Chris Phillips

My office has witnessed The Case of the Missing Spaghetti, The Hidden Brown Rice, and most recently A Summertime Spring Roll Mystery. Clearly there’s an office lunch thief among us. And while I have my suspicions, I’ll leave cracking The Case of the Office Refrigerator to the professional sleuths. Instead, with apologies to Nancy Drew, let’s focus on six proactive ways to make sure your lunch meets the right mouth. When I bring lunch from home, I eat right at noon.

Buddy, you’re never going to get another decent night of sleep again! My husband and I heard this line several times a day in the months leading up to our son’s birth. Now that he’s here, people continue to inquire almost daily about the sleeping habits of our new little family. I implore you: Stop asking new dads about how much sleep they are getting. If dad or baby aren’t sleeping well, they don’t want to talk about it more than they already are.

Have you heard about the brownies made with carrots and spinach (PDF recipe)? The new cookbook Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld, wife of comedian and sitcom star Jerry Seinfeld, shares advice on how to hide vegetables so kids will eat them. There’s recipes for pureed cauliflower in mac and cheese and kale in spaghetti and meatballs.

Fresh Direct will stop using cardboard delivery boxes. They’ll use recyclable totes and bags instead. Seems like a big improvement, right?Bummer is that Fresh Direct will take up to three years to make the change. “Switching our systems will involve a complex re-engineering process,” Fresh Direct explained in an email they sent to customers yesterday.

Rachael Ray’s garbage bowl flies as a concept: put a bowl on your counter and drop peels and meat trimmings into it as you cook. This tip frm the Queen of Quick saves trips to the garbage can and keeps kitchen floors and counters cleaner. But do cooks really need a Rachael Ray branded melamine Garbage Bowl to get the job done? Wouldn’t a compost pail or a regular bowl be a better solution?

We cut into a lime with the best intentions. We’ll squeeze half the lime over chicken tacos one night. Then, we’ll stick the left over lime half in the fridge with plans to use the rest in gin and tonics the next night. The problem is that we often forget these little dribs and drabs. They sit in a forgotten corner of the fridge until they go bad. Enter Tupperware’s Forget Me Not.

Heads or tails Kitchen reader Josie-o emailed in to ask us for drinkware storage advice … and we’re passing her question along to see if we can find any consensus on this. “Just one of those things I’ve always wondered about. I was raised with ‘right side up’ yet curious when friends’ kitchens had their glasses upside down,” Josie-o said.

“One whose cabinets and refrigerator doors are filled with an excess of food seasonings . . . a person affected by a mania for condiments.”That’s a condimaniac according to the spring issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. You know the type: a fridge bulging with three kinds of capers, a rainbow of olives, plus a collection of aging pestos, ketchups, and tapanades.

Easy peas-y Frozen peas will be a staple of our shopping cart for a few more weeks, until the fresh local vegetables hit the markets.This week we tested six different kinds of frozen peas from four different stores and set to work systematically tasting them all.Going into it, we wondered if Birds Eye easy-to-find peas packed in silver paper (Key Foods, $1.29, 10 oz.) could win. We had great expectations for the fancy Bonduelle extra fine petite peas imported from France (Fairway, $2.

A good jack-of-all-trades grocery store is vital. While Manhattan’s Westside Market is not as elegant as some stores or as cheap as others, consider Westside Market as an everyday efficient way to make meals happen.A one-stop-shop in a store like the Westside Market also gives cooks the opportunity to spend less time shopping and more time in the kitchen (or napping!).

Another grungy New York City icon is gone. Western Beef supermarket recently moved from West 14th Street to West 16th Street and lost its personality in the process.In its old location, Western Beef was sandwiched between a bottle service nightclub and a stylish Belgian bistro. With its orange signs and sidewalk carts overflowing with discount corn chips, the store was the neighborhood eccentric. The new store is sadly much like any other faceless chain supermarket.

Schaller and Weber is a well-respected butcher, but the shop is also an opportunity to experience the Christmas season in a new way.They sell chestnuts, Christmas cookies, foil wrapped chocolate Santas in many sizes, and marzipan shaped into fruits and even some marzipan pigs.Schaller and Weber offers the largest variety of Lindt chocolates I’ve ever seen.

The butchers at A&S Pork Store want their customers to know they are “real butchers.” Unlike the meat departments in supermarkets and gourmet stores, these experienced guys know what they sell. If you have a special request, they might be able to butcher it while you wait, or you might have to place a special order and wait until tomorrow. They deliver in the neighborhood.

Amy is clearing out her kitchen on the Upper East Side. She’s posting a variety of brand-name kitchen items here including a white Williams-Sonoma corner cabinet, a Bodum electric grill and a Moulinex Julienne Machine.My pick is her collection of vintage hammered aluminum cookware. My great-grandmother cooked with pots like these. Take look at her post here.And don’t forget to post your own listings at The Kitchen’s classifieds by clicking the yellow button to the right.