Feel Good About Your Food: The Real Co

The Real Co's Pink Himalayan salt

Buying organic food is great, but when companies like Walmart get into the organic food game, you have to wonder how much the local farmer is being helped.

The Real Co seeks to change that. 

This single origin global food company espouses the mantra “good comes from good.” It just launched with three products: Basmati Rice, Himalayan Pink Rock Salt and Organic Raw Cane Sugar. All of these are sustainably harvested from either a single farm or family with products that can be traced back to their exact origins.

The transparency in food origin extends to transparency in packaging- you can see inside each item.

The Himalayan Pink Rock Salt is handcrafted in the Himalayan Mountains and is a gorgeous contrast in color - I sprinkled it on white chocolate chip cookies for a sweet and salty effect.

The Organic Raw Cane Sugar dissolves in cold liquid as well as hot, so it is ideal for cocktails when you've forgotten to make a simple syrup or for sweetening iced tea.

The third product, white basmati rice, is harvested in Punjabi. It cooked up fluffy and nutty, with each grain holding its integrity.

That integrity extends to the products themselves; the farm workers who help produce these products are paid a fair wage.

Ordering in for the Emmy's

A pile of outdated menus stuck in a kitchen drawer is so 1990. Use your drawers for their intended purpose, to store corkscrews and bottle openers, and order your food on the web.

New Yorkers have several online delivery services, which offer a network of restaurants and no additional cost to the coach potato. With the Emmy’s approaching and football season under way, this is a good time to consider options.


Grub Hub has over 15,000 restaurants in 13 cities, including Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Oakland, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC.

You can sort by cuisine, restaurant name or menu item and read Yelp reviews to help try an unfamiliar restaurant.


Allmenus.com also includes Yelp reviews. They live up to their name by trying to include all the menus of local restaurants in every market – but this means that some restaurants don’t participate in their online ordering program. So you might see a menu for a place you want to order from – and not be able to order.

Of course, you could actually leave your house, but you can also spend hours searching the 250,000 menus from cities across the United States. It’s also in over 400 college campuses.

Seamless offers apps for apps for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry users, or you can old-school it with a computer. The site covers 7,000 restaurants in 27 cities across the US and UK, and you can bookmark restaurants you like for easy re-ordering.

Delivery.com, the newest service in New York, has restaurants, but also grocery stores, liquor stores and florists who deliver – about 3,000 places in all. It has about 10,000 places in 10 cities outside New York.

Delivery.com offers reward points; follow the other sites on Twitter for promotions and special deals.

To go with your food, try The Sparkling White. Created by the folks at Sauza in honor of seven-time Emmy winner Betty White, a nominee for Hot In Cleveland.

7.5 oz. Tequila
2.5 oz. Triple Sec
3 oz. fresh lime juice
3 oz. Agave Nectar
12 oz. Prosecco or sparkling white wine
Lime Wedge for garnish
Combine first 4 ingredients in a shaker filled with ice and shake vigorously. Strain the mixture into a chilled champagne glasses and top it off with the sparkling wine. Serves 9.

The vegetarian panini

If you are coming to New York and want to take your vegetarian family out for lunch, or an early dinner, 'sNice, in the West Village (there’s another location, in Park Slope) is perfect. The sort of self-service restaurant – you wait on line to order, but your food is brought to you – has about a dozen sandwiches, a couple of huge salads, and a daily soup. Some food is vegan, all is vegetarian and everything is delicious. There are fake meat versions of traditional sandwiches, like a Cuban, with soy ham and pickles, a tempeh Rueben, with sauerkraut, and a Thai ‘chicken’ wrap, but don’t get your heart set on a particular sandwich; the menu rotates. The quinoa salad sometimes skimps on the avocado slices, but is quite filling, and the autumn salad, with cranberries, bleu cheese and walnuts, is available year round.

One note: cash only.

The city ‘snice is 45 Eighth Ave., near 4th St. The Brooklyn branch is at 315 5th Ave., near 3rd St.

A stand-out ‘sNice sandwich, the vegan Panini, is particularly easy to replicate at home. I pressed a block of tofu between two cutting boards, weighting it down with my Nespresso maker (you could also use a heavy pot, like Le Creuset, or maybe a left-over fruitcake). When you press tofu like this, it takes on the consistency of cheese, or paneer, but gives you more protein. I love cheese, but if you have a cheese sandwich every day for lunch, you are eating a lot of fat.

Spread a Ciabatta with pesto sauce and add tofu slices and a couple of oil packed sun-dried tomatoes. That’s it. This is also a great sandwich to pack in a lunchbox.

The vegetarian family hits the road

Becoming a vegetarian is a choice I made at age 15. It enraged my mother, which only strengthened my resolve to stick with it.

And I have. I used to cook meat for my husband, but stopped when I was pregnant and threw up in the butcher shop. He stopped eating meat then, too. And we have raised our three daughters as vegetarians.

We do eat fish, which I justify since according to Jewish dietary laws, fish is pareve – neither milk nor meat. If it’s good enough for the rabbi, it’s good enough for me. One of my kids did briefly flirt with eating chicken, her teenage rebellion; now, she won't even eat fish.

Travel can be a challenge, but then, so can dinner at a friend's house. You just have to adapt.