The Dinner Diary Dispatches

Recording every meal and menu since February 1998

When I sit down at my desk on Monday morning, I do three things before I start to officially work: I drink my coffee, I check my book sales, and I open my Dinner Diary to record the previous week’s meals. Many of you know that I’ve been writing down what I cook for dinner (or where I eat for dinner) every night since February 22, 1998 as a way to get organized about a ritual that is pathologically important to me. In 2010, the diary turned into the Dinner: A Love Story blog, which turned into the Dinner: A Love Story book, and I will go on record to say that never in the history of cookbooks has it been so easy to pick a line-up of recipes that were destined to become keepers: I just looked at the ones that showed up month after month, year after year.

But today I wanted to revisit the diary briefly because I realized that even a quarter century later, I’m still reaping the rewards of this decidedly deranged habit, specifically when it comes to having people over for dinner. Every time we cook for someone, I write down the menu, boxing it off like a little sidebar (you can take the girl out of magazines…) and sometimes even include little annotations (and grades 🤓) in the margins. Naturally, the longer I do this, the more valuable the diary becomes as a resource — when a menu works, I often just cut and paste it for the next dinner party. Here are a few from the last, um, two decades…