Want to prepare one meal the entire family will actually eat? Get your children to finish their vegetables? Spend more quality time with your kids?

Enter The Family Kitchen , where award-winning chef and mother of three Debra Ponzek shares recipes that are simple enough to please kids, refined enough to satisfy parents, and easy enough for everyone to roll up their sleeves and help make. From Breakfast to Dinnertime, Bake Sales to Vegetables and Salads, Snow Days to Summer Supper on the Grill, chapters include 125 flavorful crowd-pleasers such as Pan-Seared Pork Chops with Green Apple–Cranberry Compote, Honey-Glazed Carrots, and Double Hot Chocolate with Homemade Marshmallows. This is food you and your kids will want to eat every day—and not a smiley-face pizza in sight!

While dinner may frequently be over all too soon—cut short by homework, practice, or bath time—preparing meals together in the kitchen can help you steal a little more time with your kids. The kitchen is warm, the pace relaxed, and the conversation easy. Children are also proud of their culinary accomplishments, exclaiming at the table: “I helped make it!” and then diving into a huge portion of those very same carrots they peeled just minutes earlier. Each recipe includes a list of exactly which steps kids can tackle. In addition, there are tips on how to incorporate healthful ingredients and new flavors into a child’s diet; how to make a kitchen safe for children; and how to pull off a kids’ cooking party. The indispensable companion to every family’s favorite gathering spot, The Family Kitchen has a place in every home.

Surely I am not the only mother who can barely recall what it was like before three kids took over the house, the car, the backyard, and my heart, and it’s precisely because of this 180-degree turnaround that I wanted to write this book. The book is for moms and dads who like to cook, who want to teach their kids proficiency in the kitchen, and who want to eat well—without pretension—when they find time to cook at home. Above all, this book is about the possibilities for connecting with your kids and enjoying your family by cooking together. —From the Introduction