Last spring, I volunteered to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids' table at a church potluck. Knowing that not all kids like the dark, nutty whole wheat bread I grew up on, I bought a loaf of plain country white at my local Trader Joe's. As I stood in line, waiting to pay for my purchases, I wanted to shout out to all the people standing around me, "The white bread isn't for me! I swear I don't eat this stuff!" I was sweating by the time the loaf was tucked into my handled brown paper bag.

Bread is one of those staples most households like to keep around. Over at UrbanMamas, they are having an interesting conversation about how you pick the sliced bread that you buy for your family. I thought it would be an fun question to bring over here. What guides your choices when it comes to the regular loaves you keep on your counter or in your fridge (we were always bread in fridge people in my family)? Do you read labels or have a regular brand? Do you feel the same sense of shame that I have when you buy white bread, or do you wave your white bread flag proudly? Do tell, inquiring minds would like to know.

My grandfather loved to entertain. He always kept a stocked liquor cabinet and had a stash of canapes in the freezer, in case people dropped by unexpectedly. He also always had several boxes of chocolates squirreled away that he would pull out and offer to guests after meals (even if dessert had been served). He felt that this was how to be a good host.

These guest chocolates were sacred and no one was allowed to touch them in the interim (my sister and I didn't not count as guests on our own, much to our chagrin). Sadly, this meant that in Grandpa Sid's later years, when he was no longer able to see or taste particularly well, these chocolates were often picked over and slightly aged. Family members knew that it was best to smile and say, "No, thanks," when he proffered the box in their direction. We would try to warn people before the Whitman's Sampler or box of See's was pointed at them, but it wasn't always possible.

This particular story come with a two-part question. Is there any food stuff that you keep around solely to feed guests? And, who had the elderly relative who was always trying to offer you a food stuff of questionable age and edibility?

If you're hungry and willing to fork over the cash, there are plenty of companies that will be willing to deliver you a meal. MSNBC recently noted a few companies that are now bringing their goods right to your front door (or, in some cases, your kid's school).

• For $100, California-based RAWvolution will send you a box filled with two soups, four entrees, four side dishes and two desserts, all - you guessed it - raw and organic.
• For parents who are way too busy to throw an apple and a pb&j in a paper bag for their kid, they can schedule to have Freshlunches deliver Junior a healthy, organic lunch (about $4-$7 per day), just like mom would make. Except...she didn't. Some company did. Oh, well - guess it's better than Lunchables, right?
• Three Potato Four will send you a week's worth of food (or so they say), which includes four organic vegetarian entrees, two side dishes, soup, salad, dessert, and bread. Heck, they even throw in some flowers for ambiance!
  

Now, these options are all well and good, but if you want healthy food delivered to your family, why not join a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) program, and support your local farms while going easy on transportation emissions in the process? And if you need some company to make your kid's lunch every day, maybe you should re-assess your super-busy schedule, no?

Yesterday my mom and I made a big apple crisp and roasted off five huge sweet potatoes (which are destined for this dish). She is letting me have my way with the sweet potatoes, but the apple crisp was more of a tricky compromise. I've made a lot of crisps in my day and have developed a technique that I really like. However, that method relies on a food processor, which is a piece of equipment that my mother doesn't have. So we went back and forth, melding my mental recipe with the one she often follows from an old, favorite cookbook.

Later today I'll be chopping vegetables with my dad, making stuffing and getting the bird into the oven. I look forward to doing this kitchen dance with him every year, and happily, we've gotten to the point where we can anticipate each other in the kitchen without words. It's a joyful thing.

I hope that all you Slashfood readers out there are having equally nice days as I am, full of cooking, eating, drinking and laughing.

In my regular life in Philadelphia, I do all my own cooking. I've been living with a roommate for the last few years, but we have never gotten in the habit of sharing the task of cooking or mealtime. On occasion I'll have dinner with friends and we'll share in the cooking, but when it comes to breakfast and lunch, I am always on my own.

One of the joys of being at my parents' house for the holidays is the fact that the cooking gets shared. Last night my mom and I made a pot of chicken soup together and it was wonderful to share in the chopping, stirring and clean up together. This morning I was sitting at the dining room table when I heard my dad rustling around in the kitchen, opening the fridge, getting out a pan and breaking some eggs. He popped his head around the doorway, looked at me and said, "Scrambled eggs with cheese?"

I nodded emphatically and within a couple of minutes the plate you see above had appeared in front me. I took a bite and sighed in happiness as the taste of the tender eggs and sharp cheese moved across my tongue. Then I said, "I think eggs just taste better when someone else makes them for you!"

What are the foods that just taste better to you when someone else makes them for you? Is there some comfort food from childhood that one of your parents still makes for you? Have you taken to making that same food item for your own kids?

