"serving" news and stories

After your chili has cooked for a good 1½ to 2 hours, it's ready to eat, but if you've waited that long, what's another day?!?! Letting chili cool down overnight, or at least for several hours and then re-heating it just before serving somehow makes the chili taste about five thousand times better, if that's possible. For a party, that's incredibly convenient, since you can make the chili at least one day in advance.

For the Super Bowl, serve the chili straight from the slow cooker. The slow cooker may not be the most stylish thing to leave out on the buffet table, but it will ensure that the chili stays warm as it sits out all afternoon (or evening) long. Throw a ladle into the chili and let your guests help themselves. If you have large handled mugs (that you might use for cappuccino or soup), use those for serving. Having a handle will decrease the chance that mingling guests will spill the chili on your immaculate floor.

Chili alone is good, but with "toppings," it's even better. Shredded cheese, sour cream, chopped red onions and scallions, and diced avocado or guacamole are good things to set out as a "bar" to put on top of chili.

You may also want to serve chili with some sort of bread. The natural choice here is cornbread, but any thick, chewy bread is good, as are tortilla chips.

Energy Fiend has a great caffeine content database that can give you the exact amount of caffeine in just about any drink you could want to know about. It is a great resource because, although drinks containing caffeine make it clear in the ingredients list, they don't list the actual amount of caffeine that they contain. Coca-Cola, perhaps taking a cue from E.F. is hoping to make getting this information easier for consumers by adding labels to all of their products indicating their exact caffeine content.

Such labels are already found on Enviga (8.33 mg/oz.) and Full Throttle (8.81 mg/oz.) and Coca-Cola Classic (2.83mg/oz.) cans will have it by May, with the rest of the beverage lineup - including Diet Coke (3.75mg/oz.) to follow over the rest of the year, though the labels will not be put onto the bottles and cans of Coca-Cola products sold outside of the US.

For comparison, drip coffee (black) has 18.13mg caffeine/oz., Red Bull has 9.64mg/oz. and regular black tea has 5.88mg/oz.

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The USDA's nutritional guidance system, MyPyramid, has not been the smashing success that organizers hoped it would be when it was unveiled almost two years ago. The problem seems to be that the new pyramid, as opposed to the old one, only provides guidance, not hard and fast numbers to follow. This means that diners need to take responsibility for their health and their choices - and motivating them to do so is not an easy task.

Trying to help the public to better understand and make use of the already in-place system, food manufacturers and retailers have joined together to create the Take a Peak program. The program aims to get people thinking more closely about health and using MyPyramid with in-store advertising, banners, signs and kiosk. Displays will how reminders of how many servings of whole grains should be eaten per day and what serving sizes look like. Some products will be given a logo indicating why it maybe a good choice.

The trial run of the program will cover 2,000 stores in 17 states and includes Publix, Raley's and SuperValue. Depending on the response from consumers, it may not be long before the plan (or propaganda, if you prefer to look at it that way) ends up in stores at the rest of the US, as well.

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It's hard to tell how many calories something has just by looking at it. We already know what an ounce of nuts looks like - but what do servings of other common foods look like? Wisegeek took pictures of 200 calories portions of 71 common food items, including everything from staples like flour, cornmeal, oil and butter to muffins, ketchup, bacon, Powerbars and Tootsie Pops. They every carefully cut down the items that were more than 200 calories per piece to provide the most accurate visual example possible. Measurements are given in grams or milliliters, as well as calories. And as an additional bonus, every item was shot on the same plate, bowl or glass, so the size of each item can easily be compared to its neighboring items.

Now, calories aren't the only thing to take into consideration when planning your diet, but it is still nice to see that one glazed donut doesn't have quite as many calories as a bakery muffin or a bagel because it makes it that much easier to enjoy every once in a while.

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The recommended daily serving size of nuts is about one-ounce, an amount that should contain approximately 160-200 calories, full of protein and other nutrients (vitamin E in almonds, manganese in hazelnuts and iron in cashews, for example). A nutty snack will also fill you up with a good balance of protein, unsaturated fats and carbs. The problem lies in getting that one-ounce size. I know that if I want to eat some nuts, I don't put them on my scale in the kitchen before I pop them into my mouth, although I do worry a bit about how many I've eaten when a big bowl is placed in front of me. An extra serving or two of nuts can add up quickly, especially if you're indulging a bit extra over the holidays. The trick is to learn what a one ounce portion looks like and nutnutrition.com, which is run by Planters, has a great interactive resource to help you do just that. The site lets you see what one-ounce of nuts looks like when scattered and in a 1/4 cup measure. After a couple of visits to the site, you'll be able to sit in front of that big nut bowl and snack with confidence.

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