Home for Dinner: Mixing Food, Fun, and Conversation for a Happier Family and Healthier Kids - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ANNE K. FISHEL, PH.D., is the director of the Family and Couples Therapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate clinical professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School. As cofounder of The Family Dinner Project, she has been interviewed by NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Good Housekeeping, Parents magazine, and other major media. She writes the Digital Family blog for Psychology Today.

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"This transformative book will change your family's life for the better. With persuasive research and delightful stories, Dr. Fishel offers solutions that any parent can put into place at home, around the table. You must read Home for Dinner . . . and so should every family therapist in America." —Michael Thompson, Ph.D., coauthor of Raising Cain

Dinnertime has become a rare luxury among today's busy families. Yet study after study shows that no other hour in your children's day will deliver as many emotional and psychological benefits as the one spent sharing food and conversation, unwinding, and connecting. Increased resiliency and self-esteem, higher academic achievement, a healthier relationship to food--these and other positive outcomes have been linked to the simple act of eating dinner together.

Make it happen for your family with Harvard psychologist Anne Fishel's impassioned but practical can-do primer for prioritizing mealtime. Dinner becomes doable with the tips, recipes, and heaps of inspiration packed into this one-stop family-happiness booster. Learn how to:

* Overcome time-constraints, scheduling issues, and post-work fatigue

* Put delicious food on the table with quick, healthy recipes

* Get everyone to pitch in, even the littlest cooks

* Bring gratitude to the table, and avert complaints and conflict

* Satisfy varied taste buds, from picky toddlers to meat-denouncing teens

* Get your family talking, laughing, and engaging with one another

* Keep it up--with minimal hassle, and a lifetime of rewards

Anne K. Fishel, Ph.D., is Director of the Family and Couples Therapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology at the Harvard Medical School. As cofounder of The Family Dinner Project, she has been interviewed by Good Housekeeping, NPR, The New York Times, and other national media. Dr. Fishel writes the popular blog "Digital Family" for Psychology Today.

“There are magical opportunities for tenderness, courage, healing, laughter—and almost everything else it means to be human—when the people we love come together to eat the food we love. This remarkably wise, engaging, lovely book is an invaluable guide to all of us in creating this magic. Give yourself the pleasure of reading it and join The Family Dinner Project.” —Richard Weissbourd, Faculty Director of the Human Development and Psychology Program Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of The Parents We Mean to Be

“Anne Fishel’s warmth, wisdom and humor are the ingredients that make this book such a delight to read. I recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to eat with others—new couples, parents and grandparents—because while it delights you, it will also convince you that we can and should eat well and do it together.” —Paula Rauch, MD, Director, Marjorie E. Korff PACT Program (Parenting At a Challenging Time) and

Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

“Anne Fishel’s book, Home for Dinner is simply delicious. It is filled with helpful suggestions about family dinners rich with fun and good food. The book is packed with recipes for food, conversation and community building. Anyone can read it, enjoy the completely engaging style and learn to reap the health, mental health and family benefits of family dinners.” —John Sargent, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, Tufts University School of Medicine

“Anne Fishel serves up a sumptuous banquet of compelling science, clinical wisdom, family psychology, delicious recipes, and a lively, personal style into a single book that will nourish families in mind, body, and spirit.” —Martha B. Straus, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Antioch University New England

“Home for Dinner offers a feast of insights, hands-on advice, and mouth-watering recipes that will equip readers to turn the necessity of eating into an opportunity for growing family relationships, building children’s intelligence and social skills, and nourishing healthy bodies and minds. Research-based, story-sprinkled, and supremely practical—an enlightening read.” —Abigail Carroll, author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal

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CHAPTER 1

Welcome to the Table

Experiences with food have played a central role in my life as a wife, mother, teacher, therapist, and community organizer, and they constitute the raw ingredients for this book.

