Healthy Eating 101: What Are Empty Calories?

Counting calories is important for losing weight or maintaining your current weight, but you also need to understand how calories work. Calories are not the same thing as empty calories, and these informative facts from the USDA will show you why.

What are empty calories?
Empty calories are calories that come from solid fats and added sugars. These calories add virtually no nutrients to your food, making them unnecessary and harmful if they're consumed in excess.

What are some foods that contain empty calories?
Foods with empty calories include desserts like cake, cookies, pastries, and donuts, sugary beverages like sodas or fruit drinks, many types of cheeses, and meats like sausage, hot dogs, bacon and ribs. Today, there are healthier versions of many of these foods that contain fewer or no empty calories.

How many empty calories can I have?
The number varies from person to person, and it depends on things like gender, age, weight and level of physical activity. As a general rule, adult women can have anywhere from 120 to 260 empty calories per day, while adult men can have 260 to 330 per day. That number is lower for small children.

For more information about empty calories and how to enjoy them in moderation, visit the USDA website.

5 of the Best Uses for Day-Old Bread

Eating bread before it gets stale can be tricky. If you’ve got a surplus of hard, days-old remains on your hands, here are a few ways to ensure your bread doesn't go to waste:

  1. Make a crostini. One way to maximize your stale bread is to act like you wanted it to be hard and crispy in the first place. Toss the bread in the oven on 325°, then top with your favorite bruschetta, cheeses, meats, or spreads.
  2. Top your French onion soup. French onion soup just wouldn’t be the same without the crunchy croutons smothered in gooey cheese. Roughly chop your stale bread and add a few pieces on top of the soup before you melt the cheese topping.
  3. Try out a bread salad. No, this isn’t a ploy to make salad more delicious (and less healthy). Bread salad, also known as “panzanella,” can be topped with sliced tomatoes, artichokes, grilled chicken, and your favorite Italian dressing to create a rustic, hearty meal.
  4. Make a grilled cheese. It may seem counter-intuitive to attempt to use your day-old bread for a sandwich, but lucky for you, grilled cheese and panini are supposed to be crispy anyway.
  5. Give it to the birds. If all else fails, break the bread up into bird-sized crumbs and you’ll make the avian community in your neighborhood very happy campers.

What to Do With Stale Bread [Real Simple]
17 Uses for Stale Bread [Wise Bread]
The 10 Best Things to Do With Stale Bread [First We Feast]
Recipes for Stale Bread [Saveur]

4 Unique Dishes to Take to Your Next Potluck

A potluck dinner is a fun way to experience a wide variety of different cooking styles, inviting every guest to bring a covered dish to contribute to the meal. Whether you’re tired of your usual potluck recipes or you’ve never brought a dish to a party before, don’t sweat it. If you’re invited to an upcoming potluck but don’t know what to bring, these four recipes will help make your dish a hit.

Caramelized Onion and Bacon Tart [Oprah.com]

Best Broccoli Salad [Mr. Food Test Kitchen]

Make-and-Take Potluck Dishes [Chow]

Old Fashioned Pineapple Upside-Down Cake [All Recipes]

Public Domain/Public Domain

Craft Websites to Inspire Your Creative Side

Have you ever looked at something in a store and thought, “I could make that”? If you’re an aspiring DIY-er or you already love to make things at home, there are a large number of websites to help you find project inspiration. These clever DIY blogs are some of the best.

Martha Stewart’s The Crafts Department  
There’s no one better to take craft advice from than Martha Stewart herself, and her website’s craft page certainly won’t disappoint. Full of crafting ideas for hosting parties in your home, making jewelry to wear yourself or give as gifts, and even knitting and crocheting patterns, this beautiful website will leave you feeling motivated to make something of your own.

SheKnows
Dedicated to helping stay-at-home-moms or busy mothers “stay busy and creative”, SheKnows is a fun website with information about scrapbooking, sewing, and crafts for the whole family. Decorate your home for upcoming holidays, learn different sewing techniques, and even keep the kids busy with the creative projects you’ll find on this site.  

How Many Servings of Fruits and Vegetables Should You Eat Each Day?

You know that you need fruits and vegetables every day to stay healthy, but how many do you need? This handy calculator from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will determine how many servings of fruits and veggies you need in just a few simple steps.

Here's how it works:

  • First, enter your age and gender.
  • Next, select your level of physical activity. This option includes 30 minutes per day or less, 30 to 60 minutes per day, or more than 60 minutes per day. People who exercise more need more food to provide energy, and they can also afford to eat more because of how many calories they’re burning. People who exercise less should also eat less to avoid gaining weight.
  • Your daily fruits and vegetables limit is measured in cups. Things like one small apple, one large banana, one large sweet potato and 12 baby carrots all equal one cup. It’s actually much easier to meet your daily requirements than you might realize! To see other examples of one cup of fruits and vegetables, check out this chart!

To use the fruit and vegetable serving calculator, visit the CDC website.

