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Earlier this week we talked with Rebecca Smith of Smiths in Bloom about her working mom who made dinner every single night, how she blends Ecuadorian and Jamaican cooking for her two girls, and why most people who say they can’t cook are really just short on time. If you missed it, read the full Order Up! conversation right here.

Now for the rapid-fire round. Rebecca shares the pantry staples she never runs out of, a Jamaican sauce that fixes pale food in two dashes, and the two gadgets she can’t choose between, plus the friends she cooks from when she wants to try something new.

Three pantry staples and three fridge staples you always have on hand?

Pantry: coconut milk, beans, and rice.

Fridge: a tomato of some sort, red tomatoes or tomatillos, because I make salsa at least once a week. Cilantro, which is in everything I cook. And green bell pepper. Onions, garlic, and green bell pepper are huge in Ecuadorian cooking, but onions and garlic live in the pantry, so green bell pepper it is.

One Ecuadorian, Mexican, or Caribbean pantry ingredient everyone should try?

For Jamaican, browning sauce. If your food looks a little pale, like it’s missing that caramelized look, add a couple of dashes. It doesn’t alter the flavor, it adds to it. It’s basically caramelized sugar.

For Mexican, chipotle in adobo. Add it to mayo for an aioli, or blend it with broth using your immersion blender and you’ve got a sauce. It’s spicy, but it’s amazing.

For Ecuadorian, honestly, rice, beans, and cilantro. I don’t know that there’s one pantry item.

A favorite sauce, adobo, or seasoning blend?

Loisa. It’s women-owned and Dominican-owned, out of New York, organic, and free of colors and dyes. We haven’t had anything like that in our community. It’s been long overdue. Their seasonings for sure, and if I don’t have time to make my own sofrito, theirs is a pantry staple too.

The weeknight dinner you make on repeat?

Picadillo. It’s Cuban, it has olives, and it goes in my Instant Pot. It’s a 15-minute thing, and I always have ground beef on hand. [Check out Rebecca’s Instant Pot Picadillo recipe right here.]

One under-30-minute recipe on your site you’d point someone to first?

One of my sheet pan dinners. Sheet pan dinners are quick, and everything is in one place.

The kitchen tool that earns its counter space?

It’s a tie between my Instant Pot and my Breville Sous Chef.

One affordable thing every home cook should own?

A good knife and a knife sharpener. If you can chop things quickly and it’s not the frustrating part of your day, that saves you time.

And if anybody knows a good peeler, tell me. I go through them like nobody’s business!

A creator or cookbook you’re into right now?

I really love supporting my friends. Ebony at elicitfolio makes a red rice with bacon that’s divine. I’ve recreated it since we had it together.

If I’m going to try a Jamaican recipe, I’d go to Anjali at The Stush Kitchen. She makes a lot of desserts, and her recipes are easy to follow. Or TyphanieCooks.

And my friend Jake, @the_therapeutic_chef, came over a couple of weekends ago and showed me three blender sauces, gluten-free and dairy-free, under four ingredients. He uses cashews for the creaminess instead of cheese. I’m obsessed with that right now.

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Don't Be Afraid of the Mess: Rebecca Smith on Cooking Culture with Toddlers

Once or twice a month, Rebecca Smith boils green plantains, mashes them with butter and salt, stuffs them with cheese, and serves them to her daughters with a fried egg on top. Summer and Sadie are three and four, and they know it’s called tortilla de verde. That matters to Rebecca. It’s one of her mom’s Ecuadorian dishes, and she makes it at home so her girls will recognize it when they sit down at their grandmother’s table.

Rebecca is the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants. She grew up in Los Angeles eating tacos and enchiladas, moved to Miami at 13, and married a Jamaican man whose family taught her to cook with thyme and pimento. Her daughters are Jamaican, Ecuadorian, and American, and so is dinner. A teacher for more than a decade, she started posting weeknight dinners in 2023 and now writes recipes at Smiths in Bloom for parents who want big flavor in about 30 minutes.

We’re sharing this conversation in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, which is celebrated every year September 15 - October 15. It’s a good excuse to pay attention, though like we say at One Potato all the time, and Rebecca would be the first to tell you, her family doesn’t switch on its identity for a few weeks a year. They cook who they are all the time.

We talked to Rebecca about how her mom came home from work and made dinner every night, and why Rebecca now calls her superwoman. She explains how Jamaican flavors fit into a 30-minute weeknight, why her girls will drink the coconut gravy from her shrimp dish but won’t go near the shrimp, and what she learned cooking around her husband’s vertigo diet. She also makes the case that most people who say they can’t cook are really just out of time.

Her advice for keeping a food culture alive is simple enough to try tonight: let the kids in, even when it’s slower and messier.

A Conversation with Rebecca Smith, creator behind Smiths in Bloom

Introduce Yourself: I’m Rebecca Smith. I’m a recipe developer and food blogger, and my recipes are a reflection of my life. I grew up eating Hispanic flavors, and we craved Mexican food because we were in LA. The food I crave is the food I make.

I’m the child of Ecuadorian immigrants, my husband is Jamaican, and we have two girls: Summer, who’s three, and Sadie, who’s four. They’re Jamaican-Ecuadorian-American, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m so proud of our blended family and the identity they carry.

Who influenced the way you cook the most?

My mom. She was a working mother from when I was young, and I never once saw her not make dinner. Every single night she came home from work and something was already in the Crock-Pot or the oven, or there was a casserole. She tied a lot of her value to being the person who put a meal on the table for us to gather around.

If you ask her, she’ll say I don’t cook anything like her. But I grew up with the idea, as a Hispanic woman, that dinner was always going to be on me. So I might as well love it, right? After school I’d watch Food Network and the Cooking Channel, and my mom and I bonded over that. Not just cooking, but watching food, the techniques, all the different cuisines. She’s my biggest influence.

Now that you’re the mom, how do you see what she did?

My mom is superwoman. There’s no way I could have done what she did at that stage of her life. If I were her, my kids would have eaten out at least once a week. She worked until six. She’d wake up early and get the meat going for the lasagna or the spaghetti, so when we got home all we had to do was make the pasta. She was literally planning her life around feeding us.

That sacrifice was bigger than wanting her kids nourished. It was, “I want to show up this way as a mother.” Now that I have two littles, I get it. She’s a beast. I have so much more respect for her.

Is there a dish from your mom that you’re passing down to your daughters?

Tortilla de verde. Verde means green plantain; plátano is the ripe one. You boil and mash the green plantain with butter and salt, then stuff it with whatever you want, chicharrón or cheese. I make the cheese version for my girls, and one with yuca, at least once or twice a month. They eat it for breakfast with a little fried egg, and they know what it’s called.

It’s easy to replicate and not ingredient-heavy, so toddlers aren’t afraid of it. And no matter how often I make it, there’s nothing like when my mom makes it. For my birthday she’ll ask, do you want muchines? Tortilla de yuca? Fried yuca? Thankfully my kids know what all of those mean, because I make them at home.

Is there a food from your childhood your daughters just won’t eat?

Encocado de camarón, which is shrimp in coconut milk. It’s super easy and really delicious. They’ll drink the gravy. I’ll give it to them over rice and they’ll eat that, but they won’t touch the shrimp. If I made it with chicken they might try it, but that’s not how the dish is made. So I’m like, this is the way we eat it.

Same with ceviche. I love ceviche. They’re like, no, thank you. It’s in process. Hopefully in a few years!

You once felt you had to fit your cooking into a niche. What made you stop?

On social media, you have the freedom to share what’s on your dinner plate. This is who I am. Once you get into SEO, you start thinking about someone searching Google. Say I make poblano gnocchi, basically rajas with gnocchi. That’s a fusion dish. It’s never going to rank in a Google search.

So you hit a fork in the road. Do I cook for Google, or do I stay true to my story and the people who already know it? Most of the time I keep the recipe. Maybe it doesn’t get a million hits, but it’s a reflection of who I am, and my readers understand that. I decided to go that route.

Your husband grew up eating Jamaican food. What does blending your two traditions look like on a weeknight?

The beauty is that my girls get to experience both cultures at their grandparents’ houses. At home, I pick things that aren’t going to take me a million years. Jamaican food is truly a labor of love, low and slow, and I’m your 30-minute cook. Let’s get in and get it done.

So I make curry chicken and rice and peas, which is made with coconut milk, beans, scallions, and thyme. Those two are staples for us. I love brown stew chicken and curry goat too, but the girls eat those with his family. I don’t make them.

Mostly I bring the flavors I’ve learned to love into everything else. I never cooked with thyme before my husband. Now it goes in chicken stews, chicken thighs, all of it. I add pimento seeds to almost everything, whole in soups or ground. In Ecuador we have estofado, a kind of stew, and I’ll chop the meat smaller so it cooks faster and put pimento in that too.

Some dishes are sacred, though. You don’t want someone saying, this is not my mom’s curry chicken. So I stick to the ones I can replicate well and keep them as close to the real thing as I can. I want the food to taste familiar when the girls go to grandma’s house, on either side.

How do you think your girls would describe the food in your house?

I think they’d say food is fun. They see me prepare it, and they get in the kitchen with me. They’d say it’s flavorful, because they’ve tried so much and it isn’t tied to one cuisine. Hands down, their favorite is Mexican. They ask for tacos, literally. Carne asada tacos, and aguacate all the time.

At three and four they don’t have the language to say it’s experimental, but I hope that’s what they take away. I believe food is sacred, and I try to stay true to certain flavors. I also don’t want them to be afraid of having fun in the kitchen. Mix and blend, just like you are, and bring that into your food. It’s safe to do that.

A lot of first-generation parents worry their kids will lose the food along with the language. How do you keep that connection?

Get them in there with you. Don’t be afraid that it takes longer or makes a mess. The only way they’ll grow a healthy relationship with food is if they feel like part of the process.

It’s like chores. You bring value to this house, so pick up after yourself. The same way you include them in the rest of the home, include them in the kitchen. And they get excited. Mine chop tomatoes and help me shred cheese, whatever feels safe for their age. Have them watch you cook, have them dump things into the pot, and add a little more responsibility as they grow.

The tradition of food is really the feeling: getting in there, smelling it, watching how someone else prepares it. That’s what I don’t want to lose.

You’ve written about some hard years. Was there a stretch when cooking got hard?

My husband had a very serious bout of vertigo. We went to a bunch of doctors, and everybody just wanted to put him on medication. We wanted to actually fix it. We ended up at a clinic in Beverly Hills and saw a nutritionist, and he did a whole test. No mushrooms, no kidney beans, a whole list of things that were adding to the dizziness. Some of those were the foundation of how I cooked. My hands were up in the air.

But I’d done this before. My dad has acidity problems with his stomach, so he can’t have onions or garlic or cooked tomatoes. That’s one of the reasons I learned to cook in the first place. I went down the rabbit hole of Thai food, lots of ginger, curries, coconut milk, and he found flavorful food he loved that wasn’t bland. I love my dad so much and I wanted to fix that.

So I took that same energy and did it for my husband. I saw it as something stretching me, and since we host all the time, it made me better at cooking for all kinds of guests. Thankfully it happened before kids, so I had time to research what goes together.

You were a teacher for more than a decade. How does that show up in the way you write recipes?

The notes section. I’m always asking, what would I want to tell somebody making this dish? I don’t like the idea that a recipe has to be followed to a T. If you have chicken instead of beef, we can turn down the cook time and you can still make it. The vegetables and sauces are tied to the dish, but if you don’t love the protein, don’t decide the recipe isn’t for you. Let’s find a way for you to enjoy it.

Some of my blog posts are longer than others, because there’s nothing worse than spending your money and time at the store and then the dish doesn’t turn out. Sometimes it’s one simple tweak, like keep it on medium the whole time, or bring it to a boil and then turn it down. Those little things make or break a recipe. So I explain it like I’m talking to a student.

A lot of parents say flatly that they can’t cook. Is that really a skills problem?

To be honest, I think it’s a time problem. We’re so busy with work, social media, school pickup, activities. It’s deciding which thing deserves space in your brain.

My go-to advice is to find a recipe with five ingredients or less and start there. If you don’t cook every day and you see a recipe with 16 ingredients, you’re already out. My best friend is a doctor with no time. She says, tell me to pour a bunch of ingredients in an Instant Pot and press a button, I’m in. Tell me to chop an onion, I’m immediately out.

So even as a creator I ask myself, could we get a really solid, delicious base with six ingredients? I think about who I’m creating for, busy moms. What’s already in your fridge? You don’t have to go to the store. Type “what can I make with broccoli and chicken” into Google and go from there.

Every cook will tell you they’re still learning. We wouldn’t even call ourselves experts. Just get started.

Your recipes promise dinner in about 30 minutes. What shortcuts do you lean on without apologizing?

The Instant Pot. Anything that takes longer than 30 or 40 minutes, I’m transferring to the Instant Pot. I don’t care if the recipe says use a regular pot. It’s going in there, and we’ll be done in 20 or 30 minutes. Soups can almost always go in a Crock-Pot, so working moms can throw it in, go to the office, and come back to dinner.

I also cut the protein small. Your chicken breast doesn’t need an hour. It needs maybe 15 minutes. Estofado is usually chunks of meat, and I’m like, no, we’re chopping this into little bits, and we’ll get the same flavor in 30 minutes.

And I’m a sucker for a good immersion blender. You don’t need to blend a whole soup in six batches. Put the immersion blender in, put your apron on. It might be a little messy, girl, but you’ll be okay. I also have a Breville Sous Chef that does my dicing and slicing. If you cook more than four days a week, those gadgets are an investment. Ask for them for Christmas. Give yourself the gift of time back in the kitchen.

You’ve moved houses a lot. Is there a dish you always end up making first in a new place?

Tacos. I can always find tortillas, you can put whatever protein you want in them, make a quick salsa, make a quick guac. You get nostalgia in every bite. My kids never fight me on a taco. I even bring my own tortillas when I travel. My parents aren’t Mexican, but tacos remind me of my childhood.

What’s one cooking skill you think every home cook should practice?

Building a base. It doesn’t matter what you’re making, you need onions, garlic, and bell peppers chopped. Pick one day a week. On Mondays, I’m going to chop four onions and pulse three heads of garlic and put them in containers. You’ll be more likely to cook because you’re not starting from scratch. Those base flavors are in everything, so you’ll use them all week, and you’ll get in and out of the kitchen even quicker.

Follow Rebecca Smith on Instagram @smithsinbloom

& Don’t forget to follow US on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

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Earlier this week we sat down with Michelle Schor, co-founder of Hundy!, to interview her for our Order Up! series. We talked about growing up food-obsessed in Canada, building a fruit pop made from one ingredient, and pitching Shark Tank two weeks after giving birth. You can revisit her interview right here.

Now the practical half. From the three staples she always keeps on hand to the Austin brands she roots for and the snacks that survive a car ride with a toddler, here’s what actually earns a spot in Michelle’s kitchen.

Current favorite Hundy! flavor in your house?

That’s tough. Right now it’s the Berry. Our tropicals are the most popular, but Berry feels like you grabbed a handful off the farm and put it straight in your mouth. It gets a little messier than the others, but cold and fresh it’s exactly right.

Three pantry or freezer staples you always have on hand?

Garlic salt, first. It makes almost any meal taste better. Olive oil, because it’s a basic you have to have. And a sauce ready to go for whatever we’re making that week, since we grocery shop every weekend and plan our meals ahead.

In the freezer it’s fruit, smoothie ingredients, and Hundy!. We don’t keep much frozen otherwise. Zoey’s been downing Hundy!’s since she was six months old. She had a friend over recently and the two of them scarfed down two each.

Favorite kitchen tool?

Good knives, honestly. And then something random: the little rings you crack an egg into so it cooks in a perfect circle. [It’s an egg poacher!] I love an over-easy egg round. I also love plating. I’m not running a Michelin kitchen, but making a plate look good is a creative outlet for me during the day.

Current favorite easy weeknight dinner?

