This Week's Food

In the midst of the horror unfolding in Ukraine, we found ourselves desperate for something to latch our hopes and humanity to. We found it, hope that is, in the smallest glimmer, from Chef Jose Andres and his non-profit World Central Kitchen. Chef Andres, Michelin star chef and the winner of multiple James Beard Awards, started WCK in 2010 to address the humanitarian crisis in Haiti after an earthquake devastated the region.  They are now in Ukraine: 

Who doesn't love a snow day? Thinking back to childhood, snow days always meant hot chocolate with lots of marshmallows and my brother (hi, Hughbie!) and me ending up in some sort of snow/ice fight. We asked some of the team to share their snowy comforts/what they're entertaining themselves with while inside, and here are some of their responses:

This week's fish is Fluke from Red's Best at Fish Pier. Fluke, sometimes called Summer Flounder, is much more prevalent in the summer months in New England waters. But each winter, for a short while, they take a trip North from their toastier homes to pop into our frigid waters. We are in the middle of that brief but tasty séjour, and are grateful for it. 

This week we have a delightful little wink from your childhood in at Treat of the Week. Peanut Brittle from Two Fat Cats Bakery is a nod from simpler times when the Internet wasn't a thing, roller skates were, and you had permanent dental hardware that made you look like a deranged cartoon beaver (just me??). It feels somehow reminiscent and special. We hope you enjoy it.

Another peach of a day served up to you by vengeful, spite-fueled New England weather gods.  What a delight. We hope everyone is safe at home and off the roads.

To keep you cozy and warm we have created a Valentine's Day Pop Up to give you the warm , culinary fuzzies.  We're aware that Valentine's Day can be viewed as a corporate construct, just another way to shove nauseating Jewelry commercials into your eyeballs until you pass out. But to us, its an excuse to pour a glass of wine, crank some Pasty Cline and cook a delicious meal in your sweatpants.

It's a very strange Saturday Morning for the Family Dinner Fam. There have only been 3 Saturdays in 4 years that we haven't been lovingly packing and delivering your shares while trading jokes and listening to bad 90's Hip Hop. ( Do I know all the words to "Shoop" by Salt N' Pepa?? Does a one-legged duck swim in circles? Yes. Of course I do.)

Dinner, as we all likely are aware, comes at the end of the day. Sometimes it comes at the very end of very long days, where we have been stretched and pulled in a thousand directions, seemingly simultaneously. We get home and the prospect of dinner looms large, imposing another demand on your tired brain that feels like it clocked out hours ago.

We are always trying to tell more and more folks about the mission of Family Dinner.  That we want to bring you the highest quality, best tasting local food around and use data and predictive analytics to eliminate waste in the system and give small family farms the chance to compete at a larger scale. (Insert Family Dinner cheerleading emoji here.)

Since the dawn of Family Dinner (which feels like it was in the Mesozoic Era when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but in fact was only in 2017), we have been sourcing seafood from our friends at Red's Best and at Ipswich Shellfish Company.  

We will certainly continue to do so but this week we wanted to introduce a new face to the line up: True Fin seafood which hails out of Portland, ME and is our main seafood purveyor there.

For many of us (all? Yeah. Let's go with all of us), 2021 has been a year of fatigue and malaise draped in a cloud of general blah that rarely lifted. People are just so darn tired, feeling worn down to the nub with a tank that's teetering on "E". It's hard to pick up your head and peek around for bright spots.

We hope you have a wonderful Holiday and get to enjoy some delicious food and time with friends, family, and dogs. :)

A little, organic bird may have told you that we have expanded Family Dinner into Portland, Maine. (And if you didn't know, now you know.) One of the very best parts of working in a new community is meeting the folks who make up its fabric. We met Lee and Bryna from LB Kitchen early in our Portland wanderings and fell in love immediately.

I'm willing to admit to having a cookbook problem. Well, technically two problems. First, I can't seem to stop buying them and second, I can't seem to use them for their intended purpose. So many of them are like museum pieces, oohed- and aahed over at first review and then rarely referred to again.  A great example the gastronomic magnum opus "Paul Bocuse: The Complete Recipes"; the exhaustive collection of the French Masterchef. It includes such works as Le Lievre a la Royale;  a wild rabbit with foie gras and truffles cooked in a sauce of its own blood. Doesn't exactly scream Approachable Weeknight Meal.