Eat

The hero ingredient of this meal? The store's bottled Indian-style garlic Achaar sauce.

Pork chops with a corn salsa? Yes, please.

Can you guess what it is?

It has a secret ingredient that really puts it over the top.

The ultimate summer winner chicken dinner.

Budget dinners for busy families.

Including chicken, pasta, beef, and vegetarian ideas!

They're super simple, yet perfect in every way.

From lunch box muffins to pasta salad.

"I've found that my two kids will eat four times as many vegetables when they are presented with tasty dips and a few special snacks."

It's basically all the best salty-sweet ingredients in one amazing grilled treat.

Forget the oven.

No more moldy strawberries!

Of course there are sprinkles.

Get the kids, because this is next level.

It's smothered in sauce.

A meal you can make in only 10 minutes of hands-on time.

Smart tips to help you save a little money.

Sweet and (not too) spicy. One you start, it's hard to stop.

As far as guilty pleasures go, a love of SpaghettiOs is pretty tame. Cranking open a can may have been acceptable for me as a 7-year-old back in 1989, but it’s time to admit that what I really love are the soft O-shaped noodles swimming in a sweet tomato sauce. With this wholesome take on a childhood favorite, I know I won’t be reaching for the can opener anytime soon. My traditional spaghetti dinner takes two pots, one pan, and an embarrassing number of bowls and utensils.

Hectic mornings are standard in my house. With barely enough time to gather an armload of books, bags, and lunches before racing out the door, breakfast is often a grab-and-go affair. Instead of scrambling cheesy eggs as the school bus pulls up, I quickly warm my make-ahead cheesy frittata cups. A trio of cheeses — ricotta, Parmesan, and Fontina — season the eggs and add creamy richness.

A magical, three-word phrase that's remarkably effective.

As long as I have one of these around, I know dinner isn't too far off.

This technique is usually associated with from-scratch pancakes, but it works for a box mix, too.

If chocolate is your thing, listen up.

Why is everything from Rao's so delicious?

Once again, Costco does not disappoint.

This seedy bread takes a sandwich from good to great.

It's the warm and fudgy family dessert we all crave.

It's delicious, it's filling, and it can be ready in 20 minutes.

"Do we have any ice cream?" Yes, yes we do.

They are so much more than just pretty containers.

It’s green, it’s served on a single platter, it's super quick, and my kids request it. I mean, jackpot.

What are you cooking these days for dinner? We need some quick, satisfying meal ideas for busy weekdays!BrianDear Brian,I like to eat the same things again and again – I’m not that adventurous – so if you want something tasty for adults and kids, I’m pretty good at that. But I’ve also got a secret weapon, which is the whole staff at Kitchn – a bunch of pro cooks. They’ve chipped in to send me some great ideas as well.

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

For most of my life, I took breakfast for granted. Heck, I took eating for granted—until I had a baby. He taught me that even a food writer could lose her kitchen footing in the relentless deluge of spit-up (his) and tears (mine). But eventually I figured out enough clever work-arounds to fill a cookbook. For the book, I assembled a group of more than 100 new moms, who tested my recipes to make sure they worked amid real-life challenges.

This mall-inspired treat is low-effort and infinitely customizable. Just add ice cream!

Welcome to summer, where the sunshine keeps everyone outside until the last minute, it’s too hot to turn on the stove at dinner time, and everybody wants a quick meal so they can get back to playing. None of these things makes feeding a family easy in the hottest months, so it’s helpful to have some make-ahead meal ideas stashed away so you can cook dinner before the kids go to bed the night before, or maybe even over the weekend before work gets in the way.

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. Helloooooo, summer! ‘Tis the season for non-cooked dinners and sweet, cold desserts. Now that we can safely gather with other folks who’ve been vaccinated, my friends and I kicked off the hot weather with a collaborative dinner. They brought a beautiful salad and we made beef tartare.

If you’ve got little eaters around your table, be it toddlers or bigger kiddos, I can tell you from experience that Michelle Piccolo is someone you want to follow. Soon after her son Jack began eating solids, Michelle focused her cooking efforts on creating wholesome foods for her little eater that were easy, flavorful, and fun. And it wasn’t long after that she started her food blog, Feeding Our Toddlers, to share her dinner ideas with other parents.

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. It’s easy to miss the IKEA Marketplace after a long day of labyrinth-navigating and warehouse-picking.

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. One of the things we love most about living in a larger city is the accessibility of cuisines from around the world. In addition to having delightful meals to try, we think international food is an opportunity to expand our boys’ palates and help them become better global citizens.

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. I can’t say I had a strong idea of what kind of parent I was going to be. Even as someone who loves a plan and a schedule, I went into this thing sort of like, “Well, I gotta wait to see what I’m working with!

