This meant that call time for the guests was on the later side—around eight o’clock—which gave them a chance to say hi to the kids, then move on to the real reason for the party: to have a cocktail and eat something that didn’t call for ketchup on the side. So while one of us would shepherd Phoebe and Abby through their bedtime paces—book, backrub, kiss—the other would put the final touches on dinner, which was, for the most part, already done.
That was the other important part of our entertaining strategy (and, actually, still is). We knew that if we were going to ask parents to come at eight, we couldn’t start dinner after the kids went to bed. We had to start earlier—like four hours earlier with some kind of meat braising in a Dutch oven. If the dinner party occurred anytime between October and the first day of spring, there was about a 90 percent chance that the Dutch oven contained Andy’s pork shoulder ragù, which we’d serve on top of pappardelle and which you may have gathered by now might just be my favorite meal in this entire book. It’s particularly ideal for a fall or winter night: It’s warm and hearty, it makes the house smell insanely good, and it goes well with red wine. Best of all, when everyone is oohing and ahhing over every bite, we could almost forget—for a few hours, at least—that there were plastic Cinderella shoes strewn about the living room and that we all had to be awake before sunrise the next morning to perform sock puppet shows.
Pork Shoulder Ragù with Pappardelle
Serves 6 Total time: 3½ to 4½ hours (includes 3 to 4 hours braising time)
Because this is pork, it goes well with a salad that has a little sweetness to help cut the porkiness. Greens with apples and shaved fennel? Greens with pistachios and pomegranates? Either would be good. Also, this serves about six normal-size people (or four parents and four kids). If you are cooking for more than that, cook another pound of pasta, up the meat to 3 pounds, and add a few more tomatoes and another ½ cup of red wine. Like all braised meats, it’s nearly impossible to get wrong, so don’t get too hung up on the exactness of measurements.
This is our go-to, what we call our dinner party in a pot. Serve over pasta, serve on buns. Also makes the house smell extremely good.
1 boneless or bone-in pork shoulder roast (about 2 to 2½ pounds)
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for drizzling
1 tablespoon butter
1 small onion, chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1 28-ounce can whole or chopped tomatoes, with juice
1 cup red wine, plus more as needed
5 sprigs fresh thyme
5 sprigs fresh oregano
Small handful of fennel seeds
1 tablespoon hot sauce, for smokiness (we use Trader Joe’s hot chili sauce)
1 pound pappardelle
Freshly grated Parmesean cheese
Preheat the oven to 325°F.
Dry the pork with paper towels and liberally salt and pepper all over. Add the oil and butter to a large Dutch oven and heat over medium-high heat until the butter melts but does not burn. Add the pork roast to the pan and brown it on all sides, 8 to 10 minutes in all.
Add the onion and garlic and sauté for 1 minute. Add the tomatoes, wine, thyme, oregano, fennel, and hot sauce and bring to a boil. Cover and put in the oven. Braise for 3 to 4 hours, turning every hour or so. Add more liquid—water or wine—if needed. (No matter what size pot you are using, the liquid should come to at least one-third of the way up the pork.) The meat is done when it’s practically falling apart. Remove the pork to a cutting board, pull it apart with two forks, and then add the pulled meat back to the pot and stir. Remove the herb sprigs.
Cook the pasta according to package directions. When it’s ready, put it into individual bowls and top with ragù, lots of Parmesan cheese, and a drizzle of oil.
Tip: The Braised Beef Short Ribs are great for this kind of entertaining, too.
Braise this pork long enough and no cutting is required. Simply get two forks and start pulling.
PULLING OFF A DINNER PARTY WITH CHILDREN UNDERFOOT
The Schedule
4:00 p.m. One of us starts the pork ragù while the other tries to break a record for number of times Dr. Seuss’s Oobleck can be read in one twelve-hour stretch.
