Lannae's Food and Travel

I hope you like my food and travel blog.

April 18, 2009

Pressure Cooker - The Documentary

I went to see PRESSURE COOKER at the Nashville Film Festival on Saturday. I highly recommend it for any foodie out there. What a journey it was for 13 motivated kids from an under served part of Northeast Philadelphia. I smiled, laughed, cried and cheered for these kids. I had lived in Phila for about 10 years, and I know a little about Northeast Phila. Phila itself as a whole is a hard working class city with its share of poverty and crime. But, what Phila has going for it is a lot of history starting from revolutionary times, and an equally impressive food tradition and history. Anyway, if you are in a city with a film festival, go ahead and sit in on this one. It will warm your heart.

About the film:

"Three seniors at Philadelphia's Frankford High School find an unlikely champion in the kitchen of Wilma Stephenson. A legend in the school system, Mrs. Stephenson's hilariously blunt boot-camp method of teaching Culinary Arts is validated by years of scholarship success. Against the backdrop of the row homes of working-class Philadelphia, she has helped countless students reach the top culinary schools in the country. And under her fierce direction, the usual distractions of high school are swept aside as Erica, Dudley and Fatoumata prepare to achieve beyond what anyone else expects from them." from the official documentary website
http://www.takepart.com/pressurecooker/

April 5, 2009

LoseIt App for the iPhone/iPod Touch


picture from LoseIt.com, a Fit Now, Inc. website

Anyone who wants to lose some weight and has an iPhone or iPod Touch should look into this free app from LoseIt.com. Most of all the reviews are 5 stars for this app, and I added my review of 5 stars as well. People using this app claim to have lost weight. Well, I did download this app to give it a shot. I love this app, and it works for me! Well, I love my iPod Touch, and I am addicted to it. When I am not working or jogging, I am on my iPod Touch. Ok, so being addicted to the iPod is helpful in getting me to use an application. There are a lot of other weight loss tracking systems out there that are computer based, or paper based that never would work for me. If I had to wait and get home and type something on the computer, I would forget what amount I ate, not log a jog, or just plain never log on and write the stuff down in the computer. If I were to use a paper based tracking system, I would never pull out a piece of paper and write anything down at a restaurant. Also, paper tracking systems require prior knowledge of calories, fat grams etc, things I just don't want to have to remember.

Recording things on this iPod app is awesome for me. I enjoy my iPod so much, and use the LoseIt.com app all the time. I use it before I order something to see how many calories may be in it. The way I travel for work, I find myself with only fast food options many times, and LoseIt.com has most every low level chain menus dialed in like McD's, Pizza H, Olive G, Taco B, Starb., etc. Great to be able to find out what the calorie count is before eating something. For example, that single serving of French Fries are 600 calories with 30 gm of fat. If they are soggy bad fries, why waste the calories on such a dish that adds up to about 1/3 of my daily recommended intake of calories. I want to eat healthier when I am on travel status because when I am at home, I eat foods from my CSA (consumer supported agriculture) farm fresh foods, and eating road foods makes me weighed down and logy. The LoseIt.com app helps with keeping the healthier eating goal in mind. The feedback of the LoseIt.com app seems to exactly what I want, it keeps track of input from the day and week, every week back to when I started this program in January. It tracks carbs, fiber, sodium, calories etc by the day and week. It is great. With the LoseIt.com analysis, I have discovered usually don't get the recommended 25 gm of fiber per day, and I don't eat enough protein. I need to work on both. This program also tracks exercise, so it helps me keep track of when I jog, when I walk, when I lift weights.

What I don't get from this program is why it is free. It is so worth a bunch of $$. There are no ads. I don't believe that my app is being data mined by the developers. The reason being is that I use the app in mostly non-wifi zones, where no data can be exchanged from my iPod. I think it is just out there for free use. Does anyone know otherwise?