Tag Archives: cooking

Why Every Fridge Should be Stocked With Beer

I am well aware that not everyone loves beer, and that is more than okay. I am not recommending that you have beer in the fridge to drink necessarily, but I am here to share with you some other benefits of beer, plus some surprisingly ways to put it to use.

Beer strengthens the bones and heart
If you are a beer drinker, you likely know that it is a great post-run beverage because of the carbs, but did you also know that beer has high levels of silicon, which has long been linked to bone health? Not only that, but beer has proven to reduce the risk of heart disease in those who drank a pint daily. Great news!

Beer is rich in protein and vitamin B
Beer is also high in antioxidants, protein, and vitamin B. Please don’t try to just get your protein intake via beer, but if you are choosing between beer, wine, or liquor, pick up a pint.

Beer can be used for marinating
Like its cousin wine, beer is an awesome addition to a lot of recipes, especially when marinating meats. Since beer is acidic, it tenderizes meat, as well as adding flavor. (more…)

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Jessica Tholmer

On Demand Eating: 6 Types of Food Delivery Services that Will Bring You Whatever You Crave

Remember when having food delivered basically meant the Domino’s Pizza guy ringing your doorbell? Now you can get pretty much anything delivered to your doorstep, regardless of where you live or what you feel like eating. Here are 6 of our favorite healthy ways to make the most of this new craze for on demand eating:

If You’re an Athlete: You know how sports drinks and energy bars seem to take up a lot of shelf space at the grocery store? It can be hard to cut through the clutter and find the best foods to fuel your workouts. The pros at The Feed do this for you. Their in-house experts customize a monthly box of sports nutrition for you or you can build your own. Boxes start at $20.01

If You Like to Cook (but hate to shop): We’ve already reported on Amazon’s growing grocery delivery service and other companies like Fresh Direct are also carving out a space in the market. This is great for anyone who likes to keep food in the fridge but can’t seem to make the time to shop. Some services charge a fee of around $10, which may seem steep or cheap, depending on how you feel about grocery stores. (more…)

Posted on May 14, 2023 by Jessica Cassity

6 Secrets for a Healthy Backyard Cookout

By Team Best Life

Spring is in the air and so is the smell of smoky, mouth-watering barbecue! As you prepare to pick up your spatula and fire up the grill follow these six barbecue basics for a healthy and tasty meal:

Look for lean.
Opt for lean meats to keep calories and fat in check. Try burgers made with lean beef (95 percent), buffalo burgers with naturally lean ground buffalo meat, turkey burgers, or veggie burgers (try this tasty recipe). As for steak, look for T-bone or different cuts of sirloin and flank steaks, or buffalo steaks, which are naturally lean. And don’t forget to remove the skin from poultry; it’s loaded with fat.

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Posted on May 13, 2023 by BestLifeDiet

Chef Secrets: 11 Kitchen Essentials for Easy Cooking and Healthy Eating

By Team Best Life

Some kitchen setups support weight loss efforts while others sabotage them. (The one pictured above looks like a good start to us!) Luckily it’s easy to make over a less-than-healthy cooking and baking space. If you have the right gadgets on your counters and fill your fridge and cabinets with the right foods your kitchen can be a weight loss haven, says Best Life chef Sidra Forman. Here are her 11 healthy kitchen essentials:

Must-Have Gadgets
1. A peeler
A good peeler opens up a whole world of fresh vegetables that might otherwise seem like a huge amount of labor to get through.

2. A salad spinner
Greens are low in calories and loaded with fiber, vitamins and phytonutrients, plant chemicals that protect against disease. A salad spinner makes it easier to incorporate them into your diet. Whether you’re cooking with them or creating a salad (like this tasty Peach Salad with Balsamic Dressing), you’ll want to start with clean and dry greens.

3. A roasting pan or heavy bottom skillet
Roasting is a cooking method that doesn’t require a ton of fat and brings out the flavors in all sorts of foods. If you do a lot of roasting, you’ll need a heavy bottom skillet. These allow you to cook over high heat—they distribute the heat nicely throughout the bottom of the pan—so food cooks properly without burning. A larger size pan is a good buy because you can use it for a lot of different foods. (more…)

Posted on April 29, 2023 by BestLifeDiet

Get Creative in the Kitchen with DIY Taco Seasoning

Improvising can be a lot harder than it looks. (Just ask the cast of “Saturday Night Live”.) Going off-script in the kitchen can be especially challenging, at least at first—after all, what if you screw up and make something that doesn’t taste good?!

But once you get over those initial fears of failure—which is a lot easier once you remind yourself that you can always get takeout!—adding a spirit of adventure to your cooking will likely make the entire experience more enjoyable. Before you know it you’ll be adding a dash of this and a pinch of that to your home creations.

But before you start yelling “Bam” like Emeril and dreaming up crazy-but-tasty flavor explosions, start small.

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Posted on April 10, 2024 by Jessica Cassity

15 Ways to Take Your Family Recipes from Health-Hazard to Just Plain Healthy

By Layne Lieberman, RD

We all know it’s better to cook at home than rely on restaurants to satisfy your stomach and take care of your health. Restaurant chefs and cooks are trained to use salt, sugar, and fat to add flavor to most dishes.

Unfortunately, a lot of recipes—particularly ones that have been passed down from generation to generation—rely on these same unhealthy tricks. The good news is that even your most gluttonous go-to comfort food recipes can be altered to be healthier. It simply takes a few substitutions and healthy cooking techniques to do the job.

