This has a very high nutritional profile for a pasta recipe. The spinach ravioli I chose had a whopping seven grams of fiber all by itself–before you add the homemade tomato sauce. I watched my husband’s reaction to the green pasta filled with green flecks very carefully (he’s a total green veggie hater) and he went back for a second bowl. When I asked him point blank what he thought of the green ravioli, he said “If you want to try to get veggies in me by hiding them in something like this, I’m game.” So that is a big vote of confidence.

I took a couple of shortcuts. I refuse to buy whole canned tomatoes and then crush them up myself. This recipe called for draining whole, canned San Marzano tomatoes (but reserving the liquid) and cooking the tomatoes first to dry them out a bit, and then adding the reserved liquid later. But then they also recommend adding water to the sauce. I found this odd and decided it was a lot of unnecessary extra steps to an otherwise quick, weeknight recipe that could be made with two pots and a cutting board. So I used canned crushed tomatoes, added the entire can at once along with the basil, sugar, salt, and pepper, and did not add the water in the end. The sauce came out nice and thick–honestly, if I ran my spoon through the pot, it was like the red sea parted. So add water or not depending on how thick you think you’d like it. You can always add water and cook it down if you think it’s not right.

San Marzano tomatoes are generally the best quality canned tomatoes you can buy and I have yet to find them in any other way than whole. So that could be the reason for buying them whole and crushing them yourself. But I have a very good backup–Whole Foods 365 organic crushed tomatoes with basil are excellent. I also use bottled minced garlic very often in my weeknight cooking, and it did just fine here.

To combat my shortcuts, I splurged and bought some really good ricotta salata (for those that do not know, this is basically ricotta cheese with the liquid drained from it to make a diceable, sliceable cheese) and a 2 oz. chunk of very high quality dry salami. Every time I got a bite of the salami my taste buds just sang!

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Photo by Antonis Achilleos/The Food Network

Robin Horrigan is a stay at home mom to a 6-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. She is the cruise director for her busy family, keeping the calendar full of the stuff that makes life worth living, but leaves plenty of time to shop for shoes. When they’re all at home, you’ll find the Horrigans knee-deep in chocolate chips and cookie racks, baking treats together that celebrate the four seasons and even the silliest of holidays.

But even then, I try to wrangle my way out of it by coming up with something apple pie-esque, such as a crisp, that might do the trick instead. My pie-avoidance tactics are elaborate and creative. (Just ask the 12 couples who entered my autumn apple dessert contest a few years ago, for which I made caramel apple martinis, apple-rum punch, and nothing more. My dear husband got to taste a whole range of his favorites, and my rolling pin stayed safely tucked away.)

Despite my hatred of rolling out my own crusts, I have a few fabulous pie plates that get lonely when they are unemployed. They used to live in a cabinet, dark and dusty, season after season. A few summers ago, a timely spread in a magazine about ice cream pies gave my pie plates and me some renewed hope for a more productive future. And so I have taken to matching them up with a delicious alternative to pastry: crumb crusts. Once I mastered the technique of a crumb-crusted pie, such as a perfectly tart Frozen Key Lime Pie, I discovered many recipes that rely on this much more forgiving base.

The Frozen Key Lime Pie starts with a crust made of crushed graham crackers, butter, sugar, and salt. Most of the time I buy whole graham crackers and crush them in the food processor before I proceed with the next steps, and this is the most budget friendly way to go. But then making Lemon Cheesecake Squares is a time-consuming process, and occasionally to save a step I will buy a box of graham cracker crumbs. Leftover graham crackers in a house with children are not much of a problem, but half a package of crumbs is a challenge to make disappear. Seven Layer Bars to the rescue! This is a great recipe for a beginning baker. Need a solution that requires no additional baking whatsoever? Try Cheesecake Parfaits and swap your leftover graham cracker crumbs for the crushed vanilla wafers in the recipe. And speaking of vanilla wafers, experiment with crushing those to alter the flavor of your favorite crumb-crusted summer treats, as well as chocolate wafers and even gingersnaps. Much easier than pie.

Robin Horrigan is a stay at home mom to a 6-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. She is the cruise director for her busy family, keeping the calendar full of the stuff that makes life worth living, but leaves plenty of time to shop for shoes. When they’re all at home, you’ll find the Horrigans knee-deep in chocolate chips and cookie racks, baking treats together that celebrate the four seasons and even the silliest of holidays.

