Ayn-Monique Klahre

Buying in bulk can save you on groceries and make dinnertime easier, too.

Delicious, crowd-pleasing — and only requires 20 minutes of prep? Sign us up.

Stock up on these items to stretch out your shopping trips.

Getting kids to eat veggies is often a challenge. Pasta, rice, and bread are easy, but lots of kids shy away from the more complex — and healthy — stuff. I’ve been lucky with my girls: They mostly eat their vegetables (sometimes even with gusto!). Still, if they had a choice between cheese and crackers or spinach? Yeah, they’re going for the crackers.

From personal convenience to communal equity: here's why we'll take advantage of the free lunch program.

This piece was created for Cubby, our weekly newsletter for families at home. Want more? Sign up here for a weekly splash of fun and good ideas for families with kids. When I asked my daughters if they would be interested in testing some products from Trader Joe’s, the answer was a resounding yes. After a year of ordering groceries online, the idea of perusing shelves in-person — and picking up something other than the same-old — appealed to us quite a bit.

When it comes to cooking with kids, there’s the vision (little hands rolling perfect little balls of cookie dough!) and the reality (flour on the counter, on the floor, in their hair — everywhere). “There are so many reasons to get kids into the kitchen, but I do think they can develop a real pride in their self-sufficiency,” says cookbook author Jenna Helwig.

When I was growing up, we didn’t eat meat on Fridays. Instead, in our household, the sad alternative was usually fish sticks. I don’t have particularly fond memories of them from back then — the standard ones we often bought were usually pretty bland and soggy — but nevertheless, we ate them for dinner and got on with it. I now can honestly say that frozen fish sticks don’t have to be sad. In fact, they have come a long way since the days of my youth.