Time For Dinner: Dinner During the Holidays, An Interview With Alanna Stang
Family dinners are important during the holidays and all year around. Alanna Stang, who co-wrote Time For Dinner with Pilar Guzman and Jenny Rosenstrach, gives her tips to making the most of your dinner table experience. Host a fabulous holiday party, get your kids talking, and keep up the energy night after night with her affordable and healthy suggestions.
The Beehive: Hello. I'm speaking with Alanna Stang, the former executive editor at Cookie magazine and the current executive editor at Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Today, we're discussing the family dinner. Why is it so important for families to have dinner together, especially during the holidays?
Alanna Stang: A lot of studies have come out, in the last 5-10 years especially, showing how much dinner matters in kids' academic performance, in terms of how, whether they get into drugs and drinking, how they relate to authority and adults. You know, dinnertime is about socializing your kids. It's when you sit down, and you focus on them. The TV's off, or it should be off. It's that steadiness. It's that focus, now we're together. Now we're focusing on the family. It doesn't matter what you're serving. It matters that you're together and you're talking, and you're sharing a meal. And the studies have shown that the more frequently you can do it during the week, the better off your kids are. And around the holidays when, you know, we gather, when we come together as families, it's the time when the dinners become more special, and I think we, you know, we tend to recognize that this is a special time of year. But it really is something that is so important all year around to do in some form or another.
BH: I'm wondering, how's it possible to make meal night after night without getting burnt out, during the holidays and year round?
AS: It's hard. It's really hard. It's hard no matter what, and at the holidays when we have all of these demands and special events and parties, gifts to buy, it's even harder. You know, one of the chapters in our book is about prepping, is about doing a little bit of cooking on a Sunday afternoon to get you ready for the week ahead. It's a really helpful, non-daunting strategy to have, you know, just a few things in the fridge you can pull out and combine as meals. But you know, one of our main messages in this book is yes, a home-cooked meal is great. But if you can't do it, don't worry about it. Take the pressure off yourself. Just get something on the table, whether it's take-out or prepared food or whatever it is. The last section is about entertaining and how you can create sort of self-serve parties, where you make a bunch of things, and people can either have toppings to make a pizza or do a taco party. Or we have one that's about salad. I mean all of those lend themselves well to holiday meals.
BH: Do you have any tips to cutting down your grocery bill while still making good, healthy dinners?
AS: Home-cooked meals are, you know, really the most affordable way to eat. I think we all tend to think, oh, you know, fast food is so much cheaper. Really if you shop smartly and cook a little bit in bulk and freeze things, you'll save money. Things like beans and rice and grains, which are incredibly nutritious, are very affordable sort of pound for pound, calorie for calorie. And the more you can do soups and stews and grain-based or bean-based dishes, the more money you'll save.
BH: Are there tips you can share about making the most of your dinner table conversation?
AS: Well, it's hard to get a lot of kids to talk at the dinner table. I mean, I personally have to cajole the information out of my son constantly. In the magazine, we ran a sort of cheat sheet on how to get your kids to talk, and the idea is that sometimes you've got to do a little reverse psychology. "Oh, you didn't go to the zoo today, did you?" Or "I heard so-and-so was doing such-and-such, but that couldn't have happened," you know. And then the kid will say, "well, yeah, it did happen! And then I saw the monkeys!" or whatever.
BH: And what are the values that get shared around the table?
AS: The listening and the sharing and the talking. Creating a ritual where everyone comes and shares is a great value. Studies have shown it's important to kids' success. I think the other great value of family dinner is trying new foods. If you keep bringing it out on the dinner table night after night or week after week, at a certain point they're likely to try it. You know, some kids are more stubborn than others, but generally if you expose kids to something ten times, they'll try it and oftentimes they'll like it!
BH: Well, thanks so much for talking with me, Alanna.
AS: My pleasure.
BH: Please check out more info at pic.tv/holidays.
