Mix It Up!

Homemade Mixes Save Time, Money and Offer a Healthy Alternative to Store-bought Brands

By Suzy Feine

Quick, check your pantry! There may be unknown additives and preservatives lurking about. Hiding in that cake mix or processed cookie dough are things you can barely pronounce. Sneaking around your freezer are frozen, processed meats containing ingredients, such as sodium, well above the recommended daily allowances. While you may not feel comfortable feeding your family such additives, making every meal from scratch is a task that's hard to digest.

It's time to think outside that "cake mix" box and mix things up! Cooking from scratch has never been easier, thanks to a collection of mix recipes designed to offer home-cooked meals from the convenience of a mix.

Karine Eliason, Nevada Harward and Madeline Westover, authors of Make-A-Mix (Fisher Books, 1995), first created their homemade mix recipes during a weekly television show segment on ways to spend quality time with family. "Each week we would suggest recipes, projects and lessons that could enrich family life," Eliason says. "One of the segments we did was on teaching children to cook. We offered the audience an assortment of 10 recipes for mixes. The viewers responded in an amazing way – we had more requests for those recipes than for any [other] segment."

After that show, Eliason, Harward and Westover were contacted by a book publisher. The overwhelming response to their mix recipes led to the book Make-A-Mix, which sold over one million copies and features 67 easy, do-it-yourself mix recipes.

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