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Have You Broken Your Resolutions Yet?

© Sarah White

If you're at all like me, you probably broke most of your New Year's resolutions back in January. This year, I was going to write more, work out more, get a new job (still working on that one) and eat more healthy foods.

This last one has been helped by the fact that I stopped eating beef and pork back in November, so I have been sort of forced to find other options.

Exploring vegetarianism has actually been a lot of fun, though my husband remains skeptical about some of the things I cook. I have purchased a couple of books on vegetarian cooking, and, of course, examined several Web sites for information about staying healthy within my new dietary restrictions as well as options for new-to-me foods.

One of the places I landed was Cooking Light, the online home of the magazine of the same name.

This site is really annoyingly advertising heavy, with pop-up ads galore as well as links to advertisers, sponsors and the magazine's own promotions all over the place. It's really busy in other ways, too, with links to lots of different features all over the place. It's apparent right away that there is more to this site than cooking, which can be good if you're trying to get in the swing of an all-around healthier lifestyle.

So let's get those other features out of the way right off the bat. This is a good site for general health information -- fitness, nutrition, beauty, even travel -- not seriously in-depth, but OK if you're not looking for anything in particular, sort of like flipping through a magazine.

The information about food and cooking is more in-depth, with menu planning, cooking 101 and recipe sections. Each of these sections has featured articles as well as menus in the logo bar leading to subsections.

The In Season section has a lot of good information on ingredients, from whiskey to poblano peppers to green tomatoes. There are also sections on technique, world cuisines (how many sites do you know with articles on Turkish food?), kitchen basics in the "all about" section, and menus for entertaining, outdoor cooking, families, quick and easy, cooking with wine, and, what I was looking for, vegetarian menus.

There are 13 articles that have to do with vegetarian cooking, ranging from Vegeterian Thanksgiving to a yummy and simple Vegeterian Pasta Dinner with pesto, spinach-strawberry salad and coffee fudge pie. It's pretty basic stuff, with a lot of "meat replacement" recipes, which is the place a lot of people start exploring soy, so I can't really fault them.