Mom's Kitchen Handbook

A Good Read While some of you were hiding behind your Kindle screens taking in the naughty details of Fifty Shades of Grey during your summer holiday, I was geeking out to Why Calories Count, the terrific new book by Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim. The authors, both of whom hale from academia, take a [...]

By the time the school year comes to a close nine months from now I figure our household alone will have churned out somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 lunches. Can that be right? No wonder it can get a little old. Talking to other moms, it seems one of the biggest challenges in packing [...]

It’s that time of year. Back-to-school. Already. Again. My plan was to offer you some tidbits of nutrition or easy breezy recipe to help alleviate the pain of packing school lunches and getting weekday dinners on the table to a sometimes cranky back-to-school crowd. But life got messy. Not 12 hours after arriving home from [...]

Lest you think all of my recipe ideas come entirely from inside my own head, let me set you straight. I will shamelessly beg, borrow and steal inspiration wherever I can find it. Invite me over for a meal, and beware, I may just snatch a heavily guarded family recipe right out from under your [...]

My favorite book when I was a girl was Bread and Jam for Frances. I spent many lunch hours in the school library, headphones on, listening to the story as I followed along with the pictures of the book. Looking back, perhaps the writing was on the wall that I was headed for a career [...]

When my daughter Isabelle was about four, I took her berry picking. As we headed out into the field I rattled off instructions for choosing the ripest fruit, avoiding the prickers, and putting the berries into the buckets instead of eating them. Yet every time I’d turn my back, she’d shove a little fistful of [...]

With the weeks of summer waning, now is the time to tackle those seasonal favorites, before all the tomatoes, corn, zucchini, picnic eats, and berries give way to the apples and pumpkins, stews and casseroles of the fall. Since prior posts get buried in current ones, I thought I’d bring out some of my own [...]

I’m a lazy cook. I don’t peel my tomatoes when I’m supposed to, hack my onions into a rough chop instead of a tidy dice, rarely salt eggplant before cooking it, and build elaborate shortcuts into cookbook recipes that are too fussy for my taste. My excuse? I’m a mom. I’ve got places to go [...]

Shhhh! Let’s keep this post just between us gals. It could get me into a bit of trouble with my brother and sister-in-law. They’re both chefs whose livelihood relies on folks like us plunking down our cold hard cash to dine out. But recently I heard a few sobering tidbits that has me wanting to [...]