Good Press

Six inches of heavy, wet snow is forecast for my corner of West Virginia starting tomorrow morning. Maybe you're heading to the grocery store to stock up and you're wondering what warming comfort food you could make for dinner. When it snowed and stuck around last week, I made this divine and easy Crock-Pot meal: Creamed Chicken Over Biscuits. My business partner at Mountain Mamas Retreats , Shelley Miller, shared the recipe (aka Italian Crock-Pot Chicken) after a scrapbooking crop we held at our retreat house. There, we served it with an equally easy Brussels sprouts dish brought by a guest. The flavors of the main course and the side set each other off perfectly. We had more creamed chicken than we had biscuits so we served it over rice the second time. For dessert at the same meal I served vanilla ice cream with hot fudge cake (also made in a Crock-Pot). That recipe is from Taste of Home. You wouldn't think Italian salad dressing mix would be a key ingredient in this bu...

This is the second full week in a row that our county's schools have been closed because of bad weather. My daughter's teacher sent home work to be completed on snow days. To supplement that, she reads and has Play-Doh and crafts and she loves to write stories and letters. She gets a little bit of screen-time to go on PBSkids.org/go and to watch the occasional PBS cartoon. One morning this week she watched a "Sid the Science Kid" episode about nutrition. That, and the Olympics, spurred a full day of discussion about eating right and exercising to be strong and healthy. She worked out to her Denise Austin "Fit Kids" DVD and afterward said, "My heart is happy." Our "unit" included printables from the USDA and a story book about sneaky rabbits published right here in Terra Alta by Headline Books -- for which I am the new publicist. Every children's book Headline Books publishes has an educational component. "Grandfather's Garde...