11 Great Ways to Cook Beets

beet roots for cooking or roasting

Are you afraid of beets? First of all they’re bright red, and the color seems to bleed all over the place! Then there is a fear that their color and flavor will intimidate other dishes. There’s no reason to fear. You can learn to love the color, and taste, of beets. Many beet recipes call […]

Continue reading...

Creamy Avocado Salad

simple creamy avocado salad made in food processor

This easy recipe contains only 4 ingredients. It’s easily doubled. I make it in the food processor but it’s easy to do by hand as well. The only fat this contains is the good kind—from the avocado itself. Try it with some fresh bread and a slice or two of lettuce. I mentioned this recipe […]

Continue reading...

Evaluating the True Cost of Foods

grocery receipt and evaluating prices

We all want to cut our grocery bill. Before we do, though, we need to realize how much the food really costs. The most obvious way is to look at your bill over the month or year, discounting the non-food items. But as we’ll see below, this method has its pitfalls as well. Cost doesn’t […]

Continue reading...

Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure by Lorna Sass

I tend to flip quickly through new cookbooks, skimming over all of the recipes I know I’ll never make: The recipes are too complicated, I don’t keep the necessary ingredients on hand, or the recipes are just another way of combining foods that we get enough of already. But when Yosefa got interested in pressure […]

Continue reading...

Last-Minute Black-Eyed Peas Chili

This recipe appears in Lorna Sass’s Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure. I can’t say enough about this wonderful cookbook. My full review appears here.  The dish was unusual—sweeter and spicier than I’m used to. Like most bean recipes, the leftovers tasted even better. Last-Minute Black-Eyed Pea Chili Ingredients: 1 tablespoon safflower or canola oil 1 to […]

Continue reading...

Prepare Vegetable Salads in Advance

prepare green salads in advance

One of the most challenging things for home cooks is salad preparation. New mothers and people on a diet have an especially hard time getting fresh vegetables, since the vegetables usually can’t be eaten straight from the package unless you pay for the privilege. But you can prepare a large salad, or just some cut […]

Continue reading...

Barriers to Home Cooking

Tower of empty pizza boxes

If you ask people why they resort to convenience foods and restaurants, they’ll tell you they don’t have time to cook from scratch. Cooking does take time, especially if you want to include vegetables and whole grains or legumes. We all have the same 24 hours, but we have many commitments. Often, finding more time […]

Continue reading...

Chicken Salad with Ginger, Garlic, Basil and Green Onions

chicken salad with garlic, basil, ginger, carrot and green onion

Wednesday is Recipe Day at Cooking Manager. We rarely ate chicken salad growing up. My mother’s style was Eastern European, and I think chicken salad is more American. Chicken salad, though, has solved a problem for me. We like roast chicken, but most of my family prefers dark meat. Leftover roast chicken breast can be […]

Continue reading...

8 Great Ways to Cook Fennel

I was bringing my daughter home from the library when I noticed a bag of fennel bulbs on a low wall near the school. They had been out in the rain all day, so I decided to salvage them. When my fourth-grader visited the community farm with his school, he brought samples home every week. […]

Continue reading...

Interview with Sara from My Fun Frugal Life

strawberry kale smoothies

Please welcome Sara for today’s interview. Be sure to check out her moving post, describing how she told her husband about her credit card debt. Please introduce yourself. I’m Sara, the thrifty living mama behind My Frugal Fun Life. I have three young children, a husband, a puppy, 2 birds, and a 110 gallon aquarium […]

Continue reading...