Here are my 15 favorite recipe rules which I use to make any homemade dish healthier. (Need some initial inspiration? Browse my favorite recipes!) (more…)

Posted on March 20, 2024 by GuestBlogger

Graduating from Jenny Craig: You Hit Your Goal Weight. Now What?

Imagine it’s the day you’ve been dreaming of—where you glance down at the scale and have finally reached your goal weight! Celebration is in order. But, if you’re on Jenny Craig, which supplies pretty much all of the food its dieters eat, the thought of learning to maintain your weight while making your own meals may make you anxious.

Don’t worry. Jenny Craig’s chief nutritionist, Lisa Talamini, is here to help you feel more confident about the transition.

According to Talamini, you already have the tools you need for success. Here’s why:

On the plan, members learn to make healthy choices by adding grocery foods to their weekly planned menus. So, even though you’ve been eating packaged meals you’ve also been planning your eating schedule and supplementing with veggies and other purchased foods. You’ll keep doing the same thing, only with more cooking and less zapping!

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Posted on March 6, 2024 by Jessica Cassity

3 Steps to Perfect Pasta

Pasta is an incredibly versatile food. It’s an easy option on a busy night, or when funds are low. It’s a comforting option when you want something warm and filling. It’s also a heavy option when you’re trying to cut calories and watch your waistline.

It’s this last reason that can give pasta a bad rap, especially among dieters. So we want to share a secret with you: You can eat pasta and lose weight. Really. We promise.

The problem is, most people don’t focus on making good pasta. So, let’s start there. Let’s assume you’re already buying a whole grain option, therefore getting maximum nutrients from each and every calorie. But how are you preparing it? If you’re like most people, you’re probably just setting the pot to boil and dumping it in. If you take just a few extra steps, your pasta will taste much better.

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Posted on January 14, 2024 by Lacy

How to Cook with Parsnips and 5 Deliciously Simple Parsnip Recipes

Root vegetables aren’t the most exciting food in the bunch, but despite their funny name and appearance they can be surprisingly delicious and high in vitamins and key nutrients. Such is the case with parsnips, a lesser-known root vegetable that’s been inching its way into the hands and hearts of foodies and getting more notoriety for its versatility, pleasant taste, and abundant health benefits.

What are parsnips? Parsnips are typically grown in colder weather, allowing their starches to convert into sugar and develop their sweet flavor. They harvest in late fall and like potatoes and carrots, are available throughout winter and spring. Their appearance is similar to an off-white or pale-yellow carrot. And they have a bulbous top that tapers down to a skinny root.

When looking for a quality parsnip, choose one that is small and firm and not limp or shriveled. Once you get it home, store in the produce drawer of your fridge and they should keep for about two to three weeks. (more…)

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Dana

Stedman’s Favorite Oprah Recipes Include the Love Sandwich

For as public a woman as Oprah is, her life behind the cameras is very closely guarded. Who can blame her? Part of that life is a relationship with her long-time partner Stedman Graham. The two remain mostly out of the limelight together, leading seemingly separate lives. The truth, is the two are very close and very connected, especially in the kitchen. Every woman knows the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach!

Oprah might be one of the most powerful women in the world, with an Outlook schedule that would put all of ours collectively to shame, but she still makes time to make her favorite homemade dishes. In his very first appearance on the cover of O Magazine, something Oprah rarely shares with anyone, Stedman and his leading lady grant us a peek inside her kitchen as part of the recent first-ever Food Issue.

In an interview for O Magazine, Stedman raves about Oprah’s work in the kitchen, saying, “Chefs don’t have anything on [Oprah],” calling her a fantastic cook and adding that he enjoys anything she cooks, even that he appreciates her work.

It’s difficult to have Stedman narrow down his favorite recipe of Oprah’s, but one that stands out was an accidental creation she made just for him based on various on-hand ingredients, and it became known as the Love Sandwich, a panini made with pepper Jack cheese, turkey, avocados, tomatos and scallions served on seven-grain bread. (more…)

Posted on April 9, 2024 by Natalie K

Gluten-Free Dorm Room Survival Tips

by Shelby Kaho from Celiacs in the House

When I come home for the weekend, I try to cram in as much time with my friends as I can, but Saturday night and Sunday before I head back to school, I get down to business and cook for a solid few hours preparing gluten-free food to put in my dorm room mini-fridge freezer. The menu usually consists of fried rice with lots of veggies, grilled or baked chicken cut into small slices, sautéed asparagus, black beans, sweet and sour sauce to put on the chicken and/or steak, ravioli with sauce, steak cut into strips and sautéed, pizza, French toast, and chocolate chip cookies. I pack everything in quart sized freezer bags that I fill halfway, release the air and flatten the contents. This makes everything flat and stackable. It also makes it easier to break off single servings if the food is in a thin layer and cut up into small pieces.

I also stock up my fridge with corn tortillas for microwave quesadillas, shredded cheese (I put this on rice bowls, quesadillas, etc…), fruit cups, microwaveable sausages, lunch meat, fruit smoothies, and kefir. I also have several drawers full of the items that don’t need to be refrigerated. Some of my staples are microwaveable rice, gluten-free pretzels, chips, bread, fruit snacks, and beef jerky.

My strategy is to cover the basics like protein and carbohydrate so that I know I won’t go hungry and will always have what I need available to me. I also keep a collection of spices and sauces to make things less monotonous. My favorites to keep on hand are tamari, mayonnaise, hot sauce, ketchup, mustard, garlic powder and chipotle powder.

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Posted on January 23, 2024 by GuestBlogger

Tag Archives: cooking

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