We think in bowls. A protein bowl or a pasta bowl, sometimes Mexican, sometimes Italian, so rice with veggies and chicken, or protein pasta with salmon and a light olive oil sauce. We keep it lower on the heavy carbs. Last night was salmon with sweet potato and broccolini.

Besides Hundy!, a grab-and-go snack for your bag, car, or stroller?

Popcorn, like Lesser Evil. Healthy snack bars in the pantry. Yogurt with granola on the side, usually Purely Elizabeth, or the Good Culture cottage cheese cups. We keep cooler bags everywhere, including the car, so we just grab and go. For Zoey it’s pouches, applesauce or smoothie. Anything in a pouch keeps the car clean, even when she throws it.

A cookbook or recipe source you turn to?

Mostly we photograph dishes we like at restaurants and recreate them at home, since a lot of menus tell you what’s in the dish. I’ll make my grandma’s soups, Aviv makes his mom’s recipes, and a lot of the time we don’t follow a recipe at all. We open the fridge and go.

Austin is a CPG capital. A few local brands people should know?

Perk, for their electrolytes and protein that isn’t chalky. Whims, for what they’re doing with chocolate and sugar. Love & Cookies for really clean cookies [One Potato interviewed their founder Ashley, and she’s one of a kind ❤️]. And Better Sour, candy that’s better for you and actually tastes like candy, for the moms with a stash in the night table.

A postpartum comfort food, or something you’d send to a new mom.

It was so hot in Austin that summer, so honestly my answer is electrolyte packets. I find water boring, and I’m not a big kombucha or soda person anymore, so electrolytes were how I stayed hydrated for feeding. Beyond that I leaned into salads and lighter things that gave me energy. In winter it would’ve been soups, but in that heat I just needed to stay hydrated.

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This Mini-Series teaches kids how to prepare delicious, nutritious snacks that support focus, learning, and energy. From no-bake granola bars to homemade salsa and gluten-free chocolate donuts, this series inspires healthier eating with fun, hands-on recipes and expert tips. 👉 Click here and scroll to “Fuel Your Brain with Smart Snacks”

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Flip the Box Over: Michelle Schor on Feeding Kids the Honest Stuff

Michelle Schor is the co-founder of Hundy!, a frozen fruit pop made from exactly one ingredient: fruit. No juice or concentrate, no protein math on the back of the box. That single-source ingredient is the whole point, and it comes straight from how she was raised and how she now feeds her 14-month-old, Zoey.

In this week’s Order Up! interview, she talked about growing up food-obsessed in Canada, the PCOS diagnosis that got her reading labels instead of trusting them, and the sleep-deprived weeks when a new baby and a new business were both brand new at once. Michelle’s funny about the parts that were hard, honest about the parts that still are, and specific about what she wants parents to notice in the freezer aisle.

She’s also done one of the most bad-ass new mom things we’ve ever heard: she pitched Shark Tank two weeks after giving birth. She had been practicing her lines from a hospital bed, then flew from Austin to Los Angeles without her newborn, and talks to us about how she had to hand off her newly-pumped breast milk to a production assistant between takes. Hundy! didn’t get a deal, but she and her team walked away from the taping more determined than ever, and she doesn’t regret a thing. In fact, Hundy! is is planning a national launch with a major retailer early in 2027.

We learned a lot from Michelle this week, not just about how to read the ingredients label but also about pursuing your dreams. Just like her daughter Zoey, we’re obsessed with Hundy!, too!

A Conversation with Michelle Schor, Co-founder of Hundy!

Introduce Yourself: I'm Michelle Schor, co-founder of Hundy! I work with my husband, Aviv, and about 14 months ago we had a baby girl, Zoey, who is also a Hundy! fan.

Hundy! is the first frozen fruit pop made from one ingredient, and that ingredient is whole organic fruit. We never add anything else. With Zoey, Aviv and I have two babies now, the company and the kid, and they're both equally important. Two weeks after giving birth, I flew to LA to pitch Shark Tank. That was the first time I'd left Zoey at home. We're based in Austin, and it's been very cool to watch both babies grow up at the same time.

Before Hundy!, what did food look like for you growing up?

I’ve loved food for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Canada, so a lot of my favorite memories involve maple syrup on everything, big winter soups, and what I called elevated grilled cheese, where I’d use fun cheeses and dunk it in the soup. Poutine too, but ours always had toppings to make it a little better for you.

I knew I loved food at five years old. We were at a hotel in Florida, and my parents only let me have one soda a day. So in my swimsuit, I applied for a job at the restaurant, and they agreed to give me a soda every half hour if I folded napkins. I don’t know how my parents allowed it, but I’ve always been determined to find a way to whatever I want.

My dad was an entrepreneur with his own product, and by seven or eight I was demo-ing it with him. I fell in love with handing someone something to try and watching them make it part of their life. As for frozen treats, I was a frozen-fruit kid. Frozen grapes on a paper towel in the freezer, popsicles all summer. I was a figure skater, so I wanted something refreshing that didn’t sit heavy the way cake or chocolate did.

Did becoming a mom change how you shop and cook, or did that start earlier?

It started before I was a mom. I have PCOS, and I struggled to get pregnant, so I really leaned into how much diet affected my body. That’s when I started reading the back of a package instead of the front. So many brands say real fruit or clean ingredients, and then you flip it over and it’s juice, or concentrate, or a list of things you can’t pronounce.

My pregnancy was high risk, so I cut coffee, watched sugar and carbs, and kept it clean. Those little things added up, and now they shape what we put in Zoey’s body too. Aviv and I both love to cook, and we make about 95% of our meals at home.

How did Hundy! actually start?

We moved to Austin at the end of 2020 and fell in love with the startup community building consumer packaged goods (food brands) here, the HEB grocery stores, Central Market, the little boutique grocers. We were standing in the novelty freezer aisle one day and realized nothing there was clean. Everything was trying to be fruit, but nothing on the back of the label was fruit. When did organic grape concentrate start counting as real fruit? I must have missed that class!

Once we dug in, we understood why the space was empty. The machinery to make these types of products barely existed. Cold chain is the hardest part of the business, harder than shipping a bag of chips. And we’re working with one natural ingredient, so every pineapple and every mango tastes a little different, and you still have to keep it consistent. Aviv and I have always liked solving problems. We built Hundy! on the side while running a marketing agency, and when the agency got acquired at the end of 2024, we jumped in full time.

There’s a real gap between wishing something existed and actually making it. What gave you the confidence to go full time on Hundy!?

Taking it day by day. Nothing is linear. I picture being on a road, where sometimes, there’s a huge curve instead of a straight line, and the job is to keep going around it instead of stopping or reversing. And I remind myself we’re not sending people to space. We’re putting fruit in a grab-and-go format and keeping it good.

I’m also an immigrant. I came to the US my last year of college, and after my dad passed away I decided to stay and figure out the visa, the goals that don’t look perfect at the start. That’s been the pattern for almost everything I’ve pursued in my life, including having Zoey. You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only option. And you have to listen to feedback and leave your ego at the door.

A lot of our readers have been postpartum. Very few have gone on national TV two weeks later. How did you get through that?

Shark Tank approached us at Expo West (a consumer packaged goods conference) in March 2025, when I was in my last trimester; honestly, I was looking down at my stomach thinking, well, this isn’t a real thing I’m going to do. But they kept moving us forward in the process, so we did the paperwork step by step. We also moved into our house five days before I gave birth. Obviously, do everything in your life all at once, ideally! Ha!

I was practicing my pitch in the hospital. That’s how close it was. I think I compartmentalized the whole time. At a doctor’s appointment, it was all baby. At home, it was all Hundy! Then Zoey came, and flying to LA was the first time I left her. I couldn’t bring her because of the measles outbreak, so I just accepted it.

Nobody tells you that sleeping in one-hour increments isn’t sleep. It’s a factory reset, and then you’re back up. On top of that I was pumping on the go for the first time, handing a PA my breast milk for the fridge. As a new mom, none of that feels normal yet, even though it is. And you’re trying to dress a recovering body for national TV.

If another mom told you she had to do something hard right after giving birth, what would you tell her? The real-talk version.

You can do it, and it’s not going to be pretty. Time can be your best friend or your enemy, so look at your hours: the ones that aren’t for the baby, how are you using them to show up as the best version of yourself? Getting dressed and leaving the house is genuinely hard postpartum, and you’re full of hormones as well. Postpartum depression is real. But when you get to the other side, you’ll be proud of yourself. It should be worth it, especially if you love what you’re doing.

The Sharks didn’t make a deal, but the episode still helped Hundy! How do you feel about it now?

I’m always glad I did it. We were the last to go, so it was 11pm my time after a full day of nerves and pumping. The Sharks loved us and loved the product, and there was a point in the room where I thought we’d get an offer, and then it just didn’t come. One of them rewatched the episode later and still couldn’t tell me why.

Pretty soon after, we raised money at a better valuation and brought on our own version of sharks, people more specialized to Hundy! Trae Young, who’s an athlete himself. Randy Spelling, a life coach and a real supporter of the brand. Dr. Scott Cohen, a pediatrician in LA. We woke up the next day and decided we were still going to get it done, just not the way we’d planned. That’s been the whole path since.

When you open your freezer now, what’s in there besides Hundy!?

A lot of Hundy!. Then smoothie stuff, because Zoey loves smoothies, plus frozen veggies and a few healthy heatable things like little better-for-you pizzas. Honestly we eat more out of the fridge, simple things like salmon and salads, and we dress them up with our spice cabinet, sauces, vinegars, lemons and limes.

One rule we’ve kept for ten years: when we have dinner, we don’t work. We don’t talk about the retailer launches or who we’re pitching next. We can’t even see the TV from the dining table. We cook together nine nights out of ten, plate it together, and Zoey watches. That hour lets us separate work from home, and those dinners are some of my favorite moments of the day.

You’ve read more better-for-you packaging than anyone should. When a parent has to scan fast, kids melting down, what should they look for?

Start with the length of the list. If it’s a huge paragraph, that alone tells you something, and you don’t even have to read it. Then look at the first five ingredients. If at least half of them aren’t whole ingredients, I probably wouldn’t take it home. And ask whether you can even read it. I’m an adult and a mom, and there are still better-for-you products with ingredients I can’t pronounce.

Remember that packaging is most of the battle. The US is behind on labeling laws. In Japan or Canada, you can’t claim real fruit unless there’s a real threshold of it in the product, and a lot of what’s sold here couldn’t make that claim there. If you need help, there are apps: Oasis, Cal AI, Yuka, Bobby’s app. Or hand your screaming kid the box and let them look at it with you. Zoey’s 14 months and has no idea what I’m saying, but it buys me a minute.

How do you talk about ingredients with kids without making food a moral thing, without making sugar the villain?

Sugar doesn’t have to be the villain. Your body can break down natural sugar. The question is how much, and where it’s coming from. Aviv and I have two approaches. He’ll ask a kid, do you like taking care of yourself? Do you like making good choices? They say yes, and then, well, do you want to try Hundy!?

Mine is the secret-sauce version. I lean in and say, guess what: this is a popsicle you can have any time of day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack, and your parents will say yes. The kid turns to their mom like they’ve just been handed a superpower. Most of them like it as much as the sugary stuff anyway. We also just feed Zoey what we eat. She’s had salmon since about seven months. She throws food too, but changing up a sauce usually gets her to try.

When Zoey looks back on growing up in your house, what do you hope she says?

That she appreciated the time we put in, and that she has the same love for food and her own family one day. I hope she cooks and experiments like I did, and invites friends over for little dinner parties. Food can teach you culture, it can teach you how to take care of yourself, and it can just be fun.

I also hope she saw two parents building something, being resourceful, and being a little unafraid. There’s always a grass-is-greener version of every choice. I want her to be okay with what she has and to take it day by day. She’s been on work calls since she was three months old and watching us cook since the day we brought her home, so we’ll see.

What’s a cooking skill you use all the time that you think more home cooks should know?

Slow down on the stove. I love the stove, not the microwave, and people turn the burner on high and then wonder why the salmon came out dry. Give it the extra five minutes of love and let things simmer and sauté. Most of my meals are a protein going in one pan and a sauce or vegetable in another, then thrown together. I’m not a baker. The stovetop is my whole game. Barbecuing I leave to my husband.

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Earlier this week we talked with pediatric dietitian Jill Castle about the light bulb moment at her own high chair, the night she stopped plating her kids’ food, and what she means when she says “health is an inside job”. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find that interview right here.

Now we’re getting practical. Jill raised four kids in five years while feeding them full time for a decade, and she came with specifics: the three things always in her pantry, the Caesar salad that fed everybody on a weeknight, and the reason a pediatric dietitian keeps potato chips where her kids can see them.

Three pantry or fridge staples you always keep on hand because they’re easy to throw together?

Pasta and tuna fish in the pantry. And eggs. Always eggs. It’s a panic attack if there’s no eggs in the house.

A weeknight dinner you knew all four kids would eat?

Caesar salad with chicken, with a caveat: I used to make my own bread and save the heels, so I’d make my own croutons. Chop up romaine, the shredded parm from Trader Joe’s, my own Caesar dressing, and chicken tenders cooked quick on top of the stove. They always ate it.

The other one was chicken broccoli pasta with Alfredo sauce. Jarred Alfredo sauce. Remember, I was working full time by then.

How do you make your Caesar dressing?

Mayonnaise, anchovy paste, a little vinegar or lemon juice, some parm. Shake it up.

Anchovy paste is a great invention. I always keep it in the fridge.

A snack you always had on hand to head off the hangry meltdown?

I had a lot of snacks, so there wasn’t one standard snack. But baked potatoes with shredded cheddar and salsa, done in the microwave, because I had athletes coming home. Cheese quesadillas. Peanut butter toast. A bowl of cereal with milk was often a snack.

My snacks were always a little heartier, because I didn’t want my kids coming back an hour later asking for more. It’s not that we didn’t have the goldfish in the house. We had that stuff too. I just tried to give them something pretty substantial.

People are surprised a pediatric dietitian keeps potato chips in the pantry. Why do you?

People do come in and say, wow, you’re a dietitian and you have potato chips in the pantry. Yeah. I don’t profess to be a perfect eater. I like all kinds of foods. Part of my philosophy was that if I don’t have all the stuff around, not all the time, but if they don’t get to see all the stuff, then it becomes taboo and forbidden and scarce. And then I’ve got the child who’s overeating at the neighbor’s house.

A store-bought convenience product you buy with zero guilt?

Frozen shrimp. Frozen vegetables and frozen fruit. Pasta. Tinned fish, whether it’s tuna, or tinned chicken. Potato chips, pretzels, nuts. I don’t have a lot of food guilt. It’s a very free way to live.

A kitchen tool that genuinely makes feeding a family easier?

This is kind of a boring answer, but I cook a lot in a skillet. And I do a lot of hand chopping. My cutting boards, my good knives, my skillets, my spatulas.

One food that reliably got eaten in your house without a fight?

Fruit. I always had fruit offered at all the meals. Always at breakfast, always at lunch, and always a bowl of fruit as part of dinner. Chopped, or peel your own oranges, whatever. That was always a home run.

A cookbook you actually cook from?

I love all of Ina Garten’s cookbooks. She’s my primary gal. I have other cookbooks, but I always know that if I want it to taste good and turn out well, I’m happy with her stuff.

A food educator you trust and point parents to?

Ellyn Satter’s work, obviously, on the Division of Responsibility.

And a pediatric dietitian named Dani Lebovitz. I have a lot of respect for her because she creates education for children about food, and she just came out with a book this year: Food Positivity, How to Ditch Diet Culture and Talk to Kids About Food [Bookshop, Amazon]. What I really like about Dani is that she’s very relational. She’s into how kids feel, and how a kid’s behavior is communicating something to parents. She uses that lens, and she also makes these beautiful books meant to teach children about food, fruit, vegetables. She does it without shaming children and does it in a way that’s cognitively appropriate.

A family table rule that actually stuck?

