Beauty Health for Life

To begin, a trio of most excellent posts from the fine folks at Wise Bread. To fill out lots of other well-written and finely-observed pieces of literature. And to end, the most terrifying possibility for the future that I have ever contemplated: cats with thumbs.

1) Wise Bread:
17 Uses for Stale Bread
Breaking the Bread Code – How to Get the Freshest Loaf
Dilutions of Grandeur – Stretch Your Food at Every Meal
Honestly, Wise Bread deserves the first spot for the bread article alone (Tags are color coordinated by day? Who knew?), but the other two links just cement the glory.

2) Parenting the Tiniest of Miracles: Prepping Five Meals from Five Chicken Breasts
Super solid post on skinning, slicing, prepping, and cooking bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts, and then spreading them out to create several different meals. Definitely worth a gander, especially if you’re a poultry fan.

3) Words to Eat By: In Praise of Processed Foods
One mom uses – gasp – processed foods. Which are actually fine, depending, with a definition that encompasses a lot more than Taquitos and Go-Gurt. Read on for tips on choosing caully.

4) New York Times: Once a Villain, Coconut Oil Charms the Health Food World
In the olden times, coconut oil was believed less deadly than going to a Red Sox game wearing a Yankees jersey, but more deadly than having a quiet dinner with Michael Corleone. Nowadays, that impression is changing, thanks mostly to closer reading of old research, as well as an increasing number of delicious applications, such as the ones Melissa Clark includes in this thorough, engaging piece.

5) Obama Foodorama: Chris Christie Supports Michelle Obama
Three Republican governors with weight issues – Mike Huckabee (ex-AR), Chris Christie (NJ), and Haley Barbour (MS) – have said publicly that they think MObama’s doing a dang good job with the Let’s Move! campaign. More interestingly, her three most vocal opponents are thin conservative women – Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Laura Ingraham. (Okay, and Rush Limbaugh, but that guy stopped mattering in 1997.) Why is that? I have … theories. But they’re mean. I’m more interested in what you guys think.

6) Wall Street Journal: Consumers Start to Feel Pinch From Higher Grain Prices
Two things to know, but not necessarily freak over: “U.S. food prices will jump between 3% and 4% this year,” and “The USDA expects food prices this year to climb at roughly twice the general inflation rate.” It’s not good, but other countries are being hit a lot worse, so count some blessings, yo.

7) Boston.com: A madcap quest for ‘free’
Profile of Kathy Spencer, a hardcore couponer whos inspired thousands like her, for better (mostly) or for worse. The best quote: "When a newbie couponer is birthed, they are very much like baby vampires." Ive already started the script for Twilight: Rite Aid, so book your movie tickets now.

8) Chow: Chefs are Masochists, Culinary School is a Scam
Helena Echilin layeth the smacketh downeth. Think twice about forking over $70,000 for cooking school, folks. In most cases, you’d be better off washing dishes at a diner. At least youd be in a working kitchen.

9) The Economist: The 9 Billion-People Question
Honestly, I haven’t had the chance to read all of this (which is why it’s at #9). What I did get through was detailed, intelligent, and about as objective as you can be when you’re reporting on the potential starvation of billions. Check it out. (Er, and tell me about it!)

10) Chicago Tribune: The Kids Table - Better nutrition at the end of the rainbow
Eat the rainbow! A natural one, though – not the processed rainbow found in boxes of Lucky Charms. Blueberries, kale, and oranges are of what we speak.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Business Week: Breathing More Profit into Chocolate Bars
With food prices soaring, choco-companies are adding the cheapest ingredient of all in as filler. Nope, not used copies of Extreme’s Pornograffiti album, but – air.

Culiante: Madhur Jaffrey
Leigh! This one’s for you.

The Kitchn: Smarter Searching with Google’s New Recipe Feature
On the plus side, this means easier ingredient-based searches. On the minus side, food bloggers won’t really benefit until some coding issues get worked out. (ETA: More from Elise Bauer.)

AND ALSO

Cats With Thumbs
I genuinely fear this.



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Okay, you guys. I was going to start off by explaining that this is a massive links collection dating back to Christmas (which it is, and it starts a little further down). But a friend forwarded me this video yesterday, along with the blurb, “Someone has to tell her this is impossible.” You have to watch it right now:



Right?

Holy moly. She must be quadruple jointed. I need to start doing yoga. Or at least minimal stretching.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the top links of the last month. Enjoy!

