When Is It Worthwhile To Buy Organic? [Organic Food]

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When Is It Worthwhile To Buy Organic? [Organic Food]

via Consumerist by McLaren and Torchinsky on 6/30/09

Want to avoid eating pesticides without breaking the bank on organics? The handy "Shopper's Guide to Pesticides" makes it easy to keep track of which fruits and vegetables are likely to have bug spray all over them and which are not. Peaches, apples, bell peppers, celery, and strawberries head up the "dirty dozen" with the highest pesticide load. At the bottom: onions, avocados, frozen sweet corn, pineapple, and mangoes, which have so little pesticide, you're better off buying conventionally grown varieties (unless you're rich).

A study by the Environmental Working Group found that "people people can lower their pesticide exposure by almost 80 percent by avoiding the top twelve most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated instead."

Eating the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables will expose a person to about 10 pesticides per day, on average. Eating the 15 least contaminated will expose a person to less than 2 pesticides per day.

The guide is available as an iPhone app, a PDF, and printable HTML page. Unfortunately, it doesn't cover foods beyond fruits and vegetables, such as grains and meats. According to Consumer Reports, baby food, meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy should also head up the list of things you want to buy organically. Just make sure when doing so that you carefully read labels.

Labels including "USDA Organic/Organic," "Not Treated with rBGH," "No Hormones Administered or Added" and "Certified Humane" are the real deal. Products labeled "No Antibiotics Used or Administered/Raised without Antibiotics," "No Hormones Administered" and "Grass-Fed" might also be worth it, although there are loopholes that may make them less meaningful. Buyer beware as "Free Range," "Free Roaming," "Cage-Free" and "Natural" have such loose requirements that animals could still have been mistreated.

Shoppers Guide to Pesticides [Environmental Working Group]
Food Labels That Deserve Your Dollars [Reuters]
(Photo: travelinfool55)

Carrie McLaren & Jason Torchinsky are coeditors of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. In previous lives, they worked together on the hopelessly obscure and now defunct Stay Free! magazine .

 

 

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How to Slice and Dice an Onion Like a Pro [Eat To Live]

 

 

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How to Slice and Dice an Onion Like a Pro [Eat To Live]

via LH -mac -news -roundup -sponsors on 6/9/09

Ever wondered what the professionals do differently when they slice or dice onions and other ingredients? We did. So we called a chef, grabbed a camera, and filmed the nitty-gritty of knife skills for your kitchen education.

How differently does, say, Art Rogers, chef-owner of Lento in Rochester, NY, cut an onion than you or I? That depends on your knife skills. In the embedded clip, Rogers demonstrates good slicing technique, using his knuckles as a guide for lever-action, evenly-spaced chops.

He also shows the easiest way to get a consistent onion dice without making a mess of your workspace: Cut it in half, lay the halves on their flat sides, make horizontal cuts almost all the way through, then use the same levered slices to dice the vegetable in its place. (Be sure to hit the HD button for the high-res close-ups.)

Apologies for the somewhat shaky camera work, along with the out-of-focus moment. This was our first outing with a Kodak Zi6, Gizmodo's favorite cheap HD camcorder, and we weren't aware you had to get microscopically close to benefit from "macro" mode. Also, if you're a knife nerd (and you're in good company), Rogers is using his preferred Misono Japanese carbon steel knife, both for its edge retention and surprising lightness.

As you heard in the introduction, we've got another training video coming up for you. Thanks to Art Rogers and the Lento staff for letting us invade their kitchen, and for sacrificing vegetables and other foods in the name of edutainment.

 

 

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Jamba Juice Buy One Get One Free Smoothie

B/c you're now in the land of jamba juice. 

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Jamba Juice Buy One Get One Free Smoothie

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Feed Your Family For $5 A Meal Without Going To Taco Bell [Money-saving Advice]

as if you're looking for more recipes...

 

 

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Feed Your Family For $5 A Meal Without Going To Taco Bell [Money-saving Advice]

via Consumerist by Phil Villarreal on 6/26/09

As Oregon Trail teaches us, the easiest way to save a buck on meals for your family is by clicking "meager" every time during meals until someone dies of scurvy and there's more freshly-killed oxen meat to go around.

But if you want to be humane about it, you may as well check out $5 Dinners, a blog run by Ohio stay-at-home mom Erin Chase,who is profiled here in the Houston Chronicle.

Here is one of Chase's recipes, as published in the Chronicle story:

ASIAN CHICKEN WRAPS WITH STEAMED SNAP PEAS

Teriyaki sauce or marinade, to taste

1-2 tablespoons tahini

3 chicken breasts

1/2 bag baby carrots or 1 carrot

1 bag snap peas

Salt, to taste

Handful of chopped romaine lettuce

1/4 cup peanuts, finely chopped

4 flour tortillas, heated

Combine teriyaki sauce/marinade with tahini.

