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Made with yogurt, this drink is both refreshing and nourishing. To tell when a banana is ripe, look for tiny brown spots, called sugar spots, on the peel.

Ingredients

• 1 Ripe Banana
• ½ cup Nonfat Yogurt
• 1 tablespoon Sugar (or to taste)
• 1 tablespoon Banana Liqueur (optional)
• 1 cup Crushed Ice
• 1 teaspoon Fresh Lime Juice
• Lime Wedge or Banana Slice, for garnish

Combine the first 6 ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour the smoothie into a large glass and garnish with a lime wedge or banana slice. Serves 1.

215 calories per serving; 8 g protein; 1 g fat; 48 g carbohydrate; 38 mg sodium; 2 mg cholesterol.

Recipes from High-Flavor, Low-Fat Cooking by Steven Raichlen.

Arnie Greenspun was trying to bring some attention to his Towson bagel shop, so he posted a sign that offered, “Carbs galore. Extra carbs at no additional cost.”

Boy, did it catch people’s eye.

“Some people were just sticking their head in and saying ‘I love your sign,’” said the owner of Arnie’s Bagel Cafe on York Road. “It was a real conversation piece.”

While the popularity of diets such as Atkins and South Beach created practically overnight a multibillion-dollar industry in low-carb products and marketing, a backlash to all the weight-loss obsession has begun to creep into some advertising messages.

Shish kebabs, yakitori, satays, brochettes. Those names all bring skewer cookery to mind.

The Turks put small chunks of meat, typically lamb, on skewers and a pair of Turkish-derived words (sis, meaning skewer, and kebabiu, denoting small chunks of meat) are used around the world to describe many speared dishes. The Japanese are famous for the skewered chicken combination yakitori (yaki, meaning grilled, and tori, meaning fowl). Indonesians call their delectable beef or chicken skewers satays. While French cooks designate anything served on wooden sticks as brochettes. And that’s just a sampling. Countless countries around the globe boast skewered specialties.

Bertolli, the world’s largest olive oil producer and owner of 40 percent of the U.S. market, became the example of accountability and mislabeling in 1998, when the New York law firm Rabin and Peckel filed a class-action suit in the New York Supreme Court against Unilever, the English-Dutch maker of Bertolli Olive Oil.

The suit said that Bertolli’s labels, which said “Imported from Italy,” did not meet full disclosure laws because most of the olive oil came from Tunisia, Turkey, Spain and/or Greece.

“Bertolli brand olive oil is imported from Italy, but contains no measurable quantity of Italian olive oil,” stated court documents. Marvin Frank, legal counsel for the plaintiff, said that consumers had the right to know if they are buying 100 percent Italian olive oil.

Oved Shifriss, a plant breeder and geneticist whose development of hybrid vegetables in the 1940’s, particularly for W. Atlee Burpee & Company, helped ignite the national boom in hobby gardening, died June 25 in Bloomington, Ind. He was 89…

From 1942 to 1950, Dr. Shifriss was the director of vegetable research for Burpee, in Warminster, Pa., where he developed 12 varieties, including early hybrids of cucumber, eggplant, muskmelon and watermelon.

But it was his creation of the Big Boy tomato in 1949 that revolutionized home gardening, particularly the arduous art of growing tomatoes, said George Ball, the chief executive of Burpee…

Until the advent of the Big Boy, tomatoes were a hugely popular but time-intensive crop that flourished only under the painstaking dedication of gardeners diligent enough to spend hours staking their 15-foot vines, fertilizing to accommodate their persnickety soil preferences and protecting their delicate constitutions from disease.

Jeff Smith, a minister who became public television’s popular “Frugal Gourmet” …, died Wednesday. He was 65.

In the 1960’s, Mr. Smith, a United Methodist minister, began teaching a course called Food as Sacrament and Celebration at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Eventually he started his own program, “Cooking Fish Creatively,” on the local PBS affiliate. His television career took off with an appearance on Phil Donahue’s talk show. “The Frugal Gourmet” became the nation’s most-watched cooking show, and a series of accompanying cookbooks broke sales records for the category.

The risk assessment tool below uses recent data from the Framingham Heart Study to estimate 10-year risk for “hard” coronary heart disease outcomes (myocardial infarction and coronary death). This tool is designed to estimate risk in adults aged 20 and older who do not have heart disease or diabetes. Use the calculator below to estimate 10-year risk.

Curry favour

It’s an odd phrase. Why should “curry” have anything to do with winning the favour of somebody or ingratiating oneself with him?

