Dinner: A Love Story

by Jenny Rosenstrach

  In other words, I’m thinking this book might just be for everyone.

  A Note About the Recipes

  All the recipes in this book, unless otherwise noted, serve four, even the ones in Part 1, when the idea of living with kids, let alone feeding them, was about as realistic a proposition as flying to the moon. This is because almost every meal I’ve included is one that has made the evolutionary leap from our table for two to our table for four—and yes, often with a dollop of ketchup on the side.

  You’ll see that some of the recipes are written in conventional style, with the ingredients itemized at the top, and some are written more casually, as though I’m standing next to you and we’re having a conversation (e.g., “Add a few glugs of olive oil and a handful of chopped fresh mint”). This inconsistency is not an oversight. I’ve thought a lot about recipe structure in my career as a food editor (and once even had a spirited debate about it on my blog) and I’ve come to this conclusion: Cooking from conventional recipes is how you start, but cooking from casual recipes is how you grow. If you cook regularly enough, there will come a day when you won’t need to measure out the quarter teaspoon of cayenne or set the timer when a recipe says cook for “3 minutes per side.” Just like parenting, you will have to accept there will be snags, but eventually you’ll learn to trust your instincts.

  Part 1 • 1998–2001

  Rituals,

  Relationships,

  Repertoires

  or, how we taught ourselves to cook

  Part 1 • 1998–2001

  My mother went back to school when I was in fourth grade. She had been a full-time mom for almost ten years, and once my twin brother, Phil, my older sister, Lynn, and I were occupied all day with play rehearsals, calligraphy club, tennis lessons, and ballet and tap classes (and people say overscheduling is a new phenomenon?) she decided it was time for her to get back in the game. I remember the day she told us. We were all in the car and she was about to start chauffeuring us around the county to our various activities. But before she shifted into drive, she said she had some news.

  “I’m going to law school,” she said. “I’m going to be a lawyer.” There was a stack of pamphlets and applications on the passenger seat and she held them up as if to offer proof.

  This was thirty years ago, so the exact details of what she said are hazy, but I have a clear memory of how she looked from the backseat of our tan Oldsmobile Cutlass: proud. Until that moment, I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that my mom had her own dreams or that she could spend time doing something that didn’t involve her children. But I was proud of her, too. And telling my friends I had a mom in law school was going to be fun. I just had a few questions. Like: If you’re in law school all day, who is going to drive me to soccer practice? And: Who is going to pick me up from play rehearsal? And: On Thursdays I have Hebrew school until five thirty and then Pointe at six, so how am I supposed to get from one place to another?

  “Don’t worry, Jenny,” she said. “My classes are at night, so your life will proceed just as it always has.”

  Whew.

  And then, the whammy: “But for three nights a week, Dad’s going to be in charge of dinner.”

  Um . . . what?

  My dad didn’t cook. His contribution to the dinner table was a loaf of bread picked up at Grand Central Station before his twenty-five-minute commute home to our house in southern Westchester. (On most nights it was a baguette; on special nights it was a challah with white raisins.) But one thing you could say about Dad—no matter what was going on at the midtown marketing firm where he worked, he walked in the door every night between six thirty and seven o’clock. He never missed dinner. I didn’t realize this in 1981, but his spotless attendance record at the table was obviously a much bigger contribution to dinner hour than the raisin challah, delicious as it was. The moment he walked in was the moment we all started gravitating to the kitchen to peek inside pots and tear off pieces of the fresh bread he set on a cutting board on the table. His arrival, announced by the creaky swing, then slam, of the back screen door, was the signal that dinner was about to be served. I’m not sure my brain even had a part in this decision. All it knew was that my body was being summoned to its seven o’clock magnetic north: the family dinner table.

  And yet my dad’s presence at dinner, as important as it was, was different from cooking that dinner. Until this point, on the rare nights that he had been in charge of feeding us, it usually meant we hit the McDonald’s drive-thru. Even my ten-year-old optimistic self knew we weren’t going to be dining on Happy Meals three times a week for four years.

