Rachael Ray

I love Spring and our kiddies love it even more then we since they can frolic to the heart’s content in the great outdoors.  So whether your child’s favorite activity is riding their bike, rolling in the grass, playing in the mud or enjoying a chocolate ice cream cone, when they come home smiling they also come home dirty from head to toe. Baths await, laundry looms and some tough stains remain. Here are simple ways to pre-treat some of spring’s most common stains that unite we moms coast to coast and child to child that will help save their clothes and our manicure. Firsts a few stain removal tips: o Treat ASAP o Never rub, blot unless otherwise noted o Test hidden area [...]...

Lunch duty is a trial-and-error (and trial by fire) sort of thing. Sometimes you just need to try things and hope you learn something along the way. So in that spirit, here are seven highs (and lows) I learned last week over at LunchBoxBlues.com. Purchased crepes only sound like a good thing. You know the ones I’m talking about. The grocers sell packages of them in the produce section. Got me thinking how creative and delicious it would be to wrap a few of those around some fruit and pop them in a lunch container. Except they act like sponges when wrapped around anything moist. Which means you end up with a big pile of mess by lunch. If you want [...]...

My children attend public school in New York state, not too far from New York City, so it shouldn’t surprise me that we have a diverse student body.  But when we sent out a survey asking where the parents of the students were born, we heard of 35 different countries!  We sent the survey as part of something we call International Day-every other year we dedicate a whole Saturday to celebrating foods and cultures from around the globe. We wanted to make sure as many countries as possible were represented, so we sent out the survey and then of course asked the parents to volunteer on International Day to cook and serve foods from their native lands or ancestry. The [...]...

Last weekend, we hosted a sleep-over. All I could hear was giggling, little feet tip-toeing when they should have been tucked in a blanket, and lots of giggling. It was late, but why would I challenge their pixie moment? In keeping with their spirit, I decided to make a fun little breakfast for them. Cookie-Crusted French Toast. Since I also had a moral obligation to their mothers for being somewhat nutritious, I felt this was a good middle ground. This dish works with any cookies you have at home. All you needs is a few crushed cookies, bread, butter, milk, eggs and vanilla essence. Whilst the cookies add a playful edge, not to mention texture, there is another ingredient that takes [...]...

With the help of nothing more than a large whole-wheat tortilla, I can turn just about anything into lunch box-friendly sushi. Well, perhaps “sushi” overstates it a bit. But I can create sushi-like bites that are easy to pack, fun and nutritious. And so can you. And the best part — no raw seafood needed. The first time I tried this was with a banana. I’d planned to make my son a peanut butter and banana wrap for lunch. So I smeared peanut butter over one side of a tortilla, popped a banana onto it and rolled it up. Trouble was, it didn’t fit in the containers I usually pack his lunch in. So I cut it in half. When I looked at [...]...

Four large russets. Is that is what my kitchen is being reduced to at this present moment, I thought? I looked in the refrigerator one last time, bit this was really it.  It is on days like this, that I am particularly thankful for a well-stocked pantry. My mother had trained me well.  With a full range of spices and canned tomatoes, there was no way dinner would be an after thought. One of the dishes I loved growing-up, was ‘tariwala alu’ – potatoes cooked in a  bold gravy of tomatoes and mustard seeds.  The dish uses a lot of spices from the South, with ingredients like curry leaves and black mustard seeds – benign looking black seeds that pop like [...]...

Want to know the fastest and easiest way to get more creative with the lunches you pack? Stop thinking of them as lunches. Seriously. The reason so many of us falter for lunch box inspiration is because we get trapped by our own preconceived notions of what lunch foods — particularly packed lunch foods — are supposed to be. So after we’ve exhausted our handful of go-to sandwiches and salads, we find ourselves in a lunch rut. But once you abandon ideas of what lunch is “supposed” to be, you open up all sort of possibilities. Suddenly, pulled pork sliders (made from leftover roasted pork and a bottle of barbecue sauce) is an easy option. So is fried chicken and waffles (frozen whole-grain waffles [...]...

It may be spring but as I see it, oatmeal is an any-time-of-the-year food. It’s super nutritious, filling and delicious. Over the years I’ve made many versions and I never seem to run out of new ways to jazz it up. I like to keep my breakfasts relatively healthy, but I also want to feel that what I’m eating is special so I’m always working on ways to keep the first meal of the day exciting and healthy at the same time. It’s important to have a good balance of carbs and protein in the morning to help sustain you until your next meal. With that in mind, I try to add things to the oatmeal that will help keep me [...]...

As far as Mondays go, this one is not so bad. It’s finally sunny. It’s not snowing - or hailing - both of which it did this weekend, at the end of April. I am not panicked about any specific issues relating to any of my children (at the moment - this could change at any time). Today is also a bit of a monumental day as we are getting new counters in our kitchen. We have lived in our 100+ year-old Victorian for 12 years and we are not a family that moves into a house and immediately re-does it top to bottom. Quite the contrary. We had originally budgeted for one house project per year which afforded, among [...]...