Author: Melissa Walshe

Melissa Walshe is a food lover, an avid home cook, and an editor of the Guiding Stars blog. While creating, tasting, and curating Guiding Stars recipes, she has developed a knack for helping nutrition and flavor find a happy medium. Melissa earned her Ed.M from Harvard, and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Southern Maine. She uses her background in education to make nutritious, accurate food writing available to the home cook. In her free time, she spends a lot of time in the garden and walking her dog.

Sweet Nibbles for Self-Care

November 13, 2020October 29, 2020 by Melissa Walshe

Keep your energy high and your desire to eat holiday cookies level by picking great snacks. This list of recipes offers a satisfying way to fill a craving for something sweet while providing nutrition. These sweet treats will also fill you up. If making a little extra something to meet your snacking needs is one cooking chore to many, it’s okay. Look for snacks that earn one, two, or three Guiding Stars while you’re shopping to be sure you’ve got easy snacks on hand that offer good, better, and best nutrition.

Cooking for Self-Care

November 6, 2020October 29, 2020 by Melissa Walshe

The holidays have arrived. From Halloween through the new year, celebratory foods add stress and joy alike to our lives. If you’re the chief cook in your family, you may receive the fullest helping of stress around the holidays. Truthfully, though, no matter how many cookies we want to bake to send to family and friends, our own bodies manage stress better when they’re well-nourished. This month on Kitchen Smarts, we’ll focus on recipes and approaches to cooking that make good nutrition the obvious choice. Here are a few ideas to get you started

Orange Treats

October 30, 2020October 21, 2020 by Melissa Walshe

Kids love colorful snack food. For many families, special food is an easy and affordable way to make Halloween a little extra special. If you can’t trick or treat, you can still enjoy treats. Candy takes center stage during Halloween, which means we may want to make sure the other fun foods bring nutrition to the table. All things in balance, as it goes.

Orange…Oranges

October 23, 2020October 21, 2020 by Melissa Walshe

Herb Rubbed Roast Beef with Orange Salsa

We’ve talked about squash and roots this month. Both categories offer a wide variety of naturally orange foods and the nutritional benefits that come with them. The food with shares its very name with the color is less associated with fall, but oranges begin their season in fall. Orange juice is the most ubiquitous use of the fruit, and it does have merits as a natural sugar. The fruit can also star, however, in a wide variety of dishes from sweet to savory.

Orange Roots

October 16, 2020October 14, 2020 by Melissa Walshe

Orange root vegetables aren’t quite as emblematic of fall as are the various squashes we discussed last week, but they’re an important part of the team. If you want orange in your diet, sweet potatoes and carrots in particular are popular for good reason. They’re delicious. They’re also remarkably flexible in the kitchen.

Orange Squash

October 9, 2020October 7, 2020 by Melissa Walshe

Pumpkin pie is one way to eat pumpkin. I guess. Between you, me, and the internet, however, I don’t get it. If I’m going to indulge in a sweet treat, pumpkin pie is pretty low on my list of choices. And frankly, there are SO MANY DELICIOUS THINGS you can do with pumpkin or squash puree. Let’s play.

Eating Orange

October 2, 2020October 5, 2020 by Melissa Walshe

October is all about the color orange. It’s everywhere: including food. Guiding Stars debits foods that use artificial colors, but that doesn’t mean orange food is out. Looking at fruits and vegetables alone, there’s a panoply of orange to be munched. During the month of October, Kitchen Smarts will be exploring in-depth a few categories of delicious and nutritious orange foods.

Exploratory Procedures for Nextovers

September 25, 2020September 23, 2020 by Melissa Walshe

We’ve talked in some depth this month about nextovers. We’ve covered focus ingredients and supporting players. Ingredients alone, however, do not a cooking approach make. If you want your nextover expeditions to succeed, you need a reliable procedural code for bringing disparate elements together. Into a federation, if you will.

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