My kids watch TV. Educational TV, of course, in limited quantities at appropriate times. But many experts say they shouldn’t be watching any television whatsoever, and the Smart Mom inside my head knows there is some truth to this. But early on a Sunday when my daughter wakes up, the coffee is not yet perked, it’s too early for the newspaper to arrive, and I don’t want her to wake everyone else in the house… I don’t much care what the experts say. I’m not ready to start coloring, play-dohing, reading, and puzzling my way through the 6 o’clock hour of our Sunday morning. So she watches some Elmo, and I try not to fret too much.

It’s the same with my weekly grocery run. I stroll through the produce section, working from my list, and note that I have written “fruit for snacks.” A bag of clementines, check. A bunch of green bananas, check. A half-pint of million-dollar blueberries, check. And then, I furtively glance around to see who is watching before tossing a plastic box of sliced, bagged organic apples into my cart. As I make my way to the cashier, the evil box grins up at me like an early 1980s styrofoam hamburger holder. I quickly cover it with the radishes. The Green Mom on my right shoulder gives a dirty stare to the Busy Mom on the left side. Miser Mom hides behind my shirt collar, whispering to me about how I could have just picked a bushel of apples for the same cost as that little box.

If I were my most amazing self, I would only buy organic, locally grown apples at the farmers’ market and slice them on demand for the kids’ snacks. But no matter how much lemon juice I squeeze or how cold I keep them packed in the lunch cooler, they still turn brown. No one wins in this situation, because I have wasted money and time, they don’t eat the brown apples, and they’re still hungry.

We’re working hard to “eat the rainbow,” and for a family on the go, sometimes shortcuts and convenience packaging make the choice between apple slices or animal crackers much easier. I toss a bag into my purse at 2:00 p.m. when I’m dashing out the door to pick up my son from school, with a toddler in my arms who is still half asleep from her nap. The apples will sit in my bag for almost two hours before she’ll ask me for them in the waiting room of the karate studio, and tah dah! They’re still crunchy, crisp, and white. I’m not sure what kind of magic fairy dust gets sprinkled on the slices before the bags are closed, but there is nothing suspicious on the label, so I don’t much care.

It is not always possible to make selfless choices. I’m buying convenience for a few extra dollars and I feel good about what the kids are eating. It’s not Jim Henson’s furry monsters that the experts have a problem with–it is their delivery method, their packaging, that is controversial. Choosing good health and convenience at the expense of six mini plastic bags in the trash and a plastic carton in my recycling bin every week does weigh on my conscience a little bit. Mother Nature is the only one in the equation who really loses out. I hope she’ll forgive me. Little bags of pre-sliced organic apples (the conventional ones do get mushy and slimy) are like precious jewels in my fruit drawer.

What are your supermarket confessions?

Read about Robin Horrigan

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kubina/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Celebrity chefs, magazines and cookbooks inspire me to strive toward better end products in the kitchen. But if I hear one more time about homemade chicken stock that I can “just throw together when I keep a bird carcass and vegetable trimmings in my freezer,” I might throw in the towel and call for pizza. Sometimes I like to pretend I’m Rachael Ray making a 30-minute meal, and I’ll really time myself. It’s doable if I’m organized–and many of her ideas are inventive and delicious. The caveat is that sometimes I use every pot, bowl and spoon in my house and subsequently spend an hour cleaning up. After all the time I have spent channeling Rachael, do you think she might let me borrow her staff to take care of the aftermath?

I am constantly looking for shortcuts that cut down on shopping, cooking and cleanup time that will not result in a lower-quality end product.

Three ingredients I rely on that allow me to pull together my favorite dishes on the fly are bottled minced garlic, bottled minced ginger and boxed broths. Sure, garlic keeps for a while, but eventually it does get that green sprout; the stink is impossible to get off my hands after I’ve minced it; and every garlic press I’ve ever owned has kicked the bucket within a few months. A piece of fresh ginger does keep in the freezer for months–just as Rachael says it does. Wonderful! If you can remember that you’ve got it and then find it behind the popsicles.

Homemade stock? I do this after a holiday when I have roasted a turkey. But 360 days of the year at my house are all about boneless skinless cuts of meat that cook quickly at the dinner hour. Homemade stock is just not a regular occurrence. Boxed broth adds flavor to so many things I cook without adding any extra fat.

