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Eating Healthier with the Internet

As someone who loves to cook and eat healthy food, I looked at several dozen health and recipe websites. I found that I could probably discard my three or four dozen cookbooks and get by with just Internet recipes. If web surfing didn't get me a recipe I was looking for, I could just request it at one of the recipe-sharing bulletin boards. Here are a few of my favorite sites.

The behemoth of health food sites, www.fatfree.com claims to contain 4,260 fat free and low fat vegetarian recipes. It's a fabulous site, including links to the USDA nutrient database, lists of vegetarian restaurants world-wide, and many e-mail discussion lists. If you're feeling adventurous, try the "random recipe" button on the home page.

Another place to find a large variety of recipes on a well-organized site is www.allrecipes.com. This site includes thousands of recipes, a "recipe box" function to organize your favorites, and automated shopping lists. Allrecipes has over five hundred vegetarian recipes and 461 vegan recipes (no animal products at all) listed under "special diets." The veggie pages feature some things I've never dreamed existed, like Banana Chai Bread and Sweet Potato Burritos.

A less attractive but interesting site is www.saltandpepper.com. This site gathers recipes from usenet groups all over the web and doesn't seem to edit them much. Its rarest feature is a section on preserving food. Wondering what to do with cassava? This is your site, especially since you can search by ingredient. Some off-beat but delicious-sounding recipes are here, like sun dried tomato-almond tapenade. But if you want a recipe for ceviche (a fish soup) or bulgoki (Korean marinated beef), you'd better be able to read Chinese.

Another site to search by ingredient is run by Veggies Unite! at www.vegweb.com. Sophisticated but simple recipes here include almond- coriander couscous. Vegweb also has a terrific links page that will bring you to sites about animal rights and environmental and health issues.

At www.webvalue.net, the graphics are awful. The recipes, though not plentiful, are luscious and vegetarian. You'll find spinach wontons, spice lo mein, and cashew chili here.

Nava Atlas has written several delightful vegetarian cookbooks, including one on regional recipes of the U.S. She brings her nutritious recipes and sweetly old-fashioned sketches to www.vegkitchen.com. You'll find cold soups here, recipes organized by season, holiday menus, and one of the best links pages around.

Variety is the key at www.epicurious.com. It has a section on healthful Jewish food by well-known cookbook author Joan Nathan. There's a section listing and soliciting out-of-print cookbooks for sale. You'll also find 481 "kid-friendly" recipes here, most of which I'd be pretty happy to eat. This is also where to go if you like Jane and Michael Stern. The Sterns are a feature on Saturday's radio show "The Splendid Table with Lynne Rosetto Kasper" (KNOW 91.1FM). In the early 80's, they traveled the country discovering regional slow-food specialties within five miles of interstates and listing them in their book Roadfood. Epicurious updates their travels in a section called "Postcards from America."

Are you in the throes of spring asparagus fever? Find your support group at the Carrot and Stick Vegetarian Site (www.members.gotnet.net/walter). You'll find an amazing number of ways to cook asparagus. You'll also find excellent articles on calcium and protein for vegetarians, and on famous athletes who are vegetarian.

Maybe you don't need an asparagus support group, but you'd like to meet gay vegetarian Latinos. You'll find message boards for sub-groups like that at http://www.vegsource.com. There's a huge section here on sandwiches and fat-free recipes. Unfortunately, most of this plentiful collection of recipes is copied from Veggies Unite! or Fat Free sites.

Need more convenient foods? The attractive www.goodkarmacafe.com tells you about vegetarian convenience foods (many available at Hampden Park Co-op) and has good suggestions for sack lunches. You can certainly see commercial sponsorship here, like the convenience tips that all feature the cooking spray PAM.

Another convenience site - it has "freezable" and "quick and easy" sections-is www.recipexchange.com. There are two or three dozen ethnic food categories here. But because the site doesn't seem to be edited, you'll find odd things like a shrimp dish in "vegetarian" and an all- American recipe under "Thai." If you're of an ethnic group that Garrison Keillor would make fun of, you'll find good recipes here involving mayonnaise. But would even a Keillor character submit the ubiquitous cream of mushroom/canned onion ring/green bean casserole and call it "healthy?"

Many food sites are very commercial and don't feature many healthful recipes. Even healthy people have their off days. On those days you might like to visit the Better Homes and Gardens website at www.bhg.com/food, which is for people who really like ham, cream of mushroom soup, and Bisquick. It also features lots of baking recipes

You can also get your cottage cheese and Jello fix at www.copykat.com. This site prides itself on having favorites from many restaurants, especially chains. It includes "Better than KFC Coleslaw." If mayo isn't your preference, you can also find the occasional healthy item, such as Spago's calzone (with Japanese eggplant, prosciutto, and goat cheese).

Does reading about all this food make you feel fat? Check out www.ediets.com. For $10/month, you can join this site, which really uses current technology to make dieting easier. It's almost an on-line Weight Watchers. You can choose from regular, low-sodium, convenience food, vegetarian, and vegan diets, among others. (Yes, I'm living proof that you can be plump and vegetarian.) You can change meals around with a mouseclick, track your weekly weight loss, and print out a shopping list of food you'll need for the menus you've chosen. My favorite feature is the variety of message boards where members give each other support and suggestions. You don't get junk mail from these, like you would from chat rooms, because you have a password-protected screen name that doesn't use your actual e-mail address.

All fooded-out? Tune in next issue for websites on health and the environment.

Ellen Weinstock can't remember when she started volunteering at the Co-op. Her proudest moments in life include passing the bar exam and being called "the (shelf) stocking queen" by several coordinators.