Inside Scoop to Win a Million Dollars

Here’s another way your Scramble subscription can really pay off! I recently began writing a lifestyle newsletter ("Food for Good Living") for a new online company, Jackpot Rewards. As part of their plan to draw new customers, Jackpot Rewards will be giving away $1 million every Sunday to one member. Since they just launched their site last week, you will never find a better chance to win than this week, as Jackpot Rewards will be giving away $1 million regardless of the number of participants. If you are interested, go to www.jackpotrewards.com (and sign up to receive Food for Good Living or one of their other featured newsletters). All I ask in return is that if you win, you send me a picture of yourself holding your million dollar check!

Help feed needy people while improving your vocabulary!

I just learned about this addicting site: http://freerice.com/index.php

Test your vocabulary skills by choosing the correct definition for certain words, and for each correct answer, 20 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program to end hunger.

The site also brings to mind of one of our favorite children's book, the gorgeously illustrated One Grain of Rice: a Mathmatical Folktale by Demi. Through a story about a clever girl who outsmarts a greedy Raja and saves her community from starving, the book shows you how quickly small numbers can compound.

Your Favorite Healthy Car or Travel Snacks

In next week's Six O'Clock Scramble newsletter (Vol. 233), the famous Snack Queen (a.k.a. my mom) returns with an updated list of her favorite snacks to have within arm's reach at all times. My mom has an incredible metabolism (and a very healthy diet) and she never leaves the house without a bag full of irresistable snacks for herself and whoever is lucky enough to be travelling with her, whether it's a 10 minute car trip or a cross-country journey by plane.

If you have any favorite snacks to add to The Snack Queen's list, please post them here so she can munch on them in the future.

Love it! Morning Star Farms Mini Corn Dogs

We have a delicious and relatively healthy new snack/side dish, thanks to a suggestion from Scramble subscriber Lisa Worlund. For a vegetarian product, they taste amazingly like the real fried corn dogs with beef, but they are neither, and have 71% less fat than regular mini corn dogs. I wouldn't exactly characterize them as a health food, with their list of 36 + ingredients, but they are pretty low in fat, have a little dietary fiber (1 g per serving), and aren't too high in sodium (as long as you watch your serving size).

By the way, Morning Star Farms products are now made (or at least distributed by, whatever that means) by Kellogg, and I generally think they make good-tasting vegetarian meat-like foods.

Thinking about summer camps in February?

Does it drive anyone else crazy that we have to get our whole summers organized by February, at least if we want to get our kids into their summer camps of choice (I was already shut out of one of my first choices for Celia because I waited two hours after the sign up began!)? I guess the silver lining is that by March we don't have to sweat those details anymore.

Celia's and Solomon's camp sign ups (which were somewhere between an algebraic equation and a suduko puzzle to put together) are almost complete. What does this have to do with cooking, you might ask? Well, I'm thrilled that for the first summer, Celia is dying to do a week of cooking camp at our local bakery, Just Cakes, and this with no prodding from me whatsoever! I'm so glad my love for cooking has rubbed off on my daughter, and I'm delighted that she'll be learning new skills--maybe she can teach me some new tricks after her week of cooking camp !

Mediterranean Quinoa Salad

I've been working on this recipe for a few weeks now and think I'm finally ready to share it, though I'll wait for warmer weather before using it in the newsletter. If you try it before then, please let me know what you think:

Mediterranean Quinoa Salad
(by Aviva Goldfarb, The Six O'Clock Scramble)

Prep + Cook = 20 minutes
4 servings

You can turn that powerhouse of a healthy grain, quinoa, into a light lunch or dinner with some flavorful additions. If you’d like even more flavor or color, try adding 1/2 cup finely diced yellow or white onion and/or finely diced carrots. Serve it alone or topped with yogurt, or over a bed of lettuce.

1 cup quinoa
1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
1 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice (optional), or more to taste
3/4 cup sundried tomatoes, diced
1/3 cup pine nuts, toasted
3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley or basil, finely chopped (or more to taste)
15 pitted black or kalamata olives, chopped

Cook 1 cup quinoa according to the package directions. Remove it from the heat and fluff it with a fork.

In a medium bowl, combine the quinoa with all the other ingredients. Refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes and up to 2 days before serving.

Obesity Epidemic

As parents, many of us are worried about children's eating habits at home and at school, and how to help our children maintain a healthy diet and body weight amid a sea of temptations for unhealthy foods and drinks. Here's a link to an article from the American Observer (a publication of the American University school of communications) about the role schools play in the obesity epidemic. http://americanobserver.net/2008/02/06/childhood-obesity-epidemic/

That's my son, Solomon, making one of his healthy smoothies, by the way.

Homemade Tortilla Chips? Not Yet.

Sadly, another tortilla in the trash, with another failed attempt last night to make my own tortilla chips. This time, I loosely followed a recipe from The Washington Post, but I used a whole wheat tortilla instead of flour. I brushed it with vegetable oil and sprinkled it with kosher salt, and baked it for nearly 15 minutes at 350 degrees. It tasted like and had the texture of cardboard.

I'm not giving up! If you've had any success making your own tortilla chips, please let me know how you did it (as long as it didn't involved deep frying, which I know works like a dream.)