded unsweetened coconuts
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup oat bran
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a 9 x 13-inch baking pan with parchment paper, leaving extra paper to pull the finished product out of the pan.

In a large saucepan, combine the butter, coconut oil, nut butter, brown sugar, vanilla, honey, and 2 tablespoons water. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until you have a uniform syrup. Remove from heat. Add the oats, almonds, coconut, chocolate chips, oat bran, sesame seeds, and cinnamon. Stir until the dry ingredients are thoroughly coated. Transfer the mixture to the prepared pan, and press it as firmly into the pan as possible, first using your hands, then using a spatula or wooden spoon to flatten the top. Sprinkle the salt over the top.

Bake until the edges darken, 35 to 40 minutes. The mixture will be soft when you take it out of the oven, but allow it to cool completely before taking it out of the pan and cutting into 16 squares.

They can be stored at room temperature in a covered container for 10 days and in the freezer, cut and stored in a covered freezer-safe container (with layers of parchment paper) for 4 months.

Don’t forget to check in with us this TUESDAY, APRIL 24th. We have an exciting proposition for you. Well, we think it’s exciting anyway. I hope you do, too.

On any given day, there are about a zillion things that can derail family dinner  – where do we begin? — and I’ve probably heard about every one of those things from you guys these past few years. How do I deal with the fussy toddler? The spouse who won’t help? My coworker who makes me feel bad about leaving the office before him? The relentlessness of after-school activities and all the schlepping it entails? This last one always stumped me. It seemed of all the obstacles one could face, this one was something we could control instead of complain about. What I didn’t know until fairly recently, though, was how broadly defined the term “after-school” has become. We just got the soccer schedule for the spring and one of my daughters has a practice that ends at 7:30, at a field that’s a 20-minute drive away. That’s a dinner deal-breaker if there ever was one. Well, unless you have this recipe in the repertoire. Cause you can have this on the table in the time it takes for your midfielder to walk in the door, change out of her jersey, get washed up, and return to the table where she belongs.

Simple Miso-Glazed Salmon
A big reason why I could get this on the table so fast was because I had a stash of the glaze in the fridge already. Making the glaze definitely qualifies as the kind of task your bright-eyed morning self can do ahead of time — it takes only a minute or two if you have all the ingredients on hand.  Your beaten-down evening self will thank you later.

1 1/3 pound salmon
2 tablespoons white miso*
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon brown sugar
squeeze of lime

In a small bowl, mix together everything but the lime. Slather the miso glaze on salmon and broil for 10-12 minutes until it gets golden on top. (Watch it carefully. The sugar in the glaze will burn.) Serve with lime wedges.

While the salmon was broiling, I briefly sauteed some snap peas in a drop of sesame oil, then tossed them with a sliced radish, sea salt, a squeeze of lime, and chives. (Scallions would be better than chives, but I didn’t have any on hand.)

*You can buy white miso at Asian specialty stores or better supermarkets like Whole Foods. It keeps in the fridge for ages.

I realize I’m not breaking any journalistic ground with this observation, but I’m going to say it anyway: It’s kinda crazy what you can check off The List when you’re not surrounded by small people asking for a snack or to tie a soccer cleat or to find the math notebook which was right here a second ago and to look at me! Look at me! Look at me!  Take, for instance, an unseasonably warm winter Friday this past February. My friends Ed Nammour and Kate Porterfield showed up in my kitchen at 8:00 am — a few minutes after Andy and I shepherded Phoebe and Abby to the bus stop — and by the time the girls disembarked seven hours later, brains filled with fractions and parallelograms, Ed had shot this crazy beautiful honest-to-God Book Trailer for me, complete with a thing called B-Roll? Do you guys know from B-Roll?

I’m exaggerating a bit there — B-Roll is one of the few terms I knew going into the whole production, but that’s about where the knowledge tops off. A big reason why I chose a career as an editor and then opted for the blog medium when I started Dinner: A Love Story 2 1/2 years ago, was because I didn’t have to, you know, talk. With my mouth. Out loud. In front of people. I warned Kate — who was serving as the off-camera interviewer, and who you might remember for coining the page-turner concept — that she would have her work cut out for her. I was not going to be able to put a sentence together in any kind of coherent way. I am a writer! I speak through my keyboard and like to have time to scratch my chin while formulating unique insights!

“Jenny,” Kate replied to all this. “You’re not talking about North Korea here. You’re talking about dinner.”

See why I forced her to be on set with me? Five hours later, I had managed to articulate a few thoughts about family dinner and my book, and why this project has meant so much to me as a parent these past few years. And Kate was on the 1:20 train back to Brooklyn, where her daughters were returning from their school day.

I hope you have some time to watch it and, if you like what you see, to share it with other people who might be inspired to catch the family dinner bug, too. If you love what you see? Well, by now, I think you know what to do. And if you’d rather spend those 3 minutes and 57 seconds reading about North Korea, I’ll crystallize the video and the book and the entire mission of DALS for you with one quote I said at about 3:09:

“What I tried to do with this book is cover all the things that can happen at the family dinner table during all stages of a family’s life.”

That means the Just-Married Days, the New Parent Days, and the Bonafide Family Dinner Days, when we get to have conversations at the table that don’t begin with the phrase “If you don’t eat that fill-in-the-blank….”