It becomes even weirder when you discover that the phrase really means “to stroke a fawn-coloured horse.”

Its origin lies in a French medieval poem called the Roman de Fauvel, written by Gervais de Bus in the early 1300s. Fauvel was a horse, a conniving stallion, and the poem is a satire on the corruption of social life. There are several layers of meaning in his name: fauve is French for a colour that is variously translated as chestnut, reddish-yellow or fawn. A close English equivalent is the rather rare “fallow,” as in “fallow deer,” an animal that has a brownish coat.

In addition, fauve can be the collective name for a class of wild animals whose coats are at least partly brown, such as lions and tigers (the fauverie in a French zoo is the section devoted to the big cats). In the poem, the name Fauvel is also an anagram of the initial letters of the French names of six sins: flattery, avarice, depravity, fickleness, envy and cowardice. And his colour evokes the old medieval proverbial belief that a fallow horse was the symbol of dishonesty.

The poem was well known among educated people in Britain, who started to refer to “Fauvel,” variously spelled, as the symbol of cunning and depravity. That quickly became “curry Favel.” “Curry” here has nothing to do with Indian food (that word arrived in the language from Tamil via Portuguese much later, at the end of the 16th century) but is the term for rubbing down a horse. The idea behind “currying Favel” is that the horse in the poem was susceptible to flattery, figuratively a kind of stroking.

Among people who didn’t know the poem — then, as now, that was nearly everybody — “Fauvel” or “Favel” meant nothing at all. “Favour” seemed a much more sensible word; by the early part of the 16th century popular etymology had changed it to that and so it has remained ever since.

Visually, making the connection between the cite tag and blockquote might not always be so easy. In attempt to make that connection, this example overlaps the cite tag onto the bottom border of the blockquote.

If you’re a fan of cooking shows, you should be aware that you shouldn’t follow the cooking procedures shown in these programs too closely. According to researchers from the Food Safety Network, TV chefs all too often demonstrate grossly unhygienic behavior that can lead to diarrhea instead of delight. According to this research, which studied cooking shows from America, Britain and Canada, “for every example of correct food handling, there were 13 food hygiene errors, typically seven per 30-minute show.” But what sort of food hygiene errors are the researchers referring to?

The failure to wash hands was observed in 75 per cent of the programmes viewed. Close behind was the failure to separate raw and fresh foods, observed in 72 per cent of programmes.

Other mistakes included wiping chopping boards with raw meat wrappers, and tasting food with a spoon then using it to add ingredients.

The Agriculture Department’s new testing plan for mad cow disease, which calls for testing up to 220,000 cows by the end of 2005, is seriously flawed and will result in “questionable estimates” of the prevalence of the disease in the nation’s cattle, according to a draft report by the department’s inspector general.

The harshly critical draft, released yesterday by Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who has long been a critic of the department, said the sampling that began June 1 was not random “because participation in the program is voluntary.”

In addition, it said, the department has fallen short of its own standards by failing to test all cattle condemned at slaughter with signs of brain disease, and it now lacks a credible plan for testing animals that die on farms.

Faced with fixed costs like labor and rent and with food prices that must remain competitive, restaurants have historically tried to squeeze as much profit as they could out of wine. At a minimum, the industry standard has been for restaurants to charge triple what they pay for a bottle. Consumers usually end up paying at least twice the price they would pay in a retail shop, and that’s in restaurants considered to be charging fair prices for wine.

I cannot pinpoint exactly when I began asking servers in restaurants whether a chicken dish was made with dark or white meat — and began declining to order it if it was white meat.

I only know that I got tired of relentlessly overcooked, chalky, cottony meat and realized that my preference at home for cooking thighs or whole legs had become, for me, a global predilection.

But according to surveys, I am in the minority: Americans in general express a two-to-one preference for white chicken meat over dark.

Given that we generally like salty, fatty, highly flavored food, I do not know what that figure reflects, other than a cosmetic avoidance of fat. (Breasts are undeniably lower in fat than legs, though legs are not especially high.) The truth is that when you want a blank canvas just a shade more substantial than tofu, you can do no better than the boneless, skinless chicken breast, especially when mass-produced.

Initially I am too nice. I am nodding and apologizing to everyone who is unhappy, but then they feel free to keep complaining. They all want to speak with the manager, who demands I become tougher. This is unnatural for me, particularly because I often agree with the customers. They did have poor service. Waiters forgot their orders or ignored them. Why is the wait so long? Good question. Because one of the owners or a celebrity arrived with eight friends and needed a table. There are too many reservations in the books.

