Posts tagged ‘websites’
My New Kitchen (and Curried Brown Rice)
As I’ve mentioned about a million times, Brian and I recently moved to a new apartment. I’d just like to share with you my old kitchen:
It was a shared kitchen/dining area, but as far as the kitchen’s concerned, that was it. All our appliances, dishes, bakeware, glasses, mugs, pots, pans AND food were kept in these cabinets. It was a little cozy.
This is my new kitchen:
More cabinets (though the perspective on this picture is a little difficult). Definitely more drawers. Lots more counter space. What’s that behind the door in the lower right corner?
Oh, it’s a pantry! A whole closet in which to store food (and my reusable shopping bags and apron collection)! Imagine that!
Needless to say, Brian and I (probably mostly me) are greatly enjoying our new kitchen. It’s nice to not have to empty out an entire cabinet to access what we need.
If you’re looking for something to cook in your kitchen, I highly recommend Curried Brown Rice with Tomatoes and Peas, as recently seen on Cheap Healthy Good. The dish was cheap and healthy and good, as expected, plus you can read about her worst date ever. I’d never made anything with brown rice before, but since it’s baked in the oven it’s pretty impossible to mess up. I used regular curry powder, since I’m too cheap to buy anything I don’t have to, and it still tasted great…though now I really want to try it with Madras curry. Brian and I don’t like peas, so I subsituted assorted frozen veggies for the peas.
You Should Play Free Rice
This morning, triggered by Mashable’s article 20 Ways to Change the World in Only 15 Minutes a Day, I decided to start playing FreeRice again. My husband, it turned out, had never heard of it. Based on this travesty and the fact that others out there may not have heard of it either, I thought I better share.
FreeRice is a simple (but not always easy) multiple choice game from the UN World Food Program. For every answer you get correct, 10 grains of rice are donated to those in need in an effort to end world hunger. 10 grains may not sound like much, but it certainly adds up–I managed 2000 just this morning. Moreover, FreeRice makes this point on their site:
The rice you donate makes a huge difference to the person who receives it.
According to the United Nations, 25,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes, most of them children.
Though 10 grains of rice may seem like a small amount, it is important to remember that while you are playing, so are thousands of other people at the same time. It is everyone together that makes the difference. Thanks to you, FreeRice has generated enough rice to feed millions of people since it started in October 2007.
FreeRice was one of the few “games” students were allowed to play online at the school I previous worked at, and for good reason:
Learning new vocabulary has tremendous benefits. It can help you:
- Formulate your ideas better
- Write better papers, emails and business letters
- Speak more precisely and persuasively
- Comprehend more of what you read
- Read faster because you comprehend better
- Get better grades in high school, college and graduate school
- Score higher on tests like the SAT, GRE, LSAT and GMAT
- Perform better at job interviews and conferences
- Sell yourself, your services, and your products better
- Be more effective and successful at your job (from FreeRice.com)
Also, I just discovered this morning that in addition to English vocabulary, FreeRice has categories for Art (Famous Paintings), Chemistry, English Grammar, Geography, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Basic Math and the Multiplication Table. Something for everyone!
So really, what do you have to lose? More than likely, you’re wasting plenty of time online. Make some of it count by donating rice to those in need.
$30 a Week, Tweeting Foodies and Food52: Highlights From My Reader
Wow, its Friday again. Where did the week go? Oh, I remember! I’ve spent it moving to my new apartment! As a result, the highlights for this week are a little thin. My absence is worth it, however: the amount of storage in my new kitchen is at least twice what I have now. So excited. Hopefully by tomorrow evening we’ll be just about settled in and I can really get back to cooking.
Highlights for August 8-14
This week I discovered a new blog. Actually, that’s not news, I add new blogs to my Reader at a rediculous rate. But I’m really interested in this one. Thirty Bucks a Week is written by a Brooklyn, NY couple who are striving (and apparently succeeding) to only spend $30 TOTAL on groceries each week. There are lots of “eat cheap” blogs out there and I follow several…but this is the first one I’ve found that’s ” 100% vegetarian”. If you’re looking for inexpensive vegetarian food, it’s definitely worth a look. (via Time via Cheap Healthy Good)
The social networking blog, Mashable, posted a list of Tasty Tweets: 55+ Foodies to Follow on Twitter. Yay, more people to follow! Don’t forget to follow Relishments on Twitter (somehow I didn’t make the list).
If you have original recipes you’d like to share (and possibly have published), then you need to check out Food52. Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs started the site with the idea that some of the best recipes come from home cooks. As a result, they’re creating a recipe database and crowdsourcing a cookbook to be pushed in 52 weeks by running weekly cooking contests. The site is currently in beta so you have to sign up for an invitation, but it goes live on September 15. More information from Tech Crunch.
Julia Child, Lollypops and Operation Beautiful :Highlights From My Reader
Highlights for August 1-August 8
Julie and Julia opens in theaters today! I’d certainly like to see it at some point, though it’ll probably be a while if the amount of time it took me to go see Food, Inc is any indication. At any rate, the internet (and the news, for that matter) have been all abuzz about it:
- Hollywood met the food world at the movie’s premiere as told by The Atlantic Food Channel.
- NPR reports that Julia Child’s copper pots have been added to the exhibit at the National Museum of American History.
- Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, a “Julia-lite, Cliffs Notes” book of Julia’s tips is being re-released…I may have to get that one…I’m suddenly feeling guilty that there’s not Julia Child in my cookbook collection (via Huffington Post)
Last week I posted a link to Luxirare’s pie lollipops…and Bakerella actually made them!
