HEALTHY WHITE

Kamis, 03 Juli 2008

CHG Favorites of the Week

Hey everyone – before we get to today’s favorites, just wanted to link to three older CHG articles that could help out with the weekend’s party planning:

Cheap Healthy Party Food

Picky, Picky: Frugal Healthy Menu Ideas for a Fussy Crowd

Classy Parties on the Cheap: Baby Showers, Barbecues, and Beyond

Look out for a few more links later today from Veggie Might, too. We'll break for the weekend after that, so have a lovely 4th!

Food Blog of the Week
Love Food Hate Waste
LFHW isn’t so much a blog as an entire site devoted to making meals from what’s already hanging around your kitchen. Based in the UK (note the Marmite), its pages are FILLED TO THE BRIM with simple, valuable cooking information presented in clean, fun way. Seriously, you’ll kill at least 15 minutes flipping through the graphics. Good times.

Food Comedy of the Week
George Carlin on Food
Classic Carlin from Carnegie Hall in the early '80s. It’s full of his signature wordplay, and about as PG-13 as he ever got. Still dang funny, though.

Food Organization of the Week
Louie’s Kids
Tying in to last week’s article on overweight kids, Louie’s Kids “is a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization that raises funds to help treat childhood obesity … [it] works to find the best treatment options to meet the needs of each child … Founded in 2001 in Alexandria, Virginia and operated today out of Charleston, South Carolina, Louie's Kids serves economically disadvantaged kids nationwide.”

Food Quote of the Week
“I had teeth that stuck out so far, I used to eat other kids' candy bars by accident.” – Rita Rudner

Untried Cheap, Healthy Recipe of the Week
Rhubarb Compote at Culinate
A simple recipe for a tricky vegetable. Man, that’s beautiful.

Food Video of the Week
“Milk and Honey” by Beck
Stellar live performance of Midnite Vultures’ eighth track, complete with trippy lighting tricks that make Mr. Hanson look like a member of Jefferson Airplane. Fun-kay.

Totally Unrelated Extra Special Bonus of the Week
Best Week Ever's blog
For the most part, the pop culture blogosphere is a weird, scary place where baby bumps and two-headed beasts named Brangelina and Anistayer litter front pages like so much paparazzi-strewn confetti. Then, there’s Best Week Ever. SO creative and SO well written, it avoids the ignoble trappings of the TMZ/Perez Hilton/“OMG! Katieee Holmez iz a ROBUT!!!” crew without ever batting a rainbow-hued eyelash. Even better, it occasionally posts painstakingly-researched features like 50 Animals Squashed Against Glass. Just relax and go with it, yo.

(Photos courtesy of chromasia and Best Week Ever.)

CHG Year 2: A Feedback Request

It’s been a year since Cheap Healthy Good officially launched, and sweet readers, I have a question: how can this blog be better?

See, we’ll be making a bunch of changes around here in the coming months, and your views, wants, needs, desires, and smartass comments about kale are most definitely needed. So, if you have a second, I’d love to read your opinions on the following:

What topics would you like to see covered?

Which articles do you never, ever want to see again?

Are there foods you want more of?

What kind of links do you prefer?

What design improvements would you make?

If there’s a single change you could make to CHG, and decreasing the frequency of Office references isn’t an option, what would it be?

I really value your input, and will to do my best to meet your needs while still maintaining the blog’s tone, style, and mission. Speaking of, on my end, I promise the following:

A new design. While Blogger’s been dang skippy for hosting purposes, there’s a real-live website in the works, with an actual logo and nifty little tabs. Oh! And fresh colors, too. Because I am the girliest girl to ever girl the girl, choosing those will be my favorite part.

Better pictures. It’s true! No longer will you ask yourself, “Is that a plum or a rock?” or “Was she being strangled by the mob when she took that photo?” Moving forward, I hereby pledge to read my camera’s manual, so CHG recipes don’t appear to have been prepared in the Bat Cave. Barring that, I will at least try different angles.

A focus on food. There are so many tangential issues related to cheap, healthy cooking that the blog’s kind of gotten away from its central theme a bit. In the future, Wednesday articles will have more of a culinary bent, though there’ll still be the occasional 50 MOST AWESOME QUOTES ABOUT KUMQUATS post.