1)Money Saving Mom: Celebrating a Major Financial Milestone
A lifelong frugalist, Crystal and her husband Jesse are now buying a house outright. 100% cash down. No loans necessary. I don’t think she’s 30 yet. They have three kids. Dare to dream, folks.

2) Three-way tie from The Kitchn
25 Money-saving Tips for Frugal Cooking and Shopping
25 Favorite Quick-and-Easy Weeknight Meals
Spice Storage & Pot Racks – Reader Storage Solutions
The Kitchn has been tearing it up the last three weeks, with countdown after countdown of their best posts from 2009. Nearly every comp is worth a gander, but these three stuck out to me.

3) Ruhlman: America – Too Stupid to Cook
Half smug rant, half caul critique, Ratio author Michael Ruhlman bemoans both the state and underestimation of U.S. home cooks. Read the comments for a fabulous, extended thoughtful discussion. (Thanks to Elise for the link.)

4) Jezebel: Taco Bell’s Drive Thru Diet isn’t Really a Diet After All
More fast food joints are pushing their menus as diet aids, with Taco Bell most recently jumping on the bandwagon. Marketing-wise, it’s pretty brilliant. Are-you-serious-wise … really? Taco Bell? The same people who placed a Fourth Meal ad (“The meal between dinner and breakfast!”) next to the one for their lower-fat Fresco menu? Hunh.

5) Chow: 10 Tips for a Healthy Diet
Resolution makers! This level-headed advice is an excellent way to kick off your 2010 dietary overhaul.

6) MSN Smart Spending: Are Weight Loss Plans Worth the Cost?
On the timely CBS piece exploring the efficacy and value of eight popular diet programs. South Beach walks away the clear winner at $3.25 per pound lost, while In the Zone runs a staggering $224 for the same. Yikes.

7) Gizmodo: You’re Doing it Wrong – How to Properly Buy, Maintain, and Use a Knife
Stupendous all-around tutorial on the most important piece of hardware in your kitchen. This will make cooking about 1000% easier. Id stake my socks on it.

8) Serious Eats: Resolution – Eat Less Meat
Looking to improve your health and bottom line immediately? Eat a few vegetarian or meat-lite meals every week. This quick rundown from Almost Meatless co-author Tara Mataraza Desmond is a good way to get started.

9) Casual Kitchen: How to Resist Irresistible Food
Worthy piece on how logic/thoughtful eating can conquer cravings/mindless eating. If you’re interested in visualization and behavioral modification (or, simply going mental), definitely check this out.

10) KGW: Portland culinary institute faces class-action lawsuit
When I first saw this headline, I thought, “Man, such entitlement here.” But further inspection reveals a much more complex issue. When a school promises to place you in cooking capacity at a major restaurant, and you end up as a busboy, do you have a right to raise a ruckus? Law school graduates don’t start in the mailroom.


HONORABLE MENTIONS

Bitten: Roasting Winter Vegetables
Vegetable + olive oil + salt-n-pepa + 30-40 minutes in a 400°F oven = wonderful January dinner. Don’t you love math?

Buffalo News: On a budget? Eat out in style by making smart choices
Quick, solid roundup of frugal restaurant strategies for newbies.

Cooking Issues: Crowded Wet Mushrooms – a Beautiful Thing
Hey! We’ve all been cooking mushrooms wrong. Dang. (Thanks to Eat Me Daily for the link.)

Food Politics
FDA warns Nestlé - Juicy Juice misbranded!
How Many Extra Calories Cause Weight Gain?
What’s up With Food and Nutrition in 2010?
Three solid quickies from Marion Nestle. The Juicy Juice thing is appalling.

Fox: Man Pays $72 for Taco
Frugality fail.

Get Rich Slowly: The Best Time to Buy Almost Everything
You may have seen Lifehacker’s recent roundup on this, but GRS is much more thorough.

MSN Smart Spending: Bean Counting and Bag Lady Dreams
Reflective piece in which writer Donna Freedman chronicles some tough times and the dreams that keep her going.

New York Times: Living on Nothing but Food Stamps
An increasing number of Americans have no income whatsoever, except for their food allowances. Scary.

Roger Eberts Journal: Nil by Mouth
Cancer robbed the movie critic of his ability to speak, eat, and drink. But he can still write like the dickens.

Serious Eats: Low-fat Brownies – Applesauce vs. Yogurt
Yogurt wins by a mile. Read on for reasons.