Visit http://pic.tv/holidays/2010/11/02/time-for-dinner-dinner-during-the-holidays-an-interview-with-alanna-stang/ for audio of this interview.
The Beehive: Hello. I'm speaking with Alanna Stang, the former executive editor at Cookie magazine and the current executive editor at Martha Stewart Omnimedia. Today, we're discussing the family dinner. Why is it so important for families to have dinner together, especially during the holidays?
Alanna Stang: A lot of studies have come out, in the last 5-10 years especially, showing how much dinner matters in kids' academic performance, in terms of how, whether they get into drugs and drinking, how they relate to authority and adults. You know, dinnertime is about socializing your kids. It's when you sit down, and you focus on them. The TV's off, or it should be off. It's that steadiness. It's that focus, now we're together. Now we're focusing on the family. It doesn't matter what you're serving. It matters that you're together and you're talking, and you're sharing a meal. And the studies have shown that the more frequently you can do it during the week, the better off your kids are. And around the holidays when, you know, we gather, when we come together as families, it's the time when the dinners become more special, and I think we, you know, we tend to recognize that this is a special time of year. But it really is something that is so important all year around to do in some form or another.
BH: I'm wondering, how's it possible to make meal night after night without getting burnt out, during the holidays and year round?
AS: It's hard. It's really hard. It's hard no matter what, and at the holidays when we have all of these demands and special events and parties, gifts to buy, it's even harder. You know, one of the chapters in our book is about prepping, is about doing a little bit of cooking on a Sunday afternoon to get you ready for the week ahead. It's a really helpful, non-daunting strategy to have, you know, just a few things in the fridge you can pull out and combine as meals. But you know, one of our main messages in this book is yes, a home-cooked meal is great. But if you can't do it, don't worry about it. Take the pressure off yourself. Just get something on the table, whether it's take-out or prepared food or whatever it is. The last section is about entertaining and how you can create sort of self-serve parties, where you make a bunch of things, and people can either have toppings to make a pizza or do a taco party. Or we have one that's about salad. I mean all of those lend themselves well to holiday meals.
BH: Do you have any tips to cutting down your grocery bill while still making good, healthy dinners?
AS: Home-cooked meals are, you know, really the most affordable way to eat. I think we all tend to think, oh, you know, fast food is so much cheaper. Really if you shop smartly and cook a little bit in bulk and freeze things, you'll save money. Things like beans and rice and grains, which are incredibly nutritious, are very affordable sort of pound for pound, calorie for calorie. And the more you can do soups and stews and grain-based or bean-based dishes, the more money you'll save.
BH: Are there tips you can share about making the most of your dinner table conversation?
AS: Well, it's hard to get a lot of kids to talk at the dinner table. I mean, I personally have to cajole the information out of my son constantly. In the magazine, we ran a sort of cheat sheet on how to get your kids to talk, and the idea is that sometimes you've got to do a little reverse psychology. "Oh, you didn't go to the zoo today, did you?" Or "I heard so-and-so was doing such-and-such, but that couldn't have happened," you know. And then the kid will say, "well, yeah, it did happen! And then I saw the monkeys!" or whatever.
BH: And what are the values that get shared around the table?
AS: The listening and the sharing and the talking. Creating a ritual where everyone comes and shares is a great value. Studies have shown it's important to kids' success. I think the other great value of family dinner is trying new foods. If you keep bringing it out on the dinner table night after night or week after week, at a certain point they're likely to try it. You know, some kids are more stubborn than others, but generally if you expose kids to something ten times, they'll try it and oftentimes they'll like it!
BH: Well, thanks so much for talking with me, Alanna.
AS: My pleasure.
BH: Please check out more info at pic.tv/holidays.
Visit http://pic.tv/holidays/2010/11/02/time-for-dinner-dinner-during-the-holidays-an-interview-with-alanna-stang/ for audio of this interview.