Helpful Site: ingredientcritic.com

I was looking for some nutrition info on parsnips and came across this site:

Ingredient Critic
http://ingredientcritic.com/spicy-healthy-crunchy-parsnips

Helpful!  I still want a more basic breakdown of the numbers (sugars, carbs, protein, etc) but there is some helpful info here, particularly if I'm venturing into cooking with a completely new ingredient, like when we had the CSA and I had kohlrabi staring me in the face for the first time (scary!)

tools: steamer

I grew up with a Rival steamer/rice cooker that my mom used for a couple of decades - pretty much three or four times a week.  We were eating a LOT of rice in those days.  We would have rice for dinner with soy sauce and then the leftover rice would be served at breakfast with milk and sugar.  We used it for veggies too - mostly carrots or asparagus.

I now have my own steamer and it is fan-cee - woo!  It's beautiful and it works so well and I love it.  It's a double-decker and has a wonderfully large capacity.  I grabbed this pic of my current Rival steamer from Amazon.

I have not tried meat in it, but I have cooked rice in one basket and a veggie in the other basket, or two different veggies.  Steaming always sounds to me like it will be a big pain, but once I get it going, it really isn't bad.  I like it that I can set something to steam for 30 minutes, then work on the rest of dinner, and everything has some hope of being done at the same time.  It's the perfect cooking method for me because I prefer almost all of my veggies to be crisp-tender and boiling or even pan cooking sometimes just doesn't let up and they are a soggy mess.  Tim has grown fonder of several veggies that I suspect he disliked mostly because of texture in the past.  And I agree - soggy asparagus is one of the most disgusting things ever.

My new use for the steamer is to cook food for baby Sophie.  I steamed apples and carrots the other day, with great success!  I am using a little munchkin hand-mill to grind up the softened food - but I need to switch to my big food processor (more on that later).

I'm also reading that steaming is a great way to retain nutrients (compared to boiling or microwaving).  We are pro-nutrients, so this is great news.  Leave me a comment if you are steaming something that I haven't thought of.  I kind of want to try potatoes.  We do green beans, asparagus, carrots, spinach, and apples now.  Have you tried any meat or fish?  Want to encourage me to be brave enough to give it a go?

tools: Plan to Eat

As I struggled with this wave of cooking ennui, I started to look to friends and blogs for ideas and thoughts on recipes, meal-planning structure, shopping frequency... all of it.  I found some great resources, but my favorite one came from I'm an Organizing Junkie in the form of a meal planning tool.

Plan to Eat has jazzed up the whole routine and I am loving it!  I started with the free 30-day trial, and by day 4 I was convinced that this would make the difference.  It's been wonderful.

The recipe importing is ideally straightforward and easy to use.  When I have a recipe on paper I type it in and then it's available for planning at any time.  If it's an online recipe I can use their bookmarklet to import it directly into my recipe stash at Plan to Eat.  This is making my recipe and meal-planning blog-surfing so much more productive and worth my time.  I am not printing off recipes to try to use later - just click import, change anything that I know I don't want in my version of the recipe - and it's done.  Simple.

I love the drag-and-drop planning structure.  Recipes are displayed on the left-hand side (and you can search through them, or filter them as you find helpful) and then when you've selected a recipe for dinner on Thursday night, drag it over to Thursday night.  Love it.

Then the customized date range on the shopping list searches your planned recipes and culls out a shopping list, sorting items by departments (which you can label in a way that makes sense to you) and then also sorts them by store.  So handy.

The ability to friend people within the site means that you can easily swap recipes with friends with accounts, or you can look for people on message boards who are trying to follow a similar diet track.  This has been so helpful for me as I try to get better at finding lower-carb options for our family.  I was browsing through the friend posts and saw Weight Watchers, Paleo, Gluten-Free, Organic-focus... lots of options.

I recommend taking the tour and seeing what you think of Plan to Eat.  Let me know if you sign up and want to be friends so that we can swap recipes.  It's a beautiful site and the simple, cornflower blue (classic kitchen color) design makes me feel organized and ready to plan.  Check it out!  I bet you'll love it.

Update: Tim is right - he mentioned in the comments that I left out a key feature in my review.  The meal plan can be published as an iCal feed and imported into a Google calendar, Outlook, etc.  We use Google calendar as a family and it has been great to have our menu for the evening available at a glance.  It's a handy feature.