Summer is definitely the grilling season. Across the country, people are headed outside for fun, sun and some of their favorite grilled food. From backyards and patios to parks and campsites, everyone is firing up their outdoor grills to get the most out of summer.

While George Foreman Grills may have been born on the kitchen countertop, today’s line includes grills that let you take healthy cooking anywhere you need it. That’s just part of our commitment to make healthy cooking easy and readily accessible, no matter where you are. So, from your kitchen counter, to the backyard and beyond, you can make healthier meals for your family that still satisfy their taste buds.

With our indoor-outdoor grills (GGR50 or GGR200), you can enjoy backyard grilling with all the benefits you get from your George Foreman indoor grill. Thanks to an electric heat source, rather than wood, coals or gas, you can even cook outside on the patio or even your balcony in an apartment building or condo. This makes the fun of outdoor grilling more accessible to everyone, whether you’re out in the country or right at the center of a major urban area. We go more in-depth on these versatile grills in the Product article of this month’s newsletter.

For grilling that goes beyond the home, the George2Go™ Propane Grill (GP200) lets you take George anywhere to Knock Out the Fat. The grill provides 2½ – 4 hours of grilling or griddling with a reversible grill and griddle plate. This makes it perfect for park picnics, road trips and camping, giving you a family-size cooking surface for breakfast, lunch and dinner food. Plus, with the adjustable slope and George Tough™ nonstick coating, you’re getting the George Foreman Healthy Cooking combination anywhere you cook.

With outdoor grilling from George Foreman, you’re getting all of the Healthy Cooking benefits of cooking with George for all your outdoor events. All of the grills feature our George Tough™ nonstick coating for oil-free cooking. In addition, they offer an electric heat source, rather than an open flame, so you can avoid some of the health risks associated with outdoor grilling – for more on this, read this month’s health article on Making Outdoor Grilling Healthier.

As we approach Mother’s Day, we’d like to salute the people that use our products every day and give a little insight on how George Foreman works each day to design products that simplify cooking and enhance your time spent in the kitchen. We’re constantly striving to make it easy for you to cook healthier for your family without a lot of extra work or hassle. Here are just some of the ways that George Foreman makes a mom’s life a little easier.

Healthy Eating Made Simple

Getting your family to eat healthy can be a chore – it’s hard to get a healthy dish that your whole family will love to eat. The George Foreman commitment is to make it easy to cook healthy by offering products that do the work for you. Features like our patented slope, George Tough™ nonstick coating and adjustable angle grills all make cooking healthier easy by making it a regular part of the cooking process you’re already doing.