The End of the Road…for Now.

Throughout the semester, I have learned quite a bit about blogging. The biggest lessons I have learned, in no particular order, are:

1. Having a full-time job and a full-time blog is QUITE challenging.

2. Coming up with creative and unique content is 80% of blogging; once you have that, the blog entry will practically write itself…

3. That said, coming up with such content on a weekly basis (with no outside help), makes it VITAL for the blog author to choose a topic/issue that he or she is familiar with.

4. Food blogs that involve cooking are tough. Not only do you have to write the blog, but you also have to prepare the dish- which is a much larger time commitment.

However, there is also a lot about blogging that I love. First and foremost, I love reading other people’s blogs- blogs I follow, friend’s blogs, complete stranger’s blogs…I love them all. And I am very inspired by those blogs that are similar to my own. Throughout the semester as I have maintained this blog, I have enhanced my cooking skills and honestly learned quite a lot about food. As a young chef, I am always trying to learn as much as I can!

There is no doubt that I will continue to blog even once this class comes to a close. BUT. I must be honest and say that the odds of me posting more than once a week are quite low…until I finish school at least!

Stay tuned for a holiday entry! And keep checking back as my kitchen adventure carry on into the new year…

Merry Christmas!

How Do I Compare?

For this week’s post, I decided to do a little research and see what the professional food-blogging world was up to. The website for Campbell’s soup really caught my eye. No, it is not a blog about the 500 things you can do with soup, it is instead more like an online food encyclopedia. This website has everything! And is organized quite well for such a large blog with so much content.

Campbell’s company really understands it’s targeted audience and what it is that audience is wants to hear. The blog is divided into categories, some more unique than others:

– Recipes

– Our Brands (had to give themselves a little shout-out!)

– Cooking Solutions

– Entertaining

– Eating Smart (my personal favorite)

– Savings Center

– Community

These sub-heads really do encompass every aspect of the food world. I really enjoyed the “cooking solutions” section; it is more or less a guide to techniques, new spins on basic dishes, tricks to get kids to eat :), and so much more. The recipes section was further broken down into types of food, different parts of the day, popularity, etc. I really found it easy to navigate and quite helpful!

However, my favorite part of this blog was the eating smart section- for obvious reasons. And, this is also where I got a few ideas of my own, learned mistakes I had made (and how to fix them) and also seen how many more resources you have when there is an open wallet at your expense. There is definitely MUCH more here than I could ever put on my little blog, but the same principle still exists- taking a comforting, full fat dish and making it something you can eat every day, with half the calories. I don’t have a creative and/or social media team working for me to give me unique tips or new spins on dishes, it all has to come from my one little brain. So, in comparison to Campbell’s Kitchen, my blog may also seem a little out-dated or old fashioned.

(Not to mention the fact that since Campbell’s products have such a strong brand presence already, half their work is already done for them.)

The community section is really neat. Like mine, they have linked to a myriad of social sites and do great things there (over 300,000 fans on Facebook, which is CLEARLY light-years ahead of Grits and Grains). They also have a feature called “Kitchen Conversation,” which is basically a never-ending online conversation about food and cooking! How fun. Maybe my 4 followers and I could one day do something like that? Ah, to dream. Twitter is the same way, with over 20 tweets per day. Campbell’s is clearly doing things right!

All in all, I would definitely recommend Campbell’s Kitchen to EVERYONE. Go, check it out and feast your brain on incredible information that you can use to prepare a real feast for yourself!

 

Green Bean Casserole!

So those who have been following me for a while know that my favorite trick is to take an otherwise fattening casserole and make it healthy. This week I decided to tackle a holiday favorite, green bean casserole.

Typically, this dish is made with cream of mushroom soup, which is extremely high in fat and sodium. To cut down on calories, I used fat free cream of mushroom soup and low sodium green beans. I also used reduced fat cheddar cheese (and used it quite sparingly) and cut the amount of French’s fried onions in almost half – sorry, you can’t cut those out entirely!

