I love this book.
Every once in awhile I'll read a book that's not just good, but one that comes into my life at the absolute perfect time. I read Dinner: A Love Story in the middle of a particularly stressful couple of weeks. Every day felt like a wild swing on the pendulum with great things (my work is in a gallery!) and not-so-great (being turned down for a writing job I really wanted). This book was a little oasis of joy waiting for me at the end of the day. It was soothing and comforting, the literary equivalent of a bowl of homemade mac and cheese.
It's a cookbook in that there's recipes inside, but it's more than that. It is the story of a family and their dinner evolution—the dinner parties of a young couple, the trials of trying to rush home for dinner when working a hectic full-time job, the agonies of trying to get your two kids to branch out beyond the chicken nugget. There's a lot of text in this book, much more than in an ordinary cookbook. And it's good text—amusing in places, packed with down-to-earth common sense in others. There's a warmth about the author's personal life story that makes it feel engaging and real.
The author, Jenny Rosenstrach, is a former editor of Cookie and Real Simple and a current contributor to Bon Appetit. I'll admit I love reading books by former editors because they are usually so well-written, smart and entertaining at the same time. Jenny writes a popular blog of the same name (Dinner: A Love Story). You've probably heard about it before; I'm apparently the last person to know about it. (If you
write your own blog, you'll enjoy here little riff about becoming
obsessed by her web stats.)
While I marveled at the stories and tips (calling green beans "green fries" is a stroke of marketing genius), there were a few recipes that caught my eye. They look clear and easy to understand and a good many of them work for fast weekday meals and picky kids. One that blew my mind was a Hawaiian pizza that you can make on the stove top so you don't have to turn on the oven in the middle of the summer. Hello, where have you been all my life?
Highly recommended.