Dinner: A Love Story: It All Begins at the Family Table
Jenny Rosenstrach - june 11, 2013

Jenny Rosenstratch chronicles her often hilarious adventures cooking for (and sometimes with) her husband and two daughters over sixteen years in this three part cooking memoir. Made of hearty stock, she refuses to describe family dinner as a problem, but admits that some of the challenges involved can be "soul-crushing" and "harrowing". 

To which I  wholeheartedly agree, as the mother of two children myself. But it can also be tons of fun and incredibly rewarding, when things go well. All three parts of this book (newlywed dinners; new parent dinners; successful family dinners) are fun reading for any parent who has ever struggled to put dinner on the table, or even considered the idea. People without children who are looking for simple dinner strategies should have a look, too, especially those who are beginning a family.

Each of the three sections is full of fool proof recipes and useful advice. My favorite is the middle, which contains great ideas for "marketing" various meals to children -  attempts to persuade them to taste new foods the first time, instead of the tenth. For parents of picky eaters, these examples of working solutions are inspirational for seat of the pants dinner table thinking.

As the author knows, it takes time to make dinner work. Not a few hours of pre-planning and prep, but full years worth of daily trial and error are required to master the process. And that is even before adding kids to the mix. Children bring in a thousand more situations requiring a well rehearsed improvisational kitchen performance.  

This book not only works as a collection of recipes and self-help manual for keeping sane while feeding children, but also as an endearing snapshot in time. Dinner A Love Story covers the madness of putting home cooked meals on the table in the new millennium with grace, style and humor - all of which are necessary for dinnertime success in our busy lives. So busy that I, like the author, forgot to fill in my kids' baby books, too. So instead, I'll come back to Dinner A Love Story to remember my years feeding kids.