eat your colors, etc.

I just realized that the only time I've mentioned work on this blog was when I was crying. Not fair really, because for the most part, I'm really happy there.

Maybe you're curious, maybe you're not, but I'm gonna tell you anyhow. I get to do a lot of cool things at EatingWell, like create weekly newsletters, build health topic modules (I'm working on diabetes and bone health right now), work with partners like MSN and WebMD to syndicate our recipes and articles, and think of neat ways to feature content from the magazine on EatingWell.com. That requires some re-purposing and we get to rewrite some of the content to make it search engine friendly (SEO). This is definitely a challenge--no hyphens allowed, "healthy" instead of "healthful," "recipes" instead of "recipe," h1 and h3 tags--but fun to see our website climb up the ranks in Google search results.

This week, I created an antioxidant-rich recipes collection (I had to take out the hyphen for SEO though). I had a lot of fun doing this, because rather than organizing the recipes by course or ingredient, I arranged them by color! That's because every color represents a different antioxidant, which is a powerful plant-based nutrient that can protect against diseases and some types of cancer. My boss called this approach "thinking out of the box" and she was pleased. Actually, the color-coding idea came from Carolyn, our Associate Food Editor, but I had the pleasure of putting it to action.

Thus inspired, I had a short day today (Summer Fridays) and so went home and made myself a huge antioxidant-rich salad for lunch on my porch--lettuce, tomatoes, blue potatoes, basil, mint, ginger, garlic... Finished it off with a fresh-and-in-season peach for dessert for a full rainbow of health benefits.

Geez, I guess I am a dork. But at least now you know that I'm a happy and a healthy dork.