This week, the Eat Local Challenge asks participants to look at how to expand the challenge to families.

Halloween is less than two weeks away, the annual holiday where for many American kids the goal is to see how much candy they can consume in a short period of time. For adults, the Halloween challenge is to find other activities for the kids that can compete with eating candy, not always an easy task. I love cooking with my sister's kids when I go to visit, so I've been scouring the food blogs for some fun Halloween treats that would be fun to make.

If you've watched Food, Inc., you likely have a pretty good, overall sense of what's wrong with our food system today -- which helps put all the continued news reports of foodborne illnesses and obesity problems in context. Of course, all that continued bad news still gets depressing even if you know what's creating the problems.

Fall means time for apples, and cooks who like to bake go crazy in the fall with homemade apple pie, apple tarts, and apple cake. Of course all these apple dessert creations taste great, but one of the best and easiest use for fresh apples is homemade applesauce. If you haven't made homemade applesauce, you've never had *real* applesauce, which tastes amazing and makes the house smell wonderful too.

On any given night, I make three meals, which may sound like your house as well, except that our reasons probably differ for the assortment of choices at the dinner table. Our family keeps kosher and we practice ahimsa, which means that our five-year-old twins need to perform mental math on a daily basis weighing out what they want for dessert vs. what they want for dinner and divide by how hungry they are in the moment.

One of the best things about being a contributing editor for BlogHer, is being able to showcase other women bloggers.  So today, I thought we could take a look at some blogs about nutrition, weight loss, and fitness. In no particular order, here are eighteen health and fitness blogs that I think you might like.  I hope you enjoy checking them out as much as I did. All You Can Do Is Tri...

When summer ends and families have to get back on a school night dinner schedule, what's needed are easy menu options the kids will eat. Kids love macaroni and cheese, and even when you make the kind that comes in a box it's probably a more nutritious dinner option than fast food. But macaroni and cheese is so easy to make with real food ingredients, it's worth trying a few recipes to find a nutritious homemade mac-n-cheese to add to your dinner rotation.

It's not that we don't eat breakfast over the summer, it's just that breakfast is a much more casual affair when we don't need the kids out the door at o'dark thirty every morning. It means that over summer vacation, the kids can make their own breakfasts, whenever they get hungry. And they can eat... well, not whatever they feel like having, but pretty much anything reasonable. I wave my hand and go back to my computer, and then around noon I fix them a reasonable lunch and call it good.

School starts soon in the U.S., which brings back the school-night dinner dilemma of finding easy menus that kids and parents will both like. I'm here to remind you that kids love chicken nuggets, and homemade chicken nuggets are better tasting, more healthful, and less expensive than fast food nuggets or the frozen heat-and-eat type. Here are some ideas for homemade nuggets that could become a regular part of your family's dinner rotation.

Off I went, on the hunt for cookbooks with inspiration for packing school lunches for kids. And yes, I rustled up a few. But for all the food bloggers who aspire to cookbooks? This could be your lucky break! The subject of healthy school lunches seems wide, wide open, looking for a break-through book. Is lunch meat so easy? Is PB&J so ubiquitous? What IS going into the lunch boxes of kids' lunchboxes? Anyway, here's what I found.

I remember a few things about school lunches growing up. I remember that, most of the time, I brought lunch from home rather than eating lunch at school. I remember finding notes from my Mom in my lunch, and how much I both enjoyed and was terribly embarrassed by this fact. (That being said, Mom, thanks for the notes – some days, I wish I could open my little lunch cooler at the office and have one waiting for me!) And, of all the food I remember, I most recall the weird, greasy rectangles of fairly flavorless “pizza” served up by the Fairfax County Public Schools cafeterias. On the rare days that I actually got to buy lunch, I often chose the pepperoni incarnation of this particularly disgusting “treat,” the pepperoni really more like small dots of processed, brightly-colored, well, I have no idea what they were. They were chunks, and they didn’t really taste like normal pepperoni, and, well, that particular lunch cannot have been good for me.

When I was little, I was forced to eat prunes everyday despite the fact that I hated them.  I had to sit and eat three prunes every morning to be "regular".  The prunes would sit and slowly dissolve in my mouth for what seemed like hours, and I would try not to gag.  Of course, I vowed never to impose foods on my own children.  Little did I know that I would face myself in spades.