[Each week at ProfHacker, Billie Hara (and friends) offer "What's For Lunch?"—health-conscious recipe suggestions and a discussion space for readers to pick up some tips and share their own. At ProfHacker, we recognize that sometimes lunch is a lifehack.—Ed.]

Here at ProfHacker, we look for "hacks" that make our lives easier. Many of our posts are about apps (applications) that make computing easier (or at least more fun). Apps aren't only for your computer or your smartphone, however. Have you ever considered that your slow cooker is an app? (Application / Appliance, get it?)

A slow cooker is an app that no kitchen should be without, as it will save you time, energy, and money.  We've supplied recipes for this appliance in the past: Pulled Pork, White Chili, Chicken Soup, and theme food from the television show "Lost."

Today, we present a slight different take on this kitchen app....

A few months ago, I wrote a short piece for ProfHacker about the benefits of service learning activities (or community involvement) for faculty. One of the benefits of volunteering in your local community, I argued, was to help keep your busy life in balance. Volunteering in my community has helped me balance the stresses of a (new) academic career with challenges of my (not so new) personal life, but volunteering has also helped me keep perspective about what I do, where I am, and where I've been. That perspective has been—at times—invaluable.

Service learning has been an important part of higher education and pedagogy for over 20 years because it adds richness and reality to an academic experience for both students and faculty. Service learning activities and experiences allow students to combine what they are learning in the classroom with the "real world" experience of working...

Belcher, Wendy Laura. Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, Sage Pub, 2009. $49.95. ISBN 978-1-4129-5701-4.
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Over the past several months, we at ProfHacker have offered a number of posts about academic writing, our Writer's Bootcamp series. These posts deal with (among many other things) writing tools, creative ways to keep writing, and writer's block.

Today, however, our Writer's Bootcamp series offers a review of Wendy Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (2009). This review supports the aims of our Bootcamp series, but it also targets a specific subset of our ProfHacker audience.

Here at ProfHacker, we write articles that are helpful to a very wide range of people who work in or around higher education. A significant number of our readers are junior faculty members...

This morning, Heather recalled how a professor's inclusive in-class grammar made learning more engaging.  In this post, I want to think about how we frame our pedagogy, to ourselves and to our colleagues.  In September of 2009, I wrote an article for ProfHacker about Teacher-Centered vs. Student-Centered pedagogy. In that post, I described a situation I'd found myself in where I had been described by a new colleague as a "teacher-centered" instructor.

I understood very quickly that my colleague and I were not working with the same definition of the term, as I'd always seen myself (and others had seen me) as a student-centered instructor.

In my real life and in the comments to that ProfHacker post, the term "teacher-centered" stirred some debate. As modern-day pedagogues, we desire to be student-centered, egalitarian, libratory, process-centered, or whatever modern-day buzz-word we ...

[Each week at ProfHacker, Billie Hara (and friends) offer "What's For Lunch?"—health-conscious recipe suggestions and a discussion space for readers to pick up some tips and share their own. At ProfHacker, we recognize that sometimes lunch is a lifehack.—Ed.]

Comfort foods are typically foods that are simple to prepare yet are familiar, evoking nostalgia and security. Macaroni and cheese is a common comfort food dish. Grilled cheese sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, meatloaf, and tuna casserole also fall into the "comfort food" category. For me, having breakfast (eggs, pancakes, waffles) for dinner is a comfort meal.

Every now and then, comfort good can be a great treat. ('Cause they can be high in fat, calories, and carbohydrates.) But occasionally, no other food works. Comfort food is what we need.

Today's recipe is an old standby for any meal of the day (breakfast,...

[At ProfHacker, we strive to help you create a balanced and meaningful life for yourselves. We do that, often, by trying to live that type of life ourselves. In today's special announcement, ProfHacker writer Billie Hara and contributor Bill Wolff announce the creation of Composing with Images Press, a publishing venture that combines digital with print media, community service, and a balance to academic lives through creative ventures. --Ed.]

Since July of 2009, Bill Wolff and I have explored the intricate relationships between images and words by taking photographs that depict particular themes. We then write reflective texts that examine our photographs through the lens of that theme. We compose both through words and images, and we posts these texts on our collaborative photoblog, Composing with Images.

Our individual photographic selections for each weekly theme are...

[Each week at ProfHacker, Billie Hara (and friends) offer "What's For Lunch?"—health-conscious recipe suggestions and a discussion space for readers to pick up some tips and share their own. At ProfHacker, we recognize that sometimes lunch is a lifehack.—Ed.]

Last week, I picked up Clean Eating Magazine at the grocery store (an impulse buy at the check-out counter). Even though I didn't need another cooking magazine, I'm glad I bought this one. It's a terrific magazine, loaded with recipes using "clean food."

Clean food is not, according to first impressions, food that has not been washed adequately. According to a definition from the New York Times, clean food is (in short) food free of artificial preservatives, coloring, pesticides, drug residues or growth hormones (that sounds organic to me, but folks swear there's a difference).

Nonetheless, today's recipe comes from the...

Here at ProfHacker, we strive to offer you a balance of articles that will help you balance your life. Balance is key to productivity, creativity, and an overall sense of wellness.

However, it is easy to help others balance their lives, and it's not so easy sometimes for us to balance our own. This is true in classroom activities, for just one example. As professors in higher education, we often strive to include activities in our classes that enrich students' experiences, and we work to make the theoretical content of courses we teach integral to the students' worlds. We balance course content with inspiration, motivation, and expectation.

We might include an experiential component in a course because of the richness it can add to a student's understanding of course content. Service Learning has been an important part of higher education and pedagogy for over 20 years because it adds...

[Each week at ProfHacker, Billie Hara (and friends) offer "What's For Lunch?"—health-conscious recipe suggestions and a discussion space for readers to pick up some tips and share their own. At ProfHacker, we recognize that sometimes lunch is a lifehack.—Ed.]

Today we offer two recipes for in-season vegetables: one is very easy to prepare and one is very (very!) healthy for you. Both are wonderful dishes. OK, you might not want to prepare them both for the same meal, but then, you might. Of course, that's totally up to you!

Pestos are simple to make, and this arugula pesto is very tasty. Once added to pasta, and with an additional little salad, you have dinner. The second dish takes a little more time to prepare, but uses fresh vegetables that are in season and plentiful.

Linguine with Arugula Pesto

--from A Cook's Bible: Seasonal Food by Susannah Blake

Ingredients

• 11 oz....

When I was a younger woman, I wanted to be a rock-and-roll photographer. In this profession, I surmised, I could travel the world, learn from creative people, develop my own vision, and not work in a nine-to-five world. But more than all of those, I wanted to photograph the musicians and singers whose music transformed my life. I wanted my vision of these talented and eccentric people to represent how the masses saw them. I wanted to be like Annie Leibovitz.

Well, that dream didn't quite work out as I'd hoped. Unfortunately, I liked to eat. And pay rent. Lack of support (and youth) kept me from progressing very far. However, I found other means to live the life I wanted. I traveled the world (OK, one country besides this one but I have traveled). I have worked around creative people, and I have developed my own vision. And thanks to advanced humanities degrees, I do not work in a...