Smartlife

There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of food you can get online. Just like your groceries, you can also order baked goods online and get them delivered right to your doorstep. Now, as you can imagine, it was difficult for me* to compile a list of online bakeries without ordering every savory-looking bakery product that met my eyes. Thankfully, I made it through the entire list without packing on any extra pounds. With a little moderation, you can too — but do treat yourself and taste-test a few. You might just find an online bakery or two to substitute for any local ones you travel to, thereby saving yourself some time and gas money.

M&Ms, gumdrops, lollipops, rock candy, jelly beans, sour bears, Hershey’s Kisses, and white chocolate dipped pretzels — thanks to the Internet, you can now enjoy all these various sweets without ever having to leave your sofa. But just when you thought life couldn’t get any easier, Smartlife is here to say it can — we went ahead and compiled a list of 40+ places where you can buy all these items and more (trust us, lots more) online. While it may seem ironic to you that a blog called “Smartlife” is facilitating tooth decay and weight gain worldwide, there’s nothing wrong in our opinion with enjoying life’s little pleasures every once in a while as long you do so in moderation. Enjoy.

As a working mom with two small children, keeping track of what goes into my pantry and my kids’ mouths can be an overwhelming task. I want to feed my kids healthy foods; however, deceptive or misleading labeling practices often leave me confounded, especially as I struggle to read the tiny print of nutrition labels while holding onto a three year-old who wants to run and a seven year-old who wants to play kamikaze grocery cart.

How often have you looked into your refrigerator and noticed that it was empty? That you didn’t have anything to eat and no ingredients to cook? I don’t know about you, but this happens to me way too often, forcing me to make an unproductive run to the grocery store or eat yet another overpriced and unhealthy meal out of the house. If only there were a method to make sure you had enough food, always. Fortunately, with the increase in personal outsourcing options, now you can even outsource the most basic of tasks: grocery shopping.

Traditional, in-store grocery shopping consumes 269 hours of your life per year (assuming you’re the “average” American grocery shopper). Online grocery shopping and home delivery, on the other hand, only takes up about 13 hours total, if that. Throw in other benefits such as money saved on driving (IRS’ most-recent estimate on the cost per mile of car travel is 58 cents) and impulse buying (4% of all groceries purchased at stores go to waste), online grocery shopping is a smart way to save yourself some time and money.

A few months ago, I wanted to make what I thought would be a simple Mediterranean pasta salad. As fate would have it, I ended up spending several non-planned hours flipping through cookbooks and magazine clippings looking for the recipe. Once I finally found it, I drove off to the local grocery store to acquire the requisite ingredients, only to discover that I’d forgotten the recipe at home. Rather than drive back, I decided to shop from memory, carefully analyzing each item stacked along the aisles so as not to forget anything. But I did. When I returned home, I found something missing among my recently-purchased Mediterranean pasta salad ingredients: THE PASTA!