All posts by: Keely Brown

Cool tailgating: Tips for packing your ice chest for the big game

Home & Garden
By Keely Brown on September 18, 2011 in

Tailgaters with their cooler

Football season has officially started and so, too, have fall tailgating parties. To get into the tailgating mood, we checked out fun football food suggestions from some favorite online sources. The Food Network has scores of ideas, including tips from Guy Fieri. His advice: planning ahead, bring enough utensils and provide lots of hand-held food goodies.

Tailgating season is the last hurrah for your cooler before it gets tucked away in the attic or basement until next summer. Don't have one yet? Check out updated cooler report for some top picks. No matter what type of cooler you have (be it a fancy wheeled cooler with telescoping handle or just a cheapy Styrofoam model), they all need to be packed properly if you want optimum performance out of them: Read more

Sugar is sweet--but is corn sugar?

Kitchen & Food
By Keely Brown on August 14, 2011 in

Sugar cubes in glass

High fructose corn syrup (known in the trade as HFCS) has become the culinary equivalent of global warming. While many people choose to believe in the scientific evidence pointing to its risks, others continue to dismiss it as yet another food-fear fad drummed up by the diet police. Read more

Barbecue: The secret is in the sauce

Kitchen & Food
By Keely Brown on July 30, 2011 in

Paint brush with barbecue sauce

Few foods in America seem to evoke the passionate partisanship of barbecue. Aficionados swear allegiance to their favorite regional sauce -- bottled or homemade -- as they would to their native state or hometown. And while it may seem the simplest of recipes -- tomatoes, sweetener, vinegar, spices and smoke -- a good barbeque sauce will merit praise worthy of the most complicated epicurean production. The secret, adherents will tell you, is in the balance and blending of these basic flavors. Read more

The Shady Side of "As Seen on TV Land"

By Keely Brown on July 21, 2011 in

A 1950s couple watching TV

Back in the 1950s, when the pioneers of the medium promised "Better Living Through Television," they probably didn't foresee the Snuggie or the Big Top Cupcake pan. But thanks to the infomercial - a miracle of modern marketing - we can visit an alternate, utopian universe called "As Seen On TV Land" at any time of the day or night.

In "As Seen On TV Land," dogs never bark and cats never claw expensive furniture. Food never spoils, but comes out perfectly prepared with little cook time and no clean up required. Rips are repaired in seconds, $10 gadgets can effectively replace high-priced electronics, and décolletage never shows at the office. These products are marketed as must-have, problem-solving gadgets. But what happens when fake review websites and swindling online product sales make your ASOT purchase a big hassle? Read more

Scandal, bribes and high-dollar intrigue... about olive oil?

Kitchen & Food
By Keely Brown on May 28, 2011 in

Olive oil pressing

Ahh, the sunny land of olive oil, where tourists and locals loll about in shady Tuscan or Provençal groves, savoring artisan breads dipped delicately into saucers of small harvest EVOO...

Now imagine a dark underworld of foreign intrigue -- a world where suspicious characters traffic in goods "guaranteed 100 percent pure," and where customs agents stake out exotic ports of call, waiting to seize rusty container ships full of contraband booty.

But this isn't a bad remake of  "Scarface." The substance in question? Olive oil, where stories of bribery, raids, seizures and arrests are making headlines all over the world. Read more

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