eating

While visiting a friend in Los Angeles last month, I got roped into taking a cooking class. "C'mon, it'll be a nice change from going to a restaurant," my friend Laurie told me. Afterward, I agreed she was right. And I have to add that not only is attending a cooking class a fun alternative to...

The headlines for various projects and challenges to eat on a small food budget always slurp me in with their titillation, the gauntlet-throwing, and immediately I ask myself: could I do it? The answer always disappoints, because I'm either doing it already or find the challenge so impossible it's...

This anorexic economy may be costing us our jobs and life's savings, but it's not stopping us from finding comfort in eating out. Zagat, the restaurant rating organization, found in its latest survey that the national percentage for restaurant and take out meals dropped only 2% this year -- from 50...

China has ordered the 112 official Olympic restaurants not to serve dog meat during the Beijing Olympics in August so as not to gross out Westerners. They also strongly suggest that all the other eateries in town stop selling dog meat for the month, too. The move is like their orders to shut...

Having tried a few diets, it seems logical to me that, the more repulsive and flavorless one's food is, the less likely one is to actually eat a lot of it. In that context, I can completely understand why cabbage diets, kasha diets, grapefruit diets and the like are so successful: after a few days...

In an article in the New York Times this week, a chef chronicles his attempts to prepare a week's worth of gourmet meals from groceries bought exclusively at a 99-cent store. The recipes, including baked salmon in coconut sauce and an impressive tuna casserole, looked appetizing. I just can't...

Back in the early nineties, "Food Stamp menus" were en vogue, and the newsgroups and early web sites were full of ideas (of course it wouldn't hurt to pay a few dollars for the knowledge!). Cynthia Hillson, then a mother of five living outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, was one of the first to...

In an earlier post, Tracy Coenen noted the incredible savings that she reaped by cooking at home. Her specific example was a pot of chili. Tracy pointed out that, were she to eat chili at her favorite restaurant, she would pay $8 a bowl. However, by cooking it herself, she reduced the cost to $2.94...

Americans are eating out more than ever, and it doesn't just show in their waistlines. It shows in their pocketbooks. While everyone's complaining about the price of gas, the increased cost of staples like milk and eggs, and the rising interest rate on that credit card balance they've been...

I've been reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a book extolling the virtues of eating locally (and the horrors of eating feedlot meats and processed, packaged corn- and soy-based foods of all kinds). The book is an apologetic sermon; apologetic largely because eating locally is...