Website/Blog Review: My Favorite Things

My Favorite Things is a blog done by my friend Bridgette that is simply ratings of her favorite things related to child care and children. There are lots of helpful food-related products reviewed and more are coming all the time. Check it out!

Website/Blog Review: $5 Dinners

I thought it would be fun to showcase some of the other blogs I look at that are about food. This is my newest discovery (and the first I'll showcase): $5 Dinners. Erin, the blogger, has young kids that seem to be about the ages of my own children, so her meals are very kid-friendly. She includes simple recipes and breaks down the cost per item. Check it out!

Website Review: Kitchen Parade

Kitchen Parade is a fun new recipe website I just discovered. It has a blog associated with it that is all about eating vegetables, and it has scores of searchable recipes. One of the best features is that you can search for seasonal recipes--this will help you make the most of farmer's markets, what might be on sale that week in the grocery, and what you might be growing in your own garden. It's also a great place to find recipes for any given vegetable or fruit. There's a Weight Watchers link on there for some WW friendly recipes, as well as various healthy eating tips. The producers live in the north/Canada region of North America, so their growing seasons will be a bit behind those of us who live in the heat-drenched south. Check it out for veggie inspiration. Time to try something new!

Website Review: Allrecipes.com

If you haven't checked out allrecipes.com, what are you waiting for? This, to me, is the premiere recipe search database. Recipes are submitted by ordinary cooks and then are rated by cooks all over the world; when I say "rated," I don't just mean a few people gave some recipe 5 stars. Some recipes, like our all-time favorite Butternut Squash Soup, have received an average of 4.5 stars from 587 people/cooks!!! Many other websites have jumped on the bandwagon, but allrecipes still seems to be number 1.

Allrecipes is very easy to use, is free, and provides the option to customize your own "recipe box" (including the addition of "personal recipes"). It also provides the ability to create a shopping list for any particular recipes (and allows you to add further ingredients for general use); it provides a built-in converter if you need more or less servings than a given recipe lists; it provides detailed nutrition information for most recipes; it provides the ability to list your favorites as well as create "meal ideas" for recipes.

The search feature allows you to browse in a general category or search for specific ingredients/cuisines/courses. This is a nice feature for those of us who often search for recipes which will help us use up random leftover ingredients.

In some ways, allrecipes has too many choices for someone like me. I could spend all day looking up random recipes and ideas, reading all the reviews, and then deliberating over which variation I will end up making. But it is an invaluable tool--allowing a "More-with-Less" attitude with the internet since you can customize the number of servings and/or use up your ingredients so as to not waste food. It's also provided us with some definite family favorites that we make repeatedly. Check out Catherine's Spicy Chicken Soup, After-Thanksgiving Turkey Soup, Asian Coleslaw, and Refried Beans without the Refry for some great food.

Website Review: Mealtime.org

Mealtime.org is a great resource for busy cooks. It's got connections to the Canned Food Alliance and the Food Pyramid, so you'll find a nice combination of recipes and tips that use convenience products with nutrition in mind. In fact, their slogan is, "Canned food--the easy way to eat right." Granted, canned foods are often higher in sodium than made from scratch, but they certainly help out on busy nights! Mealtime.org has a recipe collection, tips for eating with kids/different ages, ideas for holidays and different ethnic meals, and a customizable "recipe box." We're trying the 3-Cheese Chicken Florentine this week, so we'll let you know how it goes!

Website Review: The Food Pyramid

The Food Pyramid is EVERYWHERE these days: on nutrition labels, on bags of raisins, in fast food restaurants,.... It took me a long time to get over the Four Food Groups I was taught in school. Then, I became an advocate of such diets as the South Beach Diet (not a low-carb diet, per se, but a modified carb diet) and thought the Food Pyramid encouraged way too many carbs. Finally, I decided to check it out. You know what I discovered? It's a GREAT tool for anyone wanting to balance their diet, lose weight, keep track of what they eat, or just find out what a serving size really is. And, it's free!

