Some people think that wholesome playtime for kids is akin to buying organic–that in order to really “get the really good stuff” and provide your child with the best in playtime nutrients,  it’s going to cost you. On the contrary, there are many clever ways to keep your child’s mind and body active that use materials you may already have around the house (and if you don’t, can easily get at a 99-cent store)!

I recently asked Bobbi Conner, author of Unplugged Play: No Batteries. No Plugs. Pure Fun. to share a handful of fun ways to play on the cheap. She recommends going with what you already have (since you’re likely sitting on a treasure trove of toys for your young ones): Do you have a laundry basket? Muffin tin?  Paper bag? How about a box of pasta? Always keep safety in mind, and let the playtime begin:

#1. One Giant Floor Drawing

You will need: large sheets of drawing paper (or butcher block paper), invisible tape, and crayons. To do: Cover your kitchen floor with big sheets of paper. Use invisible tape to hold the paper in place. Challenge your child to use crayons to draw a HUGE drawing or create a “village”—with roads, houses, a river and trees.  When the village is drawn—add a few toy cars to drive through the town!

#2. Lunch Bag Puppet Show

You will need: paper lunch bags, nontoxic markers, scrap paper,  scissors, and glue. To do: For young preschoolers, parents can cut circles (for eyes) and any other desired facial features or accessories (noses, ears, hats, and so on). Glue or draw the parts of the puppet on the bag and then show your children how to manipulate the puppet by placing your hand inside the bag to make the puppet head move and “talk.” They can tell a story with their puppets, sing a song, or put on a puppet show.

#3. Kitchen Table Fort

You will need: several flat sheets, and some toys and props for pretend play. To do: Drape the sheets over the kitchen table or a series of chairs and let the kids haul their toys and books and pillows inside the homemade lair for hours of pretend play.  The game could involve a “camp-out” (maybe a parent can make s’mores in the kitchen!) or a pretend library or school.

#4. Macaroni Mix-Up

You will need: assorted uncooked pasta shapes like ziti, elbows, bow-tie; a  muffin tin; and a paper lunch bag.  To do: Pour ¼-cup of each pasta shape into the lunch bag and mix it up. Challenge your child to sit at the kitchen table and sort the pasta—all the elbows in one compartment of the muffin tin, all the ziti in another, bow-ties in a third, and so on. Preschoolers love to sort! Advanced version: Use tri-color pasta to practice color sorting.

#5. Coupons as Currency

You will need: an old wallet, coupons from the Sunday paper, an empty laundry basket, and canned or boxed foods from your kitchen or pantry. To do: Parents cut out the coupons and stuff them inside the wallet. Give your child a shopping cart (a.k.a. laundry basket) and line up the foods on the table or a low counter so he or she can pretend to be a shopper at the grocery store and “buy” groceries with coupons.

*And don’t forget, your local library is filled with lots of  free entertainment that won’t cost a dime! So whether you’re a parent or babysitter, bring on the next rainy day.

For more than 700 more play ideas for indoors and out, check out Bobbi Conner’s Unplugged Play!

With the High Holidays coming up, Judy Bart Kancigor, author of Cooking Jewish, shares some of her favorite holiday memories and recipes.

To read an excerpt from Cooking Jewish, click here or scroll to the bottom of this post.

When I was growing up, my large, boisterous family would gather in my grandparents’ tiny apartment in Belle Harbor, New York, for the festive Rosh Hashanah meal. Papa Harry, a carpenter who had emigrated from Russia in 1906, would extend the dining table with boards reaching practically to the walls. The arrival of the aunties with their foil-covered dishes signaled the beginning of the holiday feast, a menu that seldom varied:

For the forshpeis (appetizer) Aunt Estelle’s homemade, lovingly shaped gefilte fish served with Uncle Lou’s horseradish, hand-grated on the back porch to keep out the fumes;

Aunt Irene’s golden chicken soup and ethereal matzoh balls, followed by Mama Hinda’s roast chicken and brisket with oven-browned potatoes and Aunt Sally’s tsimmes (sweet carrot stew).

