I don't have kids and don't have to consider the family dinner hour. But I like Rosenstrach's writing style and many of her recipes, especially the riffs/options for all. Have adapted her ideas to communal cooking with friends. ( )

I probably would have rated this 3.5, but having just read "The Homemade Pantry" before it, this book is much more realistic. The author recounts over a decade of homemade meals, acknowledging the busyness of working and parenting and trying to create healthy, appealing dinners every night. ( )

Enjoyed the narratives, less so the actual recipes (so didn't end up buying it after I checked it out from the library). ( )

This was one of my favorite books of 2017. Jenny created a blog with an emphasis on making family dinners a priority. This book is the culmination of that project. I loved it! I had never read her blog, but you definitely didn't need to.

My favorite thing about this "cookbook" is that her personal stories and experiences are sprinkled throughout it. You feel like you're getting to know her as you read about her recipes. I love how simple and straight forward most of the dinners are. Her philosophy is clear on every page: use good ingredients and make food you love and your idea of what "dinner" should be will change.

So far we've tried three of the recipes and they've all been great. We made the chicken pot pie, the arugula and prosciutto flatbread pizza, and the kale, white bean, and sausage soup. I love that there is room to get creative with her recipes. If you know you love a certain ingredient, toss it in the soup or on the pizza. You don't have to worry about messing it up.

The book has already gotten me excited about meal planning again. I've bought the ingredients for some of her other recipes (pork ragu, creamy tomato chicken, and tomato and white bean soup) and can't wait to try them out. Jenny includes lots of tips for getting kids to eat good food, which was so helpful! ( )

A cookbook with stories, my favorite kind. It details quite a few years of the author's and her husband's family dinners as they held down jobs in New York, commuted home to New Jersey, and raised two daughters -- all while cooking real family dinners every night (well, except if they were invited out or went to a restaurant.) Although I'm in a very different life situation from the author, I still want to put a homemade dinner on the table most nights without spending all day at it. Some of the dishes call for more expensive ingredients than I like to use regularly, most are quite doable by the average middle-class family. Though Ms. Rosenstrach wrote the book, her husband also cooks and she credits him with his own recipes. She has a blog http://www.dinneralovestory.com/ which is good, since I got the book from the library. Recommended; you'll probably find at least a few recipes to copy down. ( )