🥔 Food People, Parent Picks: Ashley's Favorite Things
The founder of Love & Cookies on butter, parchment paper, cast-iron skillets, and the snacks she keeps in her car for everyone’s sanity.
Food People, Parent Picks: we ask our favorite chefs, food writers, and industry insiders who we interview in our Order Up! Series to share the products, books, and bites they can’t live without.
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Earlier this week we talked to Ashley Cameron, the former labor and delivery nurse and mom of three behind Love & Cookies, about growing up on her family’s pecan farm in New Mexico, baking with her son Charlie through his Kawasaki disease recovery, and how those long afternoons in the kitchen turned into a clean-label, butter-based cookie company. You can revisit that interview right here.
Today we’re getting practical. Ashley shared the pantry staples that anchor her chaotic-but-fed weeknights, the kitchen tool she’ll one day pass down to her kids, the snacks that keep three active kids out of meltdown territory, and the one ingredient swap she swears by for better cookies. Quick, specific, and immediately useful — the way good notes from another mom always are.
Three pantry or fridge staples you always keep on hand?
Butter, always. In the pantry, protein bars — my kids thrive when there’s protein on hand. In the fridge, sliced cucumbers, grapes, strawberries, and a container of hummus. That’s the standard “throw it in the car and feed everybody” combo.
Your go-to weeknight dinner?
Grilled chicken, broccoli, and rice with some kind of teriyaki or sweet chili sauce on top. We rotate through it two to three nights a week. Hands-down staple.
One store-bought item you always grab for busy nights?
I cook from scratch a lot, so this is genuinely hard. But — Trader Joe’s frozen pizzas. Throw it in the oven, it’s done, everybody’s happy. That’s the emergency play.
Kitchen appliance or tool you’d replace immediately if it broke?
My cast-iron skillet. It cooks everything. It’s perfectly seasoned. Dish soap is not allowed near it. It’s on the list of things I want to one day pass down to one of my kids.
If a parent wants to start baking with their kid for the first time and not lose their mind, what should they make?
Chocolate chip cookies. Always a good place to start. Two tips: slightly under-bake them — don’t over-bake — and follow the recipe exactly the first time. You can get cute on round two. If you don’t know how it’s supposed to turn out, you won’t know what went wrong.
Of all the Love & Cookies flavors, which one is your current favorite — and which one do your kids fight over?
My current favorite is our new lemon cookie. So good. But my kids are obsessed with our pumpkin chocolate cookie, our holiday flavor — they will literally fight over them. At home I make a cream cheese frosting to put on top, and it turns into a whole thing.
What snack do you keep in your bag or your car for the meltdown moments?
Chomps beef sticks for the hangry-and-grumpy emergencies. For when they’re being good, I keep a stash of dye-free Giggles — the little fruit snacks with the fun facts on them. My youngest gets dragged to all the big-kid stuff, so when he’s being exceptionally patient, he gets a pack of Giggles. (Don’t tell on me.)
Favorite cookbook for dinner inspiration?
A few. The fun one is my grandmother’s OG Betty Crocker cookbook — published in 1961. I love pulling it out to see how far we’ve come. For everyday cooking, I love The Defined Dish [Bookshop, Amazon] and What’s Gaby Cooking [Bookshop, Amazon]. Both have great stuff.
Baking ingredient worth splurging on?
The inclusion. That’s baker-speak for whatever you’re mixing in — the chocolate chips, the dried fruit, whatever it is. That’s the flavor people taste in the final cookie. Splurge on really good chocolate. And on butter. Quality of butter and quality of inclusion are where you’ll feel the difference.
Your go-to school-morning breakfast?
Credit where it’s due — my husband is the breakfast guru. The two staples are sausage and egg breakfast tacos, which we make almost every morning (very Texas of us, I know), and gluten-free pancakes that I sneak protein powder into. If you’ve got a 12-year-old boy hitting a growth spurt, you understand. You have to put protein in everything or he’ll eat you out of the house.
Your family’s comfort meal when someone is sick or sad?
The Defined Dish’s Herbed Healing Chicken Soup [Bookshop, Amazon]. Hands down. The kids ask for it by name. I’ve made a few small tweaks for the family’s preferences, but that’s the comfort meal in our house.
A kitchen item that was a splurge but earned its place?
My cast-iron skillet, again. A really good, high-quality cast-iron skillet is expensive — but it lives in the same spot, gets cleaned the same way every time, and one day, one of my kids will inherit it.
One affordable tool or ingredient swap for parents getting into baking with their kids?
Skip the silicone baking mats — use unbleached parchment paper. This might sound nitpicky, but those silicone mats are full of microplastics, and high heat is not a great mix with that. Unbleached parchment paper goes on every baking sheet I use. Roll it up, throw it away, and your pans don’t stick.
And on tools: I only cook with wooden spoons or metal spatulas. I don’t keep silicone or rubber spatulas in my kitchen.