Cooking Light Does It Right

Ah, the holidays. It's that special time of year where you can overindulge with your family, friends, and food. From Thanksgiving to January 1st it's a holiday cook-off with everyone preparing their favorite secret recipes, gourmet cheeses, delectable chocolates and fancy adult beverages. Then, sometime during January, the music stops and you step back on the scale wondering what the heck happened.

Thankfully, Cooking Light has a solution for your extra “holiday poundage” (and possibly your New Year’s Resolution).Cooking Light has watermarked every recipe in their January/February issue. There are a total of 79 scannable recipes in the issue ranging from Stir-Fried Lemongrass Chicken to Lemon Cornmeal Waffles with Raspberry Rhubarb Compote.What makes Cooking Light so satisfying is that I can save every recipe in the issue and make a customizable shopping list right from my mobile device using the Digimarc Discover app. After creating a myrecipes.com account, I can access recipes and shopping lists whenever it’s convenient for me.

Thank you, Cooking Light for simplifying my life.  Now I don’t have to rip out recipes from Cooking Light or make frantic calls home wondering what ingredients are needed to make Bison Chili with Chickpeas and Acorn Squash (tricky ingredient — 1 bottle dark Mexican beer). I’ve also experienced one of the most frustrating cooking experiences multiple times — arriving home from the store and realizing I need to make another trip to the store since I forgot an ingredient. (For the record, I’m still not to blame for forgetting to buy mayonnaise as an ingredient for cake batter. Who puts mayo in their cake?) And let’s not forget — since the recipes are from Cooking Light, I know I’m preparing healthy meals without sacrificing the taste. My gut could use a break after the holidays, college bowl game parties and NFL playoff nachos, chili, and bacon wrapped (fill in the blank).

In the latest issue, Cooking Light does an exceptional job introducing digital watermarking to its readers with a full page of instructions on page 6 and redirecting users back to page 6 whenever there’s scannable content. Like Oxmoor House's America's Favorite Food Cookbook, "Scan It, Cook It" is the future for all food related publications.

By the way, here were my runner-up headlines for this blog post:

• HO, HO, HOly Holiday Poundage
• Scan those Holiday Pounds Away
• Shed those Santa Snacks