Mom's Kitchen Handbook

Some of the very best ideas for preparing fruits and vegetables come from talking to the folks behind the food: the farmers themselves. And why not? These people know their produce better than anyone and are likely up to their ears in whatever they’re growing. Leave it up to the green thumbs to figure out [...]

I spent some time wandering around with my camera last week, going a little overboard with the snapshots because suddenly everything is blooming and gorgeous. I want to hang onto every sweet smell and delicious image in the same way I want to cling to my children’s childhood. Here’s my herb garden, planted in aluminum [...]

Babysitter food. That’s what we called the frozen entrees my mom would pull from the freezer on nights she and my dad were heading out on the town. Any other evening of the year she made good-quality, lovingly prepared, homemade food, but on date nights, supper meant a rotating selection of TV dinners, corn dogs, [...]

The first time I hatched a plan to lose weight was at age 14 when I decided it would be ideal to have the taut and sinewy shape of celebrity, Sarah Jessica Parker. I put myself on a diet that involved filling a cereal bowl with water, heating it up in the microwave, and eating [...]

With food manufacturers pouring billions each year into convincing our kids to eat junk, how’s a health-minded mom to compete? Presentation is a big part of it, something Madison Avenue marketers figured out long ago when they started decorating food packages with cartoons and inserting toys into cereal boxes. One study found 50 percent of [...]

I’ve been feeling a little guilty lately knowing how I’ve neglected all you moms who rely so heavily on your crock pots. Although I’ve been slow cooking a batch of beans on a near weekly basis, my slow cooker has otherwise been collecting dusk, which is why it’s been a while since any new recipes [...]

My approach to assembling a meal each night is hardly different from pulling together an outfit each morning. Take today’s recipe: it started with my mood for something a little lighter and the desire to use the perfectly ripe avocado sitting in my fruit bowl lest it go rapidly south. From there sprung the idea [...]

For those of you celebrating Easter, you are likely to have a heckuva lot of chocolate on your hands next week. As such, I thought you might appreciate this post I did last year on using up leftover Easter candy: My family knows better than anyone that I go weak at the knees for chocolate. [...]

When my oldest daughter, Isabelle, was about three, she and I made a lemon tart together to bring to a family gathering. We mixed and rolled dough, twiddled our thumbs as we waited for it to chill, pressed it into the pan just so, and cooked a luscious Meyer lemon curd to pour into the [...]