Purists may balk at the use of these shortcuts. I’ll readily admit that as much of a food snob as I have become, I don’t notice the difference when I’m whipping up a quick sauté at 6:30 on a Tuesday night. Keep an open mind and experiment with these three shortcuts. I have a favorite brand of broth (Whole Foods 365) and bottled minced ginger (The Ginger People), but the garlic seems to be the same no matter which brand I try. I throw it in salad dressings, mash it into softened butter, make garlic bread… my family is none the wiser that I didn’t peel and chop the stuff.

The new wave in wine packaging is even more difficult for some consumers to get their head around, but I promise that the benefits outweigh any silly snobbery. Folks, it’s time to stop thinking outside the box and simply drink what’s inside of it.

First made popular in Australia and synonomous with Franzia in the United States, box wine is now moving from plonk to posh. (For any of you uber-traditionalists shaking your heads, might I remind you that at one time wine was stored in goat skins and I don’t think any of us would eagerly return to those glory days!)

This is a topic that has intrigued me for many years, to the extent that I wrote my Master’s thesis on premium box wine. Needless to say, it has been incredibly exciting to finally see the vision become a reality.

This year we have seen the explosion of high quality wine in 1-liter Tetrapaks, like you see for soymilk or stock, as well as 3-liter bag in boxes from around the glob

Why is this a good thing? Please allow me to explain. A standard 12-bottle, 9-liter case of wine weighs about 45 pounds, half of which is packaging. A case of Tetrapaks, however, is only 26 pounds and contains 3 extra liters of wine. Think about all the fuel wasted on transporting those heavy bottles around the globe. In addition to the environmental friendliness, box wines are also friendly to your pocketbook and your lifestyle. We have seen wines that would retail for $12 a bottle sell for $30 a box (the equivalent of 4 bottles), so basically an $18 discount. For boating, backpacking, and other outdoor activities, box wines offer a safer and stable alternative to fragile glass.

Saving the best for last, the bag in box wines stay fresh for up to a month and a half after opening! The bag collapses as the wine is poured and the spout prohibits the ingress of oxygen. This means if you just feel like having one glass of wine with dinner, you don’t have to worry about wasting the rest of the bottle.

Need a cup of wine for a recipe? Box wine should be a pantry staple. Throw some in your soup or sautée and enjoy a glass while you cook. I assure you that we are talking about great quality, artisan wines, not mass produced industrial alcohol. Many of our customers were skeptical when we first started offering an array box wines, but the rave reviews and repeat sales speak for themselves. So, what are you waiting for?

Over Thanksgiving seven years ago, my husband suggested we get a crock pot. I have no idea where this came from since this is the man who cooks nothing but the occasional Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas roast. But I thought he was onto something. After all, we had an infant at the time and another mom friend of mine had been raving about the simplicity of dinner in the slow cooker prepared during naptime.

Next thing I knew, the slow cooker appeared under the Christmas tree, complete with a recipe book that I think contributes to the negative image of the slow cooker (read: lots of recipes using cans of soup and cheese sauce). I was a bit hesitant about embracing the crock pot, as I had a notion that they were relics leftover from the 1970s. But slow cookers seem hip now, with Williams-Sonoma selling $300 All-Clad versions and a plethora of more sophisticated cookbooks to maximize their results.

We are in prime slow cooker season, so I have been testing some recipes recently. Last weekend I made Real Simple’s Slow Cooker Smoky Pea Soup. The whole family enjoys split pea and ham soup, and true to its name, this one was really simple to make, and was tasty though it felt like cheating. Confession: technically I did cheat since I did not use a ham hock; I used a diced ham steak, but the results are equally good. It also provided enjoyable lunch leftovers for a few days.

Speaking of cheating, here is my favorite slow cooker trick: pulled pork. We invited some good friends over for a casual Sunday dinner a few weeks ago. I decided to make pulled pork in the slow cooker. I literally placed a boneless pork loin roast in the slow cooker and covered it with a bottle of barbecue sauce, put the lid on and let it go for about 7 hours. Once cooked, I shredded it, tossed it in the sauce, and served it on yummy, oversized pretzel rolls. Our friends raved. I had to confess it was a complete cheater’s meal. This dinner of pulled pork sandwiches, roasted sweet potato wedges and a green salad required literally a 5-item purchase at Trader Joe’s: the meat, the barbecue sauce, the rolls, a bag of sweet potatoes and a bag of salad!

