Eating Together, Being Together
Grow closer as a family through mealtime bonding. Explore more than 80 recipes plus essays, tips, and activities for the whole family that show how cooking together and sharing family meals can help build healthy relationships with food and with each other.
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Eating Together, Being Together: Recipes, Activities, and Advice from a Chef Dad and Psychologist Mom
With unique insights from a New York Times–starred chef dad and an award-winning psychologist mom, Eating Together, Being Together is much more than a cookbook. It teaches parents and children from toddlerhood through the teen years how to engage around cooking and mealtime. Each chapter offers easy-to-make recipes using fresh ingredients accompanied by thoughts and tips on using mindfulness to deal with picky eating, listening skills, academic stress, and more. This structure allows preparing and eating meals together to be meaningful, where kids and their parents, guardians, and caregivers can learn from one another and grow closer.
Recipes include a range of food options to accommodate varying tastes with accessible step-by-step instructions for parents and kids. Activities for each chapter tie in key themes for cooking and for life and are presented in a developmentally thoughtful way for young children, preteens, teens, and grown-ups. From eating mindfulness and having honest food conversations to building rituals that support togetherness, this book explores how the family meal, whether cooking or eating, can bring families closer together.
Whether it's kids sharing their feelings while they mix batter, or adults telling stories of their childhood while enjoying a favorite recipe, a special kind of bonding happens around food. Eating Together, Being Together gives you the recipes and activities for that bonding experience and helps set the table for connection.
Awards and Accolades
Silver Winner, Nautilus Award, Food, Cooking, and Healthy Eating category for Eating Together Being Together: Recipes, Activities, and Advice From a Chef Dad and Psychologist Mom (2024)
Grand Prize, Chanticleer International Book Award, Instruction and Insight Non-fiction category for Eating Together Being Together: Recipes, Activities, and Advice From a Chef Dad and Psychologist Mom (2023)
Finalist, American Writing Awards, Cookbooks category for Eating Together Being Together: Recipes, Activities, and Advice From a Chef Dad and Psychologist Mom (2023)
Finalist, American Writing Awards, Parenting and Family category for Eating Together Being Together: Recipes, Activities, and Advice From a Chef Dad and Psychologist Mom (2023)
Reviewed by Philip Van Heusen for Readers’ Favorite—5-star Review
Eating Together Being Together by Julian and Caroline Clauss-Ehlers is packed full of helpful information concerning both cooking and parenting. Combining these two categories is a natural fit when considering how much time goes into food preparation and family time spent eating together. Each section includes ideas for family time, eating mindfulness, fun facts, parenting hints, recipes, and nutrition information. Some of the many suggestions deal with enabling children to make healthy choices and eat nutritious food. Children tend to open up while helping prepare meals and snacks. Julian and Caroline also include many family activities centered on food. The hints on managing, arranging, and filling a kitchen for maximum use are excellent. This book will appeal to readers on many levels. I have never seen a book combining parenting and culinary skills, but this book does. Julian and Caroline have hit a home run, and I hope they have started a new trend. What do you get when you pair a professionally trained chef with a psychotherapist to write a book? Working together, Julian C.E. Clauss-Ehlers and Caroline S. Clauss-Ehlers combine their separate fields to produce an amazing book that is part cookbook and part parenting book. Their two areas of expertise combine seamlessly, creating a book that is a pure delight to read. Caroline gives ideas to get your children to eat foods that are good for them. Julian takes away the concerns attached to cooking new foods. Their writing style makes the reader feel comfortable, even in areas that have produced anxiety in the past. The importance of modeling is taught, as well as eating mindfulness. The model HAVEN is introduced to support listening skills. I highly recommend this book and hope more like it are published soon.