Chatelaine

There are many topics best avoided for their propensity to inspire awkwardness, and many are related to money. Here's what to do when they come up.

Natrel now offers lactose-free 35% whipping cream and 10% coffee cream in addition to their lactose-free milk products.

I’m still traumatized by garage sales from when I was a child and my parents would make us help out with their garage sales. I’d be like, “You can have that for five cents!” And my Dad would be like, “What are you doing? That’s worth at least $2.00!” Plus, the lugging the stuff out and then lugging it back in. It’s no fun to host a garage sale. But, now, it turns out my new favorite pastime on weekends is to hit garage sales. This is because my daughter loves them. So, yes, I’m now one of those people — just driving my daughter around and she’ll suddenly screech, “Stop! A garage sale!” So we’ll stop.

Oh, babies. What won’t we do to have them? And thanks to breakthroughs in fertility treatments more and more women are able to have children in ways never dreamed possible. But with endless possibilities come ethical concerns too. If we can do almost anything to get what we want, where do we draw the line, if at all?

We can’t stop the clock, but it’s possible that by choosing the right foods in our diets, we can slow it down a little. The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer Cookbook features meals that attack what the authors refer to as the “Four Horsemen of Aging”: oxidative damage, inflammation, glycation and stress. When we choose meals that prevent these effects in our bodies, we can protect ourselves from getting old before our time.

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, of reality TV Jersey Shore infamy, is crediting some recent weight loss to taking a product called Zantrex-3. The questions that come to mind are: What is Zantrex-3, does it work, and should you take it?

Three easy ways to clean your mushrooms that won't ruin their shape and texture.

I've been writing about training for a triathlon in fairly broad terms, but today, let's get down to the nitty-gritty details. How much swimming, cycling, and running must one do before signing up to complete a triathlon? Realistically, how much is enough?

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be sex symbols. The wardrobe is skimpy, the job security tenuous, and worst of all, you have to self-lobotomize in order to work with men who are slightly less discerning than the sweat from Arnold Schwarznegger's pleistocene brow. Paging Transformers director Michael Bay and actor Shia LeBoeuf.

Summer is by far my favourite time of year. But as the temperature hovers around 30°C and the humidity skyrockets, my locks begin to look less-than-beach-worthy. I arrived at Toronto’s L’Oreal Academy (on one of the hottest days of the year so far) and my hair was in a weird state of limbo...

Over at The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin recently posted about a resolution of hers — "Take a Field Trip" — where she describes a recent visit to a perfumerie in New York to seek out good smells and cultivate some happy-making fragrances. It's a little touch that can make life a little happier, and it's got me thinking about how making (and, ideally, sticking to) some resolutions isn't just for January 1. Life in the spring and summer feels so different to me than it does in the fall and winter, so it's only fitting that I should have a different set of ambitions and projects.

In this regular feature, Virginie Martocq, finds solutions to all your decorating quandaries.