  “What are we going to eat?” I asked my mother.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she said.

  They figured it out all right. They figured it out in the form of Breaded Chicken Cutlets. Later, when I had kids and was forced to compete with the chickenless chicken nugget, I’d call this dinner “crispy chicken” or “Grandma Jody’s Chicken” (named after my mom), but in 1981 we just called it Chicken Cutlets Again? It must have been the only thing my mom taught my dad how to make, because other than the occasional bowl of spaghetti with “butter sauce,” that’s what we ate three nights a week for eight night-school semesters. Sometimes my mom would set up the dredging station with three plates—one for the flour, one for the beaten egg, one for the bread crumbs—while she waited for my dad to come home from work. He started taking an earlier train to accommodate her new schedule, and as soon as he walked in they’d exchange a few pleasantries while he took off his coat and she put hers on, then kiss each other hello and good-bye. With Tom Brokaw wrapping up the Nightly News on the tiny black-and-white kitchen TV, Dad would finish what my mom had started, standing at the mustard-colored Formica counters moving the cutlets from plate to plate, then finally into the hot skillet. By seven o’clock there would be a homemade meal on the table for my brother, my sister, and me. A decade later, when Mom was partner in her own firm and Dad would be the first one home, he would often prep the chicken dredging station for her.

  From a ten-year-old’s perspective, my parents’ thrice-weekly do-si-do routine was seamless, and their acts of sacrifice for the family expected. But now as the mother of two girls (one who is almost ten herself), I know better than to assume it was as easy as it looked. I’m sure I was too busy memorizing the lyrics to “Food Glorious Food” to notice all the backstage coordinating that had to happen in order for our complicated little lives to continue running smoothly—and in order for us to sit down to a home-cooked dinner with at least one parent every night while my mom was able to go off and learn about torts and civil procedure and pursue a career.

  What did I learn from this besides the desire never to see another breaded chicken cutlet for as long as I lived? Well, for starters, I had a front-row seat to an equality-minded marriage. A marriage where parental roles were flexible, where the pendulum of responsibility swung from spouse to spouse depending on the circumstances, and a marriage where, at the end of the day, the kids came first (unless there is only one beautiful plump apricot left in the bowl, in which case, the mom always comes first). I also learned about the importance of sharing a meal with people who loved me enough to tag-team dredge my chicken.

  So a decade and a half later, when I got married and settled in Brooklyn Heights, I had a very clear sense of what family dinner looked like. And so did my new husband, Andy, who also grew up in a house where both parents worked and where dinner was a command performance for every member of the family. We had other things in common, too: We went to the same college (where we met), we had the same career path (publishing), we had both highlighted large sections in chapter 1 of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and thanks to our parents, we both had highly cultivated guilt complexes, specifically as they related to dinner.

  Even before we had kids, before I was adding up the hours at home and at work and trying to make the numbers come out even, I felt guilty about staying late at work and missing dinner. And s
o did Andy. If either of us made after-work plans that precluded eating together, the abandoner always asked the abandoned if it was okay. As in, “Is it okay if I go out on Thursday with Brian who is flying in from Chicago for one night to see me?” or “Is it okay if my college roommate’s dad wants to take me and his daughter to that new Jean-Georges restaurant Vong?” It is somewhat astounding for me to think about this so many years later, especially now that we have children and the whole idea of guilt has been ratcheted up to levels I couldn’t have grasped back in those days—because of course the answer was always yes. Of course! What kind of marriage required spousal permission for a gin and tonic with a college friend who had flown in from one thousand miles away? It was more than permission, though. It was respect. Respect for each other, respect for the ritual, respect for the meatballs.