6:30 p.m. Make the kids’ dinner. We either give them a few shreds of meat pulled from the pork (it will be edible but not optimal) or, more likely, pull a Trader Joe’s pizza out of the freezer.
7:00 p.m. Bathtime begins. One of us gets the kids clean and dressed. If there’s any other part of the bedtime routine that can be checked off the list —more Oobleck reading, teeth brushing—we check it off the list. While this is going on, the other parent is downstairs assembling the cheese plate, making the salad or side dish, stacking up a pile of plates and utensils, and setting a large pasta pot filled with water on the stovetop. (I am of the belief that there is no task too small to do in advance.)
8:00 p.m. Guests arrive. We introduce them to our beautiful, clean kids! If either daughter has any show-pony trick up her sleeve (hula-hooping, Taylor Swift lip-synching, jump-roping), we do our best to convince them to go for it. We make sure to set out starters and offer our patient guests a strong cocktail during this portion of the program. (Andy is of the belief that this should be a Manhattan.)
8:25 p.m. One of us starts boiling the pasta water.
8:30 p.m. Kids go to bed. One of us heads to the bedroom with the kids and attempts to convince them that the most recent reading of Oobleck was their bedtime story. This never ever works. On most nights we read each daughter one book, but on this “very special night,” we read one book to both at the same time. (When the girls got older, on nights like this, we also let them sleep over in each other’s rooms to minimize the chances of them complaining about bedtime.)
8:40 p.m. Lights out. We trade places: the parent who is with the guests heads upstairs and plants as many bedtime kisses onto foreheads as necessary while the other sets the table. (Note: We do not like to ever leave our guests without at least one host around.) If the stars align, we don’t hear from the kids until five thirty or six the next morning.
8:45 p.m. We add the pasta to the boiling water and shred the pork for the ragù.
9:00 p.m. We dish up some pasta with ragù and cheese, place the salad bowl on the table so guests can serve themselves, open up a bottle of Barbera, make a feeble attempt to talk about what’s going on in the wider world outside our homes, before all four of us come around to discussing our charming, sleeping children.
Photograph by Jennifer Livingston
Part 3 • 2006–Present
Family Dinner
or, the years the angels began to sing
Part 3 • 2006–Present
I spent a lot of time in the first few years of our daughters’ lives reading about—sometimes obsessing over—milestones that they hit and missed. How could I not? Every visit to the pediatrician was like report card day: Is she smiling? Is she sleeping through the night? Is she pulling herself up? Is she pointing? (“She must be pointing by twelve months,” said one clipboard-wielding doctor with a seriousness that scared me.) How many teeth? What percentile? (God, how we hated percentiles.) We stressed about milestones they “missed” and celebrated like crazy over milestones they achieved ahead of the curve. (I’m sure the word gifted was thrown around after we saw eight-week-old Phoebe following that spinning mobile with her eyes.) There were milestones I looked forward to—when we could turn their car seats to the forward-facing position. And there were milestones that left me feeling berefit—getting down to the last bag of frozen breast milk a few weeks after I had weaned Abby. I was surprised by how hard it was to say good-bye to that era of lugging ice packs and bottles back and forth to work, where I’d pump behind my closed office door. A Post-it that said Just a minute, please switched places from the front of the door to the back of it all day long, and I still have the note stuck on a page in Phoebe�
��s baby book.
As the girls got older, of course, we spent less time focusing on their developmental milestones and more time dreaming about family lifestyle milestones. Going on a transatlantic flight. Going on a family bike ride. Sleeping until 7:00 a.m. We were still exhausted. Once, when the kids were one and two and we were very much still in the trenches—hovering, tummy timing, being awake a full four hours before “starting” our workdays in the office—I remember asking my co-worker Tom, a father of two middle-school-aged kids, if I was going to be this tired for the rest of my life. No, he told me. It all turns around at about age six, when they can make their own breakfast. When you don’t have to wake up with them to pour the juice and toast their bagels. When they can scroll through the DVR offerings and select Sponge Bob for themselves. These were unimaginable milestones to me— Hold on a sec . . . They eventually learn how to turn on the TV?
