Food & Dining

Summer time is here ... HOORAY! Bring on the beach vacations, picnics, trips to the pool and of course camp lunches. If you're like me and tired of serving up the ole carrots and ranch dip, look no further for a few new, exciting and tasty fruits and veggies to add to your lunch box or cooler to keep things on the healthier side this summer. Each variety of produce listed is easy to find at most larger, local grocery stores. Enjoy these colorful and interesting fruits and veggies at the dinner table, poolside or added to your snack repertoire. Sugar Snap Peas - Delicious raw or cooked, the sugar snap pea has a sweet crunchy exterior with peas inside its...

Before I was a mother, I envisioned my family's meal times, especially dinner, as nothing short of perfection. I'd serve up deliciously prepared meals a' la June Cleaver, and my family would eagerly gobble them up while praising my culinary efforts. Boy was I WRONG!!! Despite the fact that both of my children eat a pretty wide variety of foods, my 4-year-old daughter enjoys dragging meals out for what sometimes feels like an eternity. Her reason behind the desire to make dinner time about as long as a professional sporting event remains a mystery. The agony of getting her to eat a decent amount of food within a reasonable amount of time has become one of the most dreaded...

  Soda, pop, cola and Coke; whatever you call them soft drinks have become a main stream beverage in our country and are readily accessible to quench our thirst at check out lines EVERYWHERE! Confession: I'm a self proclaimed former diet soda addict. Growing up in the land of potluck dinners and southern barbecues two-liter beverages were ever present at all meals. Believe me, as a child and well into adulthood I drank my fair share of soda (and other sugar laden beverages). I myself gave up the addictive soda drinking habit many, many years ago when, with a little self-guided research, discovered I was having some nasty side effects when I didn't get my daily dose of soda. In my...

A long work day concludes. My sons are running around, coloring, and watching a cartoon. I am chopping vegetables in the kitchen. My knife knocks the cutting board rhythmically. Onions, celery, tomatoes, carrots, and potatoes slide into my prep bowl. I find a song to groove to on my iPhone. The butter sizzles in my green Dutch oven. I season the butter and dump the onions in to simmer. I work through the rest of the recipe. The vegetables sauté, filling the house with a lovely aroma, and I stir the mixture. I add other ingredients as I go along, savoring the process. From the living room I hear my husband and my boys talking and laughing with the...

I've never been able to get much out of any 'how-to' parenting books. Maybe it's the part of me that hates being told what to do, but they never seem to help. A friend knew my distaste for them and suggested Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman. After reading just the summary I could tell it was my kind of book. An American journalist, Druckerman is living abroad in France and gives birth to her first child. She quickly begins to notice the differences among French and American parenting styles and subsequently how the children behave. What I enjoy most is that it's simply an observation of some of the differences without saying one is right or wrong. A new perspective...