  Because, it turns out, those meatballs don’t just appear on the table by themselves. And it also turns out that just because you have a clear idea of what dinner is supposed to look like, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an easy thing to execute—especially if your cooking skills are not as highly developed as your guilt complexes. Neither of us really knew how to get a meal on the table when we first got married, which is to say, we didn’t really know how to cook. It’s not that I was afraid of cooking or hadn’t spent time in the kitchen as a kid. I spent a lot of time there. But my strength was baking, specifically baking from scratch, which I defined as “anything not purchased from the Entenmann’s section of the Grand Union.” That meant Betty Crocker brownies from the box counted as “from scratch” as did Jiffy corn muffins. I’m pretty sure no week went by in the 1980s when I didn’t bake a batch of “homemade” Duncan Hines chocolate chip cookies for my sister and brother. (Remember? The box mix that came with the “butter flavor” squeeze packet?)

  I don’t want to sell myself too short here, though. I did have one or two house specialties, like chocolate croissants, which I concocted by slicing open a frozen Sara Lee crescent roll, stuffing it with half a Hershey bar, then nuking it for exactly 35 seconds. And I had a few meals I could put together in a pinch: Kraft macaroni and cheese topped with browned ground beef (I still make this from time to time: it’s childhood in a bowl); buttered and salted skinny egg noodles; and Steak-umm sandwiches, which I think I had for every weekday lunch in the summer of 1984. I didn’t think too hard about the difference between fresh foods and packaged or processed ones. Until my mother handed me a garlic clove in 1989, I distinctly remember thinking that the only form of garlic was powdered and jarred, with a McCormick label slapped across the front of it.

  So for a while, there would be more microwaved veggie burgers than osso buco at our just-married Brooklyn dinner table. Not only because our culinary skills weren’t quite where they needed to be, but because we had yet to figure out how crucial shopping and planning were in the dinner equation. I had yet to figure out the dinner diary system.

  The dinner diary . . . What drives a person to write down what she cooks or eats for dinner every night in a blank book? And to do this every night for fourteen years and counting? I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time, and I have a few theories, none of which, amazingly, involve an obsessive-compulsive diagnosis. The rationale I like the best is this: It always bothered me that Andy and I spend so many of our waking hours planning for dinner only for all traces of that meal to disappear forever in fifteen minutes. When we were first married, I can remember on more than one occasion opening my eyes in bed on a Sunday morning and seeing my new husband staring right back at me, wide awake. As soon as he felt it was safe to engage his sleep-greedy wife in conversation, the first thing he’d say was not “Good morning” or “How did you sleep?” but “What should we do for dinner tonight?” Then the rest of the day seemed to be headed in one direction: the meal. Writing down what that meal was made the effort and the event itself seem less fleeting and more meaningful. Or maybe that’s just what I tell myself.

  But on Sunday, February 22, 1998, the very first date on the very first page of my dinner diary, I didn’t care about theories. I had one thing on my mind when I opened up the blank green book that Andy bought me for the previous Christmas: How do I make dinner happen? How can I ensure that I will never again have to endure the agonizing back-and-forth weeknight email exchange that began around five o’clock and usually went something like this:

  AW: What should we do for dinner?

  JR: I don’t know. What do you think?

  AW: I don’t know, what are you in the mood for?

  JR: Something healthy? Salad?

  AW: Just had a big salad for lunch. Pasta?

  JR: Nah, Jennifer Aniston lost thirty pounds by not eating pasta.

  AW: Well what, then?

  JR: I don’t know.

  AW: Sweet.

  When, by some miracle, we did decide on a meal, we’d usually have to cram in an express shop at the supermarket on our way home. And since we were in our mid-twenties and therefore never leaving work before our bosses left, that meant we weren’t home until after eight o’clock, by which point we’d be starving and opt for ten-minute spaghetti with Ragú Robusto instead of thirty-minute ditalini with amatriciana sauce, or whatever recipe sounded good when we were flipping through Food & Wine at the beach a few days earlier. What added to the stress was that I had no confidence in the kitchen, no confidence in my improvisational abilities. I had not yet trained myself to look at a lone onion and envision spaghetti with caramelized onions. I had not yet learned that I wasn’t going to be arrested if a recipe called for smoked paprika and I only had the regular kind. I was a recipe girl. I liked to follow them by the letter. I was not an improviser. Not an off-roader. If given a choice between those two diverging roads in the yellow wood, I’d have chosen the more traveled one every time.