But before we would get to that point, our family hit a more astounding milestone than the one Tom described. It was in 2006, one of my days off from work, and I was playing with the girls (about ages three and four) in Abby’s room. The two of them had locked into a pretend game with their new pirate ship and I had a radical thought: What if I left the room, went downstairs, and started making dinner? That is, what if I trusted the girls—trusted some distant inner voice buried underneath all my neuroses—and let them play without me helicoptering over them to make sure no one fell on the corner of the play table or squeezed the finger paints onto Abby’s bedspread or licked a 9-volt battery? (Amazing how active my imagination became as soon as I had children.) So I turned on Abby’s baby monitor and went downstairs to start making meatballs. With one ear on the monitor I poured a glass of Pinot, whisked my egg, worked the ground meat, shaped and browned the balls, and then placed them one by one in the Dutch oven where Andy’s Great-Grandma Turano’s tomato sauce was simmering away. At some point I realized I was listening more closely to Lucinda Williams on the iPod than I was to the girls’ playful chatter on the monitor.
Andy walked in soon after. It had been about forty-five minutes and I went to the bottom of the stairs, cleared my throat and singsonged, just like my own mother circa 1981, “Giiirrrrls! Dinner’s ready!” I didn’t have a dinner bell, but I might as well have. Phoebe and Abby marched down the stairs, took a seat at the kitchen table, and we all ate meatballs with tomato sauce together. It probably only lasted about two minutes and forty-six seconds, but it felt, to me, like the most beautiful two minutes and forty-six seconds in human history.
I don’t want to in any way suggest that we cracked the dinner code on that particular night and from then on out it was smooth sailing. It turned out, dinner milestones were just like every other milestone—we tended to do a lot of one-step-forward-two-step-backing. There would still be many many nights following this one when it was impossible to occupy Abby as I attempted to make a marinara. And dozens more when Andy and I wouldn’t eat until after the kids went to bed or where Andy and I ate one thing while the girls ate a Trader Joe’s frozen pizza next to us. It took many more milestones—psychological, physiological, gastronomical—to get to a place where it felt like I figured out how to do family dinner with the kids efficiently, enjoyably, and regularly. But this Meatball Milestone was remarkable in that it was the first time I started to believe what Tom and everyone else had promised me: that sanity might one day return to our asylum, that very soon family dinner was going to turn into something we’d enjoy, rather than just endure. It was the first time I saw a glimpse of our future—and sometimes a glimpse is all you need.
Where family dinner was once the time of day for Andy and me to try out a new recipe from The Silver Palate (prekids), or the time of day to plunk down one bottle of bourbon and one bottle of gin on the kitchen counter beside two ice-filled cocktail glasses (postkids), during this next phase of our dinner narrative (the part I’m calling “Family Dinner”), meals became something so much bigger than just the food on our plates. Once Abby turned three and was capable of sitting still for a few minutes, and of not spilling her water twice in two minutes, and one out of every hundred times actually answering the question “How was your day?,” dinner finally started resembling the ritual I had grown up with. Slowly, very slowly, it was becoming the emotional anchor to our days, the only time we all set aside our iPhones and Polly Pocket fashion cruise ships to hash out whatever was on the collective family mind. I found that even when the meal was over in a flash, it was sometimes the only time we actually looked at each other, talked to each other, listened to each other. Even today, five years after the Meatball Milestone, it’s very possible for me to spend an entire day with my children and somehow not do any of these things in any kind of meaningful way.