Stack them. Everybody stacked their phones in the middle of the table, and nobody touched a phone until we were done at the restaurant. My kids still do it. My oldest came home a week or two after starting college and said none of her friends eat with their families. They never sit down for a family dinner. That was mind blowing for her.

One food rule you’d retire, a line you wish parents would stop repeating?

Something around: that’s not healthy for you, or, you have to eat a healthy diet to be healthy. It doesn’t have to be an uber healthy diet to be healthy. The body’s pretty forgiving.

We want children to learn to love and eat healthy food. We want to be the example of that and provide the opportunities for it. But it’s not a report card. It’s not like you’re getting an A because your child eats perfectly.

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Health Is an Inside Job: Jill Castle on Raising Kids Who Thrive at Every Size

By the time she was 18 months old, Jill Castle’s first daughter was underweight and anemic. Jill had been a pediatric dietitian for seven years by then, feeding critically ill kids at Mass General and Boston Children’s, and she’d assumed her own baby would be easy. She did what her training and her pediatrician said. More calories. Another meal. One more bite. It all backfired. Then she watched her husband feed the same child off his own plate, no struggle at all, and the realization hit: It’s me. I think it’s me.

What she went looking for next wasn’t in her nutrition training. Feeding styles. Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility. The parent-child dynamic that shows up at every meal whether anyone names it or not. You can change the food, she’ll tell you, and still not change the outcome. The food and the feeding approach have to be married together.

That was 35 years ago; she’s since raised four kids, taken nine years out of practice to feed them full time, gone back to work, and written six books. She calls those years at home her secret sauce, and she means it as a professional credential. Her training told her what a child needs; ten years of after-school snacks, swim-practice dinners, and four kids who each needed something different taught her how it actually happens.

Her book, Kids Thrive at Every Size, brings all of this together: eight pillars of wellness, starting with family culture and running through sleep, movement, feeding, food, eating, screens, and self-love. And if this feels like a lot, Jill emphasizes that every family start with only one, usually their weakest pillar. And just like the marriage between food and feeding approach, all of these pillars work together. Underneath these pillars is a premise she repeats often: Health is an inside job.

A Conversation with Jill Castle, MS, RDN, pediatric dietitian

Introduce Yourself: I'm Jill Castle. I'm a pediatric dietitian and the owner of The Nourished Child, a website and podcast for parents.

I have four children, all grown and flown. My oldest will be 30, then 28, 26, and 25, four kids in five years. I've written six books, and most of my days are now focused on nutrition education for parents and for professionals.

You trained at Mass General and Boston Children’s, managing nutrition for critically ill kids. Then your own daughter was anemic and underweight by 18 months. What sticks with you most?

My attitude. I’d been a pediatric dietitian for seven years, taking care of a lot of sick kids in two different hospitals, and I thought this was going to be a cakewalk when I had my own daughter. The breastfeeding part was. Then we started solids around six months and it was not. I was confused, I felt overwhelmed, and honestly, I felt like I didn’t know anything in my own profession.

I got the same information most new parents get when their child isn’t growing well: give her more calories; add a meal; make sure she takes a bite. I really was trying to do all of that, and it backfired. She wasn’t interested in any of it. The moment she got in the high chair, she wanted out of it.

I thought the solution was that I wasn’t giving her the right food. What it actually ended up being was how I was approaching her at mealtimes. I was putting too much pressure on it. I was too invested in her eating, and she wasn’t having it at all. How can I get her to eat? What can I put in the food to make it higher calorie? And she’d just say, I’m all done, and want to get down.

My husband could feed her quite easily, and that was the tell. He was the fun one. Sit on my lap, try everything I have in front of me, this is great. And the energy that I was bringing was: sit in your high chair, you must eat this.

It’s very embarrassing to go to your pediatrician when you’re a dietitian and hear, hmm, your child’s not gaining weight, hmm, now we’ve got anemia to deal with. I had so much shame about it.

Then I had a lightbulb moment watching my husband feed her. “It’s me. I think it’s me.”

Once you had that realization about feeding your daughter, what changed?

I started looking at all the research I could find on the feeding relationship. The feeding styles: controlling, permissive, diplomatic. Ellyn Satter’s work, the division of responsibility. And I thought, wow, I need to be a lot more relaxed and let her lead rather than have an agenda for this meal. My job is to prepare the food and get it on the table. Her job is to eat, on her timeline. Things got a lot better after that.

I still have a little internal reaction when I hear another healthcare professional say, just change the food. It’s way more than the food. You can change the food, and that doesn’t mean you’re going to change the outcome. The food and the feeding approach have to be married together. That’s where parents really start to see traction. And once you see a counterproductive feeding dynamic, you can’t not see it anymore.

Your second daughter arrived after all of this. Did you feel prepared?

I felt better prepared. And then I realized how much of it wasn’t about me at all. She was a different kid. She loved to eat. She made happy singing eating noises every time. Nothing she didn’t like. She was a joy to feed.

So a lot of this is child dependent. My first has more of a spirited personality and wants to be in charge of everything. My second was easygoing. Parents tell me this all the time. This one’s tough to feed, this one’s a joy. But we’ve got to feed them all. So how do you feed them all?

What was mealtime like in your own house growing up?

I grew up in Indiana. My dad owned his own business and was home at five o’clock. My mother had dinner on the table at six o’clock every night and we all sat together and ate together.

I’m the oldest of four, and I remember there being just enough food. Not how much we wanted to eat, but just enough. I remember going to the table like, where’s the biggest plate? Where can I sit that has the most food on it? We all did that.

My mother was a very good cook, and I loved the routine of a regular family dinner. I brought it to my own children. We had family meals most nights, and if a child was at swim practice, one of us would sit with them while they ate later.

My parents would be classified as controlling feeders. We had to finish our plate before we could be excused. Some nights that was great, because we liked what we were eating. Other nights it was a slog. You had to eat the bean soup, and how much ketchup can I put in the bean soup to make it palatable. And I had a sibling who was a picky eater, so we’d all sit there and wait for the picky eater to be done.

How did that show up in your own family?

When my kids were really young I plated their food. Everybody’s portion on a plate, served to them. And when my older daughter was around eight and my son was three, my husband and I started down a path I would consider similar to my parents: take another bite before you get up, finish your milk before you leave the table.

And I had a moment where I was like, I don’t want to go down the same road as my parents, this looks too much like that. So we switched everything about our family meals. Now we serve family style, and always have. It’s chicken breasts on the grill, on a platter, cut into varying portion sizes. If it’s a salad, it’s a big bowl of salad. It’s the gallon of milk. You can have what’s on the table or not. Listen to your body.

I was always conscious of it, too. I know this child will never eat that, so maybe I’ll put a bowl of grapes on as an addition. Everybody can have the grapes, but the grapes are really there for the one child who won’t touch the vegetables. And there are enough grapes for everybody.

I don’t plate food anymore. I just had a dinner party and I still don’t plate food. You choose what you want to eat and how much you put on your plate. That’s not my job. That’s your job. There’s some nuance, of course. If you’ve got a child who’s underweight, or a child who carries more body weight, we might tweak things. But in general, children like to be in charge of themselves, and it builds their confidence.

You took nine years off to raise your kids, then went back to practice. Did the daily reality of feeding four kids change how you advised other parents?

Absolutely. For many years I felt like that was my secret sauce. Ten years of feeding four young kids, full time. I learned a lot about routines and attitudes and the culture you create around family meals.

And how important structure is through the day. We weren’t so rigid that breakfast had to happen at eight o’clock. It wasn’t about rigidity. It was about a rhythm. If everybody had a decent breakfast at eight, I knew based on their ages they’d be hungry two-and-a-half to three hours later. If the next day we ate at 7:30am, snack moved earlier.

I always felt like I needed to stay one step ahead of them. They’d come in and say, we’re hungry, we want a snack. And I’d say, we’re all set, I know exactly what we’re having. Proactive instead of reactive. That’s what staying home gave me.

Now, that’s my family and those are my kids. My kids aren’t your kids, and every family has different pressures. But I do feel that rhythm and structure help kids feel secure. They know things are predictable, and they’re calmer as a result.

Your book, Kids Thrive at Every Size, pushes back on the idea that a healthy kid has to be a thin kid. For a parent who’s quietly worried about their child’s weight, where do you tell them to start?

The whole premise is that there are eight pillars of wellness, so there are eight areas where a family can start. Where you start really has to do with where your weakest area is.

One is sleep. If kids aren’t getting enough sleep, that changes their appetite regulation. They’re hungrier and it takes them longer to get full. So for one family, that’s the first thing we nail down. There’s a food pillar, the quality and balance of what they’re eating. There’s a feeding pillar, the interactions around the table. There’s an eating pillar. What motivates your child to eat? Boredom and unstructured time? Do they use food to feel regulated?

What I love about this approach is that most families come in thinking their diet is terrible and they have to renovate everything. You probably don’t have to renovate everything. You probably have some really good parts in your daily habits that we just need to anchor down and build from.

The premise underneath it is that health is an inside job. Can your child move the way they want to move? Can they run and keep up with their friends? Can they sleep without snoring and waking up? What’s going on inside their body, which we can see in lab values? And then there’s the psychological piece. How do they feel about themselves? Do they have friends? Do they seem happy?

Health is all of those things. It’s not just how a child looks on the outside.

Is there one worry you see parents trying to fix that doesn’t actually need fixing?

There’s one that I see a lot. Parents come in worried about their child’s health. But when you really start to talk with them, they’re worried about their child’s ability to be adjusted in our society, how their children will be treated. Will they be accepted? Will they have the same opportunities? Will they have a best friend? Will they be able to play a sport if they want to?

That’s not a diet that’s going to fix that. That’s not more sleep that’s going to fix that. To me it’s more about helping that parent believe they can implement a healthy lifestyle for the whole family and love that child no matter what they look like. Support them at whatever size they are, in a way that is non-shaming and non-biased. When they understand that, they stop worrying about some of those other things.

You can’t control society, and it’s unfortunate. There’s so much about society that does not serve children well, particularly if they’re growing up in a larger body. And it’s hard for parents, because it makes them look at their own belief systems. What do you inherently believe about size?

Eight pillars of wellness is a lot to take in at once. If a parent is overwhelmed, where do you point them first?

I wrote them in the order I think is most effective and easiest for families to put into place. The first is family culture.

How are you talking about food? Is food good? Is it bad? Is it toxic? Is it ultra-processed? These words are scary for kids, and they don’t understand what they mean. How are you talking about bodies? What words are you using to describe people in larger bodies?

If you’re saying sugar is toxic, or that a large person is lazy in front of your children, they will internalize it. That’s what kids do. They think their parents are the end-all be-all and everything they say is right and true. So they think, that person’s bad because they have a bigger body and my mom says they’re lazy. Or, sugar is in ice cream and I love an ice cream cone, so am I bad if sugar is bad?

The brain of a child is very immature, and parents don’t always recognize that a child’s ability to understand nuance and context is limited. They’re concrete thinkers. You say something’s bad, they think it’s bad. That’s why family culture kicks off the pillars. If that culture is negative, it can derail all the others.

After 35 years of this, what would you say to the parent who’s convinced they’ve already ruined their kid’s relationship with food?

I would push back on that, because kids are so resilient. They’re not a done deal by 5 or by 12 or by 13. Every day is a new day to change the conversation.

Every day is a new day to say, hey, I used to say sugar is toxic, but you know what, I enjoy it too. We don’t have to eat it every day, but let’s pick out the things we really love and enjoy them. Or, I know you’ve heard me say something about Aunt Amy’s body before. I was wrong. I shouldn’t be saying stuff like that, and we’re not going to do that anymore.

This is what’s refreshing for some of the clients I work with. You sit down with your children and say, I have been learning so much about food, and I figured out that I got some things wrong. Here’s what I got wrong. I might have been saying some wrong things about food, or about bodies, and I’m not going to say those things anymore. Of course the kids are going to be like, why? What? And then you just have the conversation.

And then a parent might ask, what do I say when my kid asks why we shouldn’t talk about bodies? A possible response: all bodies are good. All of our insides are exactly the same. Everybody’s got a unique body, and that’s what makes everybody so interesting.

That said, if you’re a parent with a child in a larger body who has health conditions as a result, that doesn’t mean you don’t take action. There are things you can do under medical supervision that help. The lifestyle pillars are good for everybody, but some children need more help medically.

When your four kids look back on how they were fed growing up, what do you hope they remember?

I hope they remember that dinner was fun and the table was a great place to be. And I hope they take some of the things I did at our family table forward to their own families.

Is there a cooking skill you use all the time that home cooks should know?

Homemade salad dressing. Red wine vinegar, or lemon juice from a squeezed lemon, and some olive oil. Throw herbs in there. Throw some maple syrup in there, and some nutritional yeast. Making your own dressing is easy and it just tastes better. Even if it’s only lemon and olive oil.

Follow Jill Castle on Instagram @i.am.pedird

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Books, Books, Books - by Jill Castle

Kids Thrive at Every Size: How to Nourish Your Big, Small, or In-Between Child for a Lifetime of Health and Happiness [Bookshop, Amazon]

Fearless Feeding: How to Raise Healthy Eaters From High Chair to High School [Bookshop, Amazon]

Eat Like a Champion: Performance Nutrition for Your Young Athlete [Bookshop, Amazon]

The Smart Mom’s Guide to Starting Solids: How to Introduce, Advance, and Nourish Your Baby with First Foods [Bookshop, Amazon]

Try New Food: How to Help Picky Eaters Taste, Eat and Like New Foods [Bookshop, Amazon]

The Smart Mom’s Guide to Healthy Snacking: How to Raise a Smart Snacker from Tot to Teen [Bookshop, Amazon]

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Earlier this week we sat down with Shannon Sarna — cookbook author, founding editor of The Nosher, and mom of three — for a conversation about learning to cook at sixteen, raising Jewish kids across a blended heritage, and why she’d tell an intimidated parent to start with pita instead of challah. She’s the author of two cookbooks: Modern Jewish Comfort Food [Bookshop, Amazon] and Modern Jewish Baker [Bookshop, Amazon]. If you haven’t read her interview yet, check it out right here.

Today, Shannon is sharing her favorite picks. From the $5 Amazon gadgets that keep her kids busy to the Trader Joe’s shortcut she doesn’t apologize for, she shares the specific tools, snacks, and staples that make a busy three-kid kitchen actually run.

Three pantry staples you always have on hand?

Chili oil. Chickpeas or white beans, something you can throw into pasta or a salad for quick protein. And good salt. Maldon Sea Salt.

A cookbook you turn to for inspiration?

Jenny Rosenstrach’s The Weekday Vegetarians [Bookshop, Amazon]. I go back to that one a lot.

And Danielle Oron’s Modern Israeli Cooking [Bookshop, Amazon]. I worked with her at The Nosher, and her shawarma spice mix is still what I use. She’s a mom too, and the recipes are relatable and weeknight-friendly.

A messy-but-fun baking activity with a kid on the weekend?

You can never go wrong starting with a box of brownie mix and letting them add whatever they want. You barely did any work. You emptied a box.

If you want a little more, decorating sugar cookies. I put out a plastic tablecloth, a selection of sprinkles, and frosting in different colored tubes. Buy the sugar cookie dough or make it from scratch, and let them cut out shapes. Mine will sit and decorate for an hour or two. Is it messy? Yes. You put it down and vacuum after. Maybe you eat them, maybe you don’t. They had a good time.

A favorite kitchen tool?

Honestly, for me it’s a digital scale. I can’t live without it, though most people don’t need one.

A fun one to have with kids around is a waffle fry cutter. I make sweet potato fries with it all the time. You can crinkle-cut carrots or other veggies for dipping.

The other great one is a homemade uncrustable maker. My kids love uncrustables, and I try to stay away from high-fructose corn syrup day to day, so we make our own with whatever filling they want. You’ll use it over and over.

A snack that saves the day when the kids are getting hangry?

Cucumbers and ranch, and cheese sticks. My mother-in-law started buying these fancy cheddar ones, and now those are the only ones they want. But they’re expensive!

