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Mission: family dinner

Dinner: A Love Story is a newsletter, website, and book series devoted to the family meal, however you define “family” and however you define “meal.”

If you visit Dinner: A Love Story or subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll get a zillion dinner ideas, from weeknight, slap-it-together mainstays to whatever 59-ingredient stew Ottolenghi has inspired me to try — but you’ll also get book, podcast, news, long reads, and travel recs because we talk about that stuff at the dinner table a lot. (See how I did that?)

It’s a love story waiting to happen.

About the Recipes

I write about real recipes, made in a real kitchen, for real people, specifically my two daughters, and husband, Andy, a book editor.

None of the dishes you see here are plated by a team of food stylists or dreamed up in a test kitchen because a focus group determined that, say, turmeric was trending.

Take my crispy fish sandwich. How good does that look? It’s topped with a dilly, spicy, rice-wine-vinegary slaw, and when it’s on the dinner menu, I look forward to it all day. I look forward to making it, and I look forward to telling everyone about it. Sometimes I go to bed still thinking about it. I feel the same way about our favorite Mexican takeout or the prepared lasagna from the old-school Italian specialty shop, or a big bowl of buttered egg noodles when it’s just me standing at the counter by myself, savoring quality alone time with my twitter feed. I felt this way about dinner even when my kids were little, and I had to deconstruct the salmon salad into a thousand separate piles of ingredients so nothing touched. Finishing the day with dinner feels like a little gift I’m giving myself every single day.

And that’s all I hope to accomplish on Dinner: A Love Story: To help you feel this way about dinner, too. To inspire you to cook something, be intentional about it, and, when you can, share it with people you care about.

Why Subscribe to My Newsletter?

For starters, you’ll never miss a post – every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. Automatically! And every post, every recipe lives on my substack platform in a searchable archive in case you want to find it later. Just like always!

If you become a paid subscriber that means you’ll get additional recipes and subscriber-only access to live chats about menu ideas, reader Q+A’s, comment threads, personalized book content, mini podcasts and videos. After blogging for ten years, this part feels new and interactive and I’m excited to see what we can do with it.

Of course, you’ll also be supporting Dinner: A Love Story as it heads into the next decade — and that means a lot. Thank you so much for considering!

Who am I?

I’m Jenny Rosenstrach, food writer and New York Times bestselling cookbook author & I’ve written Dinner: A Love Story for over a decade.

My NYT-bestselling book The Weekday Vegetarians is about a vow we made in my house three years ago that goes like this: Eat less meat, sort of. In other words, we only eat our roast chickens and pork chops on the weekend, fueling ourselves with mostly plant-based meals from Monday to Friday, and I have to say, it’s become a completely addictive lifestyle. (More here.) My daughter now claims she’d prefer my Chickpea Caesar Salad over a Shack burger any day of the week.

During the pandemic I started a series on my blog called Pantry, Projects, Purpose, which offered easy dinner ideas, time-sucking kitchen activities for the kids (and their tired parents), and ways to stay connected to the community. That series, one of the most therapeutic and personally fulfilling undertakings of my career, is now a feature of my newsletter called Three Things. Every week, I share a trio of eating and reading suggestions I think you’d like.

My new book, Get Simple, shares 100 new recipes that make eating meat-free even easier, even tastier. Get Simple picks up where The Weekday Vegetarians left off, addressing the most common obstacles that prevent dinner-makers from taking the plant-based leap.

More Dinner: A Love Story

If you want to go down the Dinner A Love Story rabbit hole, feel free to check out all 1,500+ posts, over a decade’s worth of writing and cooking. You can also head over to NPR, The New York Times, New York, The Wall Street Journal, Salon, Food 52, Real Simple or Bon Appétit, where I was a columnist for seven years, or to the beloved, mega-popular Cup of Jo, where I write about a lot of things — but mostly food.

You can of course find me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Or maybe you don’t want to do any rabbit-hole-ing and you’re only here because you googled my world-famous “dinner a love story pork ragu,” so would prefer to just go right to the food. I’m fine with that, too! Just know, I’m glad you’re here. Please, pull up a chair and dig in.

Got any questions? Email me: [email protected]

Dinner: A Love Story is a newsletter, website, and book series devoted to reading, eating, and the family meal, however you define “family” and however you define “meal.”

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© Jenny Rosenstrach