It’s still a reference tool, she said, “but that’s not as important as the actual act of recording the details of the day — about having the book in my hand and seeing the evidence of all the dinners I’ve produced and enjoyed for my family over the course of 12 years.”  For the most part, the entries are remarkably unembellished. On 9/11, the meal Ms. Rosenstrach had planned to have — chicken with arugula and wild rice — is simply crossed out. Unable to get home, she had slept at her brother’s instead. It’s the handwriting that betrays hints of life changes, morphing from a luxurious script to the slightly messier print of someone pressed for time.  In addition to the public diary that his performances represented, Spalding Gray kept a more mundane journal, one of “fact and action,” he wrote in the prelude to his book “Sex and Death to Age 14.” “This report became like a Christmas tree,” he wrote, “the structure upon which I could later hang my feelings, like ornaments.”  Ms. Rosenstrach, an inveterate saver of date books and diaries going back to first grade, says the dinner diary functions as an emotional jog, but it also represents a collection of gold stars — testament to the good work, the sometimes drudge work, she has done, in regularly feeding her family and trying to feed them well.  “Sometimes as a mother, you can spend a whole day running around dealing with these little things that are intangible, and you feel like you have nothing to show for it,” she said at home on a recent evening. “Dinner is something tangible. So I focus on that.”  When Cookie magazine, where Ms. Rosenstrach worked as features director, folded, she found the ultimate use for a diary she kept for reasons sometimes inscrutable even to herself. Its contents are often inspiration for the blog she started last March — Dinner: A Love Story.  It’s an effort to inspire other parents — with recipes, insights, rituals — to do that same hard but rewarding work of feeding their families with care.  As advocacy for the family table has become something close to a political movement, Ms. Rosenstrach feels validated, even relieved.  “I no longer feel as though I’m letting my feminist forebearers down,” she said. “Being in the kitchen, with Dad too, is no longer being trapped; it’s quite the opposite.”  It’s the eyes, rather than the mouth, that should water at the thought of those well-documented 12 years of work, the thousands of onions that needed chopping, all that breading and sautéing and boiling. Yet flipping through the pages of the dinner diary, and reading between the lines, one only senses, in all that attention to detail, a mindfulness that is as much about a way to live as it is a way to eat.  A version of this article appears in print on July 13, 2010, on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Been for Dinner? She Could Look It Up. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Jenny Rosenstrach has kept a diary of her evening meals for years, and it reveals more about her than just what she eats.