In skillet, add sauce mixture and chicken. Sauté chicken about 5 minutes on each side until cooked through (cooking times will vary depending on thickness of the chicken). Slice chicken into strips.

Shred carrots. Rinse and pat dry the snap peas. Place them in a saucepan with about ½ inch of water. Bring water to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 3-4 minutes. Season steamed snap peas with a pinch or two of salt.

Assemble wrap by adding chicken, shredded carrots, lettuce and peanuts in tortillas. Serve with side of steamed snap peas.


Note: For a guilt-free version, replace the tortilla with a large piece of lettuce and make lettuce wraps.

Makes 4 servings, each 500 calories (28.8 percent calories from fat), 16 g fat, 50 mg cholesterol, 1390 mg sodium, 57 g carbohydrates, 6 g dietary fiber, 30 g protein.

Cost $5.09: Teriyaki sauce, 50 cents; tahini, 5 cents; chicken, $2.21; carrots, 49 cents; snap peas, 99 cents; lettuce, 10 cents; peanuts, 25 cents; tortillas, 50 cents.

And here's another:

ROSEMARY ORANGE CHICKEN

4 split chicken breasts

3 oranges

2-3 teaspoons rosemary, dried or fresh

Salt and pepper, to taste

Mashed sweet potatoes

1 cup frozen organic peas

Place 1/2 cup water in base of crockpot (or spray with no stick cooking spray or use chicken broth). Place chicken breasts in crockpot. Squeeze juice from 2 oranges over chicken. Sprinkle rosemary, salt and pepper over chicken.

Slice remaining orange into 1/8-1/4 inch slices and arrange over top of chicken. Cook on low for 8 hours. Peel chicken off bone.

Serve with sides of mashed sweet potatoes (prepared by baking sweet potatoes at 350 degrees for 50 minutes in foil-covered glass baking dish with 1/4 inch of water; mash with cinnamon and butter if you like) and 1 cup frozen organic peas, cooked according to package directions.

Makes 4 servings, each 320 calories (13 percent calories from fat), 4.5 g fat, 75 mg cholesterol, 110 mg sodium, 37 g carbohydrates, 7 g fiber, 31 g protein.

Cost $5.05: chicken, $2.06; oranges, $1; rosemary, 25 cents; sweet potatoes, 99 cents; peas, 75 cents.

What a scam, right? There Chase goes promising us a dinner for $5 and both of those meals costs several cents more. Fail.

Feed your family for $5 a meal [Houston Chronicle]

 

 

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Scientists see no dietary benefit to replacing corn syrup with sugar [Brandi...

 

 

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Scientists see no dietary benefit to replacing corn syrup with sugar [Branding Trends]

via Consumerist by McLaren and Torchinsky on 6/25/09

While grocery store brands increasingly swap out corn syrup for sugar-and trumpet the fact-little evidence suggests any health benefit for consumers. Corn syrup has been demonized because it's highly processed and environmentally unfriendly. But sugar ain't much better.

"Natural sugar versus high-fructose corn syrup" [Chicago Tribune]
"High-Fructose Corn Syrup: Not So Sweet for the Planet" [Washington Post]
(Photo: banjo d)

Carrie McLaren & Jason Torchinsky are coeditors of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. In previous lives, they worked together on the hopelessly obscure and now defunct Stay Free! magazine .

 

 

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fyreasst@gmail.com has shared: The World's Greatest H.O.R.S.E. Player (Video) | The Stimulist

The World's Greatest H.O.R.S.E. Player (Video) | The Stimulist Source: thestimulist.com
fyreasst@gmail.com sent this using ShareThis.

A Beginner's Guide to Image Sharpening [Image Editing]

 

 

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A Beginner's Guide to Image Sharpening [Image Editing]

via LH -mac -news -roundup -sponsors on 6/12/09

Ideally all of your digital photos would turn out crisp and clear every time; unfortunately that's not always the case. For those times they don't, this beginner's guide to sharpening your images in Photoshop is a good place to start.

Photoshop pro Helen Bradley goes into depth with Photoshop's Unsharp mask (this tool is available in other alternative image editors, too, including GIMP) to achieve the digital equivalent of an old darkroom trick:

In the darkroom the process is achieved by taking one negative and a slightly blurred positive image, sandwiching these together and making a very quick exposure of this sandwich. Then the exposure is completed using the negative. The resulting image has sharper and crisper edges than it would have had if the blurry (unsharp) mask image had not been used. The typical sharpening tool used in Photoshop and other graphics programs is named after this traditional darkroom process and is called the Unsharp mask.

We've covered this territory once before, but now that everyone's pulling out their cameras to capture those summer vacation memories, it's not a bad time for a refresher.

Update: A knowledgeable reader writes in with his two cents:

Hey, just dropping a line to suggest that Unsharp Mask is actually a very imprecise sharpening solution. It should be avoided like the plague in almost every application. In my time as a photo archivist I have learned this the hard, mildly-embarrassing way. The main problem is that it sharpens highlights and shadows in equal measure, so it's quite easy to get HEAVY artifacting (the mark of this very-old tool is a "halo" effect around shapes) even when you're not doing a ton of sharpening.