To add flavor, I increased the amount of pepper and also used garlic powder. I think it added a little more to the background flavors of the dish and was a much more waist-line friendly substitute.

The recipe itself is foolproof. Preheat your oven to 350 and while it is warming up, dump all ingredients into one bowl and mix together.

Pour mixture into a casserole pan and bake for 25-30 minutes. Pull dish out in the last 5 minutes, top with additional fried onions and bake until they are golden brown.

I ended up serving the dish at a dear friend’s birthday party and it was a huge hit! Unfortunately I couldn’t get a picture of the final product since it was devoured so quickly. The entire dish was gone before I could get any. As a chef, that is the highest compliment. I was so pleased.

Try it for yourself! I think you will find my version just as enjoyable as the full-fat version, and you won’t miss the calories at all!

It’s Turkey Time!

Since holidays seem to revolved around food, the festive season is always a stressful time for food bloggers. In thinking about what to do for a Thanksgiving post, there are hundreds of directions I could take my blog. However, if I were to be honest, there probably is no direction I could find that hasn’t already been explored in one way or another. So, instead of trying to blaze my own fearless trail, I have decided to see what my other food blogging friends have written about and put my own spin on things in hopes to create a conversation about Thanksgiving. Not only will this help increase traffic on our blogs, but it will double the information our readers see! Thanksgiving is about giving thanks, and I am thankful for such an active and helpful network of bloggers!

Country Thanksgiving, From Southern Living

While the premise of my blog is easy ways to make southern food (read: food high in calories) healthy, I will not kid myself when it comes to holidays like Thanksgiving. There are some corners that are just not meant to be taken, and Mom’s Pumpkin Pie is one of them. However, a few basic tips can still help when making those numerous side dishes.

1. Fat free yogurt or sour cream is a great replacement for mayonnaise or full-fat sour cream. (Same principle applies for low fat/sodium condensed soups when recipes call for the full flavor versions.)

2. Cut back on butter and oil wherever possible. If you’re baking, fruit purees (I prefer apple) work wonderfully to replace either butter or oil and your audience would be none the wiser.

3. Low sodium chicken stock. Since I find myself buying this stuff by the gallon for Thanksgiving, this a cheap way to cut the sodium level of your dishes in half form the start.

4. Whenever possible, buy things fresh. Not canned. Most canned things come in a sugary syrup or a sodium-rich liquid. And rarely are either used in the dish. Fresh produce is your friend!

Did you know that pumpkin pie is actually GOOD for you?

At the end of the day don’t feel the need (or pressure) to make every dish a healthy masterpiece. We all need a little indulgence from time to time! And my friend’s blog (click here) has some DELICIOUS recipes for doing just that. Particularly, her Brie En Croute  recipe left my mouth watering. In fact, I think it still is.

However, if you have more willpower than I, this website has some amazing recipes that won’t leave you adjusting your belt by the end of the meal.

Happy Turkey Day everyone! Stay tuned for pictures from our feast later this week…

This week, I chose to tackle another high calorie, high fat casserole- zucchini rice. It sounds relatively healthy, but this casserole was originally full of egg, sour cream, cheese and butter. I quickly realized that I could make this dish, with a few twists of my own, for less than half the calories. And I did!

So what did I do? A few things:

1. Cooked the zucchini and onion in only 1/2 cup of low sodium, fat free chicken stock. Added garlic as well for more flavor.

2. Replaced the sour cream with fat-free.

3. Used less than 1 cup of reduced fat cheddar cheese and only used the parmesan cheese as a garnish on the top.

4. Instead of adding 2 eggs, I used a mystery substitute. What do you think it was?  (Scroll to the bottom of the post for the answer.)

5. Absolutely no butter or oil and added salt at the end, to taste.

6. Since it was low in sodium, I also added red pepper flakes and basil to spice things up a bit.

However, this casserole technically had many moving parts. And there were definitely some moments when I felt like this: Cooking Meltdown. Luckily though, in the end things turned out quite well!

