"I've....been singing at the table, all the livelong day...."

Yes, I admit it sounds a little strange: my husband Rick put our son Tim in a time-out for singing “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” at dinner last night.

Tim is 13 ½, which means it had been approximately eight years since his last time-out. But beyond that, it’s kind of a strange offense, by most families’ standards.

It’s also somewhat emblematic of our household. Rick and I have fairly stringent guidelines when it comes to rambunctiousness. And we felt that Tim’s insistence on bursting into song after being asked repeatedly to refrain from doing so was nothing if not rambunctious.

Although it was the first time in recent memory that the situation had escalated to a time-out, Rick and I frequently impose restrictions on dinnertime comportment. It’s not just the obvious things that most parents would object to, like eating with fingers instead of silverware or throwing food. It’s matters as seemingly trivial as exchanging inanities.

These are the kinds of moment non-parents simply can’t picture: the speed with which a family dinner involving a nine-year-old and a 13-year-old can devolve into silliness. When we deem a conversational exchange too stupid, we require a change of subject.

This is the part that all the experts in family dynamics and child development never seem to address when they discuss the importance of the family dinner hour. “Families should sit down to a meal together as often as possible,” they all tend to agree. But what about what happens at that meal? Are we wrong to insist that family dinner means an interesting exchange of ideas and not the goofiness that Rick refers to rather colorfully as “flippity-flappity”?

I don’t mean to make us sound like ogres. In general, we’re okay with silliness. But dinnertime is different. I tend to work fairly hard to get dinner ready for all of us, and when we finally sit down, I want to enjoy it with peace and quiet and interesting discussion. It doesn’t need to involve political discourse or scientific theorems, but it has to involve syllables that are real words and a bare minimum of what the fictional heroine Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle calls the “I-Thought-You-Saids.” (“What? Grandma and Grandpa are planning a vacation? I thought you said Grandma and Grandpa were scamming some Haitians!”)

So yes, family dinnertimes are important, but some standards need to apply, and last night, the standard was no boisterous singing of American folk songs. Still, I felt a little guilty when Tim was sent to his room. (“Can Holly come with me?” he asked. “No,” Rick said. “Can the dog come with me?” No again. In truth, it had been so many years that we’d all forgotten the rules of a standard time-out.) My guess is it boisterous singing at the table won’t be a problem again, unless Tim eventually takes up a career in dinner theater. In which case he’s absolutely justified in not giving us any credit whatsoever for his success.

Eating well, cooking well

For me, New Year’s Day has nothing on Labor Day when it comes to making resolutions. I imagine I’m not unusual in this regard, at least among parents of school-aged children. Never mind new resolve with which to correct habits in early January; for us, September is the fresh start in which I try every year to do everything right.

This fall, one of my resolutions was around menu planning. I like to cook, but I’m not always the most efficient meal planner. Despite the abundance of interesting recipes easily located in cookbooks I own and more cookbooks at the library; recipes sent by friends or by my sisters; recipes via the Internet; and recipes in magazines that arrive monthly in the mail, I’m all too quick to fall back on those dishes that require no recipes at all, because they’re so simple or because I’ve made them so many times. They please the palates of my family, but they also tend to get a little dull.

And there’s just so much good food out there waiting to be prepared. Interesting ingredients. Original techniques. Newly evolving cuisines. For someone who really does enjoy the culinary arts, like me, it just doesn’t make sense to fall back on baked drumsticks and pasta with red sauce and meat loaf quite so often.

My sister Sarah is the opposite. She is not only a good cook but what I would call a proactive cook, one who is always trying new recipes and new methods. In fact, she once told me that when she asked her husband if he liked a particular dish she had made, he said pleasantly enough, “What difference does it make? I’m never going to see it again.”

I aspire to be more like that. Over the summer I became lazier about cooking than ever. Tim and Rick were playing baseball during the dinner hour four nights a week, and it was just so much easier to grill or sauté some standard piece of protein and throw a salad together than get out a recipe and measuring spoons and ingredients.

