While long lines are the norm at Space Mountain, savvy travelers can skip the lines Walt Disney World restaurants.

A few clicks of the mouse, and you can make Disney dining reservations online to have breakfast with Mickey, Goofy and Donald.

According to Examiner.com, guests can book reservations for Disney World's theme park, resort hotel and Downtown Disney restaurants -- including Princess and character dining locations -- up to 180 days in advance on its dining and reservations Web site.

Guests can begin booking for specific dates at 6 a.m., a few hours before Disney's telephone reservation system opens, giving online bookings for Disney dining reservations a slight edge for popular dates and restaurants.

Do you love to cook and want to learn more about it, but don't really have the time or inclination to go to culinary school? Maybe you just need to fill in some of the gaps in your self-taught education. There's a new online resource that could really be for you.

Called Rouxbe (pronounced roo be), this wesite offers cooking lessons, short video tips, and step by step video recipes. One aspect I really like about Rouxbe is that it focuses on technique but then supplies a recipe to go along with that technique. That is exactly like culinary school. There, you learn a technique and are then expected to be able to apply that to any recipe that you come accross. There's also a store and a community/forum section.

You have two basic membership options: free or premium, which is $99 for one year or $199 for a lifetime membership. The free membership level will get you access to text recipes and the drill-downs (videos featuring techniques and tips), and you get recipe previews and one free cooking lesson. To get full recipes and access to all cooking lessons you have to get the premium membership. Sure, it's no substitute for culinary school if you have career ambitions, but $99 is quite reasonable for an online culinary school if you really want to get cooking.

[Via Accidental Hedonist]

Surely you already know of Etsy, the ebay for the crafty and craft-loving alike. But perhaps you've yet to hear of Vegan Etsy, the blog of a group of Etsy users whose online shops consist solely of vegan items.

The blog primarily features fun interviews with Etsy shop owners, whose products consist of about half baked goods and half vegan accessories (which are just as fun to peruse). There are also plenty of links to the shops, where you can buy vegan goodies to your heart's content. A sampling: blueberry muffins, lemony-glazed raspberry turnovers, pumpkin spice cupcakes...is your mouth watering yet?

In addition to being an awesome place to find new buyers and sellers, you can pick up some great tips from the Vegan Etsy crowd, like new recipes, helpful vegan websites, and gorgeous flickr pages. You can't really go wrong.

Earlier this month, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wrote a company memo that expressed concern over what he termed the "Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience." StarbucksGossip.com first posted the memo online and its authenticity was later confirmed by Starbucks, then picked up by more traditional media outlets.

The memo basically said that because of the rapid and wide-reaching expansion of the company, as well as the desire to do so quickly and efficiently, there has been a "watering down of the Starbucks experience." For example, switching to automatic espresso machines removed "much of the romance and theater that was in play with the use of the La Marzocca machines (the manual machines the stores used to have)." Another issue Schultz had was with the store designs, which have become too standard, too sterile and, in some cases, too distanced from actual coffee.

Speed and quality are important to any food service business, but not at the expense of experience of the customers' enjoyment and Shultz is proposing that they start making some changes to recapture that coffee shop experience that Starbucks first offered. There won't be a full-scale reversal in company strategy in pursuit of this goal. Instead, changes will be implemented gradually to move the stores away from the cookie-cutter, fast food chain genre while still chasing a larger global presence. Examples of this include having baristas measure out freshly roasted coffee beans, rather than having them in prepackaged bags, and changing the merchandise to have more coffee-centric merchandise, like grinders and brewers, instead of stuffed animals.

The changes planned for now seem small, but getting the aroma of freshly roasted beans back into the stores is a step in the right direction.

The concept of a restaurant guidebook is becoming increasingly outdated. The books are rarely up to date and, although they can be carried around by travelers easily, just can't offer the user the same kind of immediate response - and an interactive one, at that - as online, user-driven restaurant guides. Chowhound, Yelp and Citysearch are some of the leaders of this genre, along with similar user-review driven online forums. Zagat, which was unique in the restaurant guide book field in that it based its "reviews" on user commentary, recently decided that it needed to move to a similar online format, where users could offer real-time opinions, in order to remain competitive.

Or, at least, to attempt to remain competitive.