The centerpiece of the table was Mama Hinda’s grand spiral challah, round for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a symbol of the endless cycle of life. Only for this holiday would she add raisins, a sweet embellishment to enjoy a sweet New Year.

Sweet notes echoed from the beginning of the meal, as all assembled dipped apples in honey, to the dessert platters wedged onto Mama’s groaning sideboard: Aunt Irene’s dark, dense honey cake, Aunt Estelle’s mile-high sponge cake, Aunt Hilda’s chocolate chip mandelbrot (twice-baked cookies), and Aunt Sally’s apple strudel and taiglach, crisp cookie balls slowly simmered in honey.

Over at the children’s table, a gaggle of cousins, raised practically as siblings, chattered, spilled soup, shouted, squabbled, hiccupped with laughter, fought over drumsticks, dropped crumbs, clamored for seconds, and ran around, as far as one could run in such tight quarters, until a withering look from one of the aunties brought a temporary attitude adjustment, and then it was back to the merriment.

Or so I’m told.

We were never there!

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It’s the return of The Cake Mix Doctor, and Anne Byrn’s latest book is full of brand new recipes that turn ordinary cake mix into unique, delicious treats. Below, Anne shares some snapshots from the photo shoot for the book.

Workman Art Director Lisa Hollander, photo stylist Susan Sugarman, and her assistant work out details before shooting begins on the 163 cake photos in The Cake Mix Doctor Returns!

A huge slice of the Smith Island Cake waits to have its photo made. You cannot imagine the temptation present in this New York loft studio where cakes were frosted, sliced, photographed, then sampled, for five delicious days.

You can see from the fuzziness of this photo why I am a food writer, not food photographer. This darling Blueberry Muffin Crumble Cake, is one of my favorites in the new book. And I promise it will look a lot better in the book than in this photo.

A sumptuous Chocolate Chip Layer Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting rests on the cake stand. There’s a funny thing about photography sessions. Once you’ve seen one cake, you’ve seen them all. I love this cake and yet the food stylists and art director aren’t thinking about how gorgeous this cake looks on that stand. They’re thinking the next cake and the next…

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The author of Can I Wear My Nose Ring to the Interview? dishes out 10 great tips to jump-start your job hunt.

1. Stop looking for a job and start looking for a person.  The right person will lead you to the right job.
2. Stop sending your résumés into cyberspace. It’s a black hole.
3. Get your parents and relatives off your back and on your side—they’re in your network, too.
4. Get a business card—looking for a job is your job now.
5. Don’t waste valuable résumé real estate on useless conventions like an objective, a GPA, a summary of qualifications, or lines like “References Available Upon Request.”
6. Always dress for a phone interview. If you feel more professional, you’ll sound it.
7. Never say yes to a job offer right off the bat; accept the offer of employment, then negotiate the terms.
8. Create more than one résumé. Tailor each one to the job at hand, with specific categories correlated to the stated requirements.
9. If you want help, be specific. Don’t say “I’ll do anything”—people won’t know where to start.
10. Being young and inexperienced doesn’t have to be a liability: You’re flexible, relatively cheap, and willing to work hard to get ahead.

For more job-hunting tips, click here to listen to Ellen on NPR’s “Morning Edition.”

Ellen Gordon Reeves started helping her friends with their résumés in high school and now consults to individuals and institutions in the U.S. and abroad. She currently serves as the résumé and job-hunting expert at the Columbia Publishing Course. More about Ellen Gordon Reeves

An author guest post from Judy Bart Kancigor, author of Cooking Jewish.

My husband Barry’s contributions to “Cooking Jewish” were recipes for his Black & White Malted and his beloved Egg Cream, the New York concoction from his misspent youth, working during the fifties in his father’s candy store on Utica and Church in Brooklyn.

There’s neither egg nor cream in the classic Egg Cream, which gets its name from its head of foam said to resemble beaten egg whites, although one school of thought holds that the original 1890’s version may indeed have used eggs and cream.

