While we love checking out amateur cook-offs, the award-winning recipes are often staggeringly high in calories and fat — especially with the current everything’s-better-with-bacon-trend. So we were pleased to see the CorningWare SimplyLite Recipe Contest calling for lowfat, low-calorie recipes that can be made in CorningWare’s new SimplyLite bakeware collection, which is 50 percent lighter than traditional ceramic dishes.
Having already worked our way through soy, almond and rice milks, we decided to try a box of the Living Harvest Unsweetened Original Hempmilk at our local Whole Foods. Holy yum! When we poured it over some whole-grain cereal, we couldn’t believe how rich and creamy it tasted. What’s more, it contains an impressive amount of protein, vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids (lots of healthy omega-3’s and a small amount of omega-6’s). Sold, we started adding hemp milk to baked goods (banana bread), pasta sauces (for mac and cheese) and soups (creamy pumpkin), in lieu of high-fat dairy.
Like many interested in healthful eating, we’ve been trying to skew our diet toward more seasonal and local ingredients, but we haven’t always been sure where to turn for delicious, simple recipes. Many locavores in the know have already bookmarked HarvestEating.com, where chef Keith Snow has shared his tips, recipes and video instructions for finding and preparing seasonal foods for the past three years. Now, Snow has compiled The Harvest Eating Cookbook (Running Press, 2009) with more than 200 recipes for appetizers, sandwiches, breads, soups, salads, sides, main dishes, desserts, drinks and more.
We’ve noticed grocery stores and farm stands are now brimming with apples — and not just your basic Red Delicious and Granny Smith. American fruit farmers grow more than 2,500 of the 7,500 apple varieties in the world, according to the U.S. Apple Association, including Ginger Gold and Honeycrisp (our favorite). But with so many apples to choose from, how do you know which ones to bake and which ones to simply eat out of hand?
If we could trade places with any TV host, we’d want to be 39-year-old Padma Lakshmi. A co-founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America, she’s smart, gorgeous and, as the host of Bravo’s Top Chef, she gets to eat fabulous food for a living. “I’m an omnivore. I have a great curiosity about food,” she tells us. “Food makes me happy, which is why I’m very well equipped to do the job that I do.”
October is National Cranberry Month, and recently we got a sneak peek at the consumer category cookoff for Ocean Spray’s Third Annual Ultimate Cranberry Recipe Contest at the DeGustibus Cooking School at Macy’s Herald Square in New York City. Celebrity chef judge Tyler Florence later announced the winners at Rockefeller Center’s Loft and Garden, overlooking a 1,500-square-foot manmade “urban bog,” constructed to hold one ton of cranberries — as well as a few real-life cranberry growers — in conjunction with the event and Ocean Spray’s 80th-anniversary “Bogs Across America” campaign.
It was the buttery-smooth avocado honey given to us by a friend that sealed our love affair with the all-natural sweetener. Now, whenever we travel, we pick up jars made from the nectar of different blossoms, like delicate yellow acacia honey from this summer’s vacation in Italy, fruity blueberry honey from a weekend in Maine, and herbal-tinged sage honey from a recent visit to California. We savor antioxidant-rich honey on toast and in tea with lemon, and we blend it with Dijon mustard for a fat-free dressing to drizzle over mesclun. So we were concerned when we heard that honeybees around the world are in danger.
We know several brave women who have battled breast cancer, and National Breast Cancer Awareness Month throughout October is a special time for them and the other 2.5 million survivors in the United States. In honor of the occasion, Odwalla has launched its Pink Poetry Superfood fruit smoothie, packed with antioxidant vitamins A, C and E, as well as iron and calcium, which are often lacking in women’s diets. The company is donating $25,000 to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, a not-for-profit that funds breast-cancer research and awareness programs.
For nearly 10 years, we tallied the results of a readers’ poll for a city publication. Many times, when it came to the “Best Vegetarian Restaurant” category, people wrote, “Yuck!” or “None!” But over the years, the perception of vegetarianism has come a long way, and most people now recognize that vegetarians are not a joyless lot who subsist on twigs, berries and seeds. Even No Reservations host, chef and meat-lover extraordinaire Anthony Bourdain admittedly enjoyed southern Indian vegetarian cuisine during a recent episode. There’s no better time to try meatless fare than today, World Vegetarian Day, which kicks off Vegetarian Awareness Month.
We’ve been trying to eat seasonal, local and organic food when possible — not only does the meal taste better, but we often feel better. (Anyone who’s suffered from post-fast-food McTummy or had a salad made with ghostly pink tomatoes will understand.) So we were eager to read Clean Food: A Seasonal Guide to Eating Close to the Source With More Than 200 Recipes for a Healthy and Sustainable You (Sterling Epicure, 2009) by Terry Walters, a certified holistic health counselor and whole-food cooking instructor.
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