Editor’s Note: Click HERE for a yummy Thai Chicken Burger recipe from Make It Easy!
Whether it is her work as managing editor for Cool Mom Eats—a food website devoted to parents—or her new cookbook, Make It Easy: 120 Mix-and-Match Recipes to Cook from Scratch—with Smart Store-Bought Shortcuts When You Need Them, one thing is clear: Stacie Billis is passionate about helping parents navigate the world of food.
Billis, a food writer and cookbook author, may be best known for her successful personal blog, One Hungry Mama, where, for the past seven years, she has combined her background in child development (she has an MA in the subject from Columbia Teachers College) and love of food for a fresh take on family cooking.
“One Hungry Mama is personal—those are the recipes that I am making for my family,” Billis says. “It is very much a personal account of how food flows through my house. The things that I am feeding the kids—there is a little bit of overlap in when I come up against something with my kids, I’ll share [those] personal stories.”
With Cool Mom Eats and Make It Easy, Billis is venturing out of a decidedly personal space and sharing her passions with parents everywhere.
Cool Mom Eats is the latest offering from the Cool Mom Picks Network—founded by Kristen Chase and Liz Gumbinner—which is devoted to curating the best of what’s cool in the realms of technology, food, and gear for parents and families.
“The goal with Cool Mom Eats from the beginning was first and foremost to have a dedicated food site that was just for parents,” Billis says. “There is no dedicated food site that’s talking to parents and dealing with the issues that only they are dealing with. How do you do things on a budget? How do you do things when you have no time? How do you keep food healthy when your kids are picky eaters? That was the primary goal. Secondarily, we wanted to be non-judgmental. I feel like there is so little food media that manages to do that for parents.”
The Cool Mom Picks Network, which includes Cool Mom Picks, Cool Mom Tech, and now, Cool Mom Eats, has definitely expanded since its 2006 launch.
[gravityform id=”13″ title=”false” description=”false” ajax=”true”]
“It started as a blog and grew into something more because I think parents really wanted an honest assessment from a parent’s point of view of products that were out there,” Billis says.
One primary feature of Cool Mom Eats is what Billis calls a “360-degree perspective” that differentiates the site from its competitors.
“One of the things I have been looking for in hiring writers for Cool Mom Eats are moms who are really feeding kids,” Billis says. “We have writers—some live in the South, some don’t live near Whole Foods—[and] everybody is working on a different budget with kids of different ages, so we get a real 360-degree perspective,” she explains.
Another noteworthy feature of Cool Mom Eats, which Billis hopes will be a one-stop shop for a parent’s food needs, is recipe curation.
“First and foremost, we’re curating recipes that will be helpful with a particular focus on easy dinners, school lunches and easy make-ahead breakfasts,” Billis says. “You know when we have those seasonal moments, we really focus in on them. Like Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, so you can really rely on us as place where you can find original recipes.”
“How to Make Compound Butter”—a featured recipe on the website—is a good example of Billis’ curatorial approach. Although making your own flavored butter may sound like a complicated undertaking, Billis shows readers how it’s actually very doable. “It is an ‘elevated’ cooking technique that actually only takes 10 minutes, that makes a difference and totally becomes a shortcut. Those are the kinds of gems I love unearthing for our readers, because it really can make a difference in their cooking without much effort.”
This desire to help busy home cooks is also evident in Billis’ debut cookbook. Make It Easy—which grew out of Billis’ consulting practice and years of writing about food for parents—aims to fulfill its title: To make home cooking easy for cooks of any level.
In working one-on-one with parents—to develop their foundational cooking skills and strategies for dealing with feeding challenges, such as picky eating—Billis realized that parents needed less judgment and more support in getting food on the table.
“Parents don’t need another book of recipes,” Billis says. “They need something more than that. And this is what I learned: They need (a) someone to not judge them, and (b) they need help putting recipes together to actually make meals. You want to make a whole meal from a single book or a single source.”
This desire to create a single source for busy parents led to one of Make It Easy’s coolest features: The “mix and match” element.
“There are 120 recipes,” Billis says, “but each recipe comes with a list—you can mix and match them all together to make a number of meals.”
Building the confidence of budding (or developing) cooks—also important to Billis—led to the creation of “8 Easy Things Every Cook Should Know How to Make Well,” a section of the cookbook dedicated to building not only your repertoire, but also your confidence. “There are a handful of things, if we can make part of a parent’s repertoire and they do it well, then suddenly, your confidence goes up,” she explains.
As is the case with much of Billis’ work, her advice throughout Make It Easy has been thoroughly tested. Her 10-minute rule for meal planning is no exception. Ten minutes to create a meal plan for an entire week may seem unrealistic, but according to Billis, it is completely doable. “This is straight from working with parents,” Billis says. “I am talking about parents who didn’t scratch cook…moms who spend so much time cooking, ‘I-can’t-do-this’ New York City moms who are ordering in all the time.”
As a consultant, Billis kept reducing the amount of time she would ask clients to create a meal plan and ultimately found that parents could do it in ten minutes. “If someone is going to meal plan,” Billis says, “[the time restriction] works. [It] forces you to look at only one resource, instead of getting lost hopping around the internet, getting lost in a thousand recipes you’ll never make. It keeps you focused.”
Although Make It Easy is definitely geared towards busy parents who want to build on their home cooking skills, Billis notes that it can be a resource for cooks of all levels. “If you are a scratch cook or you are interested in cooking more from scratch,” she says, “I think [the book] will help you in that it will give you more simple recipes to start doing that more frequently.”
To learn more about Stacie Billis, visit onehungrymama.com & eats.coolmompicks.com!
