Websites to help you plan your meals
A recent report in the Wall Street Journal noted that traffic to recipe websites has increased significantly as people cut back on eating out and instead opt to cook at home.
For example, MyRecipes.com has doubled its traffic in the past year to almost 3 million visitors. Meantime, AllRecipes.com has surpassed the Food Network’s site in web traffic.
However, we here at GfC think that there is even more value in those websites that help you plan your meals and shopping for the week. No longer do you have to go to the grocery and stare at the shelves wondering what to cook. Instead, visit a site such as MealMixer, select your meals for the week (includes recipes), and it will assemble a complete shopping list that prints out nicely.
There are other such sites, including Saving Dinner and The Six O’Clock Scramble. While these sites are not free, consider that an annual fee of $50 or so per year is not terrible when you think about how much time, gas and frustration you’ll save yourself.
The latest health scare involving peanut butter has made this gizmo more relevant than ever before. The Peanut Butter Maker from SkyMall allows you to take your favorite salty snack and turn it into everyone’s favorite sandwich ingredient. Choose the nut variety (peanut, almond, cashew, or any other) and the consistency (creamy or chunky), fill the hopper, press a button, and in moments you’ll have a heaping helping of the most flavorful (and safe) peanut butter you’ve ever tasted.
It seems like every time you turn around these days, there’s some piece on the news about a food recall. Well, when it comes to the meats you prepare at home, now you can take food safety into your own hands. The CulinaryPrepTM Kitchen Appliance uses a patented process to prevent food borne illnesses by reducing the level of bacteria in beef, poultry, fish, and seafood up to 99.5 percent. And during the process, you can tenderize and marinate up to five pounds of meat, which is tumbled in an all-natural, anti-microbial solution to remove the bacteria. Once only available for commercial cooking, the CulinaryPrep is now ready to find its way into your home kitchen.
My husband was so excited when I mentioned that I might - MIGHT - be interested in owning a pink Nintendo DS one day. A gaming enthusiast, he’s been looking for a gateway game system for years - one that will get me interested in playing video games for a hobby. Well, I now own a pink Nintendo DS, courtesy of my husband, but I don’t use it as often as I could. That’s about to change because I also own “Personal Trainer: Cooking,” an interactive title that serves as a digital cookbook of sorts, guiding you through the preparation of a dish with the help of the DS Chef. The Personal Trainer takes you from recipe selection to recipe completion step by step and lets you focus on the food with a hands-free voice control feature. Once you’ve chosen the dish you want to cook, you can even take your DS to the grocery store with you, as the game includes an ingredient list (as well as a calculator so you can keep track of your spending). It’s a very cool “game” that certainly has intrigued me. And who knows? I might actually end up playing Super Mario Brothers one day after all.
I’ve had this book on my reading list for a while now, and I can’t wait to dive into it. Forty of the world’s finest chefs reveal the most interesting, riveting and humorous tales from their earliest days on the professional scene. For anyone who’s ever burned a dinner, the personal accounts detailed in “How I Learned to Cook: Culinary Educations from the World’s Greatest Chefs” will surely give you a confidence boost, letting you know that you aren’t alone when it comes to making a mess of a meal.