Wise Bread: 7 Quick Meals That Are Faster Than Pizza Delivery
Why pay and wait for shrimp when you can make it faster and cheaper in your own galley?


AND TO TOP IT OFF

Stereogum: The 12 Best Late Night TV Performances of 2009
Cheeky music blog selects the best mini-concerts from Fallon, Letterman, and more. Definitely check the near-flawless Phoenix set, as well as “Aeon” by Antony and the Johnsons. If you’ve never heard Antony Hegarty sing, you will not believe the voice that comes out of this guy. He’s been blessed.



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So much to love this week, so lets skip the pleasantries and get down to business. Like business people do. Harrumph harrumph.

1) The Atlantic: Confessions of a Picky Eater
This whole piece on selective foodies and their coping mechanisms is excellent, but I laughed most at the author bio: “Amy Sullivan is a contributing writer at TIME Magazine and a Michigan native. She has never tried scallops (or artichokes or green olives), but she does not like them.”

2) Almost Frugal: 9 Simple Tricks to Save $1000 Per Year on Coffee
Wonderfully creative ideas to cutting down on your $4 latte habit. The first bulletpoint (Starbucks vs. everybody else) is most informative, Captain.

3) San Antonio Life: Planning Key to Creating Healthy Meals
In which writer Claudia Zapata praises her mom’s weekly menu plans, and then shares tips for creating your own. I especially liked: “Plate everything in the kitchen, except the vegetables. Serve those family style to encourage healthy seconds.” Good call. (P.S. When you read the name “Claudia,” do you always think Babysitter’s Club? No? Uhhhh … me neither.)

4) The Epi-Log: The Science of Cilantro Hatred
Though I enjoy a good mouthful of herbage, many friends claim eating the happy little leaves is roughly equivalent to swallowing a tablespoon of Palmolive. As it turns out, there’s a scientific reason for that. The soapy-mouthed might be on to something.

5) Village Voice: Hot Dogs Are the New Foie Gras
Burgers and pizza are all the rage in gourmand circles these days, and Voice critic Robert Sietsema does not appreciate the trend. “The escalation of prices for what were once working-class food, is the true blowback of the economic downturn.” I don’t agree – if people can afford a $6 hot dog, let ‘em have it. Still, read on and let me know whatcha think.

6) CNN/Health.com: Fat Camps for Grown-ups – Do They Work?
You can probably guess what they discovered here, but if not, here’s the quoted expert: "Weight-loss camps are not an easy or quick fix. The short-term investment of time and money does not automatically equate to healthy weight management in the long term." This seems to go for all quick fixes, doesn’t it?

7) AP: How to eat well on a food stamp budget - $68.88
Three chefs attempt to prepare varied, healthy weekly family menus based off the current food stamp allotment (which 1 in every 8 Americans are now receiving). The first flat-out fails. The other two, one of whom is Iron Chef Jose Garces, do very well, even though both of them pay more for meat. Veddy interesting.

8) The Kitchn
How to Make a Breakfast Burrito
Skip the Microwave - Lunches That Don’t Need Reheating
What is the Best Way to Clean a Box Grater
The first two posts: invaluable for office workers. The last one: invaluable for me. I lost many a knuckle before realizing scraping downward was a bad idea. And yes, I went to college.

9) The Simple Dollar: Family Dinner Night
Show up, maybe bring a dish, select your meal from a homey assembly line, sit down, talk to loved ones. Great idea for inexpensive, casual, fun get-togethers.

10) Atlantic Food: Make Produce Safe – Share Your Ideas
The FDA is accepting electronically-submitted suggestions to improve the safety of U.S. food. This piece gives a nice overview of the whys and hows, and then provides an e-mail at the bottom. Go! Now! Tell the feds exactly what you think! (Er ... without too many four-letter-words.)


HONORABLE MENTIONS

Broke and Healthy
Inexpensive, nutritious meals from someone with actual professional cooking experience! (Meaning: not me.) Clean design, good pictures, step-by-step instructions. What more could you ask for? (Besides a rainbow made of bacon.)

Huffington Post Food: Becoming Better Cooks, or Why Sandra Lee Is Not Evil Incarnate
HuffPo’s new food section debuted this week, and among the first articles is this opinion piece by Ratio author Michael Ruhlman. He ruhlminates (haw haw) on Aunt Sandy’s place in the culinary world, finally deciding she’s defendable, because she gets people in the kitchen. I have nothing to add here, except: TABLESCAPES.