Maybe next time I shouldn’t confess just how easy the slow cooker makes my life and just let everyone think I’ve been slaving over a hot stove all day.

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I have discovered a great recipe for keeping the little ones busy and productive, while creating an easy and healthy lunch at the same time: make-your-own-pizza!

I got this idea from those highly desired prepackaged bento-box-style lunches.

Just throw some whole wheat pizza dough (homemade or store-bought) on each child’s plate, and them them poke and prod to make the dough somewhat flat (clean hands are a plus). Let them sauce up the dough using regular marinara or pizza sauce from a jar–or better yet, make your own. Then let them shower their creation with oodles of mozzarella (or whatever cheese the kids like), pepperoni, and–most importantly–veggies! I chopped up steamed broccoli, peas, and colorful strips of peppers ahead of time.

The easiest part? Pop it in a preheated 425 degree oven for only 5-7 minutes and the mini works of art are ready for consumption. A quick, easy, and healthy lunch that they got to make on their own… what else can you ask for in a meal?

Our kids had an awesome time making and eating them. They made a smiley face and other designs their imagination inspired. It was fun not only for the kids, but also for the mommies because of the easy prep. All of the ingredients were found at my local Trader Joe’s: my go-to place for quick and healthy ingredients. Try this activity the next time you host a play date for your kids. You will enjoy your little chefs’ creativity, really love that they are actually having fun and eating their veggies, and share quality time as their sous chef in the kitchen.

I was a self-taught cook—mainly by trial and error. Most cooks learned from an older family member who knew their way around the kitchen blindfolded and had all their treasured recipes in their head (with no quantities, they just knew). My mother will admit that she is not the most enthusiastic cook, and I didn’t live near enough to my grandmothers growing up to learn in that manner like so many women do. My sister wasn’t into it until much later, and so I was pretty much on my own.

I envy that, for my aunt (who learned much of her cooking from my grandmother), putting a delicious home-cooked meal on the table for us is not only an expression of love but also she makes it look effortless. So I asked her what her secrets are.

Make ahead. She takes full advantage of a spare freezer in the garage and pulls out what she needs when she needs it. She made ahead the stuffed chicken breasts so that she didn’t have to spend quite as much time cooking on our weekend together. She baked them on a cookie sheet and they were magically ready at dinnertime (this is the seemingly effortless skill to which I referred). Same for the beef stew and the cake. I’m sure it was hard work for her, but to the untrained eye, she seemed to whip it all up in a matter of an hour.

Avoid tending to something on the stove. I watched her chop a few sweet potatoes and throw them into a crock pot with some butter. She could then set the gadget on high for 6 hours and avoid babysitting a pot. This is one trick I will surely try at home. The mashed sweet potatoes were perfectly creamy and melted in my mouth.

Canning and freezing fresh fruit and vegetables when they are in season. This deserves its own post.

See what I learned in a few short days of watching a more experienced cook? These lessons are invaluable.

My sister, whose husband is half Italian-American, tells me that her mother-in-law is her primary go-to source at holidays. And both of us have been known to call upon our step-mother, who also cooks by heart, for those big-piece-of-meat type dinners.

We always seem to call on those who have trodden the road before us, and they always seem to have the answers–because they learned from the generations before them.

Who do you look to for lessons in cooking?

Girlfriends will find any excuse to get together. And what better way to spend a cold Saturday than with food and friends. In order to justify our absence from our husbands and kids, we decided we’d better find a way to benefit them as well.

And girlfriends trust each other. Girlfriends share their opinions about everything–recipes and food are no exception. Most women I know are always looking for their next batch of great recipes, so we decided to get together and test some out.

The ultimate goal was to come home with four meals to enjoy throughout the week (or stash in the freezer for a busy night).

We accomplished several things during our three hours together this weekend: quality time, trying new recipes, and preparing meals to take home for our families. Here is how it went.

I invited 5 girlfriends who, like me, are busy moms who are into cooking and trying new recipes but are short on time. Six people was the perfect size. The dads planned on staying home for some quality time with the little ones.

