Dinner: A Love Story (Jenny Rosenstrach)

Inspired by her popular blog, DinnerALoveStory.com, a practical, readable, inspiring mix of recipes and stories from a dinnertime doyenne that will be indispensible in the kitchen and impossible to put down even after you're done cooking
 
“Jenny Rosenstrach writes about food and family with such a marvelous spirit of warmth, friendship and—most importantly—pragmatism that you simply can't help but fall in love with her. As long as people keep having kids, jobs, marriages and appetites, this cookbook is destined to remain a classic.”—Elizabeth Gilbert,author of Eat, Pray, Love

"Anyone who wants to shape family dinner into a time of greater enjoyment and engagement will find Dinner: A Love Story a terrific guide. Warm, funny, packed with recipes and photos, and reassuringly nonjudgmental, it will help inspire the most faint-hearted of cooks to pre-heat the oven."—Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project  
 

Jenny Rosenstrach, and her husband, Andy, regularly, some might say pathologically, cook dinner for their family every night. Even when they work long days. Even when their kids’ schedules pull them in eighteen different directions.
 
They are not super-human. They are not from another planet.
 
With simple strategies and common sense, Jenny figured out how to break down dinner—the food, the timing, the anxiety, from prep to clean-up—so that her family could enjoy good food, time to unwind, and simply be together.
 
She shares what she knows on her blog, Dinner: A Love Story—which launched in early 2010 to immediate and overwhelming popularity—and now the book, bringing all the best elements of the website together with new recipes, photos and illustrations. Using the same straight-up, inspiring voice that her blog readers have come to count on her for, Jenny never judges, never preaches, and never cites any studies about family dinner that ultimately make all of us feel bad. Every meal she dishes up is a real meal— that is, a meal that actually happened, a meal that has been cooked and eaten and enjoyed at least a half dozen times by someone in Jenny’s house. (And up to three dozen times in the case of Andy’s now legendary pork ragu.)
 
In all, the book offers inspiration and game plans for any home cook at any level. It is as much for the novice who doesn’t know where to start, as it is for the gourmand who doesn’t know how to start over when she finds herself feeding an intractable toddler stuck in a white-food-only phase, for the person who never thought too hard about home-cooked meals until he or she became a parent, for mothers and fathers of any kind who want to carve out more quality time with their children. This book is, in fact, for anyone interested in learning how to execute a meal to be shared with someone they love, and about how so many good, happy things can come from doing so.
 
Fabulously readable and practical, Dinner: A Love Story captures the charming, the messy, the annoying, the crazy fun of dinner. And Jenny’s confidence, clarity ,and humor make this a cookbook you will want to take out of the kitchen and keep reading, falling in love with dinner and with Jenny and her wonderful family along the way.