Julie Alvin, Editorial Assistant
Food bloggers sound off on favorite recipes and time-saving tips:
Uncooked pasta sauces are perfect for warm months--check out Epi-Log's favorites.
Cafe Mom recommends this low-sugar lemonade for summer stands.
Find more time to cook with these 10 tips from the Bon Appetit Blog.
The Atlantic Food Channel explores the issue of outsourcing agriculture.
Food and Wine's blog reviews the new cookbook Well Preserved.
Lexy Schmertz, Contributing Editor
As I mentioned yesterday, after trying all the pricey juice programs out there, I've come to love my juicer. I love experimenting with different fruits and vegetables until I find the right juice cocktail. I love how fresh the house smells after I make the juice. And I love how my kids groan at the green juice and squeal at the fruit juice.
The best part is that I don't have the cost or the hassle of a signing up for a multiday juice program or detox to have fresh, homemade juice. Making your own costs about half as much as a juice program-- juice detoxes average around $10 to $12 a juice. I make a pitcher of juice, which is about three glasses, for approximately $15 to $18, or $5 to $6 a drink. Plus, I can control the ingredients (for example, I hate celery in my juice) and the quality (I know that I'm using the freshest organic ingredients).
Here are three of my faves:
Green Juice
Spinach, parsley, cucumber, green apple (add a large carrot for extra sweetness)
Vegetable Juice
Beets, carrots, green apple, ginger
Sneaky Fruit Juice (my kids love it!)
Pineapple, banana, strawberries-- and spinach! (add blueberries if you're worried about the color)
Adriana Velez, What I Made for Dinner
Who is my favorite kitchen assistant? My iPhone, of course! Here are my favorite food-related iPhone applications.
Ever since my visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium a couple of years ago, I've been carrying around one of their pocket Seafood Watch Program Guides. The guide uses safety and sustainability criteria to recommend--or not recommend--eating various fish. Handy when you're at the fish market or a restaurant.
Now there is a national guide, a sushi guide, and six regional guides you can download. Better yet, you can upload the latest online pocket guide for your mobile device or find the iPhone app on iTunes. Within each guide, fish are listed in alphabetical order as "best choice," "good alternative," or "avoid." Click on the fish and you'll get an image of fish and details. All the guides are free.
But what if octopus is on the menu? It's not on the Seafood Watch guide (yet) but it is on Safe Seafood! This guide lists over 100 different seafood alternatives, with images, descriptions, and rating for population health, contaminant levels, and environmental impact.
You're at the grocery store, wondering whether to shell out extra for organic produce without straining your budget. How do you decide? With Environmental Working Group's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides. The small guide lists the "dirty dozen," produce that tends to contain the highest amounts of pesticides when grown conventionally, and the "clean 15," produce with the least amount of pesticides.
Is local corn in season yet? Ask Enjoymentland's Locavore. The app finds your location and directs you to produce currently in season and soon to be in season and to nearby farmers' markets. It also has links to Wikipedia entries and Epicurious recipes.
Now that you're loaded with safe, sustainable seafood and locally grown produce, it's time to cook. But what if you want to convert metric measurements to standard, or double a recipe? Kitchen Calculator converts volume, weight, distance, and temperature units.
Lexy Schmertz, Contributing Editor
I became a juice fanatic two years ago, after I gave up Diet Coke and managed to cut my iced coffee addiction. (I needed something fun in the absence of caffeinated beverages.) After an enlightening conversation with a (very healthy) friend about toxins in our bodies, I took it one step further and started trying out cleanses. By now I've tried three different cleanse programs, some more than once, and I swear by the detoxing effects of filling my body with all those fruits and veggies.
I started with Blueprint Cleanse's five-day detox ($325), which consists of five juices (three green, one pineapple mint, one lemon with agave) and yummy cashew milk to end the day. The first two days were agony--I was freezing, my feet cramped, and I kept wondering why the "detox high" I'd heard about didn't seem to be coming my way. By day three I felt better, and by the end of the week I was flying--glowing skin, tremendous energy, and no need for sleep. I went on to do the Blueprint Cleanse several more times over the next six months.
On the advice of an uptown friend, I decided to branch out with Organic Avenue’s five-day "love fast" ($350) made famous by Madonna and Gwyneth. This was a bit pricier, but the quality was superior to Blueprint. All the ingredients are organic, and the juices and soups are made fresh and delivered daily, rather than every three days with Blueprint. The thing was, it just didn't taste that great.