Trader Joe’s oat bites are a hit. And I’m not above throwing a bag of chips at them! Mostly they love a dip, which is a great way to get a kid to eat a vegetable.

A store-bought shortcut you don’t apologize for?

Veggie fried rice from the Trader Joe’s frozen section. You can doctor it up, add cauliflower rice, spinach, tofu, chicken, or salmon, and it becomes the base of the meal. Any supermarket veggie fried rice works.

A kitchen splurge that earned its place?

Honestly I’m not a gadget person. I don’t even have an air fryer. My big one is a good toaster oven. I’ll cook anything in it, and the kids can toast or warm something up themselves. No regrets.

A dinner all three kids will eat, no negotiations?

Homemade pizza. After working for Dan Richer I started making it with a recipe he geared toward home, and they loved it. And homemade mac and cheese.

Comfort food — what you make when someone’s had a hard day or is sick?

For me it’s butter noodles, or noodles with cottage cheese. Those were my comfort foods growing up. When someone’s not feeling well, it’s time to make a pot of soup. Chicken soup, for sure.

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Books, Books, Books - by Shannon Sarna

Modern Jewish Baker: Challah, Babka, Bagels & More [Bookshop, Amazon]

Modern Jewish Comfort Food: 100 Fresh Recipes for Classic Dishes from Kugel to Kreplach [Bookshop, Amazon]

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Food Is Love, and Other Things Shannon Sarna Knows for Sure

Shannon Sarna didn’t grow up wanting any of this *gestures broadly at chaotic family life*. She wanted to be a Broadway star. She wasn’t domestic, wasn’t interested in cooking, wasn’t planning on having kids. Then her mom passed away when she was sixteen, and she found herself feeding her six-year-old and thirteen-year-old siblings and calling a friend’s mother to ask how to boil a hot dog.

Almost thirty years later, she’s a cookbook author, the founding editor of The Nosher, and Chief of Staff to a six-time James Beard-nominated chef. From professional kitchens to cooking for her family at home, Shannon has thought hard about how she and her husband talk about food in front of our kids. In her house, there’s no such thing as good or bad food, and you cannot say the word fat. She’s a butter mom and an Entenmann’s mom, she cooks dinner five nights a week. She wants her kids to learn to feed themselves and each other.

We talked about learning to cook out of necessity, raising Jewish kids with an Italian Christmas Eve (and the Christmas cookies she bakes every year because they were her mother’s special thing, and her kids will never meet their grandmother any other way), why she’d tell a parent intimidated by baking to start with pita instead of challah, and the one kitchen skill she thinks matters more than any recipe.

A special note from our friends at Raising Healthy Families:

Teach the Skill, Not the Recipe

Your kid asks to help cook at 5:40pm, which is the worst possible moment to teach anybody anything, so you say "not tonight" and finish dinner alone. Then you feel a little bad about it. The trouble was never that we don't want our kids in the kitchen, it's that the asking never comes at a teachable hour. Katie Kimball's Kids Cook Real Food eCourse moves the teaching off your plate entirely: the lessons happen on video, at whatever time your family actually has.

The course runs across three skill levels so kids join where they are and grow into the rest, and the focus stays on skills rather than recipes, which is why a kid who learns to hold a knife properly can go on to handle half the produce drawer without a new set of instructions. VIP access never expires, so it carries a family from a four-year-old on a step stool to a teenager making dinner. The free knife skills class is a good way to see whether the tone works for your kid before you spend anything. 👉 Start with the free knife skills class

A Conversation with Shannon Sarna, cookbook writer & founding editor of The Nosher

Introduce Yourself: I’m Shannon Sarna. I’m a cookbook author and a mom; my three kids are 14, 10, and almost seven.

I spent thirteen years as the founding editor of The Nosher, which was a real joy. Now my official title is Chief of Staff to Chef Dan Richer at Razza, a six-time James Beard-nominated restaurant in Jersey City.

You taught yourself to cook and bake at sixteen, after your mom died, partly to feed your younger siblings. How did becoming the family cook shape your relationship to food?

I can’t emphasize enough what a shift it was. I grew up in an Italian and Jewish family where food was central, and I loved to eat, but I never cooked. I was going to be on Broadway and I cared about nothing else. Nothing domestic was on my radar.

Then suddenly I had a six-year-old and a thirteen-year-old to feed for long stretches, and I was calling my friend Andrea’s mom asking how to make a hot dog. I didn’t know how to boil one. Becoming a cook came incrementally to me, over almost thirty years of trial and error. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately — that I started knowing almost nothing, and now I get to guide other people. That’s kind of crazy, but it’s also a privilege.

Does that make you want to be sure your own kids leave home knowing how to feed themselves?

A thousand percent. As someone who’s been in therapy most of my adult life, there’s pretty much nothing about my mom’s death and helping raise my siblings that didn’t shape how I live in good ways and crazy ways, both. But it’s really important to me that my kids have basic skills and know how to take care of one another.

I was away recently helping a friend, and my ten-year-old made dinner for my seven-year-old. Not because my husband wasn’t home, she just said, ‘oh, I’m warming up rice for myself, Jude wants some too, I’ll do that’. My fourteen-year-old cooks for herself all the time, and sometimes for all of us.

You’ve said that when family or friends come to visit, the first question is always: “what can I feed you?” Does that caring-through-food instinct show up with your own kids?

My father-in-law would lovingly, ruthlessly make fun of me for it, because I’m always asking, “are you hungry? did you eat?”. For so many cultures, food is love; it’s universal. I connect deeply with other ethnic moms because that’s what we do.

I fold my kids into meal planning, not just so they eat, but because it engages them. They’ll say, I read about this food, can we try it? My oldest is really into Korean culture. She read about tteokbokki (spicy Korean rice cakes) years ago and desperately wanted it. I found a restaurant here, because New Jersey is the most diverse state, you can find anything. And it turns out Korean food is one of the few things the whole family will eat!

Your mom never talked about dieting; you mentioned she might eat Entenmann’s every morning, but there was always fresh fruit, always balance. How much of how you feed your family comes from her?

A lot. How we talk about food and bodies is top of mind for me every single day. I grew up performing, I heard comments about my own body, and now I have two daughters, one of them also a performer. So I choose my words carefully. There’s no such thing as good or bad food in my house; that’s where you start passing down toxic ideas. We don’t use the word fat. You cannot say it in my house, and I have no tolerance for it.

I’m passionate about farming and local food, but I’m also a butter mom, an Entenmann’s mom. There’s always an abundance of fresh food, and there’s also a cookie. I cook dinner five nights a week and pack lunch most days, and there are cheese doodles in the lunch next to the berries and the yogurt. I want them to learn to navigate that themselves.

When I talk about working out, I say I want to be a strong, healthy mom for you. Never that I want to lose weight. That’s off the table. There’s joy in food, like art. Peach season is my middle daughter’s favorite fruit season. My oldest loves mangoes. That joy should be there, without shame.

You grew up with rugelach next to your mom’s Christmas cookies. How do you think about passing on that blended identity to your kids? A lot of our readers have mixed heritages.

Statistically, most American Jews are more like me than like my husband, who comes from a thousand generations of Ashkenazi Jews. At The Nosher, it was an overt goal to help other Jews see their identities reflected in diverse foods. Jewish food isn’t just pastrami and matzo ball soup. There are Puerto Rican Jews, Chinese Jews, Italian Jews. That range is beautiful.

Our family identifies very Jewishly: we belong to a conservative synagogue, my kids go to Jewish day school, Shabbat is essential. But I come from a more diverse background, and it took me a little while to feel comfortable bringing those traditions into my family. Not sharing them would have denied my kids, and denied me a connection to my mom.

So we celebrate Christmas in a cultural, American way. We do cookies and give them to the teachers, we see the Nutcracker, we have a Christmas Eve tradition that was my mom’s Italian one. My kids know what the holiday celebrates, and it’s important to me that they understand. But I liken it to celebrating Diwali with our Indian friends, or eating dumplings for Chinese New Year — it’s about embracing the diversity around us. My kids don’t get to have a relationship with their grandmother, so these are little snippets of her they can have.

Challah was the first thing you taught yourself to master. For a parent who finds baking bread intimidating, is challah a good place to start?

Honestly, I wouldn’t tell people to start with challah; it’s just where I started, and it’s more complicated than people think. Baking bread is amazing, and once you see how easy it can be, you fold it into your week. But I’d start with pita. It’s four ingredients, a short rise, easy to do by hand, and it doesn’t need the gluten development challah does. Or a no-knead loaf you mix, stick in the fridge, and throw in the oven. You pull it out hot and it gets devoured. That’s the perfect entry point.

I suggest pita partly because pita in the US kind of sucks; what you make at home is infinitely better. Then you can work up to challah.

Your daughter used to think challah should always have M&Ms or sprinkles. How do you keep tradition fun without losing it?

What I consider traditional might not feel that way to another family, and I say that with respect — but I also don’t care. Sometimes people think engaging with their Jewishness has to look a particular way to be real. They’ll say, I’m not really Jewish like that, or Shabbat doesn’t count unless it’s homemade challah and chicken soup.

But a Shabbat meal can be a store-bought challah. Babka doesn’t have to be chocolate. If a kid makes unicorn challah, they’re still making challah. Years ago some chef made bacon-wrapped matzo balls and everyone got mad, but that was still some form of their Jewish identity. Who am I to say it’s invalid? You bring you. You make it your own. [Find Shannon’s foolproof challah recipe right here on The Kitchn.]

What do you most hope your three kids carry from your kitchen?

I hope they won’t always roll their eyes when I offer to tell them the history of bagels. Mostly I want them to feel proud. Proud of being Jewish in whatever way that means to them, and proud of their dual heritage.

And I want them to understand the world through food: that food tells everyone’s stories, and that they’re all interconnected. They love Chinese food, they love pasta. I want them to understand how one influenced the other. Jewish food tells the story of our people. We eat noodles with cottage cheese; here’s why, here’s where it came from on both sides of our family, here’s how far our families have come. It’s a sense of pride, but also an understanding of how we fit into the rest of the world.

If a parent wants to share their heritage through food but doesn’t want it to feel stressful, what’s the easiest way in?

Pick the one food that mattered to you and focus on that, then buy the rest. If Shabbat meant a roast chicken, make the roast chicken and outsource everything else so it’s doable. If it’s baking, bring in a hack, especially when kids are young, because baking with kids sounds fun and is actually messy, and they don’t listen, and it doesn’t come out well. It’s more enticing in theory than in practice.

And it doesn’t have to be cooking at all. It can be going to the market together, picking out the special pickles, setting the table, making place cards, talking to the butcher. Think of Charlotte on Sex and the City converting and preparing Shabbat dinner: the homemade challah, the brisket, the perfect apron, and then the whole thing imploding. If that’s your vision of how to do Jewish, you’ll drown. Pick one thing and buy or simplify the rest. The meaningful part is the time together, not the quality or perfectionism of the food.

Is there one cooking skill you think every home cook should know?

The best skill you can have is figuring out what to do with what you already have. Not every dinner needs to be: I picked this recipe and I’m making it. Sometimes it’s: I have corn and a can of beans and some pasta, so I’ll make pasta and a salad that don’t really go together, and it doesn’t matter. Or we’ll have eggs and toast and fruit and yogurt, and that’s a full meal.

Being able to look in your pantry and fridge and freezer and know you probably already have dinner tonight, without running to the store, that’s the skill. I know it scares people whose brains don’t work that way, who feel they have to follow a recipe. But nobody ever complained about a bowl of spaghetti with butter and a salad on the side. That’s a good dinner. Period.

Follow Shannon on Instagram at @shasarna and get her challah recipe right here!

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

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This week we talked with Laura Fuentes, the founder of MOMables, about fifteen years of packing school lunches, the pureed-carrot disaster that ended veggie-hiding in her house, and why getting a real meal on the table is more about execution than inspiration. You can read Laura’s Order Up! interview right here.

Now for the rapid-fire round. From the three things always in her fridge to her one non-negotiable trick for fluffy pancakes (she’d know, she’s flipped ~six million), Laura shares the staples, shortcuts, and lunchbox logic that keep her family fed on a busy week.

Three pantry or fridge staples you always have on hand?

Milk, eggs, and flour. It’s the base for almost everything I make, pancakes included.

One kitchen tool you use all the time?

A thin spatula, the kind that’s just right for flipping eggs and pancakes.

Your current go-to weeknight dinner on repeat?

Taco Tuesday. On repeat it’s steak tacos: sear, sear, done. I have a whole cookbook of tacos, and no one ever gets bored of them.

One store-bought shortcut?

Pancake mix!

You’ve built recipes around rotisserie chicken. What’s your favorite 15-minute move?

One rotisserie chicken should be enough for two family meals, because it’s always rotisserie chicken plus one more thing.

Rotisserie chicken pasta, chicken salad, chicken wraps, chicken noodle soup, chicken and rice, black bean and chicken quesadillas. Pick whatever you have on hand and you’ve got a meal.

Your one non-negotiable tip for the fluffiest pancakes?

Aluminum-free baking powder. It’s the biggest tip in almost every pancake recipe on my site [Get her fluffy pancake recipe here!]. If you want really fluffy pancakes you need extra baking powder, about two teaspoons more depending on the batch, and the aluminum kind comes through tasting a little metallic or salty.

One more thing: don’t use baking powder that’s been open more than six months. It loses its strength.

Kids come home with half-eaten lunches. Is there one thing that makes a packed lunch actually get eaten?

It’s less about one item and more about packing the right amount, plus a little variety, in the same lunch. That matters most for younger kids.

Food usually comes home uneaten for one of two reasons: it was too much of one thing, or they got busy chatting and ran out of time. A few different small things keeps them from feeling overwhelmed and makes it more fun to eat.

A favorite cookbook?

My Taco Tuesday cookbook. It’s 52 recipes that make Tuesday the best eats of the week, and taco night is almost always a winner.

A kitchen splurge appliance that’s actually worth it?

A fully automatic espresso machine. Mine is mid-range, but fully automatic, because I don’t want to tamp anything. I just want it simple and really good so I’m not running out to a coffee shop. Put the money in the machine.

The family dinner everyone eats without a single argument or eye roll?

My blackened chicken pasta. Every time.

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Practical, honest, and been-there: MOMables' Laura Fuentes on real-life family food

To say that Laura Fuentes has been packing school lunches for a long time is probably an understatement. She started MOMables in 2012, back before the bento boxes we all have now existed. She’s quick to point out that the lunch ideas were easy to come by, but keeping them from turning to mush by noon was the actual problem. Her kids are 20, 18, and 14 now, and guess what? She’s still packing lunches.

This year, with a high schooler at home and two kids in college, she went back to the beginning on purpose. She’s been filming short lunch videos as if she were starting over, asking what a brand-new parent would actually need to know, and making zero assumptions about where that parent is starting from. Check them out on the MOMables YouTube and Instagram channels!

Laura isn’t a celebrity chef, and she’ll tell you so. She taught herself to cook in her 20s from Food Network reruns and magazine recipes, mostly by making mistakes. She has melted a plastic lid onto a casserole and burned a pot of tomato sauce, and she remembers both. That’s a big part of why parents trust her: she’s been in the trenches of real school lunches.

We talked with Laura about the grandmother and single mom had her helping out in the kitchen but never explicitly taught her how to cook, the pureed-carrot disaster that ended veggie-hiding in her house for good, why execution is where parents actually get stuck, and the one small habit she says moves the needle more than anything else. Her message for the new school year is simple: a homemade meal doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to make it to the table.

A Conversation with Laura Fuentes, Founder of MOMables

Introduce Yourself: I'm Laura Fuentes, founder of MOMables. I have three kids; they're 20, 18, and 14.

I've helped parents make mealtimes simpler for a long time now, from school lunches to weeknight dinners to the very best pancakes. I've been through every stage of eating, and I mean every eating dilemma out there has happened at our dinner table.

You’ve said you learned to cook from your grandmother in Spain and your single mom, who both cooked from scratch. What did you take from them?