If you would want to try my recipe for this dish, leave a comment and I will email it to you.

 

 

 

 

 

(Oh, and my egg substitute was applesauce of all things! With the sweetness of the zucchini paired with the onion, you couldn’t tell it was there at all!)

There’s an App for That

Did you know that more Americans own Smartphones than hold a bachelor’s degree or speak another language in their homes? I did not and I found that statistic fascinating.

That said, I began looking through my own smartphone for southern cooking “apps” to see what was out there. I found quite a few things!

1. “Vook” and “ExpertVideo”: These are southern cooking video apps. They are designed to teach those who do not know how to prepare southern dishes. They both provide recipes, step-by-step instructions with videos so you can make sure you are cooking properly! However, there was no mention of calories or healthy food.

2. “Southern Soul Food Recipes”: This app is just a big list of recipes. You can get this one for free and enter whatever southern dish you want to make. A recipe for everything from Fried Green Tomatoes to Pecan Pie, it is all here. However, nothing about healthy cooking here either.

3. “USA Cuisine”: This app literally has recipes from every type of cuisine there is, even expanding outside the United States. While I am not a fan of something this broad, this was the only one I could find that mentioned healthy food and southern cooking on the same app.

All in all, I wasn’t overwhelmed with the food-app world. Who knows, maybe one day Grits and Grains will have it’s own!!

The Importance of Relevance

Blogs are always changing. Always adapting to current trends and markets. As the owner of a blog, I must constantly be aware of this fact and work to maintain a relevant blog. However, this is not always an easy task. There are some quick things you can do to your blog to bring it into the conversation, while others take a little more time. Below is a list of things I have recently done to Grits and Grains, that I feel will make my blog easier to navigate, easier to search and therefore more relevant in the greater healthy food conversation.

1. Pictures. This being a food blog, pictures are of the utmost importance. Since websites like Flickr and Google have picture search engines, a quick way to increase the chance your blog comes up in the search results, is to name and keyword each picture you post on your blog. That way, if someone were to Google image search “butternut squash,” the odds of my blog coming up are decent, since I have multiple pictures with either “butternut” or “squash” in the description. Clicking the image will take the searcher to my blog. How easy!

2. Comments. One of the good things about a food blog, or at least from what I’ve seen so far, is that food is a widely appreciated thing. That said, the odds of negative comments are relatively low. Granted, we all have different tastes, so the possibility is still there. I try to manage my comments by deleting spam or excessively negative ones; if someone searches my blog I want them to find a positive entry or comment, not a negative one. The flip side of this is that I also like to comment on the blogs of my readers as well. Also, if I find a blog with a similar recipe to mine, I will try to comment there as well, with a reference back to my blog.  We can all learn from each other!

3. Blogroll. This is like my personal shout-out column. Any blog or website I like, that I think is relative to Grits and Grains, or is just genuinely interesting, I will put in my blog roll. Inspirations, aspirations, and proclamations- all of it on the blog roll! It’s just an easy way to get your blog to many readers on other blogs, and vice versa. We’re all in this conversation together, and the more we reference each other the greater our likelihood of truly engaging in it!

4. Tagging Posts. Super easy way to have your blog show up in search results. After each post, I will list multiple tags that I feel are relevant to what I was writing about. If someone were to search “healthy southern cooking,” the odds of my blog appearing are pretty high. The same is true for using keywords.

5. Social Media. Use other methods of social media to announce your posts! My preference is Twitter. Not only is my twitter feed a widget on my blog, but as I am preparing a new dish or once I have posted a new post, I will tweet that something is up as well! This helps maintain trust and loyalty for readers, as well as entice those who haven’t seen my blog yet to find it!

Have another idea? Post it in the comments below!

