How to eat local for cheap

Eating locally grown and produced foods (the "locavore" diet) is becoming more and more popular, but let's be realistic: a lot of local foods are kind of expensive. Doesn't mean that they're not worth the price, or that the other foods aren't artificially underpriced, but a dollar's a dollar, you know?

So I love this article from awesome food website Culinate on 8 ways to buy local on a budget. Save yourself some cash and eat better, too!

5 fast and healthy dinner ideas

A classic problem is coming home after work, tired and hungry, and not feeling like cooking. Easier to get takeout or eat something out of a box than to cook something healthy, right?

Not so fast! Takeout takes longer than these quick meal ideas you can throw together in no time. Just think of how much better you'll feel after having a fast and healthy dinner.

1. Cornmeal-Crusted Chicken Salad

Self magazine has some of my favourite healthy recipes, and this fast chicken salad is no exception. Chicken strips are coated in a cornmeal mixture and baked for 14 minutes, and added to a mixture of salad greens, avocado, roasted peppers and goat cheese - all topped with a grapefruit juice dressing. Yum.

2. Egg Salad BLTs

Egg salad is one of my standbys for a quick meal - sometimes I just throw some together quickly, put it on toast and serve with a side salad of greens and vinaigrette. This version is a bit fancier, but still light on the veggies, so serve some on the side.

3. Herb-Baked Salmon

This is a super fast and easy way to cook salmon. While it's in the oven, throw together a side salad or heat up some soup.

4. Eggs in Tomato Sauce

Another hit from Smitten Kitchen, this one tastes best with the highest quality (homemade?) tomato sauce.

5. Easy Chicken Masala

This one requires marinating the chicken for at least two hours - but you can do it in the morning or the night before.

Trying new restaurants across the country

Sorry for the delay in posting... it's been a very busy winter! But now it's spring and I'm ready to start blogging again.

One of my favorite things to read about in food magazines like Bon Appetit is the travel sections. I love to try new restaurants when I travel and to dream about new restaurants even when I don't have time to travel. I recently found this guide to the best farm-to-table restaurants in the country on epicurious.com and it's really inspiring. Unfortunately I'm not planning a trip to any of those cities in the near future... but if you are, enjoy your meal!

Squash recipes I love

I love fall, it's the best time for cooking - the weather is cooler so you don't mind turning on the stove, and there's so much amazing fresh produce. Squash is one of my favourites. Acorn squash, butternut squash, pumpkin - I love them all.

I've made a few delicious squash recipes lately. Here are some of them.

Smitten Kitchen has a couple of recipes, of course. I love her Butternut Squash and Chickpea Salad with Tahini Dressing - it's easy to make and good to pack for lunches.

The November issue of Bon Appetit had a recipe for a Squash and Kale Bread Pudding. I made it and it's pretty amazing.

There's a great roasted squash soup recipe in the Rebar Cookbook. Squash soup is lovely and freezes well.

And I made a stuffed acorn squash recipe recently that was a mashup of a few recipes I found online. Basically, I roasted it in halves and then filled with a mixture of cooked quinoa, stir-fried kale and onions, pine nuts and grated Grana Padano cheese. So good!

And don't forget to roast the seeds! You can do all kinds of squash seeds, not just pumpkin.

Healthy recipes for green bean casserole

Green bean casserole is such a classic recipe, but it can be so unhealthy! It's a great example of how just because something contains a vegetable doesn't mean it's good for you. Canned mushroom soup is handy but it's not something I like to cook with very often - it's so high in fat and salt. Here are some healthy green bean casserole recipes I found to try, let me know what you think!

Green Bean Casserole - eatingwell.com

This one uses a pinch of grated nutmeg - yum! It also has fresh mushrooms and you can use fresh or frozen green beans.

Vegan Green Bean Casserole

If you can't eat dairy, try this recipe with vegan substitutes.

Green Bean Casserole (Shine)

This recipe uses buttermilk powder, which I'm curious about, because you can apparently use it (reconstituted) for buttermilk in recipes, and I hate buying buttermilk for recipes because I always end up having to throw some out!

Healthy Green Bean Casserole

This recipe uses homemade cream of mushroom soup to make it healthier.

Butter and nutrition (and desserts!)

Butter is kind of a symbol to me of how crazy the world is when it comes to health.

It used to be, in certain cultures, butter was just what you had. You had a cow, you milked her, you skimmed off the cream and made butter. It was the fat you had around and you used it. And it tasted good! No one worried about nutrition facts or saturated fat or the differences between butter and other fats for cooking.

Then butter became evil, according to health experts. And they told everyone to stop eating butter, so they ate margarine instead. Of course, it turned out that margarine wasn't so nutritious either, so a lot of people have gone back to butter - after all, it tastes better, and it's more natural.

Other experts say that we should be using oils, like olive oil, or flaxseed oil (but don't cook with it!), or even coconut oil, which is supposed to be very good for you.

But you know what? Butter tastes good. Especially in desserts. And it doesn't even take much - but a cookie with some butter in it tastes a million times better than something made with a butter replacement. And I love olive oil, but not in a cookie.

Nutrition is such a complicated thing.

So I like to use butter in moderation. (Good nutrition is all about moderation.) For savoury things, a lot of the time I'll use half butter and half olive oil, which I think is a way to get the best of both worlds. And in baking I use butter but sometimes I'll use some oil, or some applesauce or banana and just less butter. Desserts are better with butter, so you know what? Just eat less, and enjoy it.

What do you think about butter and nutrition? What fats do you use to cook?

Healthy dessert cookbooks I want to buy

I'm a cookbook junkie - I could spend all day browsing through Amazon or in a cookbook store. But I can't buy them all! One thing I love is cookbooks that focus on healthy desserts. It's amazing how many tricks there are for making dessert recipes healthier. One thing I do, for instance, is I almost always reduce the sugar in a recipe. Even if you cut out only 1/4 of the sugar, think of how much less sugar that would be over a year!

I was just looking through Amazon again today (so far I haven't spent anything, I'm being good!) and here are some of the cookbooks I've put on my wish list:

Don't they all look good? A couple are vegan - not that I'm a vegan, but I like to experiment with different techniques, and they get pretty creative when they can't use dairy or eggs. That fruit desserts recipe book looks to die for - I'm sure it would be pretty enough to put on the coffee table, even if you didn't make anything out of it (but how could you resist?). I like the book of bite-sized desserts because you can make really decadent dessert recipes in small portions and that way it's a healthy indulgence.

What are your favourite healthy dessert cookbooks?