Finally, if you’re looking for a way to change the world, Caitlin of Healthy Tipping Point has started a revolution: Operation Beautiful. The mission is simple: end “fat talk” by leaving anonymous positive messages on the mirrors of public bathrooms (or tucked into diet books, or on a locker at the gym or on a window…). The movement has been getting quite a bit of attention and you can participate today! Caitlin posts the best submitted notes on the Operation Beautiful site. Even if you don’t participate, visit the site for an instant mood boost.
Officially, Relishments is on vacation at the moment…but its a food-filled vacation, so look forward to lots of restaurant reviews when I get home!
I Finally Saw Food, Inc!
Vodpod videos no longer available.
I feel as though I may be the last food blogger in the country to do so, but I finally got the opportunity to see Food, Inc. last night! I’d been trying to find a local place to catch it for months (not exaggerating) and it finally arrived just one town away! The movie was what I expected, but that’s a good thing. It put specifics on a lot of things I already knew or suspected and reaffirmed my decision to eat as thoughtfully as possible. I found the film very compelling and well done. Even my husband enjoyed it and it led to, in my opinion, one of our more productive discussions about food. I think we’re more dedicated than ever to limiting our meat consumption, cooking our own food and avoiding processed foods whenever possible. Buying local and buying organic are definitely of interest to me, but less simple due to time and money.
Food, Inc is one of those movies that I think everyone should see. If you’re already aware of the information covered in the film, further educate yourself. If you don’t know anything about where our food comes from, you’re really missing out and you need to see Food, Inc. Maybe it’s the teacher in me, but I’m a firm believer that education is the first step towards creating change. The information can be overwhelming, but I truly think that everyone making small adjustments in their lives can impact the industrial food system in the United States.
Now, since every other food blogger has already said their two cents about the film, I won’t say more. They can speak for themselves:
My Review of Food, Inc (Healthy Tipping Point) –Caitlin managed to record a lot of the specific facts and statistics from the film; definitely check out her review if you don’t think you’ll get a chance to see the movie.
Food, Inc (Amateur Gourmet)
Increasing Appetite for Documentary’s Unsavory Message (Center for a Livable Future)
Finally, if you’re looking to help make change happen:
I Saw Food, Inc., Now What? (Huffington Post)
10 Simple Things You Can Do to Change Our Food System (Food, Inc website)
New Favorite Site: Evernote
Once in a while, great things find you when you’re not looking for them. Such was the case the other day when @NoMeatAthlete tweeted “Sounds like Evernote is the crowd favorite way of saving recipes. Thanks!” Saving recipes? Definitely of interest to me. I checked it out immediately.
Evernote describes itself as a free way to “easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.” Sounds good, eh? You can add information–this includes text, images and sound– to your Evernote account in pretty much every way imaginable including sending an image from a camera or phone (apparently EN can even search text in images!), emailing or tweeting.
The thing I like best about Evernote so far is that I can select just the part of a webpage or blog post that I want to save. For example, I can just highlight the recipe I want to try some day, instead of the entire blog post. Sure, I enjoy hearing about how the author’s boyfriend adored the dessert she made, but I only need to save the recipe itself. EN lets me do that.
The other wonderful thing is tweeting to EN. The details on how to do so can be found here, but it’s so great for saving tweets to follow up on!
Evernote is free (but there is a $5/month Premium option which allows unlimited uploads, among other things) and I find it incredibly useful. The search feature works wonderfully, you can publicly share your notebooks and its so easy to use. EN is making me much more organized (it’s not just for recipes!) and definitely worth checking out.
April Food Day
My Man, though ridiculously supportive of my recent obsession with flexitarianism, is a little suspect of the trend. Isn’t it more important, he keeps asking in response to rantings about the White House vegetable garden, to make sure that everyone has food to eat before we get so concerned about whether the food we are eating is organic? Isn’t some food better than no food?
He makes a good point, one to which I generally concede. For that reason, I’m very excited to have just learned about April Food Day. The purpose of the April Food Day blog is to educate readers about hunger, and encourage them to do something about it, especially donate to Feeding America. They note “Every dollar you contribute provides seven meals or 10 pounds of food. A $25 gift provides 75 meals.” Wow.
My Man is right. It’s easy to discuss the perks of various restaurants, but with the increasingly worsening economic slump, more and more people are finding themselves without employment, and without food. I don’t think there’s any debate that food is important. So, instead of trying to play April Fools tricks on everyone you meet, why not donate to Feeding America, your local food pantry or some other organization that’s working to fulfill this basic human need.
I Miss Taylor’s Pork Roll
In 2000, my family and I moved from New Jersey, where we’d spent the previous 15 years, to Maine. I’d be hard-pressed to go back, though I could be tempted by the fact that @afoodcoma tweeted “north jersey becoming “foodie focal-point” as basically every major gourmet/organic food chain moves in” with a link to this article yesterday.
But that aside, I honestly don’t miss it much. Until I saw this delicious article from Endless Simmer’s tvff about Taylor’s Pork Roll.
If you have never been to New Jersey and had Taylor Pork Roll, you should go. Now. I haven’t been back to New Jersey since 2003, but suddenly I’m considering a trip. It used to be that whenever friends of ours were coming north to visit, we’d have them bring us Taylor Ham, not to mention some good rolls. Good bulkie rolls simply do not exist in Maine, not the way they do in Jersey. Good stuff.
Thanks tvff for reminding me what I’m missing. Maybe I’ll ask some of the wedding guests to bring some up this summer, screw the registry.
relishments HAS MOVED! 