I started making a list on the train home from work one night last fall. I was sitting there, racking my brain, in a mild panic, trying to decide what to cook for dinner that night. Here's what came to mind: nothing. So I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down all the meals I could make for my husband and two kids that didn't involve the toaster oven, or customizing plate after plate, or Gitmo-style negotiations before every microscopic bite ("If you don't try that pork/pea/basmati grain, no dessert! Okay. I'm counting to three...!"). The exercise didn't take very long. I stared in disbelief at the sad, sorry lot that was my culinary repertoire:

The sad, sorry lot

• Breaded chicken cutlets
• Hamburgers
• Pizza
• Sautéed shrimp

Four meals. How was this possible? How had my mammoth archive of prekid dinners devolved into this grim little lineup? I did some quick math: I had probably churned out, on average, about 300 dinners a year since moving out of my parents' house 15 years earlier. Which means I had tracked down recipes for, shopped for, minced for, and fired up the stove for approximately 4,500 dinners in my adult life. Four thousand five hundred dinners. Granted, they weren't 4,500 different dinners, but they weren't lazy ones, either. Even when I was 23 and living by myself, I never had the punch-line refrigerator—the one with the six-pack of tallboys, nail polish, and leftover ramen noodles. I was a cookbook-of-the-month member. A risotto maker. I was fond of telling people that the first Silver Palate Cookbook was soooo much better than the second.

When I moved in with Andy (my now-husband) at 25, the cooking ante was only upped. The first thing we'd ask each other on Saturday morning was "What should we make for dinner?" We'd see a recipe that required something "exotic" (tamarind paste! pectin! a bouquet garni!) and think nothing of taking two subways to track it down—all in the name of eating something good in the exposed-brick kitchen of our fifth-floor walkup with a view of twinkling downtown Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. It was romantic, yes, but more important, it was delicious. Our quality of life, measured always by how well we were eating, was so freaking good.

And then it wasn't.

In 2002 and 2003, we added a couple of quality-of-life impediments—specifically, two girls, named Phoebe and Abby—to the equation. Dinner morphed from the highlight of our day to the last big hurdle to be cleared before bed, and over the course of the next five years—that is to say, up until that list-making commute last fall—my once-formidable arsenal of gratins and galettes devolved into the Kidz Menu at Quiznos. My daughters ate other things, sure. But never the same other things. And never anything that seemed worth all the negotiations, bribes, and empty threat-mongering. To be fair, these battles were almost exclusively with my younger daughter, Abby, who, bless her hard little heart, has made picky eating something of a professional career in her four short years on earth. Once in a while, Andy and I would spoil ourselves with a real dinner from the old days, but of course, this only meant we had to prepare two completely separate meals: one for us and one for the kids.

Coming up with dinner ideas had started to feel like an exercise in self-flagellation, as it was that night on the train. Instead of thinking about what I was in the mood for, what was fresh, what fun I might have with that tamarind paste, I was thinking this: Should we have a logistically complicated, satisfying dinner that the kids won't eat, or a simple, soul-crushing one that they will? Both options seemed evidence of some sort of failure.

I had one big thing going for me, though. As the mother of a 4- and a 5-year-old, I was no longer in the dinner-hour trenches. I could prepare a meal without having to defuse a witching-hour tantrum, or body-block a toddler headed for the basement stairs, or nurse the baby to bed as her sister screamed and the garlic burned. Given what was at stake here—a seeming life sentence of cutlets and pizza—I had no excuse not to try to get my family out of the rut.

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