I am ready to leave the country, y’all. And by that I mean that I need to be back in the civilization I’m used to. This whole bad food situation/lack of open businesses situation/ time away from a kitchen situation is getting old. And we’ll still be here for another four days. Hm. I’m learning a lot in the conference during the day and have certainly gotten some interesting perspectives on what it’s like to be a trial lawyer. I’m always afraid that my current or future employers are somehow reading this so I won’t go any further into how I actually feel about being a trial lawyer. Moving on!

So today after half an hour of driving around Macon (which, as I mentioned yesterday, is the closest city) and discovering that every single place we wanted to go to was closed, we ended up at…

Yes. I’m assuming that you all have been to this fine establishment. While the whole idea of Cracker Barrel is kind of cheapened by the fact that there’s one every 5 miles (at LEAST, sometimes there are more than that), I have to admit that I actually love the place.

My late grandmother used to love going there and I have lots of memories eating at Cracker Barrel with Granny. And I was pleasantly suprised to see that they added some new, HEALTHY food items to the menu!!! And I’m not talkin’ that “low calorie” or Weight Watchers options that restaraunts sometimes do, this was like actual REAL, HEALTHY, ingredients that they added to thier menu! Like fresh fruit! Whole grains! Even GRANOLA! This is quite something for Cracker Barrel. I’m hoping it’s a good indication that we’re sort of moving AWAY from the whole 90’s diet fad thing with fake sweeteners and whatnot and TOWARDS real, whole foods that are naturally good for you.

I think granola on a Cracker Barrel menu is a pretty good sign.

So I ordered the Six Grain n’ Granola Pancake Breakfast. Here’s the description: “Multigrain flour gives our six-grain pancake batter a naturally sweet taste. We then add our honey oat granola mix with almonds and griddle-cook to a fluffy, golden brown. Topped with real butter and served with Dickinson’s^® Pure Honey and fresh-sliced bananas. Comes with two farm-fresh Grade A eggs* cooked any way you like and your choice of our turkey sausage patties, thick-sliced, hickory-smoked bacon, or smoked sausage patties.” YUM!

It was just as good as it sounds, but the pancakes were so filling that I could only finish one! That’s no problem though, now I have a midnight snack.

I can’t tell you how many times I played this game with Granny.

Or how many times I played these crazy giant checkers with my dad.

Or how much money I’ve wasted in their awesome “country store”.

ANYHOW, I wanted to share with you iPhone users (or future iPhone users…hello there, you know you want one! :p) what my favorite food-related apps are. I actually have several that I live by, and nearly all of them are free so I had to spread the love. Here they are! (All picture previews are from iTunes)

1. Epicurious

You might already have heard me talk about how much I love this app. Beautiful design, easy to use, and most imporantly it has consistently amazing recipes. About 75% of the recipes I use come from this app! Not kidding! I absolutely love it. You can even search for recipes using the ingredients you want to use or have on hand, which is SO helpful. If you only download one recipe app, you should seriously download this one.

2. ShopShop

This is a basic shopping list app but it saves past items that you put on lists so that it can autofill them (for example, if you buy cheddar cheese all the time, it will remember that you wrote it so when you go back the next time and just type in “ch”, cheddar cheese will automatically fill in). It’s simple and convenient and I use it all the time for grocery lists.

3. Dirty Dozen

This app clearly and easily shows you what the “dirty dozen” are, the 12 produce items that have the highest amount of pesticides and therefore the ones that it’s best to buy organic. This is SO helpful for grocery shopping, because who can remember all 12?? It also gives you the “clean dozen”, the produce that doesn’t contain high amounts of pesticides and is not as important to buy organic.

4. Munch 5-a-Day

This is a really cute and fun app that has really helped encourage me to keep better track of my fruit and veggie intake. It keeps charts of your intake over time and has a really pretty design. I get excited to go into this app and add a fruit “munch”.

5. Locavore

I got this free when they had an Earth Day sale, but I believe it’s only a dollar. It takes your location and tells you where all of the local produce farms and farmers markets that are nearby. It also tells you all of the fruits and vegetables that are in season for your area, which I find to be very helpful!

6. Label Lookup

This one gives a list of all claims that you might find on consumer products and basically tells you whether or not they can be trusted! Very helpful and it can keep you from wasting money on claims that sound good but are unreliable.

7. Whole Foods

To be honest, I really just use this for the Whole Foods locator feature! But they also have a lot of healthy recipes and a shopping list feature.

8. Urbanspoon

This is a pretty popular and well known app, but if you don’t know about it it’s essentially a restaurant locator. Very handy if you’re looking for somewhere new to eat or aren’t familiar with where you are.

9. Tip Calculator

I just found this app a few days ago, and I’m SO glad I did. Plug in the amount of the check and how good the service at your restaurant was and it instantly calculates the tip and final total. It even has a feature for splitting the check!

(These pictures of a an older version, they just made a new version that’s even nicer!)

10. Water Your Body

This app helps you track how much water you are drinking a day and how much you should be drinking, based on your weight and your lifestyle. It has really cool graphics that allow you to depict how much you’ve drank by clicking on the picture of it (they have different pictures that equal different ounces…a glass, a small water bottle, a Nalgene, etc.) and dropping it on to a “table” that shows how much you’ve had in that day. Very nifty.

So that’s it! Hope that you will try some of them, they really are great! I’m off to watch some TV and heat up some of those pancakes…mmm.

Thanks for reading!

-Lauren