Public Domain/Public Domain

Get Excited for the Winter Olympics with These Three Websites

If you wait all year for the excitement of the Winter Olympic Games, these great websites will give you all of the resources you need to get ready Sochi! With full lists of games, teams, and athletes as well as information about how you can get involved with the games, these sites will be your resource for all things Winter Games.

Sochi 2014
The official website for the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, Russi, Sochi2014 is your online resource for Olympics history, this year’s events, Olympics memorabilia, and even purchasing tickets. This website also features an online fan club full of fun downloads, polls, videos and photos.

NBC Olympics
NBCOlympics.com is the online home of the official network of the 2014 Olympic Games. Here you’ll find the top news stories about athletes and teams, statistics to help you make your early predictions, and high-quality videos from all of your favorite winter Olympic sports.

ESPN
The popular sports website features an entire section devoted to Olympics coverage, with in-depth articles discussing goings-on within each country’s team in the months leading up to the games. The ESPN Olympics site also features high-quality photos, headlines for each country's teams, and thoughtful analysis.

Public Domain/Public Domain

Three Unique Ways to Make a Great Cup of Coffee at Prospect Tower

Good coffee's almost everywhere these days, with cafes dotting every corner and even fast food restaurants offering espresso drinks. Of course, many coffee aficonados still prefer to make coffee at home, using gourmet beans to create their perfect cup.

Drip coffeemakers might remain the most popular way to make coffee at home. But for those willing to experiment, there are a few other simple ways to make a great cup of coffee. Here are three you can try at home at Prospect Tower:

Pour Over
Like drip coffeemakers, pour over brewers run hot water through ground beans. Made by Melitta and other companies, pour over brewers offer a bit more control over the taste: you'll wait to grind the beans immediately before brewing, you'll pour the water over the grounds evenly, and you'll only make as much coffee as you'd like to drink. Click here to read a guide from Stumptown Coffee Roasters on pour over coffee.

Aeropress
The aeropress follows the same principle, combining hot water with coffee grounds. However, the press speeds up the process: the grounds soak for just 20 seconds, and then you'll press out the coffee into a cup. The result is coffee that's smoother and much less acidic. Click here to learn more about the Aeropress.

Cold Brewed
An increasingly popular way to make coffee, cold brewing dispenses with the hot water entirely and instead involves soaking ground coffee beans for up to 12 hours in cold water, then filtering out the grounds. The result is a very strong coffee concentrate. Mix one part concentrate with three parts water (or milk) and you'll have a very smooth cup of coffee that's very flavorful without much bitterness. Toddy, a company that makes a handy brewing container, offers some more detailed instructions on its website.

Listen to Collections of Some of the Earliest Recorded Music Online

Today, just about anyone can record a song with technology common in almost every household, but it wasn’t always so easy. If you’ve ever wondered how music was recorded before the age of computers or what the earliest known music recordings sounded like, these amazing websites will be music to your ears. 

National Jukebox
The Library of Congress’ National Jukebox is a comprehensive list of historical recordings that anyone can access online completely free of charge. Historians painstakingly took each of these songs and sounds off of their original 78 rpm discs and put them on online for preservation, including recordings from as early as 1900.

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
This impressive project, an initiative of the UC Santa Barbara Library, created a digital collection of over 8,000 cylinder recordings obtained by the Department of Special Collections. Cylinder recordings were the first commercially produced sound recordings, and this website uses them to attempt to give listeners insight into popular American music at the turn of the 20th century.

Ragtime
Another initiative from the Library of Congress, this website features historical information and recordings of popular American ragtime music. Explore essays discussing ragtime’s history and culture, biographies of artists like Scott Joplin and James Scott, and even listen to original recordings of some of the most influential ragtime songs.

5 Ridiculously Easy Dessert Recipes

Have a tiny bit of time to spare and a need for a sweet treat? Only requiring a few moments to prepare and little or no cooking time, these five dessert recipes will add a sweet finish to any meal or party.

Chocolate Covered Pretzel Sticks [Disney Family]

Death by Chocolate [Allrecipes]

Chocolate Chip Pound Cake [Allrecipes]

Sweet Grilled Cheese [Food Network]

Nutella No Bake Cookies [Shugary Sweets]

Trip Idea: Springfield, Illinois

No tour of state capitals would be complete without a visit to Springfield! Illinois's capital, as you might have guessed, features lots and lots on the life of Lincoln. But there's more to see and do! Here are some top destinations if you're planning a visit:

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum
Explore the life and legacy of the man who many call America's greatest president. The museum is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on Holidays. Make sure you make a stop at Lincoln's Tomb located just a few miles away. 

Dana-Thomas House
Head over to the Dana-Thomas House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1902. Take a tour through the house to see a bowling alley, wine cellar, string quartet band lofts, beautiful stained glass, and more. Explore the 35 room house from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday. 

D'arcy's Pint
Relax with an authentic Irish meal after a day of site seeing. The warm and cozy environment is perfect for enjoying a pint of beer and some traditional bar food. Make sure your try the "horseshoe," a Springfield classic made with Texas toast, your choice of protein (hamburger, chicken, bacon, turkey, etc.) then topped with fries and homemade cheese sauce. 

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