Covert cooking: how do I sneak healthy food into my family’s diet?
How can I stealthily convert my husband’s diet and my teenaged picky sister’s diet to get them to eat healthy without knowing. You know… baby steps. AND! what are some good whole food protein substitutes aside from tofu?
Sugar skulls of Toluca: sparkling up in your face
I’m loving this time of year. Here I was, thinking the city went crazy for El Dieciséis, but Day of the Dead is so much more colorful, and soulful. Brightly colored sheets of papel picado hang in store windows. Velvety, crimson terciopelo flowers sit in vases at restaurants. Orange marigolds, the traditional Day of the Dead flower (called cempasúchil in Spanish) have suddenly bloomed in the street medians.
Recycle your halloween pumpkin as yummy refrigerator soup
Buying a huge vegetable, setting it outside for a few days, then throwing it away bothers me. Inspiration hit when a friend explained “refrigerator soup,” made from whatever veg was a little past its prime. If this soup works for slightly saggy veg, couldn’t it work for my old pumpkins too?
10 tips on cooking for your gluten-and-dairy-free paleo aunt without pulling your hair out
Is this scenario familiar to you? You go out to a restaurant with a bunch of friends and one of them spends half an hour with the waiter trying to work out what they can eat. I’m one of those people! My diet is like a finely tuned orchestra and when I get it wrong I’m hooked up to a morphine drip hallucinating rainbows. It’s not pretty.
Lets face it, most people you meet will have foods they do and don’t eat. For some of us it is really important. Whether it’s a deathly intolerance to nuts or a commitment to not eating dead things, if you’re going to feed friends and family who are offbeat eaters, you need to pay attention or you run the risk of offending their beliefs — or landing them in hospital.
This is my survival guide for feeding offbeat eaters.
Why we shop at our dingey local grocery instead of the place with all the possibly-better food across town
While we have several quality grocery stores that sell all kinds of delicious, organic, 100% good-for-you kind of food, we tend to opt to shop at our local supermarket instead. And by local, I don’t mean locally-grown, I mean… right down the street. We don’t do this because it’s close per se — the location is part of the appeal, but that’s because John, the man who owns the store, employs people who live in and around our immediate area. His store services people who live near us, and we routinely see the same people working and the same people shopping.
What pretty candies can I give out for Halloween?
Gorgeous food is great porn: fun to look at, SO fun to imagine eating. I’ve been thinking about these glossy candied apples our copyeditor Caroline sent me for a WEEK. I would love to give out a pretty candy of my own this weekend, but A: no time and B: would kids even eat it? Aren’t parents training them to reject all things not packaged?
What’s a good, pretty, yummy, fun candy I can give out that won’t offend guardians and — even better — will be suitable for kids with nut allergies or gluten intolerances?
Make yourself a bowl of honey spiced crickets
Sariann and Chelsea are two big fans of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. They are also fans of food. They combine their interests in their unusual cooking blog, Inn at the Crossroads. Here’s their post about a tasty-sounding spiced locust!
I dreaded grocery shopping, but it’s my household job: how I made my chore less loathesome
I really, really dislike grocery shopping. It seems to take time out of my day and stores are hard to navigate and I always forget what I need and blehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I never want to do it.
But friends: NO LONGER!
Not since I made a system — everything I dislike doing is better with a system which removes the barriers to success. Now I finally have a grocery system — or at least most of one.