But now with school back in session, I’m resolved to try harder. When the fall issue of Eating Well arrived in the mail in late August, I gave the kids a packet of stickie-note flags and asked them to go through the magazine and mark every recipe they’d like to try. In the weeks that followed, I tried to make each recipe they had flagged, and each one was a success. A friend gave me a recipe she thought we’d like, and I made it the very next day. When I came across an interesting recipe in the newspaper, instead of just telling myself I’d try it someday, I printed it out right away and put it in my cookbook holder.

The kids have actually noticed and remarked upon this new approach. They’re impressed that as I make out the grocery list, I can tell them what I plan to make for dinner each day in the upcoming week. (So far this week it’s been spinach strata on Monday, sausage risotto on Tuesday, chicken pot pie Wednesday, and corn fritters with roasted squash on Thursday. Friday, of course, is the Sabbath. Not in the Jewish Orthodox sense but in the sense that I plan to wait around for someone else to make dinner. No matter how long I have to wait.)

Resolutions have a way of falling by the wayside. For New Year’s resolutions, late January is typical; for New School Year resolutions, probably soon after Columbus Day weekend. But with luck, that will be just when a new issue of Eating Well arrives in the mail, and it will be enough to keep us flagging recipes – and using them – for at least another month.

Dinner conversation

A recent study from Columbia University states that “making time for a nightly family dinner is one of the most important things parents can do to keep their teens away from drugs and alcohol.” Family dinners also lower a teen’s risk of developing an eating disorder, according to the study. Meanwhile, a nearby community has created an online initiative called the Family Dinner Project to encourage families to sit down to dinner together.

This is something parents hear over and over again: it’s beneficial to sit down and eat as a family as often as possible. No one disputes that the combination of kids’ activities and parents’ work schedules and community commitments make it difficult for most families today to do this every night of the week, but we hear often that the benefits are real and measurable if we can try for at least a few nights a week.

This past summer, I became somewhat exasperated by the challenge of planning family meals. Tim (as a baseball player) and Rick (as a coach) had games or practices over the dinner hour four evenings a week. On the evenings they didn’t have baseball, I often planned short getaways for the kids and me. Sometimes, we were home but Rick was at work. Sometimes Holly wanted to attend a kids’ event at the library. And then there were those evenings when some of us had stopped for a late-afternoon ice cream cone on the way back from swimming or a bike ride and weren’t really hungry for dinner anyway.

But now it’s fall, and the predictable rhythm of the school day once again drives our schedule. Fall baseball takes up only one night a week, not four. We tend to be at home doing homework, rather than at the beach or off on a bike ride, as the late afternoon winds down.

And as dinnertimes fall into place in a more organized fashion, I notice that we all enjoy them more as well. Plus the kids are getting older, which makes the event more orderly as well as more interesting. Actual conversation rather than random silliness occasionally prevails. Earlier this week, while we ate grilled sausages, corn bread and sliced cucumbers, Tim asked questions about Facebook privacy after we told him he couldn’t friend anyone who regularly used profanity in posts.

Tim wanted to know if Facebook administration would ever stop a user from using profanity. We said we didn’t think so. “Are there other things you could get in trouble for saying?” he asked.

“Well, you might get in trouble for making threats or dangerous comments,” I said.

“But not posting naked pictures?” Tim asked.

We admitted that was extremely inadvisable but not illegal, to the best of our understanding, assuming it didn’t involve minors.

"What would happen if you posted naked photos of the president?” Tim wanted to know.

“The Secret Service would track you down,” Rick told him.

“But I thought freedom of speech meant you could say whatever you wanted,” Tim argued somewhat illogically.

“Posting photos isn’t the same as freedom of speech,” I said.

“Where would you get naked pictures of the president?” Holly wondered.

“It would be easier with some presidents than others,” Rick conceded.

“Can you say anything you want on Facebook about the president?” Tim pressed.

We tried to explain the concept of treason, and that although freedom of speech is a fundamental American principle, the government also monitors public communications such as Facebook for anything they think could be a danger to society. Moreover, Facebook as an institution has to report communication that they believe to be dangerous.

“This is a very strange dinner,” Tim said at last.

“No, it’s not!” I said. “It’s a real conversation! I’ve been waiting thirteen years to have real conversations at the dinner table!”

It wasn’t even like we were discussing anything that consequential, although it’s always useful to sneak in a message or two about on-line discretion when you’re dealing with a thirteen-year-old. But to me, this was progress. Not only had I made a well-rounded dinner with all the major food groups represented, not only was everyone in the family eating from most of those food groups, but we were also discussing something beyond who said what to whom on the bus that morning.

After we’d cleared the table and washed the dishes, Tim posted this on Facebook: “Yummy and funny dinner. Sausages and cornbread. Conversations about calcium-packed food, a doctor's questionaire and talk about presidents without clothes on... All very.... fun.”

I felt exonerated. The conversation and the fact that we were all having dinner together had made an impression on him after all. It reinforced my commitment to continue having more organized dinner hours as the school year progresses. Sometimes hardly anyone eats what I prepare, and other times the kids exchange silly barbs rather than interesting ideas. But once in a while, family dinner hour works just as it should. And if we all try, maybe that will become the rule and not the exception.

Quasi-locavore

Preparing Sunday evening’s quasi-locavore menu reminded me that although if it’s awfully difficult to go one hundred percent locavore in our part of the country, it’s always fun to try.

Even Barbara Kingsolver, who brought the concept of a locavore diet to the attention of millions of American readers (including me) in her 2006 memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, allowed each family member one exception, one non-local ingredient that they could sneak in to the yearlong scheme of eating local. Kingsolver herself chose coffee; her daughter chose chocolate. Those would probably be my top two choices as well; I’m not sure which way I’d go if I had to pick just one or the other.

For Sunday’s dinner, to which we’d invited my parents, I started with vegetables I’d bought at Carlisle’s Farmers Market the day before: new potatoes and tomatoes. On Sunday morning, I dropped Holly off to play with her friend Bella, and Bella’s mother handed me a zucchini just picked from their garden.

And the other local cache I had, in addition to these vegetables, was herbs grown in my garden. Some were from cuttings grown in a town close by and others were from my friend Jane’s Carlisle garden, so all the herbs passed the test.

For an appetizer, I made a goat cheese tart topped with herbs and olives. Another year, I would have been able to buy goat cheese right here in town, but unfortunately, our prize-winning goat cheese makers moved out of town earlier this summer. So the cheese wasn’t local, and neither were the olives (which a truly locavore plan would require me to eliminate from our diet altogether, unless we happened to be traveling in Greece), but the herbs scattered over the cheese were. Then I sliced the tomatoes and zucchini, layered them in a baking pan, and made pesto to spread over them. The basil for the pesto came from my garden; the other ingredients – the Parmesan, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil -- were not local, however.

With the potatoes I made potato salad. The local ingredients were the potatoes, of course, and garlic chives from my garden. I theoretically could have made mayonnaise using eggs from local chickens – local eggs are ubiquitously available in our community – but I didn’t, so that was a supermarket item, as was the vinegar, the salt and the pepper.

Since I’m the only vegetarian in my family, I bought sausages to put on the grill: not local at all. I could have increased our locavore score if I’d instead grilled steaks from my parents’ farm. But somehow it never seems right to serve guests food they themselves produced.

For dessert, I made chocolate custard. It would be very difficult to grow cocoa beans in New England or most other parts of the U.S.; chocolate is something many American locavores have to compromise on or give up altogether. The milk and eggs in the custard could have been locally produced if I’d gone to a little more trouble to find those items. Not the sugar, though.

I topped the chocolate custard with raspberry sauce. One of the vendors at Farmers Market had fresh raspberries, and that’s what I should have used, but we’d eaten the entire pint of raspberries we bought before we even left Farmers Market. So that ingredient was grown elsewhere.

All in all, I think my locavore score for this meal was only about a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, but at other times of year it would be a 0 or a 1, so it’s a start. Locavore eating isn’t easy, as Kingsolver admits in her book about it, especially in New England, where there are abundant choices two or three months a year but very little in the way of fruits and vegetables at other times (although I realize a lot can be done with canning, preserving and freezing).

Moreover, shopping at Farmers Market carries its own inherent conflict. Carlisle’s market includes a few local farms but mostly backyard gardening hobbyists; buying from those gardeners who cultivate plots at our town’s community gardens doesn’t do anything for the goal of supporting local agricultural businesses.