Turkey “Chick” Chili

For those who haven’t followed the weather lately, DC just suffered from a nor’easter of sorts, complete with rain, sleet, snow and temperatures in the 30s. That said, all I wanted to eat this weekend was chili. However, chili is traditionally a very hearty (and caloric-friendly) dish. I wanted to try my hand at something a little lighter, something that has the same tastes as chili, but without the gastronomic aftermath. I also haven’t used my crock pot yet this fall and thought this was a great time to bust it out.

After reading multiple healthy chili recipes, I got an idea for what sorts of things I could do to cut back calories. However, I went even a step further than most:

1. Turkey instead of beef (99% fat free)

2. Low-sodium diced tomatoes and kidney beans

3. No oil or butter. At.all.

The beauty about a dish like chili is that there really is no set “recipe.” 90% of the ingredients you add to taste. Below you will see what I chose to add. As long as it’s somewhat related to a vegetable, it will most likely taste good, so you can really add whatever you like. That said, I give you “chick chili.”

Begin by sauteing 1/2 cup to 1 cup of onion with roughly 1 pound of turkey.

Once the meat is almost cooked, add the green pepper. I used about 1/4 of a cup, but you can use as little or as much as you like. While ingredients are cooking, add eveverything else to the crock pot. There is no rhyme or reason do it, just dump everything in. My chili had diced tomatoes, only 1 can of kidney beans because I am not a bean person, half a jar of salsa (more flavorful than just tomatoes), 4 cloves of garlic and then a plethora of seasonings: salt, pepper, oregano, chili powder, paprika and cumin. Stir everything together and let it sit until the turkey is done.

After the turkey is cooked, lightly drain it on a paper towel so you aren’t adding extra juice to the chili. Remember, you’re not making soup. Carefully add the turkey, pepper and onion mixture to the crock pot.

Once you have added everything to the crock pot, re-visit the dish with your spices. I added a second round after I had everything in together.

Once you have it the way you like it, put the lid on and turn the pot to low. Let it sit for approximately 4 hours. If you like a chunkier chili, remove the lid from the crock pot for the last 30-45 minutes and the sauce will dramatically thicken up. In the end, you will be left with this:

Top with a little bit of fat-free sour cream and cheddar cheese. Enjoy! And to my surprise, this one was a serious crowd pleaser. I was hoping to have leftovers for lunch this week, but it was so good that there was nothing left by the time I served it!

Soul Sista

Well it’s always nice to see that I’m not alone in this quest for healthy comfort food. Recently, I came across this blog and loved it. There are so many neat things about it:

• The organization is incredible. For example, take the recipe tab. Not only are they split up into different cuisines, but also by different categories and even by menu! She also gives you ideas for place setting, decorations, etc. And that’s just one tab! Which leads me to my next point…
• There is SO MUCH on this blog! Basically anything even related to food, she has somehow incorporated into her blog and it all flows together.
• It’s easy to use. I know that sounds trite, but after going through lots of blogs from the most popular to the least, the ones that are easy to use quickly become my favorites. Some of the ones you would think would be the best make no sense at all! This one is fool proof.
• The coupons tab. I’m a starving 20-something living in a big city. Need I say more?

And then I realized it. Of COURSE I love this blog, half the stuff on here came from Oprah.

Now let’s get to what I really care about, the food. I went through her post of “9 Healthy Soul Food Recipes,” and like the rest of this site I was quite impressed. Not only does it list classic southern recipes, but a few even give you the history behind the dish or spice and what region of the south it comes from! Impressive.

However, I did have one question that I kept thinking about as I was going through this blog. At times it felt as though I was drinking from a fire hose. Which then begs another question, is there a point where you can post too much on your blog? My only complaint would be that this blog comes pretty close. While it is pretty, well organized, creative and helpful, there sure is an awfully lot of “stuff” on it.

Since I have now become their biggest fan, the only thing left to do is add them to my blogroll, follow them on twitter and essentially do whatever I can to shamelessly promote (read: stalk) this creative website.

And yes, I will absolutely be testing out some of the recipes ASAP. Stay tuned 🙂