Tag Archives: food

September 27, 2012, 11:00 am

Ordering Food Online with GrubHub and Eat24

Every day, returning home after writing ten pages and inspiring young minds with my teaching, I prepare a lovely three-course meal, often cooking my artisanal hand-rolled pasta made from grandma’s recipe, served with vegetables I pick each evening from my hand-tended garden.

Wait, that’s not true of me. I’m guessing that sometimes it’s not true of you either. Some nights there is work yet to do and no time for cooking, so we order takeout.

I’ve use two websites when I’m looking to order takeout or delivery: GrubHub and Eat24. The two services are almost identical. You search by location for the restaurant or cuisine that you want, select your order from the menu, and either pay online or when the food is delivered or picked up. Paying online (including tip) is a nice feature of both, especially if like me you often don’t have cash handy. Neither service charges a fee, though…

January 25, 2012, 11:48 am

What’s Your Lunch Strategy?

By George Williams

It’s been awhile since we posted anything about lunch in our Wellness category, but you shouldn’t take that as a sign that we’ve started skipping this meal.

Last semester I tried something new: I purchased one of my university’s meal plans. Our cafeteria is pretty good (and it’s right next to the building that houses my office), there’s a fairly wide selection of foods, and on the meal plan the per-meal price was about as affordable as anything I was likely to find anywhere else. Making sure to load up at the salad bar (and to avoid the burger and fries options) was one way that I kept my health in mind. The convenience and affordability of the meal plan ended up being a great advantage to my daily routine.

How about you? What are you doing for lunch lately? Any new strategies underway? Let’s hear from you in the comments!

Each Wednesday, ProfHacker hosts an open thread…

November 28, 2011, 3:00 pm

Beat Holiday Bloat with Mindful Portion Control

By Jason B. Jones

I think I’ve mentioned before that over the last eight years or so, I’ve lost–and kept off continuously–about 75 pounds. (Pic.) Some of that was a fad diet; some of it was switching from Coke to Coke Zero and from crazy-sweet coffee to black. But an important part was self-education about portion control, my sense of which had gotten significantly out of whack during graduate school.

Learning to manage portion control is, in part, about learning strategies for eating less than you might, without feeling deprived. This can take lots of forms, from ordering rich foods as starters rather than main courses, to loading up on salads and vegetables, to using smaller plates or even hiding food. One stupid trick that has worked for me is that, once our kid started eating the same food as the adults, I became the designated eater of “old food.” Instead of takeout for lunch, then, I can…

November 1, 2011, 3:00 pm

What’s in YOUR lunchbox?

By Billie Hara

Back in the early days of ProfHacker, we had a weekly column, “What’s for Lunch?” This column provided ways to hack the noonday meal. After all the hacking we do to remain productive, sustain technological acumen, and become awesome teachers, professors still need to eat. We supplied recipes, tools, tips, and tricks to helps us remember to eat healthy foods, foods that we could bring to work with us.

Our first post in this series set up a scenario that most of us face on occasion:

You oversleep. You don’t have time to make breakfast, so you grab a Pop Tart as you rush out of the house, hoping you won’t be late to work. Lunchtime rolls around, and you’re starving hungry, so you…

…buy something from the fast food outlets on campus
…steal someone else’s lunch from the departmental refrigerator
…scrounge for left over crackers and salad…

April 18, 2011, 3:00 pm

A Better Spice Rack

By George Williams

It’s a small thing, I know, but I’ve never really liked storing all of my spices in the little cabinet above the stove. The various labels are difficult to see, making it harder than it should be to grab the right ingredient when you need it. Reaching up above a pot of boiling water or sizzling vegetables just doesn’t seem like a smart idea. And the heat from cooking can’t be good for the longevity of all of the spices that spend their lives in plastic containers above the burners. Fortunately, I recently came across an alternative storage idea in Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food. Potter advises putting all of your spices in a drawer and labeling the tops of the lids so that you can easily see which is which by looking down at the contents of the drawer. He argues that this is a better way of keeping spices flavorful and that it makes them easier …

December 21, 2010, 3:00 pm

Favorite Holiday Dish: Reader Response Roundup

By George Williams

Far be it from me, dear readers, to encourage you to overindulge this holiday season. However, if you decide to do so — of your own free will! — this is a great time of year to eat your fill of your favorite holiday dishes. Two weeks ago, I invited you all to share the recipes for such dishes, and a few of you took me up on the offer. Others emailed me directly after I sent out a request for additional suggestions. Below you’ll find a roundup of the various foods that were shared as holiday favorites.

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December 7, 2010, 3:00 pm

Share Your Favorite Holiday Dish

By George Williams

The end of the year is nigh, and holiday events are either already underway or currently being planned. Unfortunately, this is also the time of year when many of us are buried in grading, in writing deadlines, or end-of-term committee meetings. However, I’d like to invite you, dear readers, to take a moment to share with us your favorite holiday dish. (You might have noticed that we have a thing about food here at ProfHacker.) Your favorite dish could, of course, be a snack, an appetizer, an entree, a side dish, or a dessert. In a couple of weeks I’ll write a post in which I share all of the results.

Please use the comments section below to describe your favorite, or to leave the recipe, or to leave a link to the recipe located at a site like Epicurious. Thanks!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by snowpea & bokchoi]