Cabinet Worthy Dinners

Does this look familiar? It's my friend Annie's answer to the Tabula Rasa Dinner Dilemma, also known as The Moment You Walk in From Work, Look in Your Completely Full Fridge, but Still Draw a Total Blank on Dinner Ideas Even Though You've Made Dinner Roughly Thousands of Times Before This Night. (It's an affliction most acute during the first week of school.) Annie looks at this evolving cheat sheet of a dozen or go-tos dinners to remind her what to make for her family of four. There are three categories: "Easy," "Soups," and "Sundays." What qualifies? From the look of it, meals that are simple, straightforward, real -- meals that everyone will eat, that don't set off any Richter-scale-level eruptions with the kids. I'm happy to see a bunch of DALS dinners made the cut: Quinoa with Fried Eggs and Soy Sauce, Yogurt Chicken, Sesame Noodles, Dumplings, fried chickpeas.

I used to have a similar system on the inside of my cabinet door. I taped recipe clippings from newspapers and magazines, and posted stickies with ideas all over the place, until, as you know, I permanently memorialized some favorites in actual paint (see below). I'm willing to bet -- even when there are approximately three zillion recipes available to us with the swipe of a touchscreen -- that you have some low-tech version of this cabinet door, as well.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because when Annie was flipping through The Playbook, she awarded me one of the highest honors a family dinner blogger can receive: She said she couldn't believe how many recipes in my book were Cabinet Worthy.

Cabinet Worthy! Is it too late to to change the name of my book? (And does Seinfeld have a patent on this phrase already?) I would like to retroactively assert that this was the litmus test every recipe in Playbook had to pass: Would it be posted inside the cabinet? Yep? Ok, it's in.

On this first week back to school I ask: What's Cabinet Worthy in your house?

Incidentally, Gina Triplett, who painted these recipes inside my cabinet, is the illustrator who designed the beautiful spine on Playbook. I like to keep things all in the family. Speaking of which: Great Grandma Turano's Meatballs.

PS: Locals! Next Tuesday, September 9, I'll be speaking/reading from Dinner: The Playbook at the fabulous "story salon" Spoken Interludes in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. Hope you can come by to say hello. It's quite a line-up! Click here for more details.