But it’s fun to experiment with locavore cooking and see how far you can get with it. I’m really enjoying my herb garden so far this year, and I’m grateful so many of my neighbors grow vegetables. Later in the summer we’ll go blueberry picking and peach picking and count those into our options as well. In the winter, I’ll probably cave altogether and buy all kinds of distantly grown items. The intent is strong, but during those long winters, it’s hard to resist the occasional fresh strawberry on the supermarket shelf.

When dinner has a name: Raising kids on a farm

"What’s for dinner tonight?" Tim asked me at breakfast yesterday, as he does every morning.

“Something Grandma made for us,” I answered vaguely, not because I didn’t know but because I was trying to do four other things at the same time: reach a glass down from the shelf for Holly, feed the dog, listen to a voicemail, put away a bag of bagels.

“But what did Grandma make for us?” Tim persisted.

“I don’t know, something she served a couple of weeks ago and then froze the leftovers for us. Shredded beef of some kind.”

“Pulled Freddy!” Tim exclaimed, delighted. “I had that at their house last week!”

“Yay!” Holly chimed in. “Pulled Freddy was delicious!”

My kids can’t be the only children raised on a cattle farm who call dinner by name, but I tend to think they’re in the minority. Fern Arable they are not, that’s for sure. Unlike the wistful and ingenuous heroine of Charlotte’s Web, they’ve never gone to bat to save an animal’s life. Quite the opposite: their attitude is that they’d rather eat a friend than a stranger.

And all the cows on my parents’ farm next door to our house are their friends. My kids or their cousins generally grant themselves the job of naming each new calf. Pre-grandchildren, my parents didn’t name the animals. Like many farmers, they preferred not to distinguish with personal names animals that would eventually go to the slaughterhouse.

But that policy is long gone. My kids and their cousins name each animal and refer to each animal by that name not only throughout the critter’s lifetime but throughout its culinary existence as well. “Jake is in the freezer!” they announce, or “Let’s serve Maggie for the Memorial Day cookout.” I had to smile recently as I read about a popular dish from the 1950s called Steak Diane; that recipe is believed to have been named after Diana, goddess of the hunt, but in my household every steak has a name.

Dinner guests sometimes catch me hushing my children when they use proper names at the dinner table. “Pass me another slice of Jennifer,” they’ll say. I always try to put a quick end to that. “You mean roast beef, Tim.” He smiles innocently at me, confident that he, unlike the dinner guest, can picture this entree when it stood on four legs grazing.

Living on a farm has brought me nothing but pleasure; I subscribe to the belief of many small-farm operators that we ensure our cows have a healthy, happy, free-ranging life for as long as they live and are eventually slaughtered under the most humane conditions possible. Still, I used to find it a bit disturbing that my kids were so sanguine about the history of their protein. I thought often of E.B. White’s Fern Arable, fighting for the life of her pet pig, and wondered if my kids lacked a basic humanity gene.

But now I see it differently. My kids love the animals. They walk among the cows in the pasture and witness the birth of calves. And they love them all over again as part of the food chain. In reality, their perspective isn’t macabre as much as it is holistic. Their friends think of hamburgers as patties from the supermarket freezer; my kids know the life cycle of a hamburger almost from conception.

Does this make them inhumane? I don’t think so. As it happens, I’m a vegetarian and have been since college. It wasn’t for idealistic reasons related to farm practices; it was for nutritional reasons. In some ways, I don’t understand why anyone consumes animals. But at least my kids do it with a high level of awareness. They know where food comes from and how it is raised. They name it and pet it and choose to eat it anyway. And they do it all with respect for the life the animal lived – and the pulled beef barbeque with which they ended up at dinner last night.

Eating dinner while standing at the counter

Holly’s friend Caroline seemed to think it was odd that I apologized to her for standing at the kitchen counter to eat dinner last night. “I never knew it was bad manners to do that,” she said sweetly, and I appreciated her leniency although I realize it’s something of a can’t-miss to seek etiquette approval from seven-year-olds.

Still, I apologized, because eating while standing at the counter bothers me on principle. Both the girls were sitting quietly on bar stools and I knew I should do the same, if not go the extra measure and have all of us sitting at the table, but the temptation to be lax was too great. Rick and Tim were at one of their many evening baseball games, and Holly and her friend had each other for dinnertime conversation (which in this case was about mermaids, I believe).

