A healthy dinner means different things to different people. For me it means using as many “real food” ingredients as possible. I lean hard on fresh produce from my CSA and the farmers market and lean proteins like fish, chicken, pork, beans, and legumes. I have a soft spot for baked goods, cheese, and the occasional creamy sauce. It’s all about balance and moderation for me — mostly wholesome with a side of indulgence once in a while. Maybe you can relate?

From Asian-inspired cauliflower fried rice and stuffed sweet potatoes, to veggie stir-fry and easy chicken tacos, these are my 10 favorite recipes for a healthy, comforting dinner.

READ MORE »

The way we have saved our favorite recipes has changed drastically in the last couple decades. Recipe cards were the norm in the past, alongside clipping recipes out of magazines and newspapers. But then came the internet, and with it new ways to keep track of recipes were available, including Paprika and Pinterest. It can’t get much easier than these digital, right? What could possibly be better?

Well, it turns out that there actually might be an easier way to keep track of your most-used recipes — and if you’re reading this on mobile it’s staring you right in the face. Last week on Twitter writer Adam Erace said he used his phone contact list to save the basic recipes and ratios he uses all the time. When he wants to use a recipe, he simply asks Siri to pull it up on his iPhone.

Seriously, how brilliant is that?

READ MORE »

You’ve probably heard of GMOs, and you might even know what it stands for: genetically modified organisms. But understanding what GMOs actually are is a whole other ball game, and there’s a lot of misinformation floating around. Fortunately, Neil deGrasse Tyson and his StarTalk on Mashable podcast is here to set the record straight and start the dialogue on what it really means and how it impacts our health.

READ MORE »

Welcome to a column from The Financial Diet, one of our very favorite sites, dedicated to money and everything it touches. One of the best ways to take charge of your financial life is through food and cooking. This column from TFD founders Chelsea Fagan and Lauren Ver Hage will help you be better with money, thanks to the kitchen. A version of this post originally appeared on The Financial Diet.

Buckle up for some premium grocery content, friends!

Our grocery schedule and budget changes weekly because my partner Drew’s schedule is so unpredictable — but generally, we go shopping once a month at a wholesale place like BJs or Costco, then twice a month at a smaller place (usually Trader Joe’s because your girl loves those prices, but sometimes Stop & Shop). Our BJs trip usually costs around $100, and the smaller in-between trips are usually $40 to $60 depending on exactly what I get. This makes for a pretty reasonable grocery budget, although sometimes it feels all wrong. Some weeks, I feel like we have extra and are throwing away food, and likely overspending. Some weeks, it feels like I’m trying to scrape shitty leftovers together to create some semblance of a meal that is usually rounded out with a bowl of cereal.

READ MORE »

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.”

READ MORE »

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.

READ MORE »

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).

READ MORE »

(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.

READ MORE »

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.

READ MORE »

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.

READ MORE »