No fuss meal plans for low-stress, budget-friendly family menus to be enjoyed from February to April. Welcome to the 7-Day Menu Planner. Mid-Winter menus start with Valentine’s Day when a bit of romance dominates the menu and ends with Easter, a special time to gather the family together. In between, there are five more weeks of easy menus, including a photo almost every week along with a shopping list for every day. Planning menus will change your life (for the better) forever. You won’t have that miserable feeling as you stand in front of your open refrigerator and wonder “what’s for dinner?” To solve the dinner-dilemma, follow the menus, use the shopping list, and cook! Menu planning is not brain surgery or rocket science. All you need is a desire to eat healthier, save money, reduce stress and enjoy delicious meals with your family. You will also be the powerful master menu-planner for your household. Most of us don’t really hate to cook, we hate to plan what to cook. Just follow along with the easy menus and you’re on your way.

Sharing your kitchen concoctions on your personal food blog has never been as popular as it is right now, but if you've ever had trouble getting your tasty temptations to look like pretty plates on camera, you know how difficult it can be to take amazing pictures of food. Matt Armendariz, of Mattbites food blog fame, shares his experiences and best practices for creating wonderful food photos in Focus On Food Photography for Bloggers. Written specifically for you the blogger, Matt discusses the ins and outs of equipment, lighting, composition, propping, sparking your inspiration, and getting creative, all with what you have on hand at home! Learn how to avoid common pitfalls with foods that are notoriously camera shy, how to successfully snap your dinner at a restaurant as well as on your kitchen table, and how to style your food with what you have in your cupboards. He also includes advice on post-processing, posting, and protecting your prized images. As well as on his blog, Matt's photography has been featured in The Skinny Bitch Cookbook, on Martha Stewart, Paula Deen's Best Dishes, and Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen, along with numerous food magazines and newspapers. Let this seasoned blogger give your food photography the boost it needs to really make your readers salivate!

The office can be a dangerous place. The same old daily routine has a tendency to reduce any inspiration for fun or imagination into tedious cubicles and spreadsheets. This is precisely the situation in which Doug Savage found himself. His creativity waning away under fluorescent lights of his office job, he finally discovered his own personal antidote: doodling some cheeky chickens on yellow sticky notes. He began uploading these drawings to his Savage Chickens blog in 2005, and over 18,000 cartoons later, his chickens are as clever—and absurd—as ever. The Savage Chickens must too contend with their mundane office environment, but with a little help from their favorite colleagues and friends, it’s not difficult for them to find diversions (read: trouble). From pirates and time-travelers to Middle Earth and M.C. Hammer, from the most sinister Happy Bear you’ll ever meet to Marketing Chicken who is always attached to his martini, the Chickens’ puns and wordplay will constantly thwart your expectations in surprising and humorous ways. This e-book original collection is not just an assortment of Savage’s very best cartoons, but his very very best cartoons, composed of the wittiest, most memorable drawings to date. Bring it along on your commute to work, and suddenly the office might not seem like the death of amusement after all.

An exquisite and profound tale for fans of Anne Tyler and Anna Quindlen Glowingly reviewed everywhere from O, The Oprah Magazine and Good Housekeeping to sites across the blogosphere, Lydia’s Party sparks “a-ha” moments and heartfelt conversations about friendship, regrets, and ambitions. Margaret Hawkins’s earlier books, all published by small presses, have gained her a devoted following, but this gem of a novel will introduce her to the wider audience she deserves. Lydia is hosting her “Bleak Midwinter Bash,” a late Christmas party that has become an annual tradition. Her guests—six friends who bonded twenty years ago over art, dogs, and their budding careers and romances—think they know everything about one another, but tonight Lydia prepares to shock them with a devastating announcement.

When Americans think of brunch, they typically think of Sunday mornings swelling into early afternoons; mimosas and bloody Marys; eggs Benedict and coffee cake; bacon and bagels; family and friends. This book presents a modern history of brunch not only as a meal, but also as a cultural experience. Relying on diverse sources, from historic cookbooks to Twitter and television, Brunch: A History is a global and social history of the meal including brunch in the United States, Western Europe, South Asia and the Middle-East. Brunch takes us on a tour of a modern meal around the world. While brunch has become a modern meal of leisure, its history is far from restful; this meal’s past is both lively and fraught with tension. Here, Farha Ternikar explores the gendered and class-based conflicts around this meal, and provides readers with an enlightening glimpse into the dining rooms, verandas, and kitchens where brunches were prepared, served, and enjoyed.

The world of sports is tough, competitive, and often hysterical. Steve Moore highlights the humor of sports and creates moments of absurdity in his comic strip In the Bleachers. In this e-book original compilation, the sport of fishing becomes less of a relaxing day on the water, and more a battle of wits between fish and unsuspecting fishermen. The comic wit of these shrewd fish while they attempt to bait their human predators accompanies the grisly and ironic illustrations that Steve Moore is known for. This latest compilation of In the Bleachers features Steve Moore’s unique comedic style that has propelled his career from journalism to TV/feature film animation. He has had huge success in the industry with two animated feature films and 26 animated shorts for ESPN. Moore’s success has not diminished his devotion to his comic strip as he continues to draw from his experience to give each of his comics a fresh and hilarious take on sports.

In preparing a book of etiquette for ladies, I would lay down as the first rule, "Do unto others as you would others should do to you." You can never be rude if you bear the rule always in mind, for what lady likes to be treated rudely? True Christian politeness will always be the result of an unselfish regard for the feelings of others, and though you may err in the ceremonious points of etiquette, you will never be impolite. Politeness, founded upon such a rule, becomes the expression, in graceful manner, of social virtues. The spirit of politeness consists in a certain attention to forms and ceremonies, which are meant both to please others and ourselves, and to make others pleased with us; a still clearer definition may be given by saying that politeness is goodness of heart put into daily practice; there can be no _true_ politeness without kindness, purity, singleness of heart, and sensibility.