Is there any more room left in the restaurant discussion board field for a newcomer? Given that people have expressed dissatisfaction with the way that Chowhound is run (and they way that the site looks), there just might be.

[via eater la ]

Most boxed chocolates come in a variety of flavors. The chocolates might be all truffles, each infused with a different herb or liqueur, or a simple mix of creams and nut-filled chocolates in milk or dark coatings. The blends are great when you want to share and have people who like different flavors, textures and consistencies, but when you have a box mostly to yourself, it's a waste to have the box half-full of chocolates that you don't like. The best way to get exactly what you want is to head to your nearest chocolatier and pick out an assortment that fits your tastes.

If this isn't an option for you for some reason, you're in luck because there are two online retailers that will allow you to choose an entirely custom assortment without ever setting foot in a store: See's Candies and Russell Stover. See's lets you choose from 75 different candy options, then adjust the percentage of each type that will be found in your 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5-pound box. A 1-lb mix is $17.50. Russell Stover gives you three different types of boxes ranging from 1/2-lb to 5-lb. You can't get quite the same variety as See's offers, since you are limited to a set number of types per box size, but there are still plenty of options. A 1-lb, heart-shaped box is $11.96.

Even before Chowhound became a part of the Chow network, users frequently had problems with deletions. Controversial posts and less than glowing reviews of certain restaurants were deleted without explanation and some users found that their posts were deleted with a high frequency, regardless of the topic. Since the message board is a public forum, it is perfectly appropriate for moderators to remove offensive content, but when non-offensive reviews of "off the table restaurants" and other posts relevant to the website were taken down without explanation, many users grew frustrated. The problems persist with the new Chowhound, leaving many former contributors to head to different, more open minded, websites.

It appears that Eater is one such site because they have just offered to post anything that has been inexplicably removed from the Chowhound site. They are able to do this because the "offending" posts are not removed from the Chowhound feed as quickly as they are from the site, so there is a window of time where it is possible to retrieve the posts. Of course, you will have to contact the staff to let them know if your post was stricken, but it will be interesting to see what types of pieces are selected for removal.

When Allrecipes redid their layout back in October, the design was met with less than positive reviews from users, who complained about the readability of the text, the number of advertisements and the difficulty of actually locating the main recipe on the page. Epicurious, one of the other leading online recipe sites, is now testing out a new look for their recipe pages. Fortunately, they don't seem to be going to extremes with their makeover.

The old view had a banner ad at the top of the recipe and put the user ratings, menu suggestions and related links down the left-hand side of the page. The new layout eliminates the top banner ad and moves the user reviews onto the right-hand column. The ads that used to appear in the sidebar have been eliminated as well and that space is now occupied with links to reference guides and the Epicurious recipe feed link. Along the top of the recipe, there are several tabs that make it easy to switch between the photo, reviews and the recipe itself without relying on the browser's back button.

Overall? The changes look good and it probably won't be long before Epicurious switches over to the new layout completely.

[thanks, alanna!]

In this week's Wall Street Journal, the ever savvy Catalogue Critic took on one of the most popular types of holiday desserts, cheesecake, to see if a good mail-order one could be found. Cheesecake may not sound like the perfect seasonal dessert, but more than one company that they interviewed reported that holiday sales had "increased in the double digits" over each of the last few years, and virtually all said that November and December were their biggest months of the year.

Orders were placed at five bakeries and testers, including the executive chef of the Four Seasons, were enlisted to judge. They looked for "a firm outside, a creamy interior and a balanced flavor" in each of the plain/vanilla cheesecakes. Their two favorite cakes came from Eli's Cheesecake Company and Junior's. Eli's ($28) was rich and creamy, with a shortbread cookie crust, but had a lemon flavor that not everyone enjoyed. Junior's ($29.95) was picked as the "best overall," as it was creamy, not crumbly, and had a slightly moist sponge cake base instead of a graham cracker crust. They also noted that Junior's is adding 12 flavors to their holiday menu for anyone who wants more than plain cheesecake.

Incidentally, shipping was not a problem for the testers, as all the cakes arrived in pristine condition via overnight shipping, so the cost of getting the cheesecake to your door is probably going to be a bigger concern than what it will look like when it gets there.