When all four of us are home at dinnertime, we almost always sit down together to eat. It’s a tenet I’ve heard dozens of times throughout my eleven years of parenting: eating an organized dinner together is paramount to the success and durability of the family unit. Well, maybe it’s not quite that extreme, but the experts are nearly unanimous on the importance of a family dinner hour.

And I know dinnertime deserves no less respect when it involves half the family rather than all four, or two of us and a guest like last night. But it also always seems like such a convenient time to get other tasks done: unloading the dishwasher, in this case. Sure I could sit down with the girls, but then I’d still have the dishwasher to unload when the meal was over. Why not double up, multitask, and enjoy more time with them after dinner?

Well, because that’s not how it works, of course. Finishing one task such as the dishwasher never means you suddenly have free time; it means you can get on to the next task. Having put away the dishes while I ate, I didn’t then say to the girls, “Okay, now I have twenty free minutes! Fill me in on the mermaid discussion!” Instead, I went on to opening the mail.

Several years ago I attended a talk on the topic of mindful living. The speaker cautioned the audience not to do anything else while eating other than enjoy conversation if you have company or silence if you are alone. She said she didn’t even consider listening to music an appropriate option while eating because your focus should be exclusively on the companionship and the food.

I agree with her when companionship is an option, but I can’t imagine requiring myself to sit in silence without any other activity while eating just because I’m alone. I love my occasional habit of sitting down to the Sunday paper over a solitary breakfast after everyone else has moved on to other activities. During the work week when the kids are at school, I often use lunchtime to peruse websites and blogs of interest while I eat. Not doing anything else while eating alone seems kind of like a waste of time.

The truth is that I hardly ever do it, though: read the paper or sit in silence while eating. I multi-task, just like I was doing last night in front of the girls. And I apologized to them just as I apologize sometimes to myself and even to the food that I’ve carefully prepared when I don’t give it my full attention. Failing to focus on mealtime short-shrifts everyone. It’s a bad habit that I will try harder to overcome. I’ll try even knowing that from the viewpoint of Holly and her friends, if you can’t hold up your end of the mermaid discussion, you might as well go ahead and unload the dishwasher.

Dinner (and dress-up) with the visiting cousins

My sisters both live out of state and visit only two or three times a year. One of the best things for me about living next door to my parents is that we don’t have to spend time planning which household my sisters and their families will visit when. Instead, we all circulate indiscriminately between the two houses for the duration of their stay.

Sometimes we even plan a big family dinner with everyone sitting down at my parents’ long, narrow antique dining table together at a set time. But gradually, over the years, we’ve grown wiser. Although my older sister’s two teenage daughters have impeccable manners, my younger sister and I collectively have four children currently ranging in age from five to eleven, and we know better than to expect the centerpiece of any visit to be an organized sit-down multigenerational dinner. We’ve discovered over the years that the best times with all the cousins together happen over a craft project or a swim in the pond. A walk to the ice cream stand or an excursion to the playground usually works out well for everyone too. Big family dinners, not so much.

And yet sometimes they still end up at our house at dinnertime. Not having planned it out ahead of time, we have no great expectations for gentility; instead, on nights like last night, we sometimes just succumb to the urge to let the free-for-all happen and the pieces fall where they may. And even if it can be a bear of a job to clean up afterwards, it usually ends up being more fun than anything we could have tried to plan out.

Yesterday, my sister’s two children, Hannah and Andrew, were still playing at our house well after six o’clock, and Sarah wanted to go for a run, so I started making dinner. The kids’ games had evolved from making food out of play-dough and playing restaurant with it to using the back of the playroom couch as a balance beam, so they were already getting pretty wild. Rick had to go to a coaches’ meeting, so I’d planned an informal dinner of leftovers. When Sarah got back from her run, she and I started pulling things out of the fridge. Stir-fried vegetables. Marinated pork strips. Cooked basmati. Chicken turnovers. Pan-fried cod fillets. Pasta with roasted cherry tomato sauce. It was hard to believe all of these items had been main courses at my family’s dinner table within just the past few days: now the variety looked more overwhelming than appetizing, as we lined up all the Tupperware on the edge of the counter and tried to predict who might want what to eat.