My husband, the soda jerk, couldn’t be pinned down to measurements, but in the privacy of our home (and in the interests of science) I held out the old measuring spoon as he displayed his rare talents. He did have strict rules, however, for the preparation of this Big Apple legend. First, the milk must be ice cold, the chocolate syrup must be Fox’s U-Bet (no substitutions) and you’ve got to spritz with seltzer.

When I was growing up, there was always a glass squirt bottle of seltzer on our table, which the seltzer man would deliver in wooden crates. Because the bottles were sealed, it never went flat, unlike the club soda available today.

In the 1967 film The Graduate Mr. Robinson offers one word of advice to Benjamin, revealing a vista of opportunity to the young lad: “Plastics.” The same word sounded the death knell to the glass seltzer bottle. So much so that Molly O’Neill, in discussing seltzer in her New York Cookbook, refers to the years before and after plastic as B.P. and A.P. Enter the screw-top plastic bottle, exit the seltzer man.

My father-in-law’s Brooklyn candy store had a pull-down seltzer dispenser, ideal for making egg creams, as well as other libations – “two pushes” was Barry’s measurement for one serving – or just a Two Cents Plain, a glass of straight cold seltzer.

“The seltzer came out at high pressure when you pushed the lever forward, creating a lot of foam,” my husband, Barry, recalled. “Club soda has nowhere near the fizz. You can use club soda to make an Egg Cream, but it won’t be quite as good.”

Such a simple recipe – so much controversy! Is this the drink you remember?

BARRY KANCIGOR’S NEW YORK EGG CREAM
From Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family (Workman Publishing) by Judy Bart Kancigor

2 tablespoons cold whole milk
About 1 cup seltzer
2 generous tablespoons Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup

1.    Pour the milk into a 12-ounce glass.
2.    Spritz with seltzer almost to the top.
3.    Add the syrup, wait a moment for it to fall to the bottom, and then stir with a long spoon. If you get at least an inch of foam, you did it right. Snappy comebacks to know-it-all customers: optional.

Serves 1

Note: Barry’s dad also served a vanilla egg cream made with Fox’s U-Bet vanilla syrup.

A special guest post from Barbara Flanagan, author of Flanagan’s Smart Home: The 98 Essentials for Starting Out, Starting Over, Scaling Back.

I can’t wait to get outside and mess up my backyard! Summer lets me turn my little yards—front and back, neat and not—into vegetal laboratories.

This year I’ll raise my annual tomato curtain—10’ x 20’—dotted by tiny heritage tomatoes of many colors. The curtain rod is invisible: a stainless cable stretched taut between two brick walls. After planting a tight row of tomatoes, I hang panels of 10-ft. high panels of plastic fencing (like stiff netting) stacked to the ground. When plants take off, I start my daily ritual: weave the shoots into the netting, harvest the new fruit, and snack while I chat on the phone. The tomato curtain expands through October, and yields a nice supply of indoor-ripening fruit right into December.
The front yard, a former flat lawn, is a now a slope of usable herbs planted ornamentally (17 years ago, and pre-fad). I chose ornery, quasi-invasive, flowering herbs like St. John’s wort, fern leaf tansy, and thyme. Each season, I watch them try to overtake each other, then replant the winners to rebalance. Each spring I plant seeds for nasturtium vines, and watch the edible flowers trail lightly over the front yard like lines butterflies. By September, the yard is a layered with herbal perennials holding herbal annuals aloft.

At dinnertime, I harvest mesclun and arugula growing in terracotta pots at the front door. As small hedges of sage and chives rise up, I move the pots to fill empty spots as I’m adding basil, parsley, cilantro , and rosemary seedlings—and some wildly colored Swiss Chard–to the mix.
This month I’m doing two new experiments. The first: figuring out an elegant composting ritual to replace my haphazard ways of amending soil. The second: organizing the stuff I bring back from kayaking and hiking trips: beach stones, bark, rust, driftwood, etc. Maybe I can get a building permit for constructing a grotto…

–Barbara Flanagan