As I've mentioned before, my dad typically makes a vat of gravy for Thanksgiving that nears the one-gallon mark. This means that in our house, gravy is not a scarce resource. It flows abundantly and when the gravy pitchers (boats are too puny for our purposes) run dry, it is easy to hop and refill them from the stock pot on the stove. However, I've come to understand that in other households, gravy is a valuable commodity, not to be wasted.

The first year I realized that not every family does gravy the way my family does gravy was when one of the pitchers accidentally slipped from my mom's fingers as she was passing it around the table and let loose its contents all over the green table cloth. An old friend of my parents had joined us for dinner that night and as soon as the gravy spilled, he leaped up, grabbed a teaspoon and started bailing the gravy back into the pitcher. When he was growing up, there was never enough gravy and so each drop was like gold to him, not to be wasted. He could not be calmed until we reminded him of the four quarts of gravy still waiting in reserve. Once he realized that there would be enough, he laughed, let us sop up the spill with some kitchen towels and we all settled down to eat again.

This story, of the night a friend tried to save the spilled gravy, has become one of my family's classic Thanksgiving stories. Whenever my mom and I start talking about it, we inevitably end up laughing, feeling affection for the friend and warmth from the memory.

Just about everyone I know has some Thanksgiving event that was unfortunate when it happened, but has become part of their holiday lexicon. What's yours?

Thanksgiving brings with it a whole host of wonderful things. Delicious food, a couple of well-deserved vacation days and visits from far-flung family members. I have always gotten along really well with my family, both the immediate version as well as the extended clan. However, after appetizers, multiple plates of turkey, three wedges of pie and several glasses of wine, conversation can sometimes get, well...a bit honest.

Those situations call for carefully planned comebacks and the girls over at Elastic Waist have got you covered. They've put together a list of Top Ten Comebacks for Well-Meaning but Obnoxious Relatives. They are mostly food-related, including such gems as

• Oooh, do you really think you need another biscuit? "I don't need it. I WANT it."
• Do you know how many calories that has? "Yes, and I'm looking forward to every one of them."

If your family meal is a potluck and someone looks askance at your offering and asks, "Well honey, what is in that, exactly?" Barring food allergy inquiries, you can always just reply, "It's gourmet!"

Late last week, the Washington Post's Kim O'Donnel wrote a post on her blog, A Mighty Appetite, about the food that makes you cry. The food that evokes memory in a way that is bittersweet or layered and complex. She recounts a friend's tale of his mother's post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches and her own experience teaching a young friend to cook Joe's Special (the recipe is at the end of the post) while in Zambia.

For me, the foods that make me cry are linked to simple joyful times. During the years when I was in college, I always went home to live with my parents for the summers. On weekend mornings, my dad would often cook breakfast for us, concocting vast egg scrambles bursting with spinach, zucchini, tomatoes and basil from his garden. Having breakfast made for me always made me feel so cared for, a true sign of love through food.

What are the foods that make you cry? (Tears of joy and sadness are both welcome).

Now that the kids are going off to school, it's time to tear the little monsters away from the video games and force them to buckle down on their studying, right?

Right. As in "Yeah, right, like you're really going to get them to stop playing video games."

Be not discouraged, parents. Instead of banning video games completely, you can turn it into a family activity. You still have to do family Quality Time during the school year, right? Cooking Mama, the video game we've mentioned before that lets you cook without having to get into the kitchen, has a new version out for the Nintendo Wii called Cooking Mama Cook-off. What a great way to train your kids so that in a few months, they can cook dinner for themselves. Of course, when they head off to class, you can use the Wii to do a little workout before you have to rush out to pick them up from soccer practice.

P.S. Nintendo Wiis are hard to get a hold of, but you can win one from CoolHunting and ThisNext.

With trans fats in the spotlight most of the time, it is easy to overlook saturated fats, which have long been the nemesis of the health-conscious. They have been linked to atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease and are found in butter, ghee, suet, tallow, lard, coconut oil, cottonseed oil, palm kernel oil, dairy products (esp. high-fat ones like cream and cheese) and in meats.

One other place that saturated fats are found is in parents' diets. A study at the University of Iowa College of Medicine found that adults who live with children (just about all parents) ate more saturated fat than their childfree counterparts. The study looked at adults who lived with children under 17 and those with no children. Those living with kids ate an extra five grams of fat per day, including almost two grams of saturated fat. The extra fat came from snacks, cheese, ice cream, cakes, processed meats and bacon, high-fat and often high-calorie "convenience foods."

The problem, according to the study's lead researcher, is that parents are not influencing their children's eating habits enough and are allowing theirs to be influenced. If parents don't take the time to make dinner for their children, then they aren't going to eat a nutritious dinner themselves. To make up for this, especially when part of a very busy family, researchers recommend keeping healthier snacks (fruit, low fat milk, etc) in the house and fewer high-fat frozen/convenience foods, which will help compensate for less healthy meals.

