In the kitchen

Resources and Recipes to Make Your Meal Planning Successful

September 15, 2011

With the Plan It- Don't Panic meal planning challenge beginning this Monday morning, now seemed like the perfect time to share some really helpful resources to help you succeed with your menus.
Learn more about how to make meal planning work (and some different methods for doing it), find tons of my favorite online recipes and [...]

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Gardening with Herbs 101: Preserving Your Herbs

September 14, 2011

Written by Meg Dickey, Contributing Writer
Last time we talked about how to harvest your herbs - now that you've harvested them, what are you going to do with them?
Here are my favorite ways to preserve herbs for out-of-season use:
Freezing
This method best preserves flavor.  Rinse the herbs and chop coarsely.  Place about 1-2 teaspoons in [...]

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Small Batch Dehydrating for the Summer Bounty

September 5, 2011

There's a woman who lives a few blocks down from me with this miraculous garden that seems to go from a freshly tilled plot to a wildly abundant gardener's delight in about one month flat (my husband keeps telling me not to be jealous because she probably uses Miracle-Gro or something of the chemical-sort).
She grows [...]

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Benefits of a Protein-Rich Breakfast (and a Protein Pancake Recipe)

September 2, 2011

Written by Stacy K, Contributing Writer
We’ve all heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but with so many choices (and conflicting information), it can be difficult to know what to serve our family.
While cereal or toast may seem easy and convenient, these high-carbohydrate choices lead to elevated blood sugar levels which [...]

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How to Peel Peaches and Tomatoes for Canning

September 1, 2011

Although I've been canning for 4-5 years now, it was only about 2 years ago that I learned this simple trick for peeling peaches that has made canning an easier task. I was missing out!
My 6 year old and I made this short video the other night, while peeling 40 lbs of peaches. She's behind the [...]

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8 Unique Recipes With Zucchini

August 19, 2011

Written by Stacey T, Contributing Writer
About this time of year, people are wondering what to do with all the zucchini that just keeps coming from gardens. Zucchini is nutritious - a great source of fiber, antioxidants, Vitamin C and many B vitamins - and it's delicious too!
But we [...]

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3 Simple Methods for Making Herbal Iced Tea

August 15, 2011

It may surprise you to know that growing up and into my young adult years, I was quite the fan of Nestea powdered ice tea mix. The super sweetened kind that tastes only vaguely like tea, and mostly like tea and lemon flavored sugar water.
Ever the poster child for bad nutritional decisions until I hit [...]

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Preserving the Harvest: Sweet Fruit Chutney

August 12, 2011

by Meg Dickey, Contributing Writer
Summer, and the fruit it brings, has a way of overwhelming many of us. If you've got a pile of peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots or any other kind of fruit sitting in the middle of your table, you need to figure out a way to deal with it!  One of the [...]

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Even Real Food Bloggers Get the Blues (and How to Keep Nutrition Up in Busy, Stressful Seasons)

August 8, 2011

**I shared our exciting news the other day, which entirely relates to the re-posting of this post from almost exactly one year ago. Morning sickness, fatigue and some other challenging circumstances have made it a real struggle to put decent food on the table (or desire to eat it, for that matter) these past two [...]

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Training Kids to Help in the Kitchen

July 28, 2011
Caden-kneading-bread

Knowing how to prepare real, whole foods is an absolutely necessary life skill that every child should learn. Children who are not taught the basics of food preparation will end up defaulting to processed, packaged foods, simply because they haven't learned to make anything better.
If we don't take the time to teach them, how will [...]

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