Mom's Kitchen Handbook

A household like ours with four females under one roof can tip the scales in the drama department. Never more so than in the before-school bustle when there are important details to fuss over, beyond lunchboxes and homework: whether certain shoes go with certain outfits, if ponytails are straight, if patterns clash, and now that [...]

The best part of this dish is that it might just make you feel like you are dining at a sidewalk café in Paris, particularly if you pair it with a tipple of the white wine you popped open for cooking. Plus, it’s easy to make and creates a lip-smacking broth so good you might [...]

My kids are forever groaning about whole grains in my house. “Why can’t we ever have white bread?” they want to know. It’s a little tiresome, but they haven’t worn me down. It’s one of those things on which I’m not willing to budge. Kind of like my mother and Hostess Ho Hos. It just [...]

The recipe for these chocolatey nuggets comes from fellow mom blogger Beth Aldrich who writes Real Moms Love to Eat. Made with just five wholesome ingredients, and not a drop of processed sugar, it’s the sort of thing you can’t quite made heads or tales of when you take a bite. You just know it [...]

In an era when the kitchen was clearly a woman’s domain, my grandfather was the family cook, and an excellent one at that.  When I was about 11, he served up a platter of hamburgers to my brothers and I that appeared plentiful enough to feed the entire block.  Cooked in a cast iron skillet [...]

I get giddy when my culinary leanings line up with my nutrition ones. Case in point: I learned the other day that cooking pasta “al dente,” as the Italians do, not only maximizes taste, but is better for you. Indeed, pasta cooked so it has a little bite to it has a lower glycemic index [...]

This Chicken Parmesan was such a hit with my daughter, Rosie, she managed to work it into a poem at school two years after first eating it. Waxing poetic about crispy chicken with seasoned bread crumbs probably says more about the recipe than it does about my child’s future as a poet. But, you never [...]

Those are my daughter Virginia’s miniature pink cooking tools you see. They had been scattered in various drawers of our kitchen for a number of years, until several months ago when she took it upon herself to gather them all up, arrange them in this little jelly jar and set them on the counter next [...]

  A minor miracle happened in our house last night. No, it wasn’t the second coming, or the first, depending on where you stand on these matters. Instead, my entire family ate whole wheat fettuccini without uttering a word about its whole “wheatiness.” This has never happened before, despite the dozens of dinners I have [...]