This fruit salad recipe with vanilla pudding makes a refreshing dessert or side dish for summer parties, potlucks, holidays or just your average Tuesday night dinner. It takes only minutes to throw together this fruit salad (though you do have to allow 1 hour for chilling), and whenever I bring it to parties, people demand the recipe.

The key is making sure you use fruits that aren't too wet (otherwise the fruit salad gets runny, and the pudding layer loses some of its lovely texture). I like grapes, berries (of any kind) and well-drained mandarin oranges in addition to the canned pineapple. Be sure to get canned pineapple with juice, not syrup, as the juice is used in the recipe, too.

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Fruit Salad with Pudding image by Stephanie Gallagher 2011, licensed to About.com Inc.

tFried chicken is synonymous with summer. You can serve it at picnics, barbecues, family cookouts or large parties, and everyone will love it. Even better: You can make fried chicken in advance, and it tastes just as good cold as it does hot. Making fried chicken is easy - the only trick is making sure the oil is the right temperature and not overcrowding the pot or pan. Overcrowding will reduce the temperature of the oil and cause the chicken to absorb too much fat. It will also prevent the chicken from getting crispy on all sides. Follow my step by step directions (with pictures), and you'll have no trouble at all.

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Buttermilk Fried Chicken image by Stephanie Gallagher 2011, licensed to About.com Inc.

Hint: It's easier than you might think. The fact is making vegetables appealing to kids isn't hard. It's a matter of dispelling myths about nutrition and following sensible, easy approaches to make food taste good. If you think about it, when you cook your main dish, whether it's chicken breasts, a steak or a casserole, you add basic flavor enhancers to make it taste good. Those flavor enhancers are salt, fat and sugar. You may not think of it that way, but when you add a tablespoon of oil to the skillet to brown your chicken breasts, you're adding fat. When you add balsamic vinegar to the sauce, you're adding sugar. And when you season your food, you're adding salt.

Why don't we do the same with vegetables? Beats me. But when you add these flavor enhancers judiciously, you will be amazed at the results. That is how you make vegetables taste good to kids, and no, it doesn't make those vegetables suddenly bad for them or worse than French fries. That would be like saying adding a strawberry as a garnish to a piece of chocolate cake is turning that cake into a serving of fruit.

The key is to use common sense. Check out some of these vegetable recipes for kids, too. There's something here to please even the pickiest eaters.

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Broccoli Mashed Potatoes image by Stephanie Gallagher 2011, licensed to About.com Inc.

I'm a big breakfast-lover. I could eat breakfast food in the morning, noon and at night. So I'm always developing new breakfast recipes. These pancake recipes are my family's favorites. From light and fluffy buttermilk pancakes to my kids' favorite pancakes with homemade blueberry syrup to my healthy oatmeal pancakes, there's a pancake recipe here to please everyone in the house. Make some for mom today!

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Pancakes with Blueberry Syrup image by Stephanie Gallagher 2011, licensed to About.com Inc.