Parenting Possibilities: The Family Dinner Experience

Family Dinners: Joy or Indigestion? The extensive research on the benefits of family dinners has seemed to define eating together as the make it or break it sign to raising healthy, well-adjusted children. I do agree that family meals have potential to be an opportunity to catch up on the day’s events and bond in […]

Mushroom Barley Soup

Mushroom Barley Soup I wake up in the morning thinking of the billowing steam from maple sap boiling. I love going to sugar houses to see the dramatic plumes of steam rising, to smell the sweet maple aroma, to taste the first of the season’s delicate, delicious syrup…to experience the promise of spring again. My […]

Q&A: 12 Suggestions for Including Babies During Family Dinner

QUESTION AND ANSWERS When your kids were babies, how did you include them at the dinner table? Jennifer Shiao Page writes, “Well, when she was a wee one, we always ate when she was asleep. Once she could sit up, we put her in the high chair and she sat at the table with us. […]

Just My Type: Finding Normalcy During Holiday Meals

Chew On This This past Thanksgiving, the cheese bit back. In our home, Thanksgiving has been a holiday that focuses on the three Fs: family, football — and food. Because of that, it is the second of the five late fall/early winter obstacles our famil…

Kettles Full of Apple Chutney

Apple Chutney When our vegetable garden begins slowing down, we begin apple season. We harvest our own apples, visit friends who have apple trees, and gather apples from wild trees and abandoned orchards. It’s apple time early in the morning before work, late at night when we return home, and on our day off. We […]