It probably won’t come as much of a surprise to hear that this phase of family dinner has been my favorite one so far. By 2006, we had settled into a rhythm with the kids and with our own schedules. My friend Pilar from Real Simple was starting a parenting magazine—Cookie—and she offered me a job there that I couldn’t refuse: food, features, and a four-day work week. As luck would have it, I was going to work in the same building as Andy, who was an editor at GQ, one floor above my office. (We used to joke that if he jack-hammered through the floor he’d miss me by about ten feet.) Besides being incredibly convenient for dropping off and picking up forgotten house keys, this setup allowed us to occasionally eat lunch together and frequently commute to and from work together. Five times a week, I was now guaranteed at least thirty-three minutes to have an uninterrupted conversation with my husband. And sometimes a weep session—like that one morning on the 8:43, after receiving an email from Phoebe’s dance teacher saying that she was “so sorry” I missed the recital and that “I did give the information to your nanny, but I guess that’s what happens when you work.”
The commute home was a different story. Whatever redeeming qualities we had as respected spouses, professionals, and human beings seemed to disappear between the afternoon hours of three and five o’clock, when time was tight, decisions were made with brutal efficiency, and emails were rapid-fire and clipped. (JR: Train? AW: 6:23. JR: Dinner thoughts? AW: Chili? JR: Done.)
The highlight of the day was pulling into my driveway and walking up the stone steps to our front door. Our living room faced the front yard and both girls would be perched on the couch, staring out the window, waiting for me to come into view. During the winter months, when it was dark outside and light inside, I would always see them before they’d see me, and even though I’d look forward to this moment all day, I’d make a point to pause, and sear their expectant little faces into my memory. I didn’t know a lot, but I knew that when the era of greeting Mom like a long-lost rock star every weeknight at 6:16 p.m. was over, I’d miss it as much as I missed breast-feeding. Every time I walked up those stone steps, I wondered: Is this the last night I’ll see them in the window searching for me?
I wish I could say that the cheerleading routine they’d perform upon my arrival would last throughout the evening. But the “Mommy’s home!” and the “I missed you!” cries would quickly devolve into “I’m hungry,” “What’s for dinner?” and “I want chips and salsa!” And then I’d think: Am I imagining things or did Phoebe’s Madeline alarm clock, the one in her bedroom, one flight up the stairs on the other side of the house, suddenly just start ticking really loudly?
And then it was off to the races: The chips and salsa would be doled out slowly since I wanted them to save room for dinner, so we’d play “Chips for Details.” (I’ll trade you one chip for every good juicy detail about your day.) I’d try, and often fail, to run upstairs and change into sweats just like I saw my mother do before every dinner of my childhood, then run back downstairs to pour myself a drink, just like I never once saw my mother do before any dinner of my childhood. By six thirty, I’d be cooking. In the early days, it was usually something basic (those oven-fried drumsticks that, on my best days, had been marinating sin
ce the morning and only needed to be shoved into the oven) or something quick (Spicy Shrimp with Yogurt) or something that could transition right from the chips and salsa (Taco Soup). At seven-fifteen, Andy would walk in the front door and make himself a Manhattan. Because I am a good person, I would try to give him at least three minutes to savor his drink.
And then we’d sit.
Over the course of the next few years, the dinners we ate would get more adventurous. This wasn’t a conscious decision—it simply had to do with the fact that we were sitting down together. Once the girls were exposed to the foods we ate on a regular basis, there was a significant increase in the number of times a little hand would reach across the table accompanied by the words “Can I try that?” There was still pleading and begging and no-dessert threatening. There were still auxiliary hot dogs and cheese and crackers and peanut butter sandwiches on deck just in case they didn’t eat what we were eating, but they were hitting a milestone I liked very much: They were up for adventure. And they took us right along with them.
Great-Grandma Turano’s Meatballs
The official Meatball Milestone is from Andy’s Great-Grandma Turano and was not only one of the index-card recipes his mom mailed to us when we first got married, but also so beloved that we painted the recipe inside a kichen cabinet. It’s safe to say that in the fourteen years since we’ve received that recipe, we’ve probably made them as many times as Great-Grandma Turano herself did in her ninety-six years. Total time: 1 hour
Dinner: A Love Story Page 15
