Cooking From the Farmers’ Market features 245 recipes for farm-to-table meals. Readers will be inspired to gather the best quality ingredients at farmers’ markets, like tender asparagus and sweet berries in the spring, vine-ripened tomatoes and juicy peaches in the summer, sweet butternut squash and apples in autumn and delicious winter citrus fruits. Discover the pleasure of eating seasonally and locally with this beautifully photographed book from Williams-Sonoma. It is sure to be a gift list favorite for foodies everywhere!

To purchase the book, written by Jodi Liano, Tasha DeSerio and Jennifer Maiser, visit http://amzn.to/aOv9c3.

In 1982, Bruce Feirstein wrote a book titled “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche,” that stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for 55 weeks. The tongue-in-cheek title was popular because it satirized stereotypes of masculinity and popularized the term “quiche-eater” as a not-so-manly man who followed all the trends and didn’t want to appear too macho.

With that title in mind, researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management came out with a new study titled, “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche: Regulation of Gender-Expressive Choices by Men,” published in the June 30 edition of Social Psychological and Personality Science. In essence, the study shows men are more likely than women to choose foods they think their gender should eat.

The research was conducted by David Gal, assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School, and James Wilkie, a doctoral student there. In a series of studies, Gal and Wilkie found that men are more likely to make gender-congruent food choices when they have unconstrained time and resources than when the resources are constrained.

“Our findings suggest that men experience a conflict between their relatively intrinsic preferences and gender norms and they tend to forgo their intrinsic preferences to conform to masculine gender identity. Women on the other hand appear to be less concerned with making gender-congruent choices,” Gal and Wilkie note in their paper.

Wilkie told Foodie News that it all boils down to the fact that men tend to be penalized more for violating social norms than women, thus the title of the paper. It turns out real men don’t eat quiche because social norms tell them they shouldn’t.

“If I were to eat a quiche, I might think of myself as more feminine, or if I eat a quiche in front of a bunch of my guy friends, they might start making fun of me,” Wilkie explained.
The research reveals that every day items are imbued with subtle yet pervasive gender associations. “For instance, sour dairy products and products with rounded edges tend to be perceived as relatively feminine, whereas meat and products with sharp edges tend to be relatively masculine,” according to the study.

Wilkie said there is a stereotype that women are sensitive and men aren’t so sensitive, but the study shows that the opposite is true: men are sensitive about the food choices they make while women generally don’t care.

“From our studies, we manipulated the food items on a menu based on their adjectives,” Wilkie explained. “We tried to put in more manly adjectives than feminine adjectives. For example, we made a salad sound more masculine. That might encourage men to eat more healthy if restaurants described healthy dishes in a masculine way.”

In the food choice experiment, 163 Northwestern undergraduates (51 males and 112 females) made 16 choices from pairs of food items descriptively listed on a menu. Gender associations were made via ingredients, for example a masculine dish might include gravy, while a feminine dish might contain red wine sauce. A masculine dish might be described as “hearty,” while a feminine dish might be described as “luscious.”

In essence, the research shows that men tend to care more about gender appropriate choices when it comes to food, while women tend to care very little about gender associations. “Men, when given time to think about the choices that they make, along with the time to consider the consequences of their choices, choose more masculine items, more masculine foods, more masculine products, whereas with women if we give them more time to make the choices, then they choose the exact same thing,” Wilkie said.

To read the study, click on this link: http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/06/28/1948550610365003.full.pdf+html

The self-proclaimed Hungry Girl (Lisa Lillien) has made it her mission to help people solve their diet dilemmas and maintain a healthier lifestyle. In the Hungry Girl world, no foods are “off-limits” because whatever you crave—she’s got a healthier swap!

Lillien is not a chef or a nutritionist; she is just hungry. Like many women, Lillien has struggled with eating what she wants to eat versus what she knows she should be eating. She considers herself a foodologist.

“I am obsessed with food, how wonderful it is and how much of it will make it impossible for me to fit into my pants,” she has often said.

After trying every fad diet and watching her weight yo-yo up and down Lillien has found that losing and maintaining weight is not temporary, but rather a lifestyle change. She lives by what she calls the 80/20 rule—80 percent of the time she eats healthfully and the other 20 percent of the time she indulges. She created a plethora of recipes to allow eat guilt-free eating during the 80 percent of the time when her focus is on healthy consumption. Wanting to share her knowledge with the world, Hungry Girl was born.

Hungry Girl is a free daily e-mail subscription service launched in May 2004. The website and e-mails feature tips, tricks, recipes and advice on low-fat and low-calorie alternatives to our most-craved foods. Lillien and her team vigorously test the recipes to ensure the quality of taste so that subscribers don’t feel deprived and can more easily maintain a healthy lifestyle.

One of her most creative swaps is to use ground-up Fiber One cereal as a healthier alternative to bread crumbs to coat favorites such as boneless chicken wings and onion rings, which are then baked rather than deep-fat fried.

Lillien’s realistic approach to a healthier diet recognizes that most Americans need help selecting low-calorie, low-fat snack foods. Recognition that she’s onto something is growing, as many food companies have sought out the Hungry Girl seal of approval for packaged foods.

In addition, Lillien has a growing library of cookbooks to guide people in their home kitchens, including 200 Under 200 and Hungry Girl Happy Hour.

Her daily e-mails originally went out to roughly 70 friends and family, but Hungry Girl now has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, typically gaining about 1,000 new ones daily.

Lillien has been featured on “The Rachael Ray Show,” “The View” and various other TV programs. Hungry Girl will soon be a TV show on the Cooking Channel where Lillien will be cooking her recipes, helping people navigate supermarket aisles, testing foods at the lab and showing up in unexpected places to help solve the world’s fatty-food dilemmas.

Be sure to sign up for Hungry Girl and enjoy your foodie favorites in a healthier way!