A downtown friend raved about the juicing program at Joulebody, a lifestyle, weight-loss, and stress-management company in Tribeca. I tried the three-day program called Kickstart ($225) and loved all the juices.
As I’ve tested these various detox programs over the past two years, I decided that I really like green juice and wanted to drink it without being on some program. So I bought a juicer! Tomorrow I'll show you how much fun I'm having (not to mention how much money I'm saving) with it.
Colleen Egan, Associate Web Editor
Before my friend (and Cookie photo coordinator) Aja embarked on a trip to Korea (and faced the weeks of mystery fish dishes that go with it), she had one request: simple, sweet, chocolaty brownies. I dug out my mom's favorite recipe and made one tweak: instead of nuts, which Aja nixed so that our allergic colleague could indulge, she asked for chocolate chips. This is a pretty basic recipe, so feel free to experiment with other add-ins and/or top these cakelike brownies with a dusting of powdered sugar or some frosting. Enjoy! (Can someone translate that into Korean?)
The Very Best Brownies
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
1 1/2 cups sugar
7 tablespoons cocoa
4 eggs
1 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup chocolate chips (or nuts, both optional)
1. Heat the oven to 350° F. In a medium-size bowl, mix together the butter, sugar, and cocoa.
2. Add the eggs one at a time, blending after each addition. Add the remaining ingredients and mix them together just until well combined.
3. Pour the batter into a greased 9-by-13-inch pan. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Allow them to cool for 15 minutes before cutting.
Julie Alvin, Editorial Assistant
Joe Quintana, father of twins and executive chef at New York City's popular Rosa Mexicano Lincoln Center, knows that food served on skewers is an automatic kid- (and crowd-) pleaser.
"Create a marinade of crushed garlic cloves, oregano, black pepper, salt, lime juice, Worcestershire sauce, and olive oil. Place some shrimp in a bowl, mix them well with the marinade, then let them sit for 10 minutes. Cut red onions, tomatoes, and serrano peppers into chunks, and then thread the vegetable pieces onto bamboo skewers, alternating with the shrimp. Heat a cast-iron skillet or grill to medium-high heat and cook the shrimp skewers for two minutes on each side. Top with your favorite salsa, and serve alongside rice and beans."
Jenny Rosenstrach, Fatures Director
It's tough to choose from all the delicious Memorial Day BBQ options popping up in the blogosphere, right? Well, by all means, keep exploring, but while you do, bookmark the beyond delicious tandoori yogurt marinade that is in the June/July issue of Cookie and that can make the healthy stuff on the grill just as appealing (more so, actually) as the burgers and dogs. It works on chicken, fish, lamb. (Shown here: grilled shrimp and mango salad, which is made from shrimp that have been steeped in the yogurty goodness.)
Julie Alvin, Editorial Assistant
Our favorite foodie-blog posts for the week:
For six ways to theme your holiday weekend grill-out, go to The Atlantic Food Channel.
Find tips for stress-free family dinners, at Cafe Mom.
Epi-Log joins in on the age-old debate on who makes the best pizza.
Bon App's Conscious Cook recommends an earth-friendly way to pack your lunch.
Check out Mark Bittman's ideas for money-saving meals, at Bitten.
Adriana Velez, What I Made For Dinner
Growing up in Colorado, banana boats were as important a camping staple as s'mores. I don't mean the suntan lotion; I mean the easy, grilled banana dessert. In my family, we would stuff bananas with chocolate chips, wrap them in foil, and put them over the coals. When I introduced them to my husband, son Jasper, and friends this weekend, we added sliced strawberries and marshmallows. Banana boats are easy to customize (Jasper likes his with just strawberries and marshmallows), and they taste like hot banana pudding.
Start by slicing a banana lengthwise through the top layer of skin and the flesh, but not through the bottom layer of skin.
Stuff with berries, chopped chocolate, marshmallows, or anything else that sounds good.
Jenny Rosenstrach, Features Director
I don't know about you, but I'm always excited to find new entries for the pink-food category, because pinkness makes the sell to my not-quite-out-of-her-princess-phase 5-year-old that much easier. I tried Emmi's incredibly delicious pink-grapefruit yogurt on my daughter last week, and she loved it. Well, she loved half of it, which was a start, and actually just fine with me--I happily gobbled up what was left.
