As winter approaches and we’re faced with another year of determining what's for dinner, we're sharing a glimpse at how BHG readers gather for a meal. Welcome to our new series, Dinner Diaries, where we're asking readers to anonymously share how they get dinner on the table including grocery shopping, budgeting, cooking, and their favorite family recipes. Here, a family of four in the Midwest enjoys eating seasonally. Right now, the menu includes hearty casseroles, soups, and homemade bread.
I do a full grocery run at least once a week but we always will do extra runs to the store for anything I forgot or we run out of.
I really try to stick to about $120-$130. That amount goes up when we need more household items like shampoo, laundry detergent, and cleaning supplies.
Illustration: Grace Canaan
Yes! I make a list of dinners I'd like to cook for the week, check my pantry, and fill out my list with the items I don't have. Of course there are the weekly staples that never change: milk, eggs, butter, bread, bananas, apples, and tortilla chips.
I love the online pick up from Walmart. It makes my life so much easier to grocery shop on the app and then simply drive to pick up my purchases. The app also keeps me on budget because there is no chance for splurges. I also shop at Fareway, which is my go-to for quickly picking up the items we need or forgot.
I usually cook dinner for the entire family. But with two teenage daughters who come and go during the week, my husband and I subscribe to a meal kit twice a week. We always cook that together.
My pantry always has baking supplies, especially items for bread and cookies, rice, beans, lentils, peanut butter, ramen noodles, boxes of macaroni and cheese, and always coffee!
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In a world being reshaped by climate change, gardeners are increasingly asking themselves what can be done to counter the destructive effects of extreme weather events. The answer, as we’re discovering, is to take a nature-friendly approach that supports and nurtures resilience.
If there’s one thing celebrity recipes are guaranteed to do, it’s spark a (lightly-controversial) conversation in the comments of their social media. Reese Witherspoon did just that after she shared a new creation with the world on TikTok January 18: a mug of snow mixed with cold brew topped with salted caramel and chocolate drizzle.
Iris can be seen growing in early spring and throughout the summer months. Its appearance can be very different from one another with various heights, characteristics, and blossom/leaf color.
Kathy Sandel has shared her gardens with us before (More of Kathy’s Calabasas Garden, Kathy’s Garden Transformation in Sacramento), but today she’s sharing the garden she created for her daughter in Sacramento, California.
In his classic book Mormon Country, author Wallace Stegner noted that nineteenth century Mormons planted rows of Lombardy poplar trees wherever they established settlements in the territory that is now Utah. The trees served as windbreaks and boundary markers, but they were also the flags that marked the advance of Mormon civilization in a hostile territory. In my hometown and lots of other towns all over the United States elm trees served a similar function, marking the spread of middle class residential neighborhoods during the end of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth centuries. In the 1960’s almost all of those tall elegant trees fell prey to Dutch Elm Disease, making each municipality a little poorer.
I have given up indoor seed starting completely on several occasions. The first time it happened I was a novice gardener. I had ordered seeds of just about every plant that I saw in the garden catalogs without thinking about such practical things as gallons of potting soil, hours of daily watering, and square feet of windowsill space. It also did not occur to me to determine whether or not I had room in my garden for even a fraction of my seedlings. My chaotic efforts eventually produced some wonderful plants, but the process was so exhausting that I said: “Never again.”
Hardy perennial and annual plants of varying heights which bloom in June and July chiefly; the original species or wild types from which the modern beautiful varieties are descended are natives of California, Siberia, Syria, India and other countries. Delphinium Ajacis, originally from eastern Europe is one of the plants from which the annual Larkspurs have been raised. Delphinium belongs to the Buttercup family, Ranunculaceae. The name is an old Greek one.
So another gardening year has begun and there is lots to do. I’m going to start making videos again this year, but only at the beginning of each month (while the growing season is upon us, not much really happens in December and January). I’ll be telling you what I’ll be doing that month and showing you various little bits.