Photograph by Photodisc/Getty Images.

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The dawn of DoubleX inspired me to start a project in which I entertained on Tuesdays, a day I had decided unscientifically was the most inconvenient in the week. For eight months,  I doggedly slogged through regular dinner parties , fending off strep throat and fatigue as I spatchcocked game hens and brewed big pots of chili. Though I am a food writer and a former professional cook, I had shied away from entertaining because I have a tendency to overdo it. I dirty too many pans and make too many trips to the grocery store for expensive ingredients.

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What fro-yo addict worth her Pinkberry card wouldn’t kill for a zero-calorie sweetener that doesn’t cause bladder cancer or carry the faint taste of rubber? And if it comes straight from the earth and not from the corridors of a scary laboratory? Why, even better.

Photograph of pilaf courtesy of Sara Dickerman.

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I have vowed to stop letting my perfectionism in the kitchen keep me from entertaining. I’ll toss aside my restaurant finesse and make do with what is already in the fridge. Like exercise, I’ll make entertaining a habit, and see if I can make it less overwhelming—less about the food, even, and more about the people I welcome into my house.

As part of my never-ending war on clutter, I was about to scrap the 20-odd-year collection of Gourmet magazines in my office closet, but then I heard the news today of its demise, and I’m glad I didn’t. I thumbed through an issue from 1996: It has a dozen-plus page article from Nancy Silverton with exhausting details on making sourdough breads from scratch. Gourmet always pitched its articles and its recipes for the ambitious—it was a point of pride both before and after Ruth Reichl took over the magazine in 1999 and modernized it.

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I have vowed to stop letting my perfectionism in the kitchen keep me from entertaining. The old me could barely pull off a dinner party because my ambitions of restaurant finesse just didn’t scale down to my kid-crowded life. So I decided to change my model.

Photograph of a family having dinner by David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Creative Images.

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“We had the best dinner ever at our friend’s house,” said my twins over dinner a couple of months ago.

“Wonderful, what was it?” I asked.

“Chicken tenders and broccoli,” they said.

“Oh, really?” I said, spooning the lamb siniyeh (a Palestinian dish of rice, eggplant, pine nuts, and lamb) onto their plates. “What made it so good?”

“The broccoli had cheese sauce!”

“I see,” I said. “What other dishes do you really like?”

My three boys didn’t have to think much.

“Sushi.”

“What else?”

Vered Guttman is a professional chef, but found that her kids are less impressed with her Swiss chard leaves stuffed with lamb and rice in lemon sauce than their friends' moms' simple quesadillas. After realizing that "children don’t want novelty.

Photograph of Maxine Powell courtesy of Julie Powell; Still of Amy Adams © 2009 Sony Pictures Digital Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Our cat Maxine died last week at the age of 17 without ever knowing that she’d been portrayed on the big screen. In mourning her this week, I can’t help but think about the movie version of Maxine with mixed feelings. Julie & Julia—well, half of it, anyway—is based on my 2005 memoir of the same name, and in that book, Maxine played a not-inconsiderable role.

Photograph by Sara Dickerman.

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I have vowed to stop letting my perfectionism in the kitchen keep me from entertaining. The old me could barely pull off a dinner party because my ambitions of restaurant finesse just didn’t scale down to my kid-crowded life. So I decided to change my model.

Photo courtesy of Sara Dickerman.

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My mother served dinner pretty much every Sunday night to family and friends. Even when she didn’t have time to make anything elaborate, it was a given that the house would be full of extended and unofficial family. One of the most common dishes she served was a totally non-Texan version of “chili” that her mother had used as a frugal entertaining dish when she was a child in postwar-era Maryland.