“Stop apologizing so much,” the manager insists.

Slowly, I grow thicker skinned. About a month after I start, on a crowded Saturday, a dark-haired young man wants a table for himself and five friends. They don’t have a reservation and don’t want to wait. I tell him it will be “about an hour,” which really means two. After consulting with his friends, he peels off a $100 bill and slips it to me in a handshake. I am surprised —; no one has offered me a bribe before — but I give him the next available table. The hostesses all divide the money, and when he and his group leave, we wave to them, smiling.

New witnesses have disputed the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s official account that the only American animal found to have mad cow disease could not stand up or walk when it was slaughtered, challenging anew the underpinning of the agency’s approach to detecting the disease.

The new information brings to five the number of workers in Washington state who say the infected animal was not a “downer,” according to an investigation by the agency’s inspector general.

If the animal could and did walk, it would not have been a high priority for testing — making its discovery more a matter of luck than effective surveillance.

Sometimes, when something is in season, it’s easy to go overboard and eat that thing all the time until it makes you sick to even think about eating one more bite (cherries, asparagus, watermelon, corn, apples, winter squash all come to mind). But then there are other things whose season is so short and so gracious that you are left with a yearning. This is a good feeling I think and one of them many blessings of eating seasonally — you get tempted, you give in, until you are met with resistance and then the cycle begins anew with a whole different flirtation.

Americans have been feasting on lobsters for centuries. When the Pilgrims first landed on Plymouth Rock, lobsters were in such abundance on the New England coast that storms often washed hundreds of the creatures onto the beach. Farmers took advantage of the lobster surplus, using excess crustaceans as feed for livestock and fertilizer for their fields. At the time, the ready availability of lobsters rendered them a low-class meal for the poor and unrefined.

But over the course of the past century lobsters have become a worldwide delicacy, and lobster consumption has been recast as a transcendent dining experience. Until quite recently, however, little was known about the lives of these ocean floor dwellers. Questions abounded: How do they locate prey in the ocean’s murky depths? How do they mate? And why do they seem to favor certain types of underwater terrain over others?

In his new book, The Secret Life of Lobsters, Trevor Corson draws on recent biological research to provide a comprehensive account of the eccentricities of daily lobster life. Corson’s sense of humor and ability to breathe a human sensibility into his crustacean characters enliven even the most esoteric details of how lobsters hunt, hide, fight, and mate in their natural habitat.

In the field of web site design, there is rarely a solution that is 100% bulletproof — but just as an officer straps a Kevlar® vest on — being bulletproof isn’t something that is guaranteed, but rather something that is strived for continuously. Measures that can be taken to protect your designs.

Year Correlations, Millenniums and Centuries, US and Canadian Holidays, Day of Year, Non-Leap Year, Leap Year, Calendars by Weekdays, Zodiac, Seasons, and so on.

To offer a healthful alternative to the 1992 U.S. Food Guide Pyramid, which lumps some animal and plant foods together in a single group, Cornell and Harvard University researchers have teamed up with other experts to assist the non-profit foundation, Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust, unveil an official Asian Diet Pyramid. It reflects the traditional, plant-based rural diets of Asia, which research increasingly shows to be linked to much lower rates of certain cancers, heart disease, obesity and, in some cases, osteoporosis and other chronic, degenerative diseases than those found in the United States.

The Asian Diet Pyramid emphasizes a wide base of rice, rice products, noodles, breads and grains, preferably whole grain and minimally processed foods, topped by another large band of fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds. Daily physical exercise, a small amount of vegetable oil and a moderate consumption of plant-based beverages, including tea (especially black and green), sake, beer and wine also are recommended daily. Small daily servings of dairy products (low fat) or fish are optional; sweets, eggs and poultry are recommended no more than weekly, and red meat no more than monthly.

Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science (SCS) graciously hosts the Recipe Archive.

The recommendations, which modify guidelines set by the government only 2 ½ years ago, will increase by a few million the number of Americans who meet the criteria for therapy with the powerful cholesterol-reducing drugs called statins, and many people who are already taking the medications will be advised to increase their doses…

In the report, the health officials addressed three questions: When are statins merely a sensible option? When are they imperative? And how aggressively should patients be treated? The recommendations focus on the levels of L.D.L., rather than total cholesterol levels, because L.D.L. is the target of cholesterol-lowering therapies. [Ed.: Emphasis added.]

The new guidelines, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, will be good news for drug companies that make statins and other cholesterol-lowering drugs.