I looked through my recipes on Plummelo for a few important criteria: little to no cooking on prep day; highly freezeable; no more than about 10 ingredients each; and using relatively inexpensive ingredients. We narrowed it down to 4. We wanted to start out with an attainable goal.

I saved these 4 recipes to My Recipes on Plummelo and emailed them to my friends so they could save them into their recipe boxes as well. I put the recipes into My Plans and then into My Shopping List.

Here was the part where Plummelo really saved the day in this planning process: Once the recipes were in my shopping list, Plummelo adjusted the servings for me!

For 6 people, we needed everything times 6 (for a grand total of a lot of food). The recipe showed number of servings as 4, so I entered 24 (4 x 6), and the Plummelo shopping list automatically changed all the quantities for me (for example, 1 1/2 cups of ricotta became 9 cups of ricotta).

I then hit “Email Shopping List” on Plummelo and sent the combined list to my friends. We divvied up the shopping by section of the grocery store (which was also easy because the Plummelo shopping list is divided by category, such as Meat, Produce), and each went grocery shopping on our own schedule and planned to arrive with the assigned items.

One friend and I hit Costco for all the meat, and the others went on their respective treasure hunts. I was surprised at how little effort went into the shopping when we divided and conquered.

The day of, I packed it up the food and a few essentials (including my favorite knife), ready to take to the hosting friend’s house. We allowed 3 hours for our cooking adventure, with some time built in for girl talk and munching on freshly baked muffins.

We started out with the Chicken Marbella. One team of two trimmed the chicken thighs, another team minced garlic (of course, with the garlic gadget!), and another team measured spices, olives, capers, and prunes. In no time our chicken was marinating in the bowl, and we divided the massive quantity into 6 Ziploc freezer bags for each family to pull out on the designated night.

The routine went like this for the remaining recipes. Chopping and dicing, dividing and conquering (and washing some dishes in between). Meal prep is much more fun when it is organized in advance and shared with good friends. It’s also more fun digging into a huge bowl of ground turkey when wearing plastic gloves! We had a lot of laughs about food favorites and not-so-favorites, cooking blunders, and each other’s techniques, and fed each other bites of blueberry muffin while we worked. It didn’t seem like work at all.

It took us two and a half hours and $37.50 per family (that’s less than $10 per meal) to make 4 delicious meals that are ready for our loved ones to enjoy. Economies of scale definitely pay off!

Now we each have 4 new recipes in our repertoire and 4 new meals for the week. And after receiving a big thank you from more than one of the husbands, I know we have a hall pass for another girls’ afternoon out.

Try planning a cooking day with your friends. Let us know how it goes.

That was the usual routine in our house.

Under my roof there are two working parents and three active kids (one with food allergies, which made finding recipes often tricky), for a total of five hungry bodies. Preparing for dinner–from thinking about what we wanted to eat to making a shopping list to getting to the grocery store to starting to chop the vegetables–was never easy. The “process” was disorganized and disconnected.

When you love to eat and you want to cook a delicious, healthy meal for your family but you’re short on time, you need a solution. We were in desperate need of a more efficient meal planning, preparation, shopping, and cooking process from start to finish.

That, in short, is how Plummelo was born.

I’m not only the founder, but I’m also a daily user. Not to mock the Hair Club for Men slogan, but Plummelo fixed just about all of our former problems in meal planning.

Here are a few of the major hurdles my wife and I were encountering (pre-Plummelo):

Old problem: My recipes are scattered. Some in a recipe box, some in the pages of an old magazine, some in miscellaneous computer files, some in my head. If I found a recipe online, I had trouble finding it again. New solution: My recipes are all in one place. Not only are they categorized, tagged, and searchable, but I can rate the ones we love and delete the ones we don’t.

Old problem: The hardest part is figuring out what to cook this week. New solution: I can quickly browse my recipes, look at what other people on Plummelo are cooking, and get new ideas.

Old problems: Making a shopping list from my recipes takes too long. New solution: Now I don’t even have to write out the shopping list. I can drag and drop my recipes for the week into My Plans and Plummelo automatically populates a grocery list for me. My wife can hit “Email Shopping List” and it comes to my iPhone and I can pick up the groceries on my way home! (Note: iPhone app to come in 2010!)

There is so much more Plummelo will be doing to help connect more of your cooking world and keep your kitchen life organized.

Give Plummelo a try this week.