Lessons from a Culinary Coach
Some pro dinner tips
We all know what we want dinner to look like. For me, it’s a table full of delicious food surrounded by my chattering family happily eating what I so lovingly (and maybe even calmly) prepared. Yet, for most of us there’s often a gaping abyss between our dinner hopes and dreams, and reality. What, exactly, is at the center of that table that everyone is so happy about and when are we supposed to make it?
Enter Brooke Lewy, a former restaurant chef who now uses her professional experience to help her clients and readers “eat the way they want to eat."
As a culinary coach, she works with individuals one-on-one to help them navigate challenges around food. She addresses a range of concerns, from adjusting to a shift in dietary needs or a major life transition (such as new parenthood or a recently empty nest) to the daily management of family schedules and preferences.
In her newsletter, It’s Your Kitchen, Brooke focuses on relieving the mental load of meals, providing practical recipes and strategies that can help all of us get dinner on the table.
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Brooke all about dinner. I picked her brain on how we can make family meals more manageable (including my own number one issue) and am so excited to share her insightful, compassionate, and most of all, realistic advice.
It’s not just you. Dinner is hard for all of us.
“Everybody has to eat all the time,” Brooke shares. “Even though I do this for a living, we’re still asking, ‘What do you want for dinner?’ ‘I don’t know. What do you want?’”
When it comes to her clients, and cooking for her own family, the biggest challenge of making dinner day after day is the mental load behind it. She finds that the hardest part is “figuring out what to make that will work for you and your lifestyle and have everyone sitting down.”
And there’s a lot to that – thinking of meal ideas, accounting for various family members’ preferences and dietary needs, compiling a grocery list, doing the shopping, actually cooking, and finding a time to all eat together. “A lot of the people I work with just want to know how to get dinner on the table,” she says. “It’s about the strategy.”
Brooke’s newsletter aims to take some of that work off of your metaphorical plate so you can get something onto your actual one. Each week, she provides four easy recipes along with a grocery shopping list.
“The more I talk to people, I see that nobody knows what to make for dinner. Everybody’s tired of figuring it out, so I try to make it easy for people. If you want to make dinner for your family or if you live in a place where the takeout is limited, how do you get dinner on the table and not be eating buttered pasta and frozen chicken nuggets every night. That’s my goal.”
Start small.
To up your chances of achieving your dinner dreams, Brooke recommends making a plan that’s manageable and flexible. “I think people have unrealistic goals sometimes. I work with clients who don’t cook at all and say, ‘I’m going to cook dinner five nights a week,’ which doesn’t set you up for success. I’ll suggest, ‘Let’s try for two and see how it goes, and then we can add a third.’”
When cooking for her own family, she tries to leave some wiggle room in her meal plans. “Normally, I have a loose idea of what I want to make over the week,” she says. “In my best life, I have some plans, like one night we’ll have chicken, one night we’ll have tacos. We’ll have a pasta. But then, inevitably, stuff happens and you have nights like last night where I’m opening the fridge at 5pm wondering what we’re going to do. I just make sure to have ingredient building blocks.”
Embrace the chaos.
Selfishly, I used my conversation with Brooke to pick her brain about my biggest dinner gripe – that the time of day I need to cook is logistically the worst time to do so. Whether I’m juggling cooking with homework help and urgent Lego questions or arriving home late in a scramble, there doesn’t seem to be a calm way to get dinner on the table.
“For years, our kids watched TV between 5pm and 6pm,” Brooke shares. “This past year, we realized that we had to re-prioritize homework, so now they sit in the kitchen and do that while I’m cooking dinner. I think I’m still muddling through, kind of just embracing the chaos a little bit and trying as best I can to have the older one help the littler ones. And it’s not smooth. It’s hard.”
She recommends prepping ahead when possible and having back-pocket recipes, but also just managing your own expectations of what the pre-dinner hour is going to look like. “I do try to prep earlier in the day as much as I can. But, I think knowing which recipes you can make really quickly, and more importantly without paying too much attention, helps and just accepting that it’s going to be messy and loud.”
Keep it simple.
Brooke’s top advice is to focus on togetherness at the table rather than cooking complex dishes or making sure every bite is eaten. When it comes to picky eating, she takes a more macro approach and aims for her kids to eat a variety of foods over the course of the day or week. If one kid only eats bread and butter for one dinner, she doesn’t get too bent out of shape about it.
“Of course I hope that my kids eat food that is healthy and delicious, and I always try to make meals that are full of vegetables, chicken, tofu, etc. But, it’s more important to me that the dinner table is a connective place, so I made the decision a long time ago to not make it a battleground. Family dinner is great, whether you’re eating buttered pasta or something really elaborate. It’s more the act of being together.”
And speaking of easy meals, here are some of her go-tos:
Marinated salmon: “The thing my kids really like is if I cut the salmon smaller before I marinate it. When you go to cook it, it has more crispy texture and less of the middle part, almost like nuggets. I just roast it at 425 degrees for 10 minutes. I usually make a really quick marinade, but we’ve also gotten into this Japanese Barbecue Sauce. It’s so good.”
Peanut (or tahini) sauce: “My peanut sauce is a great thing to have in the fridge. Whatever you put it on feels like a meal.” (For example, try it on tofu with rice and cucumbers).
Brooke’s (Not) Peanut Sauce:
½ cup peanut butter (any kind works) or tahini
⅔ cup warm water
1 ½ tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar or maple syrup
1 small garlic clove, grated
1 (1-inch) piece fresh ginger, grated (I’ve been using TJ’s frozen ginger cubes, so easy!)Combine peanut butter or tahini, water, soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, sugar or syrup, garlic, and ginger in a blender or mini-food processor and process until smooth. Sometimes the sauce thickens as it sits in the fridge, so stir in a spoonful or two of water as necessary to loosen it up.
For more recipes from Brooke, check out her helpful weekly newsletter, It’s Your Kitchen. Try this one, featuring Asian-ish Crispy Pork Burritos, Crispy Gnocchi with Sausage, Tomatoes, and Arugula, Tandoori Chickpeas, and Fried Fish Sandwiches.
Some Good Stuff
A good recipe: Mentioned above, Quick Fried Fish Sandwiches, from It’s Your Kitchen. Battered and fried is one of the few ways my kids actually like fish and this recipe just feels like summer.
A good read: Breakfast Cereals, A Buying Guide, from Consumed. This is a helpful resource when browsing the jungle that is the cereal aisle.
A good idea: Check out Julia Turshen’s genius hack for cutting cherry tomatoes here (swipe right on the post to see the video).