In Dinner: The Playbook: A 30-Day Plan for Mastering the Art of the Family Meal by Jenny Rosenstrach (Ballantine, $20), you get 80 recipes, along with a tutorial on how to get out of a dinner rut and into a new routine using fresh ingredients and new flavors that will get your family through the school and workweek. There’s advice on how to shop once a week, build meals around key ingredients and a workbook section in which to create your meal plan.
Rosenstrach writes: “Instead of thinking about dinner as one more task to check off your endless to-do list, you will start thinking of it as your reward for checking the tasks off your endless to-do list. Instead of thinking of it as a source of anxiety, you will think of it as a form of therapy, as the time of day when you finally get a breather. And instead of resenting the relentlessness of it … you might even come to cherish dinner’s role as your family’s North Star.”
— Connie Post
Dayton Daily News