AND ALSO

Hyperbole and a Half
Hilarious and smart, profane and unendingly awesome, I can’t stop reading this comic strip/narrative blog. If you go, you gotta check “How a Fish Almost Destroyed My Childhood” among other things.


Thank you so much for visiting Cheap Healthy Good! (We appreciate it muchly). If you’d like to further support CHG, subscribe to our RSS feed! Or become a Facebook friend! Or check out our Twitter! Or buy something inexpensive, yet fulfilling via that Amazon store (on the left)! Bookmarking sites and links are nice, too. Viva la France!

This week, its a group of pretty serious links tempered by candy, Batgirl, and a credit card application that will make your head spin. Sweet. (Also! Thank you again so much, sweet readers, for all your good thoughts and donations for Aline on Wednesday. You guys are positively wonderful.)

Image from Zatso

1) MSNBC: Sweet! Candy eaters surprisingly slimmer
Get this! Candy and chocolate eaters have “smaller waists, weigh less, and have a lower body mass index (BMI)” than those who forgo Mini-Snickers. Mostly, because they tend to work off the weight, don’t eat that much per day, and weight gain is largely (heh) associated with other things (soda, portion sizes, etc.). Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be mainlining some Jolly Ranchers.

2) Food Politics: Externalized Costs
In which Marion Nestle elaborates on the human rights, environmental, safety, and health care prices of inexpensive food. I’m not sure how much we can do on a personal level, except to buy ethically when possible. But on a macro/government level, it’s clear certain agricultural and labor policies (especially labor policies) need to change.

3) Wise Bread: How Water Can Save You $977 a Year
Remember: Water is the essence of wetness. And wetness is the essence of beauty. (And health. Drink more of it!)

4) New York Times: Colorless Food? We Blanch.
Can you imagine eating a gray Cheeto? Yeah, me neither. So it was no surprise when researchers discovered that food without coloring is way less appealing to us than foods with Red Dye #2. In fact, though some are organizing against artificial dyes in processed products, others argue, “I could live without sprinkles, but why would I want to?”

5) The Applied Research Center: The Color of Food
We’re not talking about the same kind of color as the last link. Instead, ARC did a, “survey of the food system, to map out the race, gender and class of workers along the supply chain.” And? Whites get the supervisory positions and the money, while people of color are mostly exploited. But wait! There’s more!

6) Accidental Hedonist: The Food Writers Bubble
Interesting essay on the inherent elitism and ultimate meaninglessness of food writing. Best sentence: “Many of us in food media live in a bubble. Writers, chefs, marketers, and publicists, all groups have people who, when you mention food culture, majority privilege, or the effects of poverty on consumption patterns, you may as well be mentioning quantum physics or string theory.”

Wiki Commons Lausangnau

7) Orlando Sentinel: Mislabeling of fish at restaurants may be widespread, studies suggest
We’ve posted a bit about mislabeling seafood before, but this Sentinel article goes into depth on the fraudulent practice, including, places where “escolar masqueraded as tuna, tilapia stood in for red snapper, panga and emperor fillets were on menus as grouper, and imitation crab meat replaced authentic crab.” In a 2009 study, a majority of tested NYC restaurants were passing off lesser fish. SpongeBob would never do this.

8) Cockeyed.com: The Torn-Up Credit Card Application
Dude tears up credit card application he receives through the mail. Dude sends it in to credit card company. Dude receives credit card. Jaws will drop!

9) Neatorama: PETA Offers $1 Million Prize for Lab-Grown Meat
Vegan scientists and Frankenstein enthusiasts! Get experimentin’!

10) Wall Street Journal: Calorie Rules Make Diets a Federal Affair
The government proposed a bunch of new calorie labeling guidelines for restaurants, but curiously omit movie theaters, booze, hotels, bowling alleys, and a few other “Huh?” areas. It won’t go into effect until next year, so I can plead ignorance on Starbucks’ Lemon Iced Poundcake for at least another eight months.

AND ALSO

Reddit: At Least One of These Girls Will Grow Up to Be Awesome
Guess who?


Thank you so much for visiting Cheap Healthy Good! (We appreciate it muchly). If you’d like to further support CHG, subscribe to our RSS feed! Or become a Facebook friend! Or check out our Twitter! Bookmarking sites and links are nice, too. Viva la France!