There is a new website geared towards those who, like so many of us, spend a lot of time shopping and looking for that one great deal on an exotic sea salt, a rare olive oil, or a really decadent dessert. One Gourmet Goodie spotlights one gourmet food item every day and offers it at a discount price. The downside is that the selection is limited and the offer only lasts for 24 hours, but the upside is that this results in a fairly substantial discount. There are sites that offer this "deal of the day" type of service for other goods and services, but this is the first one that I've encountered that does so with things just for foodies.

Past items included a Halloween Cake sampler from Black Hound Bakery in New York (pictured), Chocolate Peanut Butter Brownies from Simply Divine Heavenly Brownies, Chocolate Wine & Liqueur Sauce 2 Pack from Anette's Chocolates Napa Valley and an assortment of Cheddars from around the World. There are five new items each week, with the Friday item available throughout the weekend.

Back in April, we noted that Reader's Digest bought Allrecipes.com and there was some speculation that they might change the user-friendly site for the worse, especially since they said that they planed to use it as "the main portal to its other magazines and websites." So far, there really have been no major changes to the site, but it appears to have just undergone a major facelift. The new site (there is a site tour so you can figure out how to use it) seems to have given a much more prominent space to affiliated magazines and advertising partners and also seems to put more emphasis on the few top-rated recipes from every category. The biggest change is in layout. Instead of the fairly well-spaced pages that we were used to, where all of the non-recipe content was grouped on the right side of the page, it now seems that every bit of the screen is utilized, drawing attention away from the recipe.

They still have a great recipe database, though, so whether you like the new layout or not, there are still plenty of reasons to use the site.

After far, far too long a time with their slow-loading yet content-less website, Trader Joe's has upgraded to something worth visiting. The site now offers a complete look at the history and values of the privately-owned company, as well as the same information on new locations and copies of their latest "Fearless Flyer" newsletter.

The best thing about the site is that they now have a great display of their new items. Once you select your location from the drop-down menu, a page with pictures and descriptions of some of the new products in your area comes up. I already found that Cheddar with Mango, Chile & Lime is a new type of cheese ("one of the most unique cheeses (ever!)") currently being offered, a product I might not have noticed simply stocked on the shelves. They also have a useful FAQ that answers some questions about labels and nutrition, in addition to clearing up the ever-present concern of whether Trader Joe's products will turn you "into a superhero, a professional athlete or one of the great brainiacs of humankind."

Great job with the website overhaul, TJs. We love having a site that we can use!

A recent Australian study, the first of its kind, revealed that people who shop for groceries online tend to make better food decisions than those who don't. The reason for this was that when customers searched for one product - milk, for example - lower fat options were shown as a result, as well as the full-fat. Since they took the time to read the options on screen, as opposed to grabbing a carton and moving to the next item on their list, many shoppers chose the low-fat option. This happened with just about every food group.

Interestingly, the study also showed that the shoppers continued these habits, choosing the same, healthier products on multiple shopping "trips." When further nutritional advice was offered, consumers made even better choices.

The study tells us that when people take the time to really think about what they're doing or buying, people will tend to make better choices than when they're just taking the first thing that comes to mind. This is a good sign that messages about food choices and health are sinking in.

The fact that kids are bombarded with food advertisements every day hardly seems newsworthy. Nevertheless, ABC News recently ran a story about online food advertising and "advergames" that target children. The latter are online games designed to keep kids looking at advertising material for far longer than the timespan of a commercial. A study cited by ABC found that 85 percent of food brands that advertise to kids via television now have online advertising components. Cool-2B-Real (now Zip4Tweens, right) is a kid-oriented site from the National Cattleman's Beef Association. There you can play a game of hangman with answers like "Hamburgers" and "Steaks."

Some of you may recall a post last fall about monks from an Oregon monastery selling their homemade fudge online. Well, it appears that the Cistercian monks at The Abbey of the Genesee in Piffard, NY, are following suit and will soon make their line of breads available via the internet. The website for the Trappist order's bakery says that sales should begin sometime next month. Their bread baking began in the 1950s, according to a recent Business First article. At present, 14 monks work several days a week to produce white, whole wheat, raisin, sunflower bran and Genesee rye breads in the Abbey's bakery. They apparently turn out some sweets, too.