Sarah Waldman, worried about the direction American mass-produced food is headed, has focused on making nutritious, mostly whole-food meals for her family. Feeding a Family: A Real-Life Plan for Making Dinner Work is the product of a year's labor of love; Waldman made fresh seasonal meals for her husband and two children, and then wrote up the recipes, accompanied here by Elizabeth Cecil's beautiful photographs.
As Waldman puts it, children "are naturally aware of the changing seasons... and we can take a cue from them." She builds her menus around easy, thoughtfully selected options: dense, warm root vegetables in the winter, hydrating melons in the summer. Challenging readers to relax their expectations and just enjoy family dinner time together, Waldman offers many practical tips, such as prepping veggies ahead of time, getting kids involved in the kitchen, and not being worried if occasionally their entire dinner consists of whole wheat bread and butter.
With winter meals such as "Orange and Green Pasta Bowls" (Creamy Pumpkin Fettucine, Pumpkin Seed Pesto and Roasted Broccolini), spring meals like "For the Busiest Night" (Slow Cooker Indian Butter Chicken with Sweet Peas and Lemon-Pecan Shortbread Cookies), Feeding a Family contains more than 100 delicious recipes--each with tips on what the kids can do to help--grouped into 40 seasonal meals.
Simultaneously gorgeous and practical, Feeding a Family is especially good for parents seeking alternatives to bad eating habits and hoping to regain precious family time. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm