Cookbook Review: Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen

Today, I review an oldie but a goodie (first printed in 1996 and reprinted 10 years later). Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen was written about 10 years after I had the idea to do something similar: a dorm room cookbook (a project I never finished because I was too busy with college at the time).

I believe you could apply many of the recipes to college dormitory cooking. (We were only allowed to have either a single electric burner or a hot pot in our dorm room, so making our Sunday dinner was a challenge. Hot pots were difficult to clean, especially after making tuna noodle casserole. I understand some colleges now allow microwaves.) 

Anything that involves slightly more difficult concepts than, say, making a peanut butter or grilled cheese sandwich is pretty much explained. There's also a section on cooking basics. The down side, which I find with many cookbooks, is the lack of nutritional information. In moderation, however, none of this food should harm you. Furthermore, it's "kid" tested and mother-approved.

Written by the son/mom team of Kevin and Nancy Mills, this cookbook features simple recipes (for the most part).

If you're new to living on your own, don't know how to do anything besides boiling water and cooking soup and don't want to eat out all the time, buy this book! Its uncomplicated recipes and simple, matter-of-fact approach to cooking is the real thing.

Magazine Review: Taste of Home Healthy Cooking

maThe original Taste of Home magazine features great-sounding recipes that just aren't as healthy as I would like. I have about two years' worth of these magazines thanks to a friend who once gave me a gift subscription. She is a cooking professional, and knows her food, so I knew the recipes would be good.

Taste of Home Healthy Cooking magazine lightens new and classic recipes so that they can be made for every day meals. I know they will taste good and be healthier than many choices. How healthy your choices are in this magazine depends upon you: unlike a number of cooking magazines, you have access to the nutrition facts. (One of my main beefs with a number of magazines is the lack of nutritional information available.

Recipes for July 4 currently are featured on the Taste of Home Healthy Cooking  website, which also offers one issue of any of the Taste of Home family of publications free. 

Beyond Shirley Temples: The Mocktail

I've never been much of a drinker, which is, in my mind, one good habit that affects the size of my waist. Besides, I tend to like what I call "fruity girly drinks," in which you can't taste the alcohol anyway. So mocktails eliminate extra calories and make me sure I can safely drive home.

When I'm not drinking water, tea or coffee, I'll select the non-alcoholic punch or mocktail, generally created from various fruit juices and seltzer.

When you either can't or don't want to drink alcohol, here are some links to inspire your own mocktails, taking you beyond the classic Shirley Temple (one of my favorite drinks).

Washington Post (This article makes a great case for the mocktail: kids love them, too.)

Everything Mom

About.com

Allrecipes.com

Food Blogs I Recommend

I read a lot of food blogs before starting to write one myself. Some of my favorites are listed here by category.

Vegan/vegetarian/other special diets

Kitchen La Boheme
I love the artistic photos that go along with the food Alyssa Yeager writes about. It's fun and sassy. Takes quite a while to load up on dialup, though. (I know, I know. I must get into the 21st century soon.)

Vegetarian Times (self-advertised as the world's largest collection of vegetarian recipes).

Vote for up and coming chef finalists in a VT contest or enter the reader contest here. I have liked this magazine for years; the online version is equally good, featuring numerous resources.

General Healthy Food

Clean Eating. If I could have only one healthy food magazine, this would be it. The website gives a good sampling of what's available in each magazine. Also, see my prior review here.  

Desserts

About.com features all kinds of dessert/baking recipes, including healthy ones. You simply click on the appropriate category or do a search. My friends from work and I found a bunch of recipes here for the cookie exchange we had last December. (I really wish I could recall which no-bake recipe I used, so I could give you the direct link. It wasn't the most healthy recipe, as it had a fair amount of sugar and butter, but it did have whole-grain rolled oats in it, at least.)

Random

Medieval Cooking. Jennifer Strobel has some thought-provoking entries. Currently, she's in the throes of planning an authentic medieval-style feast. Updates fairly regularly, but apparently not more than once, maybe twice a week.

Product Review: Zevia

I've now tried pretty much every kind of Zevia cola, an all-natural zero calorie soda. It is sweetened with stevia, rather than aspartame or sucralose. None of them is overly sweet, as I find with most diet colas, and I feel the stevia is better for me. I've narrowed it down to my top five.

5. Orange doesn't quite match the flavor of Stewart's (regular or diet), but it doesn't have harmful sweeteners in it, either.

4. Ginger Root Beer tastes like an old-fashioned, bottled root beer.

3. Lemon-Lime has a fairly unique lemon-lime flavor; I like it as well as any diet lemon-lime flavor out there.

2. Ginger Ale is similar in taste to diet Canada Dry, to the best of my recollection. I haven't really used aspartame to speak of for about 10 years.

1. Black Cherry. This tastes nearly as good as Diet Rite Pure Zero Cherry Cola, but doesn't have Splenda® in it.

The only downside is the cost. (Regularly priced, it's about $1 per can for a six-pack.) The lowest price I've been able to find a six-pack in stores is $4 each when it was on sale at either Whole Foods Market or The Better Health Store. When I buy only one at the local health food store, I don't pay much more than I'd pay for a can of pop at the gas station.

Tailgating: What to Bring

Your friends want to tailgate before a rock concert at DTE this weekend. You want to eat healthy.

Unless you bring your own healthy food, you're at the mercy of whoever's cooking. Need some ideas? Here are a few suggestions:

• Make your own shrimp cocktail with thawed, large peeled and deveined shrimp. Use a small relish and dip dish that will fit in your cooler so you can keep it on ice. Use bottled cocktail sauce if you want to, but I prefer a mixture of organic ketchup (or at least ketchup without corn syrup in it) and horseradish sauce. (Make it to your taste. I usually start with 1 cup of ketchup and a teaspoon of horseradish and add a little more at a time if it's not hot enough. (Don't overdo the horseradish, or you will feel as though you are breathing fire out your nose.)

• Combine brown rice or whole wheat pasta, cooked, with vegetables and your choice of an oil and vinegar or oil and lime/lemon juice dressing. Light mayo, Miracle Whip Light, or soy mayo also works, but you may need to doctor the latter with seasonings and either lemon or lime juice. (Soy mayo tends to be somewhat bland.) 

• Hard boil and peel eggs; bring in plastic wrap or plastic bags on ice as well as salt and pepper.

• If there's a barbecue available, you can barbecue shrimp, chicken and/or veggies your favorite way. See Food Network's Top 10 Better-for-You Grilled Foods for more ideas.

Product Review: Amy's Brown Rice and Veggie Bowl (regular and light in sodium)

I try not to eat a lot of frozen dinners because even the ones with "healthy" in their names tend to be rather high in sodium. I try to shoot for something that's between 250-500 mg of sodium; I think most of us get too much of it. 

I have always liked the Brown Rice and Vegetables Bowl from Amy's. It comes close to the desired sodium range (540 mg). It is one of the best healthy dinners I've tried, with ingredients that I can pronounce.

One day, I accidentally grabbed Amy's Light in Sodium Brown Rice and Vegetables Bowl from the frozen section, which has about 250 mg. sodium. See meal description for this meal and Amy's other light-sodium selections here.

Both are excellent, but I have to give a slight edge to the higher-sodium version; however, the low-sodium version is great with the addition of just a little FRENCH'S® Reduced Sodium Worcestershire Sauce.