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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,