When you visit the My Pyramid site, you will find all sorts of tools to help you live a healthier life. There are separate areas for pregnant women and children, completely customizable eating plans, specific information on caloric needs for given ages/gender/activity level (check the My Pyramid Plan and My Pyramid Tracker), great charts on serving sizes (check Inside the Pyramid and click on the category you're interested in), activity planners, and even a new menu planner feature. It's pretty neat. I found out that, given my need to lose a wee bit of weight (those last few baby pounds), that I should be eating 5-6 servings of grain a day. The general pyramid says 6-11 or something like that, so I'm on the low end. Know what a serving of grain is? 1 piece of bread. Half a cup of cooked rice or oatmeal... in other words, not that much. What area was I most in need of increasing? Vegetables. Go figure. Isn't that always the case?!

I encourage you to check the website out--even just once--and survey its tools. Sure, it's a government website, so if you're leary of the "establishment," you might not take this all seriously. But, on the other hand, your tax dollars are paying for just such websites, and you might as well take advantage of it!

Eating Cheap

Check out the Eats on the Cheap article from My Recipes. It is a slideshow of different recipes and some good tips on how to keep some costs low/budget friendly when cooking meals.

Website and Cookbook Review: Saving Dinner

Saving Dinner: The Menus, Recipes, and Shopping Lists to Bring Your Family Back to the Table by Leanne Ely

www.savingdinner.com and Saving Dinner by Leanne Ely have a mission worth supporting: bringing families back to the dinner table. Ely uses her nutrition and cooking training to create family friendly entrees and then offers side dish suggestions. In my experience, her recipes are quite healthy, generally budget friendly, usually kid-friendly, and easy to prepare. While I haven't like everything I've tried (isn't that true for most cookbooks?!), the recipes are very workable for general weeknight fare. Typically, the recipes use a nice variety of store bought time-savers (such as spaghetti sauce, canned beans, frozen foods) along with a healthy dose of fresh ingredients. I prefer her book to her website menus, partly because I can then shop ahead and repeat the meals I really enjoyed. You can subscribe on the website for a variety of menus that are then emailed to you weekly; menu types include low-carb, regular/like the book, frugal, etc. Each menu includes a shopping list, serving suggestions for side dishes (and these are beautifully simple--steamed broccoli, baked sweet potatoes, etc.), and offers options for numbers of servings (2, 4, or 6). The book provides similar menus, but all entrees are for 6 servings. Shopping lists are even available for the book online--simply select your week and print! This system really helped me get through the first year of my twins' lives because it helped simplify the dinner routine immensely. In addition, because we were religious about portion control--we lost weight! Each week, both the website menus and the cookbook, offers a variety of dishes: every week includes a fish recipe, every week includes a crockpot meal (there's even an entire crockpot menu for online subscribers), weekly summer menus include an entree salad, weekly fall/winter menus include a soup, every week includes a vegetarian meal.... Ely's created the kind of system I wish I'd had time to create with my own recipes. She's planned the week, filled it with healthy and tasty options, and even given you the shopping list.

Toddler Serving Sizes (Wholesome Toddler Food.com)

Toddlers eat weird stuff in weird amounts at weird times of the day. So, how do you, as the wise parent who desires your toddler to eat healthily, make sure he or she is getting enough of the right stuff and not too much of the wrong stuff? Check out Wholesome Toddler Food for a start. This website is packed with all kinds of information and recipes geared specifically to toddlers. One very helpful page outlines some serving sizes/amounts that might surprise you! For instance, a good guideline for a toddler serving is 1 tablespoon per age. In other words, my 2 year old should eat 2 tablespoons of sweet potato for it to "count" as a serving. Our pediatrician also told us to balance her diet over the week instead of each day. What a help! That means that the 3 serving equivalent amount of sweet potato she downed the other night can "count" for a couple of days, a blessing since she'll decide she doesn't like the vegetable the next night. So, don't sweat it. Keep offering those veggies, fruits, low-fat dairy, whole grains, and lean sources of protein like you do the rest of your family. Your toddler will pick and choose, but generally will come away with the right number of servings of the right foods if the choices are there.