Kitchen sponges are notorious for being bacteria-ridden. By some estimates, they are dirtier than toilet seats. Strains of germs range from campylobacter, salmonella, and staphylococcus to E. coli and listeria.

Yuck.

“That thing is very dirty,” Philip Tierno, a microbiologist and pathologist at the New York University School of Medicine, tells Tech Insider. “Mainly because you’re cleaning up vegetables, carcasses of meat, and all sorts of food stuff that can potentially contain pathogenic [disease-causing] bacteria that will grow in numbers over time.”

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Princeton Review has been ranking colleges for more than two decades for everything from dorms to dining. In the 2017 list for best campus dining food — which surveyed 137,000 students at 382 top schools — University of Massachusetts-Amherst was the number-one school, followed by Bowdoin College, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Olaf College, and James Madison University.

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Welcome to Kitchn’s new series My Favorite Healthy Recipes, where we show you how real people around the country (and even world) eat “healthy,” however they choose to define that for themselves. Maybe you’ll even find a few recipes to add to your own meal plan.

Name: Ingrid Beer
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Age: 42
Occupation: Recipe developer, blogger (The Cozy Apron), personal chef
Number of people in household: 2 during the week (hubby and myself); 3 on the weekends (when our son comes home to visit).

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(Image credit: Joe Lingeman)

Kind Bars are the snack bar that I always reach for when I really want a candy bar but don’t want the resulting sugar crash. Full of nuts and seeds held together with a sweet-sticky glue of brown rice syrup, these bars are sweet, crunchy, a little salty, and sometimes gilded in chocolate. They are totally crave-worthy in their own right!

But Kind Bars are kind of budget-busting when I’ve got five dinners, seven breakfasts, and seven lunches to shop for my family of four. So I set to work making these snack bars at home. Yes, there are some specialty ingredients that are an up-front investment, but there’s still a huge cost savings.

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A few weeks ago, I started noticing small roaches occasionally scuttling around my kitchen. This being an old apartment building in New York City, I wasn’t too shocked. I had dealt with mice and ants in my last apartment and once stepped on a dead rat in the middle of the street (a story for another time), so it only seemed natural that cockroaches would one day appear on my personal docket of NYC vermin to confront.

It wasn’t like I had a full-on infestation — or so I thought. I’d see maybe one German cockroach, which are smaller than some other, gnarlier cockroach types I’ve seen, crawling on my backsplash or in one of my kitchen cabinets once a week, but I knew I had to nip this problem in the bud. So one night, I decided to do a full apartment clean to dissuade the roaches from coming back. I set about cleaning my sink and counters with disinfectant and spraying Hot Shot Ant & Roach Killer (side note: I later found out this only kills bugs on contact and is not a repellent) onto the baseboards and the crevices where the kitchen cabinets meet the wall.

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Fireflies caught in Mason jars, chased barefoot. Cornhole played on plush lawns or basketball on your neighborhood net, the games ending only when the street lights came on. Hours spent shaping sandcastles on the beach, or digging holes just to watch with satisfaction as they filled with water from the bottom up.

And the food — oh, the food! Laid on tablecloths and served outdoors on picnic tables, summer barbecues are the ultimate joys of the season. Close your eyes and remember the tantalizing scent of charcoal as hot dogs blistered and split their skins on the grill. Burgers sizzling on the grates, flipped by someone wearing a “Kiss the Cook” apron. Ears of fresh corn, growing sweet inside charring husks as baked beans simmer equally slowly. The smacking of lips as rib meat is torn off the bone, then again as thick sauce is licked off the fingers. Then, finally, a hollow thwak as a ripe watermelon is broken open so that seed-spitting contests between cousins can commence.

Do you remember all of that?

I don’t. Although my experiences may have held vestiges of this American daydream, the details were a bit different.

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There have been far too many Sundays in my life when I’ve wanted to get ahead on meal prep for the week but skipped it out of laziness. That stops now! Because carving out some time to make lunches for the upcoming week can make busy days run a whole lot smoother — whether they’re for your kids to tote to school or for you to pack up for the office. Here are 20 great recipes that call for a little effort on the last day of your weekend but reap big rewards.

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My September Survival Plan involves school supply lists, a fresh planner, and a collection of recipes that are fast, easy, and delicious. With my oldest headed to kindergarten and a little one hitting full-time preschool, I know everyone is going to be exhausted and hungry when we get home every weeknight from Monday to Friday. I also know that a home-cooked meal that I can pull off in about 35 minutes is the quickest way to revive the brood and get them back into our school-night routine. These recipes are some of our family favorites (hello, 10-minute tacos) and some that I’m hoping will become new regulars at our table.

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This weekend, two moving containers were delivered to our driveway and slowly but surely filled with everything in our Georgia home. Left are a few kitchen staples and enough clothing for each of us to “camp out in our house” and on the road for the next two weeks. It would be incredibly easy to give up meal planning for the next couple of days or weeks while we move, but — and this is a testament to meal planning as a tool for improving our home lives — having a meal plan and feeding my family simple, nutritious meals during a hectic time makes me feel steady and confident in a time of total chaos.

This week I’m planning meals that can be made from the small bin of cookware I packed for traveling: knives, a cast iron skillet, a sheet pan, a few measuring devices, tongs, etc. Here are the five incredibly simple meals that I’m planning for our first week of travel.

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How to Grill the Best Corn on the Cob

(Image credit: Joe Lingeman)

There are many iterations of the summer bucket list. Some include going to the beach, hiking, or watching the fireflies outside on the back porch. All crucial to the season, yes, but so is eating all the delicious things the warm weather brings. It seems there aren’t enough hours in the long, sunny days to consume all the fresh produce, burgers, and ice cream cones the summer entails. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try!

Here are the 50 foods we think absolutely must be eaten before the season comes to a close. This is our summer food bucket list.

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