More feedback. My commenting blows. I know it. Henceforth, I’ll respond to readers in a timely, well thought-out fashion with the unassailable wit, wisdom, and fart jokes my parents have semi-proudly come to expect from their grown children.

And that’s it. Bring it on, everybody!

Selasa, 01 Juli 2008

Tuesday Megalinks

Almost Fit: 20 Tactics to Kill the Fast Food Habit
Three more strategies:
1) Watch Super-Size Me
2) Read Fast Food Nation
3) Work for McDonald’s your sophomore year of college, an experience which will kill any and all urges to order a cheeseburger combo ever again.
(Thanks to Get Fit Slowly for the link.)

Best Week Ever: Heinz Pulls Mayonnaise Ad Over Gay Kiss Furor, Yet Leaves Mayonnaise, Which is Gross, on Market
BWE addresses the severe dearth of good sense that allows Hellman’s to remain on shelves while others must suffer. VIVA LA REVOLUCION!

Chow: Kids Gone Wild - How should restaurants handle misbehaving children?
As friends reproduce with ever-growing frequency (last year around this time I had 11 pregnant buds), I’m a little more sensitive to folks with younger kids. The parents rarely get to go out in the first place, so I’m not gonna raise a fuss over a flying French fry. On the other hand, a modicum of décor should be expected. If your kid can’t behave even marginally well, they might not belong in a restaurant setting yet.

Consumerist: 100 Calorie Packs Make You Fat
Well, we kind of knew this, but it doesn’t make it any funner to hear.

Consumerist: Eight Common Foodborne Illnesses and Their Symptoms
Botulism is a terrible, terrible sickness, and I pity anyone who has the misfortune to catch it. That said? It’s one of the funniest words on Earth, not least because you can make it into “buttulism” (meaning: stankbum). Whee! I’m five.

Culinate: Healthy Cookbooks – Useful books both new and old
Nice! Post of the week right here, from the ever-useful Culinate. They’ve been concentrating a lot on rice, wheat, and quinoa lately, so the books have a slight grainy focus. And yes, I wrote that whole sentence for a lame “grainy focus” gag. Sorry.

Dooce: Revelations
Ehhh … so Dooce’s cleanse didn’t go so well.

Frugal Upstate: Frugal Food Part 4 – Ground Meat
Jenn’s ongoing series hits the wide world of chopped beef this week. Be sure to check into her prior installments on eggs, tuna, and beans for lots of great, inexpensive meal suggestions.

Get Rich Slowly: My Mid-Year Financial Checkup: I Am Spending Too Much on Food
Brave, brave JD breaks down his going-out-to-eat expenditures, and the results aren’t pretty. Read and sympathize.

Get Rich Slowly: Saving at the Supermarket: 15 Great Grocery Shopping Tips
Um … I wish I wrote this?

Jezebel: Is the Obesity Epidemic Messing With Kids’ Minds?
Oh wow, of course. With all these conflicting messages about weight (Don’t be too fat! Don’t be too thin!), how are kids supposed to know what’s what? And that goes doubly for teenage girls.

The Kitchn: Shopping for a New Kitchen – What’s Important?
If this were titled “Shopping for a New Kitchen in New York – What’s Important?” the answers would be:
A) Walls
B) Shelf
C) Floor
D) Lack of wildlife
E) Colder-than-room-temperature box in which to store goods

F) Mechanism with which to warm said goods
G) Maybe a window

New York Times: The Best Foods You Aren’t Eating
Beets! Blueberries! (Battlestar Galactica!) This list of seldom-sought-out groceries is a handy guide next for your next shopping trip, when you can’t decide between romaine and something a little more daring.

New York Times: Food-Shopping Tips Direct From the Store Manager
Pair this with Get Rich Slowly’s article, and you’ll never need to read another grocery shopping-themed blog post again. (Um … except all the ones here. You’ll need to read those.) (…D’oh!)

Newsweek: Let’s Shoot the Speculators!
Who are the mysterious financial dudes supposedly driving up food prices? Financial columnist Robert J. Samuelson explains.

