Before I joined the Living team early this year, I worked on a start-up magazine called Cookie. It was a bold five-year experiment in making a parenting magazine unlike any other parenting magazine, one that was about the very real joys and terrors of life with kids—along with food, travel, home, gear, fashion, beauty, and common sense for moms. Sadly, the magazine didn’t make it. Happily, the cookbook that my colleagues Pilar Guzman, Jenny Rosenstrach (who now has an amazing blog called Dinner A Love Story), and I created in our last year there did (below is our glamorous author photo that somehow never made it onto the book).

Published earlier this month, Time for Dinner is, as our subtitle says, “strategies, inspiration, and recipes for family meals every night of the week,” because we know that sometimes you feel like supermom and are able to prep a week’s worth of meals in a single afternoon, while other times you can barely turn on the toaster. Fundamentally, the book is about putting the joy back into family dinner. So we talk about how you can come up with clever ways to create meals that feel as though everyone is eating the same thing—even if they’re not (Chapter 4: “I Want To Have A Family Dinner where We all Eat The Same Meal”); how you can break out of your chicken-finger/pizza/mac-and-cheese rut (Chapter 3: “I WANT SOMETHING SIMPLE, FAST, AND HARD TO SCREW UP”); how you can master a few simple techniques you can use over and over again (Chapter 6: “I WANT TO USE WHAT I ALREADY HAVE”); and, ultimately, how you can stay inspired enough to make the effort even when practice has run late, a fever is running high, or you are running out of steam (Chapter 5: “DO SANDWICHES COUNT?”). If you buy the book and use it, I’d love to hear from you. Below is a sneak peak inside (apologies for the shoddy photos; I took them).

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1 The back cover. The front and back are both filled with little photos of the yummy dishes inside. We thought of this design as a sort of visual menu—so fun for the kids who are allowed to point to what they want.

2 I won’t give away what’s in the picky-eater emergency kit, but I can assure you it’s worth the price of the book.

3 At the beginning of the book we show you what’s in our pantry...

4 ...and our fridge (and freezer) and why.

5 This mix-and-match-meals chart shows how to make a wholesome dinner when you're really not up for doing much (okay, any) cooking, using stuff you probably have in the house.

6 One homemade pizza + three toppings = something to please everyone at the table.

7 Turkey and cheddar on challah with versions for you and for them, from our chapter "Do Sandwiches Count for Dinner?" (hint: YES!!!)

8 The two finished versions of the sandwich (for you, left; for them, right). Yummmmmm.

9 Scrambled-egg pasta, one of the delicious dinners from our chapter called "I want something simple, fast, and hard to screw up."

10 Ice-cube-tray sushi, another recipe from that same chapter.

11 Spaghetti with hand-crushed tomatoes, also from "simple, fast, and hard to screw up," calls for kids to “help” by having them smash the tomatoes with their hands.