There’s a big gap between my grandmother’s true, slow, homemade cooking and my mom’s homemade-but-faster version, because my mom also worked. Neither of them sat me down to teach me. I learned by helping. “Can you help with this?” Season the chicken, clean the chicken, whatever it was. There was no kid task and adult task, just what you were capable of at your age.

What I carried from that is that a homemade meal doesn’t have to be complicated. You can make something with fresh, simple ingredients that tastes great in about 30 minutes. And I try to give parents permission to let go of the picture of everyone sitting down together to a hot meal. You can make dinner, leave it on the stove, and feed one wave of kids before practice and the next when they get home. A lot of parents don’t realize that’s allowed, and that’s often what sends people to the drive-through.

You taught yourself to cook in your 20s, mostly by making mistakes. What’s one that stuck with you?

I was cooking a recipe from a magazine that said to bake it “covered.” My casserole dish happened to have one of those plastic serve-and-go lids you’d bring to a potluck. So I covered it, put it in the oven, and the plastic melted right onto the food. Seriously!

To this day, when I write a recipe, I say “cover with foil.” It sounds obvious, but we make so many assumptions about the person on the other end. I’ve also burned a pot of tomato sauce because the recipe said to simmer but never said to stir, so I left it on high and kept tasting from the top. It was delicious on top and scorched on the bottom. Every one of those mistakes made me a better recipe writer.

Your site says, “If your mom didn’t teach you how to cook, you’ve got me.” What do you wish someone had told beginner-you?

That not knowing how something will turn out is part of learning to cook, not a sign you’re bad at it. So many people are afraid to try a new recipe because what they’re really asking is, “Is this going to be a reflection of my ability?”

Everyone is unsure whether a dish will work or whether their family will like it. Once you let go of needing it to be perfect, it’s freeing. I used to tell my family, “This is the first time I’m making this, so feedback is welcome, not criticism. Do we like it or not?” That’s it. It’s just a normal part of the process.

You started MOMables in 2012 focused on lunches. Why lunches first?

I was packing lunches for my own kids, and they wanted what they saw in other kids’ lunchboxes, which was the highly processed stuff I didn’t want to feed them. So I figured out how to make those things with homemade ingredients; you can make a homemade Lunchable [Get Laura’s recipe right here]. My daughter is actually the one who named it. I said, “This is a mom-made Lunchable,” and she said, “Oh, it’s a MOMable.” It stuck.

Lunch was also a real logistics problem. We didn’t have all the bento-style compartment boxes yet, so things got soggy, fruit got mushy, cheese got melty. What made me different wasn’t just the idea, it was the idea plus how to actually pack it so it survived until lunchtime.

A lot has changed since 2012. What are parents still stuck on?

Honestly, the same thing: taking an idea and actually packing it. We’re drowning in ideas now, from cookbooks and Pinterest and Instagram reels. What almost nobody tells you is how to execute.

I tell people to pick three mains for the week. Is it a turkey week? A ham week? If it’s a turkey week, Monday is a turkey sandwich, Tuesday is turkey roll-ups, and Wednesday you use the leftover tortillas from Taco Tuesday for turkey wraps. That kind of execution is the missing piece.

Was there a recipe that flat-out did not work?

Oh, the pureed carrots in mac and cheese. Fifteen years ago I made a cheese sauce with carrots blended in because I had picky eaters and wanted to sneak in vegetables any way I could. It came out more orange than cheddar-yellow. My daughter always thought it tasted a little off but figured that was just homemade sauce. Then one day she caught me adding the carrots. She still tells people about it, fifteen years later.

That was the end of hiding vegetables for me. Instead, I started making one meal for the whole family and saying, “This is what we have, and you can choose what to eat from it.” I dropped the one-bite rule too. Every meal became a chance to discover something, and it gave me the freedom to cook anything.

Your site promises that your recipes work “the first time, every time.” How can you promise that?

It means the first person to make it, or the hundred-thousandth, should be able to recreate exactly what’s on my site, assuming you don’t swap out ingredients. Everything is tested.

I also have what I call the B-Team Taste Test. Someone on my team isn’t a strong cook, and the more complicated recipes go to her. She’ll say, “This step is vague, tell me what to expect.” So the recipe card and the post both tell you what should be happening at each step. Almost every recipe also has a start-to-finish video with no editing tricks, so you can see exactly what each step should look like. That’s how I know it’ll turn out and every cook will be able to follow the recipe.

You’ve fed three kids from toddlers to teenagers. What surprised you most about feeding teens versus little kids?

The philosophy of one meal for everyone never changed. What changed is the sheer volume. Teenagers need so much more food, especially if they play sports.

My kids will take a hot lunch over a sandwich any day, so thermos lunches have become a huge thing for us as they’ve gotten older. It’s already made, I just heat it up, and it’s more filling and more nutritious. When they were little, lunch was a bunch of small things that added variety and filled the nutrition gaps. Now it’s about substance.

For a parent who’s overwhelmed and doesn’t know where to start with homemade meals, what’s the smallest change that actually sticks?

Write it down. At the simplest level, what is everyone going to eat this week? What’s breakfast? I don’t mean cooked breakfast. If it’s cereal, write “cereal.” If it’s smoothies, write “smoothies.” What’s lunch? Even if it’s the same sandwich every day, write it down.

For dinners, don’t try to make five or six new things a week. Maybe one or two new ones, then your tried-and-true meals that already work. Writing it down is what moves the needle the most, because you can see it and it keeps you on track. I have a weekly printable with little cubbies that’s fifteen years old, and people still use it. Pen and paper works.

You’ve said you’ve flipped six million pancakes. If a reader could master one simple, forgiving recipe, should it be pancakes?

I’m biased, but yes. I think pancakes are the holy grail of kitchen happiness, because they’re guaranteed positive feedback. Everybody loves pancakes, and that positive feedback builds your confidence.

That said, master whatever your family truly loves. If it’s pasta, learn to make a great Alfredo from scratch. If it’s the thing you’d pay to eat out, learn to make it well at home. I’d keep it to something you can make often, so pasta night or pancakes over a steak dinner every night. For us it’s pancakes, because it’s the thing that brings my kids and me together. [Get her recipe here!]

What’s one cooking skill you think every home cook should practice?

Patience, first. And then searing. People are so intimidated by a simple pan-seared chicken breast or a piece of salmon, and the sear is the part that scares them. It’s basic, it’s simple, and it completely transforms the taste of the ingredient. Learn to sear and you’ve unlocked a lot.

Follow Laura on Youtube and Instagram @MOMables

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

Books, Books, Books - by Laura Fuentes

The Taco Tuesday Cookbook [Bookshop, Amazon]

Clean Treats for Everyone: Healthy Desserts and Snacks Made with Simple, Real Food Ingredients [Bookshop, Amazon]

The Best Homemade Kids’ Lunches on the Planet: Make Lunches Your Kids Will Love with More Than 200 Deliciously Nutritious Meal Ideas [Bookshop, Amazon]

The Best Homemade Kids’ Snacks on the Planet: More than 200 Healthy Homemade Snacks You and Your Kids Will Love [Bookshop, Amazon]

Super Easy and Delicious Lunches for Kids: Deliciously Nutritious Meal Ideas Your Kids Will Love [Bookshop, Amazon]

Quick and Easy Grain-Free Recipes for Families: Allergy-Friendly Meals Everyone at the Table Will Love [Bookshop, Amazon]

Best Grain-Free Family Meals on the Planet: Make Grain-Free Breakfasts, Lunches, and Dinners Your Whole Family Will Love [Bookshop, Amazon]

Here’s a preview from KCRF: Request a free sample lesson of the “Kids Cook Solo” program, so you can see if it’s a good fit for you and your family!

You can find all of our BONUS Educational Cooking Activities & Holiday Recipes right here!

In many parts of the United States, Labor Day marks the last long weekend before kids go back to school, which usually means it’s the last major cookout and grilling weekend for the extended family. It's also peak corn season; sweet corn is harvested late summer into early fall, and it's at its sweetest the day it's picked, slowly trading sugar for starch after that. So a late-summer ear from a farm stand is genuinely one of the best-tasting things you'll cook all season.

This activity doesn’t add a project to that day. It just slows the corn down for a few minutes. You’re cooking it anyway, so before it all disappears under butter, you set a couple of ears side by side and taste what heat actually does to them. Raw and snappy. Boiled and tender. Grilled and a little toasty. Same corn, three different results.

No special supplies, no extra trip to the store, and nothing that has to be perfect. Let it be light. Here’s how to turn the cob into a low-key kitchen lab.

🌽 Labor Day Sweet Corn Lab: The Science of Heat, Sugar & Char

Click the button below for a downloadable PDF worksheet for the Labor Day Sweet Corn Activity, and read on to set it up:

Labor Day Sweet Corn Lab Worksheet

Tools You’ll Need:

• A pot for boiling, and/or a grill or stovetop grill pan

• Tongs

• A cutting board and a knife (adult)

• Paper and a pencil, or the worksheet (optional)

Ingredients:

• Fresh corn on the cob (2–4 ears — more if everyone wants to taste)

• Butter and salt (for seasoning and eating the corn after — optional)

Learning Goals

This is science, cooking, and sensory play all on one cob. Kids get to see how heat changes the same ear three ways: raw and crunchy, boiled and tender, grilled and browned. Tasting them side by side also gives kids a reason to describe food out loud, reaching for words like snappy, milky, juicy, toasty, and sweet. That practice builds real confidence around trying new things and talking about what they notice.

The grilled ear is where the science lives. Boiling cooks corn in water, and water can only get so hot before it turns to steam, so boiled corn softens but stays pale and mild. A grill is much hotter and completely dry, and that high, dry heat makes the corn’s own sugars and proteins react and brown. This browning has a name: the Maillard reaction, the same process that gives toast, seared meat, and roasted vegetables their richer flavor. You can keep it simple for the younger kids: dry heat browns food, and browning is what makes it taste toasty and deep. And if they’d rather just taste and pick a favorite, that counts too.

Age Modifications

Younger Kids (Preschool–K):

• Let them peel the husks and pull the silky threads, a great sensory job all on its own.

• Use describing words together: crunchy, soft, sweet, toasty.

• Taste one raw kernel and one cooked kernel, and say which one they like.

Middle Grade (Elementary):

• Help decide what to compare: boiled vs. grilled is a good first test.

• Track color and texture for each version on the worksheet.

• Vote on the sweetest ear and the toastiest ear.

Older Kids (Upper Elementary–Middle):

• Run the taste test and record the results like a lab.

• Look at where the browning happens on the grilled ear, and explain why it tastes different.

• Try the “corn clock”: taste a just-bought ear against one that’s been in the fridge a few days, and compare how sweet each one is.

Parent Notes

Corn is forgiving, which makes this an easy one to keep relaxed. If the grill isn’t happening, boiled vs. raw works fine (you really don’t need all three versions). Let kids run the tasting even if kernels end up scattered everywhere; that’s part of it. And if someone just wants to eat their corn with butter and skip the “experiment,” that still counts.

If you only do one thing: cut a few kernels off a raw ear and a cooked ear, taste them together, and ask “What changed?” That one question is the whole lesson. Keep the youngest kids on husking and tasting, the boiling and grilling stay with an adult.

Activity Flow

1. Husk it together (and make predictions). Peel back the husks and pull off the silky threads. Before cooking, ask: “What do you think happens to corn when we boil it? When we grill it? Which one will taste the sweetest?”

2. Set up your test. Keep one ear raw. Boil one. Grill one (or use a grill pan). Even two versions is enough (don’t feel like you need all three).

3. Taste the raw kernels first. An adult slices a few kernels off the raw ear. Try them: are they crunchy, milky, sweet, or a little starchy? This is your starting point.

4. Boil an ear. Drop it into boiling water for 3–5 minutes. Watch the color turn brighter and more golden. Notice how the kernels soften.

5. Grill an ear. Lay it over the heat, turning with tongs, until some kernels brown and blister. Point it out: that browning is exactly where the toasty, sweeter flavor comes from. (The grilling and the boiling tasks stay with an adult.)

6. Line them up and taste. Try raw → boiled → grilled, side by side. Pause and talk: “Which is sweetest? Which is toastiest? Which is juiciest?”

7. Pick a winner. Choose a favorite and say why. There’s no right answer here — just what tastes best to you.

Happy Labor Day from all of us at One Potato!

Last week we pointed you toward What’s for Dinner?: The Summit, the free 3-day event our recent Order Up! guest Brett DuPree hosts every August. It wrapped on the 19th, and if you caught even one session in the middle of everything else going on last week, we’re glad you did. If the whole thing flew right past you, that’s the more likely story for most of us in late August, and it’s exactly why we’re sending this.

The sessions were free to watch live, each one up for 24 hours and then gone. But Brett keeps everything available afterward through the All Access Pass, and that’s open for just a few more days.

I want the All Access Pass!

What You Get, Whether You Watched Live or Not

Here’s the honest reason a pass like this earns its keep: a meal plan that never sticks usually assumed a version of your week that doesn’t actually happen. The whole Summit is built around that idea, a better rhythm for weeknight dinners instead of one more rigid system, and the All Access Pass is how you keep all of it on your own schedule.

The pass includes lifetime access to all 25+ expert sessions (the budget dinners, the freezer prep, the picky-eater strategies, the mental-load conversations), a bonus bundle from the speakers worth $600+, and the souvenir cookbook that pulls a recipe from every single session. It also comes with a free trial month of Brett’s Supper Club, where her no-cook “gateway” meals live.

So whether you want to rewatch the one session you actually caught, finally see the three you meant to, or just get your hands on the cookbook, it’s all in one place, on your time instead of a 24-hour window.

Keep the Whole Thing

The Summit is free by design, and the pass is the optional way to hold onto it past the weekend. If dinner’s been feeling like a nightly negotiation lately, a stack of real, tested ideas you can come back to whenever you need them may be worth it. It closes in a few days.

👉 Get the What’s for Dinner?: The Summit All Access Pass

And if you missed our conversation with Brett, her Order Up! interview and Parent Picks are still right here: click here to read the story behind the Summit, plus the recipes and store-bought shortcuts she’ll defend forever.

*Note: This newsletter contains affiliate links for Freaking Delish and What’s for Dinner?: The Summit. We had Brett on the newsletter this month because we genuinely love what she’s building, and we’d be pointing you her way whether the affiliate relationship existed or not*

🍽️ What’s for Dinner?: The Summit — a free virtual summit from Order Up! guest Brett DuPree, August 17–19 — is three days of real dinner solutions from 20+ food experts, timed right for the back-to-school scramble. Save your free seat

👨‍🍳 Want the kids doing more in the kitchen this year? The Kids Cook Real Food eCourse teaches them how to actually cook (not just follow a recipe!) so they build real life skills along the way. Learn more here

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Get Ready for Back-To-School!

The lunchboxes are back in rotation, the mornings start earlier, and somewhere around five o’clock the same question turns up every night: what’s for dinner? Fall has a way of turning weeknight cooking into a logistics problem, right when there’s the least time to solve it.

So we did something we’d been meaning to do for a while. We went back through two years of Order Up! interviews — chefs, cookbook authors, dietitians, and a lot of parents in the middle of it — and pulled out the advice that’s genuinely useful on a Tuesday. Not the special-occasion stuff. The get-it-on-the-table, everyone’s-fed, nobody-cried version.

A few ideas came up again and again: cook one meal instead of five, take the pressure off yourself and your kids, and let the freezer carry some of the weight. Here’s what they told us.

One Dinner, Not Five

The quickest way to make a weeknight harder is to cook two dinners (or three. Or four). Almost everyone we talked to had landed on the same fix: make one meal, and build in a little room to customize.

Chef Kris Dovbniak, founder of the Healthy Mama Meals app, calls it a base meal: one shared foundation, then a handful of toppings so everyone builds their own plate.

“You start with one shared base: a grain like rice or quinoa or pasta, a protein like chicken or chickpeas. Then you offer a few mix-and-match toppings or sauces.” -Kris Dovbniak

Read the full interview right here:

Natalie Kotesova, creator of Wholesome Nat and mom of three, is blunt about it: separate meals just create more work. She cooks one dinner, then lets each kid adjust it with a drizzle of almond butter here, extra sauce there.