Andrew, who is five, came downstairs to tell us they had been playing dress-up. Chances are we would have figured that out for ourselves: he was shirtless and wearing a magenta tutu with a headband holding butterfly antennae on his head. He looked like the character Mango from Saturday Night Live. (As my friend Leigh said when she dropped by to pick up her son and caught a glimpse of Andrew, “Now that’s a blackmail photo waiting to happen!”) Then Tim, the oldest at eleven, appeared in the kitchen repeating a chant about frogs and port-a-potties. Hannah, who like Holly is seven, showed up wearing a pair of Holly’s jeans instead of the striped dress in which she’d arrived at our house. Holly was conservatively clad in a pink velvet ball gown.

Dinner was a little complicated, as we pieced together leftovers for everyone and tried to keep the play-dough food separate from the real food, but we got through it and we had fun. Our standards of decorum at these thrown-together meals are low. We insist on modulated voices – both Sarah and I have a very low tolerance for kids who shriek – but other than that, we roll with it.

It was a quick meal for the kids. I offered to make s’mores in the oven for dessert; three of the four kids wanted one, but Sarah and I ended up eating most of them ourselves. By the time they were made, the kids were upstairs playing Nerf baseball. Andrew still had his tutu on.

Every time they visit, we seem to have at least one evening like this: mayhem from an outside perspective, but just typical fun from our point of view. The cousins get to spend some time together. By ten minutes after dinner, we had the kitchen all cleaned up. Everyone had eaten from a majority, if not all, of the major food groups. The kids were ready for baths.

Maybe next time they visit we’ll resuscitate the tradition of a big family dinner in my parents’ dining room. For this week, leftovers and s’mores seemed like the way to go. Messy and disorganized? Yes, but everyone had fun and got along well. As far as I’m concerned, Andrew in his magenta tutu is welcome for dinner any time.

Four fussy eaters

“Did I tell you about the Spanish omelet I made yesterday?” my sister Sarah asks me on the phone. “I’m going to send you the recipe. I think everyone in your family would like it!”

Oh, what fantasy words those are. And how utterly out of reach. The thought of making an entrée that everyone in my family likes is a distant dream to me. And I already knew the Spanish omelet wasn’t going to fill the bill; my husband Rick is a fierce opponent of eggs.

Many parents of very young children complain about their kids’ picky appetites, but that’s not really the issue for us. My kids aren’t all that young, and their appetites aren’t exactly picky, in the sense that they’re not the types who will eat only chicken fingers and goldfish, say, or boxed macaroni and cheese. They’re just…well, they’re not omnivorous. They each have several things they like and a few they don’t. The problem is that my husband has his list as well, and I have mine, and if you drew a black-and-white Venn diagram, you’d find very few gray overlap areas. And this is one situation in which some gray areas would be most welcome, but we don’t have many.

My 7-year-old likes fairly plain foods. She likes meat without sauce, starches and vegetables without spice, and so on. This means she can eat a healthy variety as long as nothing has much seasoning, which means I need to remember to separate whatever she’s going to be eating early on in the preparations. I also have long believed she has sort of a biorhythmic appetite: she just sometimes seems too tired by dinnertime to make an effort with eating. When she asks for a bowl of shredded wheat and a sliced apple with cheese while I’m getting dinner ready, I’m usually willing to accommodate her, knowing she probably won’t be interested in anything that nutritious an hour later at the dinner table.

My 11-year-old son has a broader diversity of tastes. Unlike his sister, he likes spices and seasonings, garlic, onions, anchovies. In fact, it sometimes seems that his palate craves extreme flavors the way some people turn to extreme sports because they crave excitement. One of his favorite food items is balsamic vinegar. He’ll pour it on salad, eat the salad, and then finish off the vinegar with a spoon. He’ll refill his salad bowl with straight vinegar once or twice if I don’t stop him, which I eventually do because I think vinegar is bad for tooth enamel.

