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.

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.

PRAISE FOR EATING TOGETHER, BEING TOGETHER...

"Eating Together, Being Together is a game-changer in parent-child literature. It embeds family relationships in the nitty-gritty of daily life, where, after all, it resides. And then it brings the nitty-gritty, here of the kitchen, to the forefront where it can be cultivated, detailed, organized, and become a joyful and powerful vehicle for child development and family well-being."

– Berkshire Edge

Julian Clauss-Ehlers is a classically trained executive chef who has cooked in five Michelin starred restaurants. Currently he is the executive chef at Butcher and Banker and Trattoria Bianca at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan.

Dr. Caroline Clauss-Ehlers is an internationally known award-winning psychologist whose research, teaching, and writing have focused on supporting children, adolescents, and their families. Dr. Clauss-Ehlers is a licensed psychologist in New York and a professor at Long Island University, Brooklyn.