“Don’t make separate meals. Make one meal and customize it.” — Natalie Kotesova

Your job ends when the food hits the table

Half the weeknight stress isn’t the cooking — it’s the worry about whether the kids actually eat it. Two of our guests offered the same quiet reframe: decide what and when, and let them handle the rest.

Jennifer Anderson, the dietitian behind Kids Eat in Color, has a line she gives parents who are staring at a half-eaten plate and feeling like they failed.

“Your win is not when your child eats the food. Your win is when you put the food on the table. That’s your job as a parent. Your child’s job is to decide whether and how much they eat.” — Jennifer Anderson

Jessica Lawson, the recipe developer behind Big Delicious Life, zooms out even further, past any single dinner that goes sideways.

“My pediatrician always tells me: focus on the week, not the day.” — Jessica Lawson

Find both of their full-length interviews right here:

Cook Once, Coast Twice

You don’t have to be a full-on meal prep parent, but you can pre-cut a few vegetables or prep some snacks, and a number of our guests gave us a great tip to lean hard on the freezer. Batch what you can, and stash the surplus before you’re sick of it.

Chef Mareya Ibrahim Jones, “The Fit Foodie,” keeps weeknights simple by cooking in volume: a roast chicken, a pot of grains, a sheet pan of vegetables that stretch across several dinners.

“For families, it starts with planning simply. Think in volume and versatility.” — Chef Mareya Ibrahim Jones

Noah Galuten, cookbook author and chef-dad, has one freezer rule that changes the math on a hard night.

“Freeze things when they’re at their peak, not right before they go bad… The fourth night of minestrone is a slog. Freeze it. Pull it out in two weeks. Dinner’s ready. You’ll feel like a hero.” — Noah Galuten

Read the full interview here:

You don’t have to like it. You have to try it.

Picky eating outlasts any one dinner, and pushing rarely helps. The through-line from our guests: keep offering, keep it low-key, and play the long game.

Leigh Ann Chatagnier, modern Cajun cookbook author, traded total control for an 80/20 rule once her son started grabbing Chick-fil-A after practice.

“The goal isn’t that he eats everything I make at ten. The goal is that he’s an adult who’ll try anything.” — Leigh Ann Chatagnier

Marta Rivera Diaz, chef and author of Sense & Edibility, reminds us that it is all about patience and exposure.

“To honestly say a kid doesn’t like something, you have to offer it at least 10 times.” — Marta Rivera Diaz

Hand them a job

Getting kids into the kitchen is a back-to-school reset that pays off all year; not because dinner comes together faster, but because everyone slows down together.

Marc Forgione, chef and father of three, has kept the same setup by the stove since his son was a toddler.

“Since he was two or three, we’ve had this little foldable box he can stand on next to the stove so he’s at counter height. From the beginning, I’ve tried to involve him… But I’ve never forced anything on him.” — Marc Forgione

Nephi Craig, White Mountain Apache chef and father, frames the whole thing as something bigger than getting fed.

“Season the food with smiles, stories, and laughter. And when our kids help, it forces us to slow down.” — Nephi Craig

And on the nights it all falls apart

Because some nights it will. The plate gets thrown, the mac and cheese that was a favorite yesterday is suddenly offensive, and dinner is toast and apple slices at 7:15pm. Jamie Milne, the cookbook author behind Everything Delish, said the part out loud that every parent knows:

“No matter how busy our days are, we show up and eat together every night, even when Jack is being a little tyrant and throwing his plate.” — Jamie Milne

That’s the whole thing, really. Not a perfect dinner. Just showing up to the table together, one ordinary school night at a time.

This fall, we’d love to hear from you: pick a tip above and try it this week, revisit an interview that stuck with you, or tell us the one dinner that always works in your house. Leave a comment, send us an email, or hit us up on Instagram @onepotatobox. We can’t wait to hear from you!

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What’s For Dinner?: The Summit

At One Potato, we’re always on the lookout for resources that make family life easier, healthier, and a little more joyful. And when it comes to the nightly “what’s for dinner?” scramble, we’re big fans of Brett DuPree and the Freaking Delish community. We interviewed Brett this week (if you missed it, go back and read her Order Up! interview), and there’s one more thing of hers we wanted to put in front of you: the free summit she hosts every August, built entirely around making weeknight dinner easier.

What’s for Dinner?: The Summit is a free 3-day virtual event running August 17–19. Three days, 25+ food experts, and real, practical dinner help built around rhythm instead of rigid systems. This year’s theme is “a better rhythm for weeknight dinners”, which is exactly the sort of thing that’s hard to figure out solo at 5pm on a Tuesday. Summit experts include some One Potato friends you’ll recognize, including Katie Kimball of Raising Healthy Families and Jessica Lawson of Big Delicious Life!

I Want This for My Family!

Why We Love Freaking Delish — and Why You’ll Love What’s for Dinner?: The Summit

Brett started Freaking Delish to build a dinner rhythm where everyone cooks and everyone gets cooked for, moms included. Her readers loved how her recipes and routines made weeknight dinner feel doable, and she wanted to give them an easy way to tap into all the systems her fellow food bloggers use, too. That’s how the summit was born.

Now in its third year, it has already welcomed over 5,000 families in a single event. Every August, families tune in for three free days of sessions on everything from budget-friendly dinners and freezer prep to picky eaters, meal-planning burnout, and building a dinner rhythm that survives an actual busy week. And yes, there are prizes: this year’s BINGO game includes prizes from Souper Cubes, Plan to Eat, ThermoWorks, and Hey Grill Hey, plus a bonus tier from the speakers themselves.

For anyone worried about another few hours glued to a screen (we get it), each session is short and built to be practical. You can watch in the real pockets of a day, between school pickup and bedtime, and every session stays up online for 24 hours so you’re never stuck watching live. Even better, each speaker is live in the chat for the first 30 minutes their session airs, so if you have a real question about your kid’s picky-eating phase or your specific grocery budget, you can actually ask it and get an answer.

One of our favorite things is the timing. The summit lands right as back-to-school hits, right when the loose rhythm of summer gets swapped for early alarms, packed schedules, and dinner needing to happen faster than anyone has energy for. Instead of scrambling to sort that out solo in week one, you walk into the school year with 25+ new ideas already in your back pocket.

Tell Me More!

And the best part? All three days are completely free, with the option to upgrade to the All Access Pass if you want to keep everything past the 24-hour window. That upgrade adds $600+ in bonuses from the speakers, a printable souvenir recipe cookbook, and a free trial month of Brett’s Supper Club membership. When you register, you’ll get the full schedule and a BINGO card you can start playing the moment sessions go live.

A better rhythm for weeknight dinner is worth three free days in August. Here’s to making dinner easier, one night at a time.

👉 Get Your Free Ticket to What’s for Dinner?: The Summit!

*Note: This newsletter contains affiliate links for Freaking Delish and What’s for Dinner?: The Summit. We had Brett on the newsletter this month because we genuinely love what she’s building, and we’d be pointing you to her free summit whether the affiliate relationship existed or not*

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Earlier this week we talked with Brett DuPree, food blogger and host of What’s for Dinner?: The Summit, about the mental load of dinner, teaching a husband who couldn’t boil water, and why she calls no-cook meals the gateway drug to real cooking. Make sure you read that full interview right here, and grab your free Summit ticket today!

Now for the practical half. From the no-cook dinner she’d hand any parent, to the Costco shortcut in her freezer right now, to the rice cooker that’s outlasted her whole marriage, these are the specific things that keep Brett’s kitchen running.

The one no-cook dinner recipe you’d hand a parent first?

Tacos, every time. Pulled pork tacos are the move. Grab pre-cooked pulled pork, warm it up, and load up tortillas with whatever toppings you’ve got.

A husband-proof meal, something with zero kitchen skills that still feels like a win?

A roast beef po-boy, and it’s no-cook. Grab the pre-made roast beef and the gravy, pile it on a hoagie bun with lettuce and tomato, and there you go. Anybody can pull that off and feel proud of it.

Three pantry or fridge staples you always keep on hand?

Tortillas, always. Beans, and I keep fresh ones in the freezer all the time. And stock or bone broth. I make my bone broth in the crock pot and I sneak it into everything, because gut health is a big deal to me.

An Aldi or Trader Joe’s find you’re obsessed with right now?

Trader Joe’s chimichurri. I cannot get enough of it. And I’m an Aldi girl through and through. I love a good dip, and Aldi has a great stock of them: grab the Mexicali dip or the street corn dip and turn it into a street corn pasta salad. Dips are the base for half of what I make.

A store-bought shortcut you’ll defend forever?

The Costco pulled chicken, the big vacuum-sealed pack. I break it up, freeze it in portions, and pull it out whenever I need it. It’s in my freezer right now.

A dinner both your boys will eat with no fight?

Weirdly, salad. It’s all about the crunchy lettuce. If the lettuce is crunchy, you can put anything on top: grilled chicken, taco-salad style, whatever you’ve got. I’ll throw some crushed Doritos on there and they’ll eat the whole thing.

One kitchen tool you always reach for?

My rice cooker, the same one I got at my wedding. It has outlasted everything. That and a salad spinner. I don’t wash the lettuce anymore, that’s the boys’ job. I don’t get the mail and I don’t wash salad.

You do cocktail Fridays. What are you pouring right now?

I’m a wine girl at heart, so usually a spritz. But my husband makes a mean Paper Plane, and I love anything with Aperol in it.

[One Potato note for readers: a Paper Plane is equal parts bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, and fresh lemon juice, shaken with ice.]

Comfort food when someone in the house is sick?

Chicken and dumplings. Every single time.

A cookbook, creator, or account you love that isn’t your own?

Cookbook: Gwyneth Paltrow’s It’s All Good [Bookshop, Amazon]. I don’t cook especially healthy, but there’s a dressing in there, anchovies, lemon, and olive oil, that goes on anything.

For social media, Megan Keno of Homemade Home. She was on Next Level Chef, she’s been one of my summit speakers, and she can cook literally anything.

————————————————————

One last thing from Brett:

The important part isn’t the recipe, and it’s not what you cook. It’s making the time to sit down and breathe and regroup with your family at the end of the day. Even if it’s takeout, don’t beat yourself up. Just sit down, breathe through it, and try again tomorrow.

For more tips about balancing the mental load, and enjoying mealtimes with your family, be sure to check out What’s for Dinner?: The Summit running Aug 17–19 with 25+ food experts on budget dinners, picky eaters, the mental load, and freezer prep.

Learn More Here

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A Better Rhythm: Brett DuPree on Weeknight Dinner, Picky Eaters, and Real Life

Brett DuPree’s mother never wrote her recipes down. Not even the dressing, the one the whole family lived on for decades, the one they still can’t recreate six Thanksgivings after she passed. What her mom handed down wasn’t a recipe at all. It was a way of standing in front of an open cabinet and making something out of nothing.

That idea shapes everything Brett does now. She’s a food blogger, the host of What’s for Dinner?: The Summit, and a mom of two boys in Birmingham, Alabama. In a former life she worked as an immigration attorney, and then as an international adoption program manager for a nonprofit; international travel is still where her heart is. Her husband Greg, a food photographer, is a two-time cancer survivor, which is part of why food, and gathering around the family table, means what it does to her. They’re the husband-wife duo behind Freaking Delish.

Brett calls herself a dinner coach, not a chef, and she means it. Her whole approach starts from the idea that the hardest part of dinner usually isn’t the cooking. It’s the planning, the remembering, the invisible weight of being the one everyone looks at when they ask the well-known refrain, “what’s for dinner?”.

She talks with us about the year her mother’s cooking became her own, teaching a husband who couldn’t boil water (no joke!), why no-cook meals are the gateway drug to real cooking, and how she finally took a step back to notice she’d been carrying the invisible weight of dinner planning by herself when she didn’t need to be. Now, she helps other families come to that realization, and figure out the real, honest part of thriving around family meals.

A special note from Brett Dupree & our friends at What’s for Dinner: The Summit:

A Better Rhythm for Weeknight Dinner

Most meal plans fall apart the second real life shows up: the practice that runs long, the kid who suddenly won’t touch what they ate all last week, the night nobody has it in them to cook. That’s not you failing the plan. Brett DuPree built What’s for Dinner?: The Summit around that exact reality, because a plan only helps if it can survive an actual week.

It’s a free 3-day event (Aug 17–19) with 25+ food experts, each taking on a different piece of the puzzle: budget dinners, freezer prep, picky eaters, and building a dinner rhythm you can actually keep. Every speaker is live in the chat for the first half hour of their session, so you can ask a real question about your own family and get a real answer. 👉 Grab Your Free Ticket

A Conversation with Brett Dupree, founder of Freaking Delish

Introduce Yourself: I’m Brett Dupree, food blogger & creator behind Freaking Delish, host of the What’s For Dinner? Summit. My boys are 11 and 13, and my husband is a food photographer.

My husband is also a two-time cancer survivor; he’s had two different cancers over the past ten years, so that’s been a big part of our world.

First things first, tell us about What’s for Dinner: The summit. What is it, and why should our readers sign up?

I love this thing, it’s my baby. What’s for Dinner?: The Summit runs August 17th through 19th, and it’s free. It lives in August on purpose, right as back-to-school hits and everyone’s trying to get their game face on. It’s a one-stop shop for the mom who’s a little bit of everything, a little farm-to-table, a little freezer meals, a little quick-and-easy, depending on the day. This year the theme is: a better rhythm for weeknight dinners.

My whole focus is that it’s useful and actionable that night. You watch one session and you can go do the thing that same evening. We cover it all: what to actually feed your student athlete, how to use seasonal squash, how to make fresh bread, budget dinners, the mental load, picky eaters, freezer prep. It’s a little food court. You come sample everything and walk out with whatever speaks to where you are right now. And I run the whole thing myself, so I really do love it.

Let’s get to know you. What was dinner like growing up? Is there a dish or a memory that stays with you?

Growing up, food was everything in our house. We communicated through food. I’m a Southern girl from Atlanta, so barbecue is huge; my dad’s a pit master and a chili cook-off champion, a competitive foodie.

But it was my mom who really laid the foundation for how I cook with my kids today. The funny thing is she couldn’t cook a thing when she and my dad met! He taught her, and then she became the one who could make something out of nothing. She’d open the cabinet, and it didn’t matter what was in there, she could turn it into dinner. That one idea shapes everything I do: you don’t have to run back to the store, it doesn’t have to be perfect, no ingredient is sacred.

She never wrote anything down, though. She passed the year before COVID, and even her famous dressing, the one our whole family lived on, isn’t written down anywhere. We’re six or seven years out and we still haven’t managed a Thanksgiving that tastes like hers. If there were one recipe I could have back, it would be that one.

Going back to work, you were surprised to find you were still the one getting asked “What’s for dinner?”. When did you realize you didn’t have to carry that mental load alone?

It really hit when the kids were around preschool age. You step into this role as a mom and for a minute you forget everything else. For me that was doubled down, because I was also the caretaker at home. Then you come out of it and go, oh, right, I’m a whole independent person, and this whole household isn’t mine to carry alone.

There’s a saying I love: a marriage is never 50/50, it’s more like 30/70, and which way it tips depends on the season you’re in. When I started building the business, a lot of it was about separating myself from just being mom and getting back to Brett. And here’s the thing: I like to be cooked for, too. If someone makes me something, especially my husband, that’s the tops for me. Being taken care of matters to me just as much as taking care of everyone else.

You call yourself a dinner coach rather than a chef. Why does that word matter to you?

I definitely don’t think of myself as a chef. Any actual chef would look at me and go, no, ma’am. I like “coach” because so much of this isn’t the cooking. It’s the psychology of it, the mindset, the feelings, the roles everybody plays in your home. My philosophy is that it’s fine however you chop the onion. It’s fine if you don’t have that exact type of pasta. I don’t care what olive oil you use. It’s less about the recipe and more about getting everyone back around the table, and making it accessible enough that your partner can do it for you too.