So his tastes are fairly convenient except that he passionately despises tomatoes. That’s it: just tomatoes. Which brings us to my situation: I’m a vegetarian. People sometimes mistakenly think that means I’m a picky eater, but I’m not: I like just about anything that doesn’t include meat. Still, the kids both like most vegetables, so there are dozens and dozens of wonderful things that I can make for a family dinner, except that my husband dislikes eggs, rice and beans, which are essentially a vegetarian’s mainstay. (He also doesn’t like tofu, but that hardly seems worth mentioning: who unless they are a vegetarian actually does like tofu?) And although he loves pasta, as do the rest of us (as long as Tim’s doesn’t have tomato sauce), for reasons of weight control he has been strongly advised to avoid it.

So making dinner has been a rather wearisome challenge lately. Despite my own vegetarian habits – I haven’t eaten meat since 1985 – I’m comfortable preparing it for my family; I actually think it’s better for the kids to eat some meat than to avoid it altogether. But no spices or sauces on Holly’s. No tomatoes with Tim’s. No omelets or rice-based casseroles for Rick. For years, before the kids were born and then before they expressed preferences, I was fine with cooking for both a carnivore and a vegetarian. That was easy compared to this.

Once in a while I hit on an effective menu, one that everyone eats enthusiastically. Something like pork chops – plain for Holly, sauced for Rick and Tim, none for me – and baked potatoes and steamed broccoli which we’ll all eat, though Rick doesn’t have more than a bite or two of high-carb potato. Tim and I both like salad for dinner; I add some tofu to mine for protein and feel like everyone is in good shape for the evening. But those meals are the minority. So I just keep working at finding the right mix of options for everyone, and sometimes we just all have leftovers and that’s okay too.

In a way, it’s a microcosm of family life. You try to please everyone, and you can’t, and yet everyone eventually finds something they can be happy with. Compromise and flexibility. In menu planning as in interpersonal dynamics. With lots of freshly grated Parmesan cheese on top if at all possible.

Friday dinner with my parents

My parents have just returned from a 3-week trip and are coming to dinner at our house, which is something we look forward to. It’s a mini-tradition of sorts that they come over for dinner soon after returning from a trip; it gives us a chance to hear about their travels and it gives them a chance to catch up on our home life. (And on the rare occasions when we go on a trip, we do the whole thing in reverse. But they are retired and travel more than we do.)

I’m making chicken pot pie, a favorite of Rick, the kids and my father. At some point in the next two hours I’ll come up with a vegetable-based idea that my mother and I will like. Yesterday Mom gave me a ripe honeydew melon, and Holly has a brand-new melon baller that she loves using, so she’ll prepare it for dessert: a cascade of tiny melon balls in which she’ll take endless pride.

While their dinner visits are not exactly a carved-in-stone tradition, it is something we try to do often, to take advantage of living so close to them. Some things about the visits never change. My father always keeps his jacket on the whole time even though one (lesser) reason Rick and I look forward to their visits is that it gives us an excuse to turn the heat up over our usual 60-degree norm. My mother always forgets which cabinet we keep our wine glasses in (as well as our forks, napkins, and trash can). But I can’t blame her; we have a lot of cabinets, and they all look alike. The kids always get very excited to have my parents here and do various amounts of showing off. Tim usually drags my father upstairs to see him play some form of video game and then challenges him to a boxing match (real, not virtual), and Holly usually trots out some new stickers for group admiration. I’m hoping that tonight, Holly will do a reading of the chapter book (she calls it a “chackter book”) she’s been working on so diligently; the chapter she wrote last night had both Rick and me howling in laughter. In truth, I suspect someone with more knowledge of the second-grade library might find many parts of it somewhat derivative, but Holly loves the writing process, so I’ll do whatever I can to encourage her to continue with it.

Like all parent-and-children combinations, we all have our differences, but one of the advantages of being neighbors is that there isn’t a lot riding on any one visit. As host as well as daughter, I’ll hope that everyone has fun tonight, but either way, we’ll all see each other again tomorrow. It’s not like traveling halfway across the country for a holiday visit with family and feeling that it will either be boom or bust. We spend so much time with my parents – sometimes for scheduled events like this dinner and just as often for drop-in visits, farmyard tasks or walks – that there are always more opportunities to catch up with each other.

Still, I’m looking forward to it. I’m even looking forward to making the chicken pot pie. And something with butternut squash, if I can pull up a recipe. And an apple crisp, if I can get it started in time. I’d better get to work.