Grasshopper New Media Presents...

I’ve been scurrying through my recipes in preparation for our annual beach-fest.  This is the weekend that we, along with my 6 siblings, their families and my mother gather on the coast of Maine for sun and fun…  All together we are 7 siblings+6 spouses+ 24 cousins+ 1 mother.  We’ve been getting together for the [...]

I am about to begin my second season of triathlons. I’ve been seriously training for them for the last couple of months, but even in my off time I am proud to say that I was still going into the gym. The other part of the training not surprisingly is watching what I [...]

One of the hardest changes I’ve made to my family’s diet is switching from white breads to whole grain breads. It’s been a struggle to get everyone accustomed to the taste and although my husband still doesn’t love it, we know that it’s a necessary change. We both want to up the fiber content and [...]

To some extent I think we all struggle with feeding our children. Just check out our “food” category in the side bar and you will see that this is certainly not the first post on the topic. We worry. We battle. We struggle. We struggle. We struggle.
My family is [...]

I’ve been working on cleaning out my pantry lately, banishing high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, growth hormones in our milk and our meat, artificial sweeteners, and now trying to buy organic as much as possible.
It’s heart stopping to realize how much of the food I’ve been buying has been full of chemicals, and far [...]

I’m still on the path, still pinching the pennies and stretching the dollars. If you missed the first 2 installments in my quest to reduce my grocery budget you can catch up by reading Living Lean and Reducing the Grocery Budget: How I am doing it.
In the past week I’ve tried my hand at a [...]

Do you cook with your kids? I hope you do. Cooking provides so many teaching moments. There are plentiful opportunities for a child to practice math, of course. Working with fractions and becoming familiar with measurement systems are among the math skills that are honed when a child helps cook. [...]

Every once in a while, most often when she’s sick, my five-year-old daughter K behaves like someone who once didn’t have enough to eat. She piles food onto her plate in mounds much bigger than she can eat. She eats very slowly, examining and savoring each forkful. She take forever choosing treats such as fruit, [...]

Happy American Thanksgiving.
Turkey is low in fat and high in protein. It is a good source of iron, zinc, phosphorus, potassium and B vitamins. Mmmmm…. B vitamins.
More good news is that turkey is on sale everywhere now. Usually it’s a bird reserved for large [...]

People often ask me what it’s like to have teenagers. Unfortunately, for them, my answer is a very bland: “Everything’s great, I couldn’t ask for better kids.” Now, I’m not one to fall under the hypnosis of my own rose-colored glasses, and I often spend time looking for anything typical that my teens may get [...]