That’s why no-cook meals are such a big part of my membership at Freaking Delish. I call them the gateway drug to real cooking, because anybody can walk into your kitchen and make them. If it’s you after a long day, if it’s your partner who swears he can’t cook, if it’s your teenager who can only work the microwave, that’s okay. They can still make dinner. They can still take on that mental load.

What do you mean by no-cook meals? Your free starting point is a set of no-cook rush hour recipes. For someone skeptical that no-cook can mean a real dinner, what does a no-cook night actually look like at your house?

Tacos. Honestly, pulled pork tacos. The protein is the hardest part, so if you’ve got that pre-done, you’re most of the way there. I don’t see it as a cheat, I see it as being strategic, looking at your real week instead of setting yourself up to fail. It’s like starting a workout. You’re not going to crush it hard every day for thirty days when you haven’t been moving at all. Let’s just walk this week.

So I buy the pre-cooked proteins (that’s a no-cook part!) and a sauce, and it goes over pasta, over rice, into a taco or a quesadilla. Everything can go in a quesadilla as far as I’m concerned. You heat the meat, throw on some salsa and cheese and whatever toppings, and it’s done. That satisfies me every single time.

You’ve said your husband legitimately couldn’t boil water. How did that change?

He couldn’t, no! He’s an incredible food photographer, he shoots for a publishing house that does Real Simple and Food & Wine, gorgeous stuff. But he was the golden boy growing up, taken care of, and he just never took cooking on as a skill. So we started at square one. The rule in our house now is everybody cooks. My youngest learned to make guacamole when he was ten, and now he’s the king of guacamole. We make omelets, we do the whole thing. These boys are going to know how to cook.

And my husband was 100% on board from the start, because he loves food. He made some wild mistakes early on, but he had his one clutch recipe, a seared pork tenderloin with a reduction that he was so proud of. Now he’s the king of tacos and makes a great chicken salad.

So much of your work is about the planning and the remembering, not just the cooking. How do you help a parent recognize that mental load?

The biggest part is just acknowledging it’s there. Putting a name to it. For so long I couldn’t even name it myself, this invisible weight that was just sort of there all the time. So I say it out loud, over and over, and I tell people: you’re not new at this, and you’re not bad at it. We’ve all felt this. And it still circles back around, so you might be fighting this one for a while.

You’ve said dinner can be a real source of stress on a marriage, which people don’t say out loud. Once you renegotiated who owns dinner, what changed between you and your husband?

Honestly, it was really him getting it. Being able to say, oh, that mental load is actually a lot. Even just the question, what do we have in the refrigerator? He knows not to ask me that anymore, because I don’t keep a catalog of the fridge in my head, and being expected to is its own weight. When he sat in that and thought, why would I ask her to hold all of that, the shift was so lovely. You feel seen. He gets it.

You’ve said the Etsy meal plans and Pinterest boards and cookbooks aren’t failing busy parents by accident. What do most of those tools get wrong?

My problem with the one-off plan is that it’s just more. It’s one more thing, one more download sitting in a folder that I never opened, one more little failure. So my whole approach is the opposite: less is more, and you can use what you already have. That’s an angle I lean into hard at What’s for Dinner: The Summit. You don’t have to ditch your family favorites to beat the boredom. You’ve got a great place to start, so start there.

I have a whole recipe redo philosophy, and it comes straight from how my mom cooked. New recipes are great, and here are some, but let me also show you how to redo the ones you’ve already got. You don’t need thirty new recipes for the month. I never want to add to the weight we’re already carrying. I want to lighten it and make it a little more fun.

When a parent joins your supper club, what shift are you really after: the recipes, or something bigger?

It’s the habit. I’ve had people tell me they’re embarrassed by how long it’s been since they actually cooked for their family. What helps them is the mindset that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Maybe this week you find two recipes and put them on the list, and that’s what happens. Then you wash, rinse, repeat next week, and maybe add a third. I don’t cook seven days a week either. It’s about getting back into the habit, it and building from there.

You talk about failure walks and ditching perfectionism. For a parent who feels like they’re failing at dinner, what do you most want them to hear?

That you’re going to feel like that a lot, and that’s just the gig. I don’t think there’s a way out of it, so the move is to embrace it. Sit with it. Some nights dinner is a bust, and you let it go and move on to the next thing. The biggest piece is not letting one bad night decide what tomorrow looks like.

Your boys are growing up in a house where dinner is genuinely shared. What do you hope they carry into their own homes someday?

Two things. First, my kids aren’t afraid to try anything, and I love that. Our house is a revolving door of neighborhood kids, and a lot of them will only eat a few specific things. I try not to frame it as picky, I just tell my boys that only letting yourself eat five things makes your world really small, and I don’t want that for them. They love to travel like I do, and for me the whole point of travel is the food. I want them in someone’s kitchen, eating something authentic, coming home to tell me they had the best fried rice of their life.

The second thing is that cooking and carrying the load is just normal for them. Not mom’s job, not something they should feel guilty about skipping. Baseline, it’s their responsibility too, and they’re lucky if they find someone to share it with.

Is there a cooking skill you use all the time that you think every home cook should know?

Two, and they compete because I lean on both constantly. One is the grill. If you can grill, especially proteins, you can batch cook so easily. I love cooking on the grill because there’s nothing else to clean up, which in summer is everything. The other is knowing how to cook one good skillet meal, a one-pot dinner where every single piece can swap out: the protein, the carb, the sauce. Master one of those and you can make it a hundred different ways.

Follow Brett on Instagram at @freaking.delish and make sure you sign up for What’s for Dinner: The Summit today!

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️

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Earlier this week we talked with Natalie Kotesova about feeding her three boys without the pressure: the sweet peppers her oldest swears he hates, why she never makes separate meals, and how a hypothyroidism diagnosis sent her digging until food changed everything. If you haven’t read it yet, start there. It’s good context for how she stocks her kitchen.

Today we’re getting practical. Natalie walks us through the staples, tools, and shortcuts that keep her plant-based kitchen running: the sauce that gets her kids to eat almost anything, the frozen shortcut she won’t apologize for, and the splurge appliance she’d buy again. Quick, specific, and easy to steal.

Three pantry or fridge staples you always have on hand?

Bananas, almond butter, and maple syrup.

A kitchen tool you use every single day?

A high-speed blender. A million times over.

A store-bought shortcut you don’t apologize for?

Frozen rice. It’s overpriced now, which is insane. Sometimes I stand there wondering if I really want to pay five dollars for a small pack, or just buy three bags and cook it myself. But it saves the meal some nights.

A grab-and-go snack you always carry?

Bananas.

One weeknight meal you make on repeat?

Creamy pasta with broccoli. The sauce is cashews blended with water, garlic, and nutritional yeast. It comes out cheesy and creamy.

A main dish from childhood you still think about?

Molé, with rice. My grandma made it with chicken. Probably my favorite meal ever.

A sauce or seasoning trick that instantly makes your kids eat something?

That cashew sauce. You can turn it into a dressing, stir it into pasta, or use it to make almost anything richer. It’s my go-to.

A cookbook, app, or creator you turn to for inspiration?

Ellen Fisher. She doesn’t make videos anymore, but I learned so much from her old “what I eat in a day” content. She has a great podcast now.

Besides the green smoothie, your go-to breakfast for energy?

Homemade muffins. I make them with almond flour and oat flour, with almond butter and yogurt in the batter, then add whatever veggies we have or some chocolate chips. The boys love them.

A kid-friendly food you secretly can’t stand but tolerate?

Nuggets. We’re plant-based, so it’s the Impossible or Beyond ones. You can make healthier nuggets at home, but every once in a while these just hit different.

A healthy-ish convenience food your kids are obsessed with?

Potato chips. We buy the ones made with avocado oil, the cleaner brands. They don’t add much beyond being a fun, crunchy snack, and that’s okay.

One splurge kitchen appliance you love?

My Nama milk maker. It was expensive, but it makes the milk so creamy and good.

Anything you’re working on that we should know about?

I want to put together a little ebook of kids’ birthday party food. Birthday parties are usually a free-for-all of junk, and it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve been making mindful party food for my kids for seven years, and people always ask me to bring what I made or make it for them. I think it’d be worth gathering in one place.

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Helping Moms Serve Nourishing Meals: Natalie Kotesova on Pressure-Free Feeding

When Natalie was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, her doctors told her there was nothing to be done. She’s a self-described research junkie, though, so she went looking anyway. Food was what changed things. “I have never in my life felt this good,” she says.

That’s the story underneath her recipes. Natalie shares the meals her three boys actually eat, and she cooks from a place a lot of parents will recognize: wanting the best for your kids without turning every dinner into a fight. You can find her recipes on her Instagram @wholesome_nat and in her recipe book (in Español and English). She has real opinions, like rethinking the sweets you reach for instead of fearing them, and being honest about how much of a mom’s stress around toddler eating is her own instead of her child’s.

Her boys are almost eight, five, and two, and the food at their table pulls from her Mexican roots, her husband’s Russian side, and the Japanese meals the kids fell for on their own. Running through all of it is one steady belief: picky eating is normal, taste buds keep changing, and the job is to keep offering without the pressure.

In our conversation she gets into the sweet peppers her oldest swears he hates (and now adds as a pizza topping himself), why she never makes separate meals, and the green smoothie that starts most mornings. It reads less like a set of rules than a way of paying attention: to what kids like, to how food makes them feel, and to the difference between a hard day and a real problem.

A Conversation with Natalie Kotesova, digital creator behind Wholesome Nat

Introduce Yourself: I’m Natalie Kotesova. I’m the content creator behind Wholesome Nat, and I share recipes my kids love to eat. I have three boys, and feeding little ones is basically what started this whole passion. They’re about to turn eight, five, and two.

What’s a favorite food memory from growing up?

I grew up at my grandparents’ house. My grandma had nine kids, so she was in the kitchen all day. Watching her cook is where my love of food started. It wasn’t the same style I cook now. She was feeding as many people as fast as she could, and I’m more mindful about every ingredient. But that’s where it began, just watching her go.

Is there a family recipe you’re holding onto?

There’s this orange pound cake. Every time you smelled it in the oven, it got everybody excited. When I started my wellness journey, that was the first flavor I wanted to capture again. Growing up, I thought it was the best thing you could ever eat. So I worked on that recipe until it felt right.

You’ve said the meals your kids love most are the simple ones. Was that always your instinct?

It started when I got more aware of what I was putting in my own body. It made no sense to feed myself the best food I could think of and not do the same for them. So it really started with my first son. New parents tend to overthink everything with the first one anyway.

Now that they’re older, I’m learning to work in their own preferences. They’re vocal about what they like, especially when they see other kids eating something. But for me it’s about giving them the basics so they can make their own decisions later. When I go back to the standard American diet on a trip, I don’t feel as good, and I always come back to how I eat now. That’s what I want for them, to notice how food makes them feel.

Was there a specific moment that turned you toward eating this way?

I have an autoimmune disease, hypothyroidism. When I was first diagnosed, they basically told me there was nothing I could do about it. But I’m a research junkie. My husband says I overdo it. I started digging for ways to feel better, and food helped. It was a transformation. I’ve never felt this good in my life. That’s what pushed me to look deeper into nutrition and pay attention to what we all eat.

A lot of parents struggle to get kids to eat the healthy stuff. You say picky eating is normal. How do you encourage other parents?

My number one thing is that I don’t love every vegetable or every fruit myself. So I can’t expect my kids to love everything either. I try not to pressure them into liking something. Even as adults our taste buds change all the time, so of course theirs are still evolving. You put a plate down, and sometimes they like it and sometimes they don’t. Some days you’re just not in the mood for soup.

I lean on gentle encouragement and a few boundaries. I’ll say, this is what mama made, and it’s okay if you don’t like it, but this is what we have unless you want to grab a banana. Usually they’ll go grab the banana, then come back to the soup, because something just shifted. You don’t have to force it, and you don’t have to give up on it either. A little “oh, it’s so crunchy, you’re going to love it” is often enough to get them to try it. They don’t have to love it. They just have to try.

Can you think of a recent moment where one of your older kids dug in?

My oldest swears he doesn’t like sweet peppers. Everything I make, he says he doesn’t like it. But lately I’ve been sneaking them into dishes where they’re not obvious. We made a big veggie pizza and I chopped the peppers really small. Then I made fajitas with super thin pepper strips. He built his tacos, piled on guacamole, and said it was the best taco ever. Same with the pizza, he said I’d added something so flavorful. My husband said, those peppers are so sweet, and my son goes, wait, there’s peppers? I said, yeah, so I guess you like them now, Noah. And he goes, oh no, absolutely not. But we didn’t make a big deal of it. The next week we made pizza again, and he was adding the peppers himself.

People say their kids don’t like salad, but little ones just don’t love chewing greens. That’s normal. My oldest started asking for greens around six, because he saw me eating my salads. Now he loves them. So I’m not rushing my two littles. They’ll ask eventually, probably sooner, because they want to be like their big brother.

Is there a feeding worry you see other moms trying to fix that doesn’t need fixing?

The fear of sweets. Kids crave sweet things, and honestly so do I. I just reach for the better sweets. I offer a lot of fruit. There’s this fear of fruit going around that I don’t understand. I’ve never felt better than when I’m eating plenty of fruit. If my kid reaches for strawberries over cucumbers, I don’t stress about it. We naturally lean toward sweeter tastes. You don’t need to fear the craving. You just need to rethink the sweets you’re reaching for.

How much of toddler eating struggle is really about the kid, and how much is the mom?

Oh, it’s high. I catch myself in it too. He barely ate today, something must be wrong, I need to pack more veggies into the smoothie. Then I step back and remember it’s one day. I don’t eat all my fruits and vegetables some days either. It’s hard not to overstress, because we want them to thrive. Unless the bad days outnumber the good ones consistently, it’s usually fine. Go back to your instinct. They see you eating it, they’ll reach for it. Set up the environment. If you don’t want them reaching for cookies, don’t buy the cookies. Relax, start small, and look at what’s around them.

You do a lot with repurposing leftovers. How did that start?

I really hate food waste. We’re a big family, so leftovers are usually just a little bit, and I try to use every bit. I keep a base of meals I know the boys will like. I start with a starch or grain, a potato or something. Then a veggie they love, like broccoli. Then a fun vegetable they’re not sure about, which they can pick out or try. After that I focus on fats, because their brains need fat to develop, so I add more for them than for me and my husband, usually in a sauce or a dip. And I always add a fruit for the vitamins and minerals.

I keep a handful of recipes memorized, so if I’ve got cauliflower in the fridge I know I can make tacos, cauliflower sandwiches, or cauliflower rice, then build the rest around it. That’s how it works in my brain.

What’s your favorite smoothie in the house?

My green smoothie. Start with frozen bananas for the best texture and flavor. Then frozen mango, a little pineapple, one or two stalks of celery, and a tiny piece of ginger if your kids can handle it, for flavor and for your gut. For greens, kale can be too bitter for little ones, so I go with spinach or something softer. You have your nourishing meal first thing, your belly’s prepped, and you feel energized. It’s the best way to start the morning.

You’ve written, “freedom is realizing you’re the parent and you can make the rules.” Is there a rule from your own upbringing you kept or let go of?

Home cooked is best. There’s so much out there labeled wholesome and clean, and those standards aren’t always good ones. At home you can always control what goes into your food and your body. I grew up eating a lot of homemade meals, and that’s the one I kept.

Your food pulls from a few cultures. What are the influences?

I’m Mexican and my husband is Russian, so there’s already a mix. And my boys love Japanese food. It happened naturally. It was never, here’s Japanese food, you have to love it. It was more, mommy, I love this sushi, can we have more? So we do a lot of Japanese meals at home, some Mexican, and my husband loves potatoes. I also fold in the pizza and nuggets they see other kids eating, just not all the time.

You mentioned a recipe book. What’s in it?

