MealBaby lets you coordinate those new baby meals easily (DiceFood.com)

October 31, 2008 | By glarr00 In Secret Recipes |

MealBaby lets you coordinate those new baby meals easily

Back at the end of August, my cousin and his wife had their second child. In the face of this happy news, I did what any loving relative would do. I pulled down a casserole pan and started cooking. I put together a baked pasta dish with browned organic sausage, lots of wilted spinach, ricotta cheese, homemade marinara sauce and whole wheat elbows.

However, when I turned up with it at their door, instead of looking relieved to have a meal ready to pop in the oven, my aunt (who was there taking care of the two-year-old) looked harried. I wasn’t the first to bring a dish by that day, nor was I the even the third. Their refrigerator was bursting at the seams with deli containers of pasta salad, roasted chickens from the local gourmet market and a pot of turkey chili. If only MealBaby had been around just a few short months ago, we could have avoided that traffic jam of food.

MealBaby, you ask? It’s a new (free) online service that allows you to organize and schedule meals for new parents, people recovering from illness or surgery and anyone else who just needs a few homecooked meals. Once you have an account (and signing up is easy), you just set up a meal calendar for a friend, family member or yourself. You can invite as many people as you’d like to participate, and once they sign up for mealtime slot, the system blocks out the date and sends them a reminder email a day in advance. People can even participate from far away, as there’s also an option to buy a gift certificate to a grocery store or restaurant built into the system.

It’s a brilliant way to coordinate meals and ensure that your lasagna is greeted with an appreciative smile instead of an overwhelmed grimace.

[via The Kitchn]

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Cookbook of the Day

While I think you could make argument that baking is an activity good for every time of the year, I find that this season we’re heading into now - the chilly, cozy, pre-holiday days - makes for the best baking. There’s something about the shorter days and thinner sunlight that cries out for pies (sweet potato or pumpkin), quick breads (carrot or apple) and lots of soul-warming, fragrant spices.

For those of you wanting to dig into fall-time baking, but also want to experiment with other sweeteners than just your standard granulated sugar, you must check out the new cookbook by Mani Niall, called Sweet! Niall understands the important of a good treat at any time of day, but also recognizes that lots of folks want to reduce the amount of sugar they consume while upping their whole grains. This book walks that line with ease and a great deal of delicious grace.

The book opens with a short history of sugar and then introduces the wide variety of sweeteners out there that you can turn to in place of the standard, white stuff. Then he moves into the recipes, offering up ways to do Breakfast Treats, Cakes, Pies/Tarts/Cobblers, Cookies, Spoon Desserts, Candy and Frozen Desserts. The final chapter is devoted to Main Courses that have both savory and sweet flavors. My only complaint with this book is that it doesn’t offer much in the way of pictures. I understand that fewer pictures saves money, but the four pages of images are so lovely that I would have enjoyed seeing how more of recipes looked in the hands of the photographer/food stylist.

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