Easy meal prep is hot right now. By this, I am referring to the make-and-freeze dinner businesses that are thriving all across the US. With names like Dream Dinners, Super Suppers, My Girlfriend's Kitchen, Supper Thyme USA, What's for Dinner and Dinner by Design, all appeal to the "busy family demographic, where people want to have home cooked meals but don't necessarily feel that they have the time to do it themselves. These businesses offer kitchens with lots of partially assembled meals and ingredients that you can put together in combinations that your family will like. Typically, meals are prepared for a week or two in advance and everything can be frozen. Heating instructions (and any other cooking suggestions, if needed, are included.

The trend is so popular that it is starting to spread out of the US. In London, a chain called Dinners Made is springing up and gaining popularity with those who are looking for food to make in advance and freeze, and also with those who want to entertain and don't have time (or perhaps the ability) to cook everything from scratch without some assistance. Using Dinners Made means that the recipes are included, prep is done and cleanup is taken care of, as they are at every similar easy meal prep shop. Combining the convenience of working in the store with below-restaurant prices, a flexible menu and fresh ingredients, it's not hard to see why the idea is spreading so rapidly.

I think that a lot of parents like the idea of having their kids help them in the kitchen. Not only can it be good, fun "family time," but it is more educational and more stimulating than sitting in front of the TV. Williams-Sonoma Kids in the Kitchen: Fun Food is a cookbook with 25 kid-friendly recipes for ages 8 and up, though the recipes and text are easy enough for younger kids to understand as long as there is a parent around share some of the workload.

The primary goal of the book is to use step-by-step photos to teach kids some popular, basic recipes and the culinary skills needed to make the dishes. Most of the recipes have variations suggested, which will give kids a chance to be a little more creative once they get the hand of cooking. The six chapters cover "kid classics," noodles/pasta, roasting/baking, vegetable sides, sandwiches and after-school snacks. Each chapter is peppered with tips and alerts, which will both help to prevent mishaps in the kitchen and to clean them up if they do occur.

Williams-Sonoma has some of the recipes online, including Sesame Fish Sticks, Lasagna, Sautéed Green Beans, Turkey Wrap and a Strawberry Smoothie,

Recipe books aren't quite as popular as they used to be. More often than not, people buy cookbooks as gifts and pass those out to friends and family, not only because it's convenient (and the recipes are good), but because they don't necessarily have a collection of their own favorite recipes to pass on. Fortunately, as home cooking continues steadily growing in popularity, people are writing down what they like to cook. Often, these recipes show up on food blogs, but as gift idea, why not revive the idea of actually writing down those recipes to pass them on?

The Recipe Binder Set from russell+hazel includes two binders, each with recipe pages, recipe cards, menu planning sheets and measuring equivalent charts for easy referencing. There is room for photos and many computers will let you format recipes so they can be printed out directly onto the recipe cards. Alternatively, you might also have luck finding a blank recipe book at a stationary/card store, such as Hallmark.

I'm usually on the lookout for new gingerbread cookie cutters around the holidays and have yet to find a set that I like, largely because the gingerbread people turn out too large. I have one cookie cutter that is probably 10 inches long and is accompanied by a matching snowman cutter. Who wants a gingerbread cookie that big - not to mention the fact that it is a pain to bake enormous cookies because of the increased risk of over/underbaking. This year I came across this set of Gingerbread Family Cookie Cutters, which includes six reasonably-sized cutters (gingerbread man, woman , boy, girl, dog and house), all packed in a small house-shaped tin. In addition to not being inconveniently oversized, the cutters provide more options than a singleton gingerbread man cookie cutter would. It's $13 for the whole set.

Besides - baking your own will be far more fun and a lot less expensive than buying the pre-made cookies individually. If you're really not into baking, however, it might be a good idea to opt for some gingerbread cookie ornaments, which will last much longer.

This isn't exactly trailer-park cooking (not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that), but it's closer than you're going to come with books like the Chez Panisse Café or The Pleasures of Slow Food. White Trash Gatherings: From-scratch Cooking for Down-home Entertaining is about cooking with family and putting family first, although the book will help you put some good eats on the table while you're doing that. It is the very definition of unfussy, although it does include some craft-y ideas for napkin rings, tablesettings and such, like "Obscenely Large Fake Ice Cream Centerpieces". The recipes are homey and perfect for "potlucking" or just having fun, regardless of the fact that they are unlikely to show up on the menu at a four-star restaurant. Be sure to try Maw Maw's West Virginia Funeral Cake, Tater Tot Casserole and Porcupine Balls. There are full-color photos to liven up the book, as well.

Even if you don't end up cooking anything from White Trash Gatherings, it would make a funny gift for a gourmet friend that is hard to buy for because they already have all the "high class" cookbooks they could want.