It started because I had a bad habit of making something great and never writing it down, then forgetting what I did. So I started writing recipes for myself. It has ten breakfasts and ten easy lunch and dinner meals, plus sweets. It’s gluten-free, plant-based, and mostly soy-free, since that’s how I eat. Everything’s easy and approachable. The link’s in my Instagram bio.

What’s your advice for a tired mom whose kid is a picky eater and who’s out of dinner ideas?

Don’t make separate meals. Make one meal and customize it. I cook mostly oil-free and fat-free for myself, but for the boys I add their fats right on top, heavy on the sauce, a sprinkle of seeds, some avocado or coconut. Their pancakes are fat-free, then I drizzle almond butter on top, and they like them better that way. Layer it. Pancakes take toppings, tacos take fillings. Two separate meals just adds to the problem.

Is there a cooking skill you think every home cook should know?

Know how to cook your basics. Your own grains, your own beans, your own sauces. Once you have those down, you can build any meal from there.

Follow Natalie on Instagram at @wholesome_nat

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Earlier this week we talked with Elkey and Will Zandstra about “Breakfast Around the World”, the Sunday ritual that’s carried their family through 45 countries, and the bicultural table where Indonesian rice meets American cereal. You can revisit their interview right here.

Now we’re getting practical. From the one Indonesian condiment they think every kitchen should stock, to the cookbook Will calls a bible, to the grazing “dinner” that replaced dinner entirely, here are the staples, tools, and shortcuts that keep the Zandstra kitchen running.

Of all the countries you’ve cooked through, what’s an ingredient you didn’t grow up with that you now keep on hand?

Ghee. A hundred percent.

Three pantry or fridge staples you always have on hand?

Garlic, eggs, and flour. Eggs because it’s breakfast, and most people do eggs. And flour, because almost every country has some version of fried dough or a carb to start the day.

Elkey, even though Will does most of the cooking, is there one Indonesian ingredient, condiment, or sauce American kitchens should know about?

Elkey: Kecap manis, which is sweet soy sauce. And sambal, though sambal’s going to be tough for kids (it’s a spicy chili sauce).

Will, a kitchen tool you genuinely reach for all the time?

Will: My immersion blender. That’s my favorite. After that, a little whisk. Best hand tool there is.

One store-bought shortcut you don’t apologize for?

Bouillon or broth. And canned tomatoes, though honestly, we don’t even call canned tomatoes a shortcut. That’s just normal.

A snack you always have on hand to head off a meltdown?

Whole fruit or nuts. We always have apples and nuts around.

One cookbook or creator you turn to when you need a real recipe?

The Food Lab by Kenji López-Alt [Bookshop, Amazon], the giant white book, super thick. It’s a cooking bible. He breaks down the science and explains why things work. That’s why we think everyone should have it.

A kitchen splurge that was actually worth it?

A smart toaster oven. We don’t use a microwave in our house, so a good one is a solid investment. Steam, reheat, whatever you need, perfect.

A family dinner everyone eats, no negotiating?

Hear us out: we don’t really do dinner. We turned it into a grazing snack board. The kids wake up from their nap around 3:30 and graze until about 5 on carrots, fruit, cheese, crackers, and a vegetable juice, then go to bed at 7. We do the same. That’s dinner. We made the switch a while ago and haven’t looked back.

Will, a comfort meal you make when someone’s had a hard day?

Will: Pho. Or bubur, Indonesian rice porridge, which is our day-or-night staple. But if I had to pick one, it’s pho. It’s what I make after a birth.

Elkey: He’d make a batch ahead of time as a postpartum meal. For our last two kids, I had a bowl right after delivery while he held the baby.

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One Core Memory at a Time: Inside the Zandstras’ “Breakfast Around the World”

Every Sunday, a globe gets spun in a kitchen outside Seattle, and a five-year-old or a three-year-old calls out a country. By the next weekend there’s a flag drawn on the window, a passport waiting for its stamp, and a breakfast from somewhere new on the table.

That’s “Breakfast Around the World”, the ritual Elkey and Will Zandstra have now carried through 45 countries. Elkey grew up in Indonesia, where rice anchored every meal. Will grew up on American cereal, with Eggs Benedict reserved for holidays. Together they’re raising three kids: Emray, Ezrah, and an eight-month-old, in a household that’s part Indonesian, part American, where two food cultures meet on one plate.

What started as Elkey’s plan to give Will, who cooks nearly all their meals, a morning to rest turned into something the Internet fell for. But talk to them and the polish falls away fast. The big displays are the part they add for the camera, while the reality is about love, connection, and something that’s much more doable for everyone. Will gets lost in Indian supermarkets. The real magic, they’ll tell you, is taking food outside on a rare sunny afternoon.

We talked about feeding kids across two heritages, why they keep history out of breakfast for now, how to frame an unfamiliar dish so a kid will actually try it, and the one cooking skill Will swears most home cooks skip. Their anchor is the phrase that lives in their bio: creating one core memory at a time.

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A Conversation with Elkey & Will Zandstra, Mom & Dad Creators of “Breakfast Around the World”

Introduce Yourselves: I’m Elkey, and this is my husband Will. I work full-time at a tech company, and for the past two years we’ve also been busy with posting on social media. We have three kids: Emray is five, Ezrah is three, and our baby boy is eight months.

Elkey, you grew up in Indonesia. What did breakfast look like in your house, both everyday and for special occasions?

Elkey: Almost always rice. If rice isn’t on the table, it doesn’t count as a meal. Rice, meat, eggs, and a lot of fried things, for better or worse. Or bubur, which is basically a rice porridge. Rice is the foundation of every meal.

And Will, what did food and family meals look like in your house growing up?

Will: Cereal. That was breakfast. A pretty classic, traditional American upbringing. Our pantry was always stocked with the parents’ cereal and the kids’ cereal, and you’d pick whatever you were feeling that day. Special occasions or holidays, we’d do something nicer. Always an Eggs Benedict for holidays.

When you started having kids and imagining your own table, what carried over from your upbringings, and what didn’t?

Elkey: I grew up with my grandmother in the house. My mom always worked, but both she and my grandmother loved to cook for the family; it was their love language. My grandmother would wake up at 3 a.m. with my mom and make an individual dish for each of us. I have three siblings, and we all liked different things. They spoiled us. I can still feel the love and the effort they put into those meals, and that’s how I want to feed my kids, homemade meals. Beyond the love, you can’t beat the nutrition of making things from scratch, where you know exactly what goes into every dish.

Now that you’re in Seattle raising kids in a household that’s part Indonesian, part American, how does that show up on a normal Tuesday, not the polished version?

Will: It really comes down to pre-thinking and pre-prepping. I’m always thinking at least a day ahead and keeping a rough routine. For example, the kids know oats are coming the next morning, it’s a reliable staple. Predictability helps them adjust. Our household blend leans more Indonesian. I grew up on cereal and was never a huge fan, so I’d much rather actually cook, especially Asian dishes. Rice is everything, and there are a lot of spices. The kids have different palates. Ezrah handles spice better than my oldest, so there’s some catering to each, but I still try to make sure they’re all eating roughly the same thing. I don’t go as far as their grandma making separate dishes! I want them to know this is what we made.

“Creating one core memory at a time” is in your bio. Where did that phrase come from, and when did you realize you’d build your content and your parenting around it?

Will: It’s been an evolution. We’d been doing these things for a couple of years, making content and adding a little glitz for social media, but keeping it uniquely us, stuff we’d actually do on our own. The core-memory part came from the reaction. People started commenting, “This is going to be such a core memory for your kids.” It resonated, it took off, and we realized how much people connected with it.

Elkey: It’s also a blend of who we are. I see Will as an artist. He likes to work with his hands, and a lot of our activities are things he builds himself. He made the Hobbit house from The Lord of the Rings out of a cardboard box, just because he loves doing activities like that. And for me, it goes back to my childhood. My parents did their best, but they worked a lot, so I don’t have many memories with them outside of everyday things. Part of this is healing the inner child in each of us. It’s also beautiful to watch. Will and I come from two different cultures, so we’ll ask each other, “What did you do as a kid?” He taught our three-year-old to fish, something I never experienced. Getting to see his childhood in how he’s raising our kids is a beautiful thing.

Beyond the big activities, are there small rituals you suspect will become your kids’ core memories, even ones you’d never make a video about?

Will: A hundred percent, though I remember the most random stuff from when I was a kid, so what sticks for them might be lost on me as the parent. Honestly, I think it’s our outside time. We live in a really special place, and we’re constantly outside, hanging out on the lawn or making little picnics. Any chance we get, we take food outside. That’s a Seattle thing too. We hibernate for months in the winter, and the summers are exceptional. It doesn’t get dark until 10pm, so you enjoy being outside while you can.

For someone meeting you through this interview, walk us through a “Breakfast Around the World” morning. Who spins the globe? Who’s cooking?

Elkey: Will usually preps the meal the night before, and I print the menu and set up the passports, with a stamp for each country. I set up the “classroom,” too. I draw the flag on the window, write the country, and look up a fun fact. Most of the prep happens the night before, so the morning is mostly heating up the dish and making tea, for example, if the country calls for it. Then we eat together. We talk about the country, the continent, the language, sometimes the colors of the flag, which is good for color recognition, and the fun fact. Then Will explains the dish: what it is, the background, how it’s traditionally served, whether you eat it with your hands or share from one dish. The kids take turns spinning the globe. One week it’s my son, the next it’s my daughter.

Why breakfast? Why not lunch or dinner?

Elkey: It started because Will cooks 99% of our meals, and I wanted to give him a chance to sleep in on a Sunday. I don’t really cook, so I wanted to make it special, maybe making up for not being the one who meal preps. It began with random things: a special bagel day where I’d make bagels from scratch, or pancakes on a train that circled the table so the kids could grab them. A couple of months in, I ran out of grand ideas, and finally thought, what if we just pick a country and go from there? The kids loved it, the internet loved it, and it evolved. We’re 45 countries in now. It started as a way to give Will a rest, but then I got pregnant with our third and was postpartum, so he took the meals back over.

Will: I don’t rest well. It feels awkward to me.

Was there a week that surprised you, something the kids really connected with?

Elkey: A few caught us off guard. It’s evolved over time, because now the kids know something different is coming every Sunday, so there’s real anticipation and eagerness to try new things. Ukraine did really well. We made syrniki, those cottage cheese pancakes. Anything with carbs, they love. For Italy we did biscotti and warm chocolate milk, and my daughter said it was “the most perfect breakfast in the whole wide world.”

Do you feel like you’re raising little world travelers?

Elkey: I hope so. Will and I traveled a lot before kids. I lived in six different countries, so we both come from a background of loving culture and travel. We can’t do as much now, so this is our budget-friendly way of introducing them to other cultures from home.

Will: To be fair, Emray and Ezrah have done a decent bit of traveling for their age. They’ve both been to Europe, Emray has been to Indonesia, and we’re traveling again next year. They do great, honestly fantastic for young kids, and I always see them wanting to do more.

Will, the Malaysian nasi lemak and teh tarik week got picked up by press in Malaysia, and it was your first time pulling tea.

Will: Most of the time I’m learning as I go. The biggest thing with this series is that I try my best to be as accurate as I can, but we don’t always have the right resources. The important part is getting the spirit of the culture. It might not be 100% authentic, but I want the kids to have at least a decent representation of the country, the dish, the culture. Sometimes the pressure’s on. Some of these are way out of my wheelhouse.

When I was shopping for the ingredients to cook Indian breakfast, I’d been to plenty of Asian supermarkets but never an Indian one. I was in that store for 45 minutes, wandering the aisles trying to find everything I needed, getting a lot of stares, probably because I looked so lost.

Elkey, you’re usually the one educating the kids, explaining the country and its background. Without an early-childhood-education background, how do you decide what to share, especially for a country with a complicated history?

Elkey: I keep it light and fun, at a level they understand. I research with AI assistance a lot, to be fair. I’ll ask for kid-friendly fun facts, it gives me ten, and I pick something fun they can relate to. They’re five and three years old right now. History can come later. Right now they’re in this magical early-childhood bubble where everything is fun and kind, and that’s what we need to nurture. I try not to get into the politics or the complicated history. That’ll come when they’re ten, maybe a separate “Breakfast Around the World” then. For now I’m just meeting them where they are.

When you’re filming, it’s rarely one-and-done. Kids make messes, things get complicated. Any breakfast with a crazy story behind it?

Elkey: After 45 weeks, the kids are so used to it. There are times they get wiggly. Right now it’s spring, so they’ve got a lot of energy, and they’ll start squirming and not listening. But this isn’t just a breakfast thing; it’s how we run our whole day. We pause and say, “Okay, take a chance to wiggle your body. Let me know when you’re ready.” Then we start again. Honestly, nothing too crazy has happened.

Some of these breakfasts are pretty far from what a typical American two-to-seven-year-old eats. How would you advise another parent on framing an unfamiliar dish so their kid will actually try it?

Will: Keep it high level. You don’t have to overcomplicate it or over-explain. For Myanmar I made mohinga, a fish soup over rice noodles with lots of vegetables. It’s a complex dish, probably the most complex one I’ve made in the whole series. But for the kids, it’s just a noodle soup. They know what noodles are, they know what soup is. Introduce it at a level they can associate with, keep it simple, and let them try it.

Elkey: It helps that we make one meal for everybody. We’re having what they’re having. And for something like mohinga, traditionally you mix everything together, but for the kids we separate it: dry noodles here, fish broth there. Taste the components. We give them the option. If they want to try the broth, great. If not, there’s a noodle for them.

Is there a country whose breakfast everyone secretly fell in love with that’s now in regular rotation?

Will: That’s tricky. There are ones where we said, “We need to make this more often.” But keeping a routine on the breakfast schedule matters with kids, so I don’t mix up their usual breakfast very often, which makes it tough to pull from the traditional ones. Panama was probably my favorite: salchicha guisada, a sausage stew, amazing. The kids loved most of the European ones. Anything with carbs. Burkina Faso was really good too.

So what’s your standard weekly breakfast?

Will: This morning they had avocado, eggs, fruit, and smoked cod. We do porridge or overnight oats, and one day a week I’ll make a teff-flour pancake for the kids, since we’re on a bit of a different diet these days. The carbs rotate, but the fruit and protein stay. There’s always fruit, and smoked cod is usually the morning protein, with whatever carb is in rotation.

In a bigger-picture way, when your kids grow up and someone asks what food was like in their house, what do you hope they say?

Will: That it was amazing. We do breakfast differently than a lot of people in America. We do a larger breakfast, always. Ever since Emray was little we’d almost do a full charcuterie in the morning: eggs, toast options, meat, cheese laid out. We’ve condensed it since, but it’s the same idea: a wide variety to round out the morning and fuel the day. And the effort matters. I get up at 5:30 every morning to start breakfast.

For a parent who feels like they don’t have the bandwidth for a weekly ritual like this, where’s a low-effort place to start?

Elkey: Honestly, it is low effort. The passport stamps and big displays are the extra we do for social media. What we always try to do is inspire people toward things that are attainable. You don’t need a massive display. You can pull out a map, pick a country, and talk to your kids. The whole thing happens over a week: they pick a country, and you’ve got a week to grab what you need and figure out what to make. None of it happens in a single morning. Once you have a system, it becomes low effort. I have a Canva template for the menu that takes two minutes, and Will’s dish takes an hour or two depending on how complex it is. It looks like a lot, but with a system in place, it isn’t.

As home cooks, what’s a cooking skill you use all the time that you think other home cooks should make sure they know how to do?

Will: The number one thing most home cooks skip is properly preheating the pan. People throw a pan on and immediately crack an egg. You want the pan hot before anything goes in. I’ll let it sit on the heat for about two minutes, then add my grease right before the eggs. Especially with fish: always start with a hot pan. That’s a home-cooking sin. People don’t realize what they’re doing wrong when things don’t come out right.

Follow Elkey and Will on Instagram at @elkeyzandstra and @williamzandstra and on TikTok @thezandstras

& Don’t forget to follow us on IG @onepotatobox ❤️