food

Trying to lose weight? Forget the diet du jour: It all boils down to math. If you burn more calories than you consume, presto: the pounds come off.

Fortunately, there's a tool that makes this math incredibly easy: Lose It! This terrific little program lets you create a weight goal and log your daily food intake and exercise.

Yep, it's a fancy calorie-counter. But it's a really good one, and I've found it has numerous advantages over traditional calorie-counting methods. For starters, because it lives on your iPhone, it goes where you go. There's nothing … Read more

GoodGuide, the service that tells you how environmentally friendly your bottle of shampoo or other household product is, now tracks food items. And not just nutritional content either. The site puts food items up against the same microscope it does for all the other products in its database, showing you how a food item stacks up against others in the same category, and what kind of score the parent company has.

Essentially it's all the things that makes GoodGuide really work, like finding out if your laundry detergent is killing polar bears; something you can now check for your … Read more

If you need a constant supply of smoked food nearby (and really, who doesn't?) the SmokinTex Model 1100 Pro Series Smoker might be just the thing you never knew you were looking for.

About the size of a small refrigerator, the smoker fits just about anywhere. It weighs less than 50 pounds, so with the optional set of wheels you can easily move the smoker exactly where you want. Which is something you are going to want to do. It is a smoker, after all. For the first two hours of the smoking process, "you will want the … Read more

Lose It is a free, simple-to-use weight-loss app that can help you set long-term goals and track calories consumed and burned. The Lose It interface is very intuitive, making it quick and easy to log both food and exercise--which is a must for any good diet and exercise tracker. The first time you use Lose It, you enter your gender, age, weight, height, and desired weight and weight-loss rate, and the app sets a goal date and gives you a daily calorie budget. The app then helps you track your progress with graphs, logs, and daily feedback (such as useful &… Read more

In one of the most useful and engaging Web 2.0 productivity apps we've seen in ages, Bacolicious promises to make your browsing experience so very delicious by superimposing an image of a piece of tasty, tasty bacon over everything you navigate.

Here's how you use it: Type in the Bacolicious URL followed by the URL you would like to load. So, for example, http://bacolicio.us/http://icanhazcheezburger.com if you think that your grammatically challenged cat would like to have a bacon "cheezburger."

It's all part of the bizarre Internet meme centered on … Read more

Today marks a very strange day for The 404. If this is your first time listening to The 404, you picked a good one because this is something of a milestone. Recently it's come to our attention that the show is becoming more tabloidy and less anecdotal...which is bad. So check out this show baby- tons of personal stories about statewide bagging competitions, DTV delays, voluntary amputation, wikipedia editing, and the best place to spend spring break. If you're a veteran listener, prepare yourself for total domination...wait, was that a video game reference or a quote … Read more

This time of year, I hear that much of the country suffers from a season called "winter." Here in Houston, we bundle up when the temperature drops below 70, so I feel your pain. To get through these cold, dark days, consider adding a slow cooker to your kitchen appliance stash.

The Hamilton Beach 3-in-1 comes with--wait for it--three separate crocks in 2-, 4-, and 6-quart sizes. Why would you want such a thing? Allow me to explain.

We're a family of six here at our house, and four of those are kids under 10, so the … Read more

When it comes to cooking food, it seems like when using steam it is easy to overlook. But Oster's Digital Food Steamer makes steam one of the easiest ways to cook up a healthy meal quickly. It's programmable, giving you a whole list of options like delayed cooking, warming settings, and timed steaming. The hardware is just as good as the software: it has a capacity of 6.1 quarts, divided into large (3.8 quarts) and small (2.3 quarts) steaming bowls--you can easily steam multiple dishes in one go. The Digital Food Steamer also has egg … Read more

On top of all the other dishes that I dirty when I'm baking, I almost always have to get out a fresh container to store food for later, along with any leftovers. That's just one more thing I'll have to wash down the road. However, Anchor Hocking has a line of containers that let you bake in the same dish you'll use to store food in--some are even large enough that you can do all of your mixing in the same container. The Bake n' Keep Food Storage Containers are glass, including the lids. They're … Read more