Regular readers of John Chow dot Com will know that there is more to the dot com lifestyle than making money online. That certainly plays a major role, but it’s also important to have a supportive significant other and a loving family. You should also pay a little more attention to your health.
Over the course of this review, we’ll learn a thing or two from a blog called Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free. You can probably guess the main focus of that site.
Fabulous Healthy Food?
The blogger behind Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free is Amy Green. Almost six years ago, she decided to remove all refined sugars and glutens from her diet. The net result is a 60+ pound weight loss that she has managed to maintain to this day.
It is far too easy to indulge in fast food, oversized portions, and unhealthy ingredients. By reading along at Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free, you may find a way to prepare healthier food at home that is both nutritious and delicious.
The Healthy Recipe for Success
With a new post going up just about every day, Amy Green has managed to maintain quite the healthy publishing schedule. There, you’ll find a wide range of healthy recipes that you can try at home. These are free of refined sugars and gluten.
One of the more recent recipes is perfect for these colder months. Roasted winter vegetables are both hearty and healthy. In the post, you get a picture of the final product, a brief discussion from Amy’s point of view, and the complete recipe itself.
The recipe is adapted from Everyday Food, but Amy has made it her own. She describes the ingredients you need, how to prepare them, and what you need to do if you want ot make them ahead of time. You’re also granted quick access to a print friendly version of the recipe.
More Food for You to Enjoy
At the end of each recipe, you are also offered three related recipes. In this instance, we look at how to peel a butternut squash, how to oven roast a squash, and how to make an apple and walnut stuffed acorn squash.
You could say that this is the same as the “related posts” plug-in that many bloggers use, but the LinkWithin feature adds in a thumbnail preview too. I am personally not a fan of its use within the main index; I’d prefer if the “related posts” were only shown within the individual articles.
It’s very unlikely that you’ll find a recipe for a foie gras burger on Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free, but there is no shortage of nice treats. Sip on some chocolate coffee martinis, munch on some fresh cookies, and even feed Fido with pumpkin dog biscuits. The variety is certainly impressive.
Regarding the Site Design
The soft pastel color scheme used by Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free is pleasing to the eye, but it clearly has a more feminine slant to it. This is understandable, given that the main blogger is female and the primary audience is likely female as well.
The three-column template seems to work quite well too. I like the placement of the icons in the top right, giving readers fast access to the Twitter, Facebook, RSS, and email subscription features offered by the blog.
It’s good to see the brief “About Amy” blurb near the top too, but there are at least two things that I would like to see changed. First, it may be useful to have a link to the main about page beneath the brief bio. Second, it is a little confusing to see a second about page for the site. Rewording the first “about” to be a “bio” instead may make more sense.
Third, Amy currently lists her Gmail account as her point of contact on the site. It is much better to use an email address that uses her own domain. Better still, she should institute a simple contact form so that her email address can be better protected.
A Delicious Treat for Health-Conscious Foodies
Overall, I’d say that Amy had done a good job with Simply Sugar and Gluten Free. The domain is certainly longer than I would have liked, but the content is reasonably powerful and the range of recipes will certainly be useful to people who want to eat this kind of food. If you want some good eats while staying healthy, Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free is worth adding to your reading list.
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