Book Report: Dinner: A Love Story

Good for a vacation read. Light, straight-forward (and able to be downloaded to my iphone minutes before crossing over into no cell phone territory.) It's a story about family dinner. The author and her husband find cooking and sitting down to dinner together to be a ritual that is foundational and nurturing to their family's life. The book is segmented into the years when the author is newly married, when she has two kids under two, and then once the kids are old enough to sit down for the meal. The whole thing is interspersed with recipes appropriate for each phase.

We already work hard to cook and eat dinner together, so that idea was not new. Instead what I took away from the book was an underscoring that trying to do this when your children are little, and your both working full-time, is hard. Calibrate your expectations. Also, there were several recipes I highlighted and look forward to trying. And lastly, early on in the book the author describes that she is inspired to be her friend's dinner doula. I love that phrase. The concept of being there to support someone in the kitchen and the underlying pay-it-forward value of the idea. Beautiful.

Author's blog: Dinner: A Love Story | Amazon for the book: Dinner: A Love Story