My daughters and I in our kitchen.

How it started

I started Something New for Dinner with the idea of creating a place to share dinner recipes I have prepared for my family for the last 25 years. I am a big believer of the importance of home-cooked nutritious meals, and sitting down around the dinner table together. Some of these recipes I have created, some I have found in cookbooks and magazines, and some I learned from my family, friends and other cooks. I share my recipes with the hopes that you will enjoy them and that they will inspire you to cook and create recipes of your own.

I had a lot of help

While I know how to cook and am a consumer of internet content, I didn’t have a clue as to how to create internet content. Fortunately for me, I have two talented daughters. My eldest, Lauren, is an online marketing expert and the founder of Bixa Media. Lauren helped me set up my website, taught me about internet marketing, and patiently answered all my dumb questions. My youngest daughter, Margo, is a graphic designer. She designed my logo and made Something New For Dinner look great. Check out her work on margomade. So lucky me to have two talented daughters to work with. Without them I don’t think I would have bridged the gap into the internet world. Additionally, my nephew Parker Reed helped out with a professional photo shoot of my daughters and our kitchen.

Celebrating family, friends and great food

Something magical happens when you share a meal with others. Something New for Dinner is focused on providing flavorful, nutritious, not-too-difficult recipes to share with family and friends. While regular family dinners are harder to achieve in our busy and fragmented lives, the family dinner remains an important cornerstone for raising children. It provides a time to relax together, communicate, talk about ideas and teach the fundamentals of good nutrition and other life skills. Most importantly, the family dinner provides a time to laugh and enjoy each other.

Something magical happens when you share a meal with others.

Continuing the family dinner tradition as empty nesters

Now that our children have more or less left the nest, my husband and I continue the family dinner tradition with our friends by hosting mid-week meals. Sometimes it includes a game or a fun learning event, like wine tasting. Other times it is just a good meal and conversation. We start at 7 pm and tell everyone they must be gone by 9:30, so we are not up too late. (Now doesn’t that sound old!) It is a great way to enhance our week and connect with friends. My 20-something daughter Lauren is now doing the same thing with her friends. She calls them her “neighborly dinners.” I like that. We all should have more neighborly dinners!

The importance of learning good nutrition at the dinner table

Americans have developed truly appalling nutritional habits. A national reliance on fast and overly processed food is creating a ticking time bomb for our country. As people’s eating habits worsen, our bodies widen and are beset with diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases. This is not just a personal tragedy for the chubby, but a national crisis that will shorten lives and deplete personal and government bank accounts.

We can fix our national health crisis home-by-home and meal-by-meal

Poor nutrition is so fixable. The solution begins with the adults in the family. Our children mimic our eating habits and feed from our cupboards. Something New for Dinner focuses on recipes made from healthy whole foods. When you shop for our recipes you will spend most of your time in the produce, meat, fish, poultry and dairy aisles and very little time in the heart of the store where all the processed and additive-ladened foods are. The good news is whole foods are delicious. That said, we don’t shy away from an occasional really good indulgence.

Individual dietary considerations

The more I learn about nutrition, the more I realize how much we really don’t know. We are constantly turning our collective nutritional knowledge on its ear. Food pyramids get rearranged, calories are no longer considered equal, and some foods that one person thrives on can make another person who is sensitive to them very sick. To meet the nutritional needs and preferences of a broad range of people Something New for Dinner includes recipes for vegan, vegetarian, dairy-restricted, gluten-free and paleo-friendly meals.

Good food is good fun

Really. Food preparation is a creative and fun activity. The point of this website is to be a starting point for trying new things. Think of cooking as a blank canvas. Mix flavors, textures and colors. Don’t sweat specific quantities. Substitute ingredients. Change the recipe to suit yourself. Spread the love and cook with your children, your spouse and your friends. Don’t worry if you flub up a meal, it will make a good story. Turn up the music, pour yourself a glass of wine and enjoy. Always enjoy!