I first made a commitment to cooking tasty family dinners twenty-two years ago when my husband gave up smoking after our second son was born. It seemed like a fair trade—one oral pleasure to nourish and delight him in exchange for another that could kill him. In the bargain, I soon realized I had stumbled onto something with unexpected benefits for everyone in my family. Some nights, my two young sons wanted to help—at first just banging pots around but later stirring the soup, washing the greens, and pulling basil leaves off their stems. Their kitchen participation turned them into stakeholders at dinner—they wanted to try their own handiwork. Other nights, they preferred to play with their father. On those nights, I was left alone in the kitchen, and cooking became the one quiet, meditative time of my day. It felt like a guilty pleasure. In the guise of being a good mother, I earned some time to myself.

We ate dinner in the kitchen around a wooden table. It was cozy when our sons were young, but it became pleasantly cramped as they stretched out to more than six feet tall. My sons were adventurous and demanding eaters. They egged me on to try a new dish almost every night despite my wish to build up a repertoire of recipes that I could make in my sleep (a state I hovered close to as a working mother with two young kids).

While I wasn’t exactly Julie Powell trying all of Julia Child’s recipes, I did try to keep up with my sons’ curiosity about new foods, and I experimented with dishes I’d never eaten before. Once, we spent an entire afternoon trying to open a coconut they’d spied at the supermarket after seeing one in a Babar the Elephant book. The coconut remained stubbornly shut despite my assaults on it with hammer, screwdriver, and knife. Finally, I cleared out the street below and we threw it out a third-floor window. This was effective, but it meant that we couldn’t use the coconut milk, which supposedly was the best part.

Another time, we made limeade by squeezing about twenty limes like mad. Days later, my older son, the chief squeezer, developed a mysterious rash in a C-shape around his thumb and index finger. After consultations with numerous pediatricians who were stumped, a nurse diagnosed it as a rash that develops when sun interacts with lime juice. Other mishaps occurred from time to time when I tried a new recipe. I recall a hollandaise sauce that tasted like papier-mâché. But I like to think that my sons and I learned to appreciate one another’s willingness to try new things even when the results were inedible and never to be repeated.

As my sons got older, they began to cook dishes and then courses and then whole meals on their own. One night a few years ago, I came home from seeing patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, feeling tired and depleted. As I entered the house, I was struck by the homey smell of melting cheese and saw that the kitchen was strewn with cookbooks. Knowing I would be home late, my younger son, Joe, had driven to the store and purchased ingredients to make dinner. And not just any dinner, but a blue cheese soufflé accompanied by a salad of beets, spinach, and roasted walnuts. He was headed off to college in a few months, and I knew he’d learned one important lesson at home: the power of a home-cooked meal to bring cheer at the end of a long day.

Now that my sons live in their own apartments, I am proud that they are competent and creative cooks. (My husband is another issue, but I didn’t raise him!) My older son, Gabe, can throw a dinner party for a dozen friends, with stuffed eggplant, butterflied chicken, and a risotto made with from-scratch chicken stock. Joe makes dinner in a shoebox-size New York kitchen and then takes leftovers to work for lunch.

But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that my family dinners have been a seamless affair with everyone praising my culinary efforts, asking to chop the onions, and offering to wash the dishes. Making dinner night after night was sometimes tedious and frustrating. I often felt too tired to cook, or didn’t have the ingredients I needed, or had started cooking so late that the kids had spoiled their appetites on snacks by the time dinner was ready, or I couldn’t think of a menu that would please everyone, or I threw up my hands when the kids’ rehearsals and athletic practices were scheduled at the dinner hour.

Home for Dinner is intended for any parent who feels similarly frustrated, bored, or overwhelmed by the prospect of making dinner night after night. Think of this book as a well-stocked pantry that has sauces to perk up a tired meal or a can of beans to add nutrition to a familiar dish. Perhaps, one night when you’ve run out of ideas of what to cook for dinner or what to talk about at the table, you’ll remember something you read here and pull it out, like grabbing something from a back shelf. My hope is that you can dip into it tonight, next week, or next year for something to make dinner easier or more enjoyable. There’s nothing here that is meant to be a heavy lift, nothing that requires an overhaul of what you’re already doing.