Philadelphia Inquirer: I do … want that mixer
Soon-to-be-married folks! Heed the wise words of this newspaper! It’s a fantastic cheat sheet detailing what to include on your registry. Cutting board? Yes! Mango pitter? No! (Thanks to Slashfood for the link.)

Serious Eats: Cheap Local, Sustainable, and Organic Food: Is It Out There?
SE’s head honcho/resident foodie-on-a-diet lists simple ways to buy quality chow as inexpensively as possible. His third tip can not be emphasized enough: buy local at the peak of the season. A blueberry purchased in July is tastier, cheaper, and has less of a negative impact on the environment than one bought in December.

The Simple Dollar: The Minimalist Kitchen: What You Need (and Don’t Need) to Set Up Your First Workable Home Kitchen
Oh wow – Mark Bittman picked up TSD’s original minimalist cooking post (Which – awesome. Congratulations, Trent!), so here he expands to the kitchen. Nice.

Slashfood 8: Homemade frozen treats
Nice, brief list of gourmet-ish frozen pop recipes. (Rejected titles: Pop Culture, Pop Stars, Pops Rock, Pop in the Name of Love, Don’t Pop Believing, Pop! Or My Mom Will Shoot … okay, done now.)

Slashfood: McDonald’s is being sued by Devo
Q: Are We Not Men?
A: We are Devo! And We Do Not Appreciate Having Our Signature Upside-Down Planter Hats Placed on Happy Meal Toys!

(Photos courtesy of Ronald McHummer Sign-o-matic, Facebook Apps, Cherylspelts.com, and Mr. Wever's Blog.)

You Say it’s Your Blogday: CHG's Top Ten Recipes

WOO! We made it! A year ago today, CHG launched with a smile, a strategy, and a semi-sensical mission statement. While world wide web domination is probably a couple of years in coming, we've carved out a neat little niche in the highly competitive arena of health-and-frugality-oriented food blogging.

So, thank you to everyone – all 158,126 of you – who’ve popped in over the last 12 months. I’ve really enjoyed writing for and learning from you. Y’all are aces.

And! Thank you to the 1,551 websites, blogs, and people who’ve sent traffic this way, especially MSN Smart Spending, Get Rich Slowly, Paid Twice, Frugal Hacks, A Good American Wife, Money Saving Mom, English Major Money, Serious Eats, and Frugal Upstate. Three cheers.

Also! Thanks to Jaime and Leigh for joining up, and Rachel for subbing in while I was on vacation. I'm way grateful for your viewpoints, limeades, and kale chips, ladies.

And finally! Thanks to The Boyfriend, for eating lots of crap in between the good stuff.

Which brings us to today’s food. In celebration of the whole one-year shebang, I went back and picked out my top ten favorite meals/snacks/whatever. While each of the 105 recipes on this site has been Boyfriend-Leigh-or-Jaime-tested and Me-approved, these guys I remember as being particularly tasty. Behold their wonder! (In convenient alphabetical order.)

Baked Apples
Source: The Cook's Bible by Christopher Kimball

Essentially a crustless apple pie, this warm, Autumn-y dessert makes me yearn for colder weather.

Cheesy Eggplant Bake
Source: AllRecipes.com

Bad name. Good food.

Chicken Provencal
Source: Cook's Illustrated's Best 30-Minute Recipe

Possibly my absolute favorite, and it really only takes a half-hour. Yay, olives!

Falafel with Tahini Sauce
Source: Epicurious.com (Falafel) and EatingWell.com (Tahini Sauce)

The Boyfriend's best-loved dish. You don't miss the deep-frying one bit.

Gazpacho Pasta Salad
Source: Cook's Country Magazine

Dude. I make this ALL THE TIME. For every occasion. Even when it's not appropriate, like a pasta haters convention.

Marcella Hazan’s Lemon Roasted Chicken
Source: WCHSTV.com via Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan

To make this even better (as if), chop thick-cut carrots and Yukon gold potatoes into 1-inch pieces, drop 'em in the bottom, and roast along with the chicken. You won't know what hit you.