Dress to Ingest
Clever Tees Make Food Fashionable

By Warren Rojas

Photography by Hana Jung

Never mind wearing your heart on your sleeve. Make 2008 about proudly displaying your epicurean ideals.

The Diet Detective’s latest crop of deliciously wry T-shirts highlights nutritional sensibility (a donut-emblazoned covering warns, “think before you eat”) and gourmet pride (a plucky tomato declares itself “locally grown”) without becoming overly preachy.

With more than two dozen pun-ny styles to choose from—the carrot-backed “bite me” and onion-based “cry baby” designs are personal favorites—the demonstrative shirts can easily be appreciated by hardcore chowhounds and hipster fashionistas alike. Plus, each FoodTee purchase benefits a trio of food-centric children’s groups.

To view the full FoodTees clothing line, visit: www.dietdetective.com/tshirts.

(May 2008)

Mobile Meal Minder

By Warren Rojas

To try CalorieKing Mobile for yourself, visit:
www.calorieking.com/mobile.

Chances are, you’ve used your cell phone to make dinner reservations, order takeout or coordinate impromptu cocktail parties. Now, you can use it tally up the consequences of all those glorious indiscretions.

The diet watchdogs over at CalorieKing have made their online food database more mobile-friendly, allowing anyone to search for free the nutritional makeup of almost 60,000 consumables found at your local grocery store, a favorite restaurant or just lying around your pantry.

“You’ve got your national food chains … and it goes into generic foods like apples and bananas,” a CK spokesman said of the exhaustive calorie cruncher, adding that in-house researchers update nearly 15,000 foods per month and cover almost 300 nationwide eateries (ranging from fast-food mainstays like Burger King to casual dining destinations like California Pizza Kitchen).

A search of recently added items turned up a grab bag of familiar snacks, including: Haagen-Dazs Reserve ice cream, Silk soymilk, Minute Maid juice blends, Freschetta pizzas, Cascadian Farm organic sherbet, Nestle Treasures truffles, McDonald’s McSkillet burrito and Gatorade sports drinks. Meanwhile, CalorieKing subscribers ($55 per year or $7 per month for an interactive weight-loss program) can use the mobile site to log items they might eat on the fly directly into their online diary.

(May 2008)

Mealtime MacGyverism

By Warren Rojas

“The Complete Idiot’s Guide to
Cooking Substitutions.” Ellen Brown.
Alpha Books, 200 pgs., $16.95.

Ever reached into the pantry for a pinch of that, only to draw back an empty container?

Veteran cookbook author Ellen Brown can relate. That’s why she’s pieced together a grab bag of so-called “recipe savers” in her latest tome, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cooking Substitutions.”

“General cooking is open to endless variations, all of which can lead to successful results,” she explains early on in the encyclopedic guide, a roster of replaceable foodstuffs supplemented with quickie cooking techniques (Toque Tips), troubleshooting recommendations (Food Foibles) and explanatory asides (Sub-text).

Ingenious substitutions include: blood oranges (reduce regular orange juice by a third and add grenadine), turnips (use a 50-50 puree of rutabagas and parsnips) and ricotta (sugar-dusted farmer’s cheese). Likewise, invaluable guides like her beef tutorial (Brown ballparks the amount of meat required per guest) and a top-down equipment walk-through (baking pan volumes are delineated; alternate uses for everyday utensils are proposed) should prove handy for even the most experienced chefs among us.

Brown also provides plenty of easy-to-navigate tables and charts displaying the utilitarianism of everything from apples (Johnathans scored high all across the board) to assorted cheeses (the U.S. tied in terms of superlative hard cheeses; France claimed the crown for soft varieties).

(May 2008)