A night-and-day better tool is Photoshop's own Smart Sharpen, in the advanced settings mode. It grants you the ability to roll off all the sharpening on highlights, so that it's only actually sharpening the shapes in the image. It also lets you roll off the sharpening on the shadows, which allows you to avoid excessively sharpening edges or surfaces (and helps you avoid sharpening film grain rather than the image itself). You can do much more sharpening this way without exponentially increasing the image's noise. Smart Sharpen does take a bit more time to work its magic for the complicated math it uses, but it's a pretty brilliant tool and one of hundreds of reasons Photoshop has no real competition right now.

If you're just sharpening your MacBook headshots for facebook, by all means enjoy your unsharp-masking. But if you're working with any picture that you really care about, do it a favor and sharpen smartly.

P.S. To the commenters - "Smart Sharpen" IS in fact a high- (and low-)pass sharpening method. Any more intricate/complicated high-pass methods won't get you any better results than Smart Sharpen.

Understanding the basics of Sharpening in Photoshop [Helen Bradley via Lifehacker AU]

 

 

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How to Freeze Apples, Peaches, Plums, and 16 Other Fruits [Eat To Live]

 

 

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How to Freeze Apples, Peaches, Plums, and 16 Other Fruits [Eat To Live]

via LH -mac -news -roundup -sponsors on 6/12/09

Earlier this week, we showed you how to purée your fruit for a quick berry lemonade. If you want to save your fruit for the long-haul, weblog TipNut's extensive guide to preparing 19 various fruits for freezing is worth a look.

In order to pack a particular fruit, you must first know its intended use. This will determine the type of packaging required: dry, sugar, or syrup pack. The dry pack method, for example, is used on fruits that can be frozen without any prep time (apart from your basic washing and draining). Blueberries, cranberries, and currants fall into this category.

The full post also offers advice on how to prevent fruit discoloration and includes the above chart that breaks down a total of 19 fruits according to their preparation requirements and preferred packing methods.

Once you master the art of fruit freezing, take a look at our complete guide to freezing food to further expand your culinary (freezing) skills.

How to Freeze Fruit [TipNut]

 

 

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Homegrown Evolution

do you know this site?

 

 

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Homegrown Evolution

via Cool Tools on 6/26/09

Mead making, beer brewing, bread baking, urban poultry raising, container planting, pirate gardening, foraging, pickling, bicycle-powered hauling, solar-oven making and anti-car culture ranting are just a fraction of what you'll absorb plumbing the archives of HomegrownEvolution.com. Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, husband and wife urban homesteaders, guide those of us who can't make it back to the land on how best to incorporate aspects of it into our modern city-bound lives.

They're encouraging, but don't preach or pretend to be perfect, and therein lies their appeal. Erik and Kelly are friends of mine, and over the past few years their website and their book, The Urban Homestead, have led my household, step by small step, to be less consumptive and more productive.

-- Elon Schoenholz

Here's an instructional video on how to make your own self-watering container. If you plan to undertake this project, be sure to use a food-grade bucket, as the authors recommend in The Urban Homestead. SurviveLA was the original name of the Homegrown Evolution website. -- ES

Homegrown Evolution
Free

Sample Excerpts:

Related Entries:
Country Wisdom & Know-How The Art of the Stonemason The Complete Joy of Homebrewing

 

 

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Dell G2410 24" Wide "Green" LED Backlit Flat Panel Monitor $139 (or $134 w/ ...

a "tv" for our bedroom?

 

 

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Dell G2410 24" Wide "Green" LED Backlit Flat Panel Monitor $139 (or $134 w/ DPA)

via SlickDeals.net on 6/25/09

 

 

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FDA: Stop Using Zicam Nasal Gel, It's Associated With Loss Of Sense Of Smell [Recalls]

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FDA: Stop Using Zicam Nasal Gel, It's Associated With Loss Of Sense Of Smell [Recalls]

The FDA has recommended that consumers stop using several different Zicam products because they have been associated with the loss of smell (anosmia). Anosmia may be long-lasting or permanent.

The FDA says it has received more than 130 reports of loss of sense of smell associated with the use of three Zicam products:

Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Gel
Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Swabs
Zicam Cold Remedy Swabs, Kids Size (a discontinued product)

The FDA says that some of the cases occurred after only one dose.

"Loss of sense of smell is a serious risk for people who use these products for relief from cold symptoms," said Janet Woodcock, M.D., director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). "We are concerned that consumers may unknowingly use a product that could cause serious harm, and therefore we are advising them not to use these products for any reason."

FDA Advises Consumers Not To Use Certain Zicam Cold Remedies
Intranasal Zinc Product Linked to Loss of Sense of Smell [FDA]

~david

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