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Photo by Travis Rainey, Food Styling by Thu Buser, Prop Styling by Linden Elstran
What does “feel-good food” mean? It depends on whom you ask. That’s why each month our Feel-Good Food Plan—with delicious recipes and a few wild cards—is hosted by someone new. This month test kitchen director Chris Morocco shares the dinner that ensures his whole family eats together.
I avoided my editor (hi, Kelsey!) for days when asked to pitch recipes for the Feel Good Food Plan. See, my earliest days as a recipe developer were when my kids were babies. For years I developed scores of recipes for our old Healthy-ish column that were perfectly aligned with how my wife and I ate at home, and I had no shortage of inspiration. Then the pandemic coincided with my kids hitting peak ages for picky eating and fucked up the joy I had previously found in cooking for others. Stuck at home, cooking 3–4 meals a day sucked it right out of me and didn’t spit it back out for a long time.
Even to this day, there is a clear divide between the instinctive abandon I feel when cooking through a project at work and the grind of feeding people at home. Yet something recently has softened. Progress, of a sort, yet I didn’t immediately know what to say to Kelsey, since these days feeding our family is still nuanced, and occasionally fraught. Many nights our dinner menu is downright scrappy, and certainly not Instagrammable. The key thing about how we eat at home that makes me feel good is that whatever might be on our plates, my family eats dinner together every single night.
Instilling positive eating habits in our kids is about more than eating their vegetables. (A good thing, as there is a unique agony to watching a small child labor over eating a single green bean as though it were a small turd.) The ritual of eating is just as important. Candles are lit. The kids know to set up the lighting just so and never put on the overhead lights lest my wife enter the house and act like she is staring into the fire of a thousand suns. They also set the table, or, close enough. Whatever kind of day we have had, we share it (or don’t) over a meal and engage in the practice of spending dinner time with no devices and no distractions.
For me, family dinner has always been inviolate, mainly because I grew up that way. It runs deep in the family, like when my Italian “cousin” came to visit (I am not sure we are actually related but these distinctions don’t really matter in Italian families), he sat with my sister as she ate a microwave burrito so she wouldn’t have to eat it alone. When it comes to the menu, I have let go of the idea that we will all eat the exact same things. It was hard at first, given that I always pictured putting one messy-delicious platter-of-whatever on the table the way I imagine other, surely better and more inspired recipe developers must do, and letting us all tuck in, but that just isn’t the reality. There is a zigzagging line between pandering to fussiness, and accepting the reality that we all just like different foods. Trying to hit the bulls-eye of the Venn diagram of what we eat is certainly possible, but also risks burning out after eating the same few dishes over and over again.
I see my kids becoming people, navigating the world, and that includes their relationships to food. For years people would advise me that the best way to combat picky eaters was to include them in the cooking process, and to be honest I resisted it. The kitchen has been my space in our home for years. Most nights I just want everyone to get the heck out. As my kids’ preferences have softened, and I’ve relented, we have made everything from pancakes and waffles to scrambled eggs (though one child still won’t eat them afterwards but anyway), handmade pastas, tortillas, and many other low-stakes projects.
My kids’ involvement in the making of dinner has meant their culinary boundaries have expanded, all the way to include pad Thai, a weeknight staple we make at home. It’s pretty easy and fast, inherently gluten-free, and not short on flavor. A similar palette of flavors is at work in this Chicken and Cabbage Stir-Fry. My older son and I developed this recipe with a different intention: to be a vehicle for getting him and his brother to like (or at least tolerate) tofu. But as with kids in general, things didn’t exactly work out that way. Sticking with ground chicken made it an easier sell, and in the end, the fact of getting the kids to eat cabbage was enough. For now.
Chicken and Cabbage Stir-Fry
More Feel-Good Finds for the Month
My snack before dinner
Snappy olive oil crackers with a schmear of Jasper Hill Farm’s Harbison cheese is my pre-dinner snack that lets my brain know it is time to let go of the day.
Harbison Spruce Bark-Wrapped Bloomy Rind Cheese
$26.00, Jasper Hill Farm
A procedural in the background
Sometimes I cook dinner with my earbuds in; police procedurals like Bosch, or Ludwig are great since you can tune your attention in and out without getting too lost.
Grown-up houseplants
I didn’t feel like an adult until we got a zillion plants from Stump, our local plant shop. Now there’s planters outside the front of our house, on our patio, and on our roof. They are harder to take care of than kids! But to see green living things on both sides of your windows makes it worth it.
ZZ Plant
$30.00, Stump
Next Time
September’s Feel-Good Food Plan will be hosted by chef Millie Peartree who’s sharing how pre-workout meal prepping actually feeds her whole family. We’ll see you next month!
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