  So on that February Sunday, in an attempt to preempt all this dinner angst, I wrote down a lineup of everything I wanted to cook that week on the first page of my blank book. This is what it looked like:

  My Dinner Diary: Week one, year one.

  Then we drew up a shopping list based on that lineup and hit the supermarket. It wasn’t sexy and it wasn’t necessarily original, but our advance planning system worked. The day we started doing this was the day cooking and eating together started resembling the meals I grew up with, dinners that were relaxing and satisfying. So what if I had to put up with friend after friend picking up my diary from the kitchen counter, then, after realizing what it was, asking, “Jenny? Is everything okay?”

  Things could not have been more okay—on the food front and beyond. I was starting to shape a theory about dinner. I found that if I was eating well, there was a good chance that I was living well, too. I found that when I prioritized dinner, a lot of other things seemed to fall into place: We worked more efficiently to get out of our magazine offices on time (Andy was at Esquire and I was at Biography, a small publication from A&E), we had a dedicated time and place to unload whatever was annoying us about work and everything else, and we spent less money by cooking our own food, which meant we never felt guilty about treating ourselves to dinner out on the weekend. And perhaps most important, the simple act of carving out the ritual—a delicious homemade ritual—gave every day purpose and meaning, no matter what else was going on in our lives. A decade later, when a New York Times reporter wrote a story about my diary habit, all kinds of people got in touch to tell me they did the same thing or to offer their own theories about why someone might be compelled to record the fact that she ate a spinach frittata on September 19, 1999. The letter that meant the most to me and that helped make sense of my dinner compulsion more than any other was from a man named Rudy. He told me that his wife started her dinner diary habit fifty years ago after experiencing a tremendous (unspecified) loss. He wrote: “She never told me this, but I think she started [writing down what she made for dinner] when she was depressed, and it was a mechanism to cope with her depression, showing that she is taking care of herself.�
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  Taking care of ourselves—and to some degree our marriage—officially began on that Sunday, February 22, 1998, with chicken cacciatore, which we made for Andy’s brother, Tony, and his wife, Trish. That meal has fallen out of the rotation, but two of the five listed that week are still going strong: chicken pot pie (which you’ll read about later) and Curried Chicken with Apples, which not only introduced me to the basic technique of making a quick skillet meal but also later proved to be the perfect starter curry for my kids. In fact, I think of that recipe and my dad’s chicken cutlets as two of the most meaningful dinners in this whole book.

  Breaded Chicken Cutlets (aka Grandma Jody’s Chicken)

  In spite of my desire to never eat breaded chicken cutlets again, this was the first meal I ever made for Andy (at twenty-two, my meal repertoire was about as varied as my dad’s) and in the years since, the chicken has proven to be a real lifesaver in the slap-it-together weeknight meal department. Plus, if you have this in your repertoire, you can make “chicken pizza,” chicken Milanese (just top with an arugula and tomato salad that has been tossed with oil and vinegar), and real chicken fingers. Total time: 25 minutes

  Few generous glugs of olive oil (5 to 6 tablespoons), more as necessary (you are not deep-frying here, but pretty close)

  2 eggs, lightly beaten

  ¾ cup all-purpose flour

  1½ cups plain bread crumbs or Kellogg’s Corn Flake Crumbs that have been salted and peppered

  4 boneless chicken breasts (about 1¼ pounds), rinsed and patted dry and pounded like crazy

  Add the oil to a large skillet set over medium-high heat.

  Set up your dredging stations: one rimmed plate for the eggs, one plate for the flour, and one plate for the bread crumbs. Using a fork, coat your chicken pieces first in the flour (shaking off any excess), then in the egg, then in the crumbs, pressing the chicken into the crumbs to thoroughly coat.