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that Ed’s work was far from over when the bus came at the end of our shoot day. He spent more hours than I can bear to think about whittling the 60 minutes of dinner-talking and pizza-flipping footage into the 3:57 narrative you see above. How I got so lucky to live around the corner from a filmmaker and commercial director who (on the side!) loves to support local projects…I’ll never know. I’m just glad I got to meet him that day five years ago when he, his wife, and six other families bid farewell to their kindergartners at the bus stop.

Reminder: A week from today, April 24th, be sure to check in with DALS! We have an exciting proposition for you which, amazingly, doesn’t involve our yogurt-marinated chicken. Well, it sort of does, I guess. But only peripherally.

It’s 10:45 on Wednesday night. I’m in bed. The girls are too. If they are not yet asleep, they are puzzling over who will be booted from American Idol tomorrow. My husband is sitting next to me working on something very exciting for DALS that we will tell you all about the week of April 23. (Please make a point to visit that day.) And I’m writing about Cobb Salad. (How exactly did I get here? Please tell me.) I don’t have a whole lot to say about the meal, other than it was assembled between 4:00 and 4:20 (wedged in between a long overdue pediatrician appointment and a soccer practice that was plotting to invade our dinner hour), and that the swap-in of shredded kale for crunchy romaine went largely unnoticed by the girls since it was buried under some favorite flavors (read: bacon), and that it works well for kids because it can be customized like a salad bar, and that it made a dent in our significant stash of hard-boiled Easter eggs, and that I wish my kids would eat eggs as enthusiastically as they decorated them, and that every time I eat it I wonder why I only think to make this the week after Easter.

That’s all.

Kale Cobb Salad

In a bowl, toss together large bunch kale (shredded), 3 pieces bacon (crumbled), 2 tablespoons scallions/red onion/shallots (minced), handful tomatoes (chopped), 2 hard-boiled eggs (chopped), 1/2 cup crumbled blue or feta, 1 avocado (chopped), 1 cup cooked chicken (shredded or chopped) with your favorite dressing or this all-purpose vinaigrette. Set aside any potentially deal-breaking ingredient for the kids — in my house, that would  be the ingredient that inspired the meal to begin with: eggs.

A few other ways to use up hard-boiled eggs! Spring asparagus with chopped egg and onion (serve with crispy chicken or fried fish); sliced hard-boiled eggs on white toast with mayonnaise and chopped chives (Andy’s personal favorite); classic potato salad (if you have an advance copy of my new book, see page 244); Curried Egg Salad Sandwich; Caesar Salad Deviled Eggs; Salad Nicoise Sandwich; French meatloaf (page 136 of Time for Dinner)

I’m beginning to think that parenting is just a lifelong excuse to turn anything into a celebration. Because if you really think about it, there is always something to celebrate.  The problem with this of course, is…there’s always something to celebrate, i.e. there’s always some kind of treat that — in our house at least — seems to be central to the celebrating. It’s the last day of school before spring break: By The Way Bakery cupcakes! You just rode your bike four miles: Mint chip ice cream! It’s Daddy’s birthday: Cherry pie! No cavities at the dentist: Pain au chocolat! It’s Passover: Matzoh brittle! It’s Easter….oh dear Lord, Easter. I think this holiday — which we technically don’t even celebrate — might have officially eclipsed Halloween as the biggest treat-o-thon in our family. It begins with the obligatory air-dried Peeps, then the neighbor’s Easter Egg hunt where we are lucky to come home with only a few chocolate eggs. (Woe is the poor soul who wins the 1000 Jelly Bean Jar contest!) And then there is the long-awaited treat-filled basket from Grandma, which, to the girls delight, always includes a ginormous chocolate bunny. A ginormous chocolate bunny that ends up sitting in his plastic case in the corner of the kitchen like a museum piece: So fun to look at, yet never consumed. This year, we decided to change that — instead of letting him get all dusty and sad, we melted him down to make the healthy-ish chocolate covered banana pops that you see below. They are easy, delicious, and just the thing to cap off our dinner on Thursday, when we plan to celebrate the dog’s third birthday.

Chocolate Covered Banana Pops

There is a recipe for these in my first cookbook, but you don’t really need official instructions. Before you begin, cut your bananas in half, insert popsicle sticks or halved wooden skewers (as shown below) and freeze for about 15 minutes on a flat surface. While bananas are freezing, melt down your bunny over low heat (removing all bowties and styrofoam accessories, please), whisking as the bunny shrinks*. (You can also do this in the microwave in a Pyrex for about a minute, depending on the size of the bunny.) When your chocolate has melted, pour into a deep measuring cup or a cereal bowl. Dip your now semi-frozen bananas into the chocolate and place pops down on a wax-paper covered surface. Quickly sprinkle oats, sprinkles, or chopped nuts on top before the chocolate hardens. Freeze until ready to eat, at least a half hour.

*I added water as mine melted to get to the right consistency, but usually even a drop of water or hint of steam puts the chocolate at risk of seizing, so only do this if absolutely necessary. My friend who works in a test kitchen surmises that the reason mine didn’t seize and get grainy was because the chocolate in the bunny was not, in fact, real chocolate.

The chocolate hardens fast, so add your toppings quick like a bunny.