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. The little milestones in our kids’ lives — like hitting their first baseball, reciting a poem on stage, providing a random act of kindness, or conquering a fear — are moments that deserve to be celebrated.

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. We all know the drill: We should be having dinner with our families. That time together, we’re told, is key to unlocking everything from healthy family relationships to, well, health. As a childfree, busy food-and-spirits writer who made a big family change during the pandemic, I’ve thought a lot about this lately.

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. Even before having kids, I knew I wanted them to grow up knowing how to speak Japanese. What I underestimated was the sheer difficulty of teaching Japanese at home. As you can imagine, it’s a huge commitment to teach a second language. My husband is Filipino, so we mainly speak English together.

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.

If there’s one thing harder than deciding what to make yourself for dinner, it’s coming up with easy dinner ideas for your kids. You want to get something on the table that’s fairly quick to make and doesn’t require a lot of effort. And you also want a meal that the kids (and ideally the whole table!) will devour, while contending with food preferences that can ping-pong from week to week. And it can feel even trickier when you have a picky eater on your hands.

Toddler parents know this one thing to be true: A hungry toddler is a cranky toddler. And while we’re often in a rush to feed our littlest eaters before they melt down, we also want to make sure they are regularly trying new foods and getting balanced nutrition, too. Need fresh ideas? We got you. Some of my fellow editors (all parents!) and I brainstormed a massive list of our favorite easy and wholesome toddler food ideas — and below, you’ll find all of them.

When there’s a toddler in the house, it makes all the difference to have a handful of dinner recipes that don’t take long to pull off. Now that your kiddo is running around, you can’t turn your back for a second! And even more importantly, you need meals that will please the newly choosy palates of little eaters without boring bigger eaters to tears.

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.

Do you remember the absolute joy you’d feel when your mom would pop open a can of biscuit dough and a package of bite-sized sausages — meaning pigs and a blanket were on the horizon? Our version embraces that exuberance, but we’re upgrading the whole thing. Thanks to our smart technique, you don’t have to individually wrap 50 tiny sausages to create the perfect bite of flaky, buttery pastry and smoky sausage (but more on that later).

Hello, and welcome to the first recipe in my new column, But First, Breakfast! I’ve been thinking about the idea for this series for a long time, probably ever since I started touring to promote my breakfast cookbook, Whole Grain Mornings, and readers told me how much they longed for really simple weekday breakfast ideas. This series is about real-world, make-ahead breakfasts that you can actually fit into your busy, everyday life.

For all the times I have ordered chicken lettuce wraps at Chinese restaurants like P.F. Chang’s, inhaled entire “appetizers” by myself, and sighed with happiness while licking sticky sauce from my fingers, it never once occurred to me to try making this dish at home. Partly, lettuce wraps have always felt like an indulgence that needed restriction to restaurant visits only.

Getting kids to try new foods is simply an exercise in marketing. Case in point: When I made falafel for dinner one night, I called them chickpea nuggets instead of falafel and my children gobbled them right up. They asked for chickpea nuggets again and it got my mind churning with an idea for an actual chickpea nugget recipe — one with all the flavors and textures of chicken nuggets, but baked and egg-free.

Packed with vitamin-rich sweet potatoes, this simple soup is a quick family meal that ensures a dose of veggies even in a relatively small portion. The natural creaminess from the potatoes provides a pleasing texture for kids and is delicious topped with everything from crumbled bacon to a dash of hot sauce for parents. The red lentils are more subtle in flavor than their brown and green counterparts, and they cook about three times as fast, so they’re ideal for weeknights.

This is the macaroni and cheese recipe I grew up on — creamy sauce, chewy pasta, and plenty of cheese. It always felt like a special treat to us kids, although I suspect my mother liked it more because it was an easy stovetop dish that requires just five ingredients and almost no thought to pull together at the end of a long day. Whatever the reason, whatever the occasion, a bowl of this mac and cheese will always spell comfort.

When you come home extra late after a crazy day at the office, it may seem like your only options for dinner are takeout, those questionable leftovers in the fridge, or scrambled eggs and toast. You’re starving and cranky and you need dinner fast, after all. Luckily there’s a fourth option: these 10-minute tacos. Yes, making tacos in 10 minutes is absolutely possible.

Five simple ingredients tag team on a dinner that everyone at the table will love — including mom and dad, given all of the veggies tucked inside!

Oh, avocado toast — the perfect shortcut meal for any time of day. And one of my absolute favorite ways to serve up a meal that works for the entire family, even the wee ones. Avocado toast is the perfect example, too, of the type of food I am sharing this week for DIY Mama; simple, adaptable meals that with a few adjustments are equally delicious and nutritious for mama and toddler.

Because you know, drinking your greens always feels good.