Mom's Kitchen Handbook

With Thanksgiving behind us, it was a quieter Week in Food. Here’s a peek at a handful of photos captured with my iphone over the past week or so. Loving cold-weather fruits in salads such as this one made for a workday lunch: butter lettuce, radiccio, persimmons, goat cheese, hazelnuts dressed with white wine vinegar, [...]

My husband lived in the UK for four years where he got hooked on Scotch eggs and haggis, and developed a fondness for the English toastie: a crispy sandwich made in an electric press. Consider it the smaller, humbler cousin of the Italian panini. Long before we had children or any money to blow on [...]

I’d never thought much about the potential downside of eating a soft egg on toast or a raw one cracked into a shake until relatively recently. I grew up in a household where we stored eggs on the kitchen counter, ate them with runny yolks, and were allowed as much raw cookie dough as our [...]

You put heart + soul + elbow grease into your pie crust, it’s a crime to toss out all the precious scraps left behind after the shells are filled. As we head full swing into the holiday season, I thought I’d share a method for turning extra dough into scrumptious little cinnamon sugar cookies. The [...]

In addition to Thanksgiving prep, this week involved a little road trip to LA to visit family and friends. Here’s what we got up to, snapped with my iphone. Spent a few nights with my friend Francey, who made nourishing smoothies each morning that the kids lapped up like chocolate milk. In addition to frozen [...]

I’m a sucker for holiday rituals. It’s all the little traditions that lend real meaning to the big feast days of the year: serving the pie on your grandmother’s beloved plate, gathering fallen leaves to decorate the table, or giving the youngest guests first dips on the turkey drumsticks. Here’s a sweet tradition-in-the-making that puts [...]

It’s probably safe to assume that at this point the country is replete with enough Thanksgiving dinner inspiration to last into the next millenium. A speedy Google search turned up 180 MILLION hits when I plugged in the words, “Thanksgiving recipes” (my Colorful Cabbage Salad among them). So let’s all stop talking turkey for the [...]

The weather has turned chilly here, which makes me want to stay warm at the stove now more than ever.  Below are a handful of snapshots of what I got up to…in the kitchen, and out…all taken with my iphone. We hosted a gaggle of family for a casual supper featuring Ina Garten’s most excellent [...]

Thanksgiving meal planning inevitably revolves around how to roast a golden bird or nail a perfect pie crust. The notion of a salad at the holiday table is usually an afterthought, unless it’s one involving jello, mini marshmallows, or canned mandarins. But your Thanksgiving table NEEDS salad, people. All the heaviness of the meal — [...]

Last week I talked about teaching your kids to cook for both selfish reasons (so one day they’ll cook for you) and unselfish ones (your kids will be armed with an essential life skill). If you missed that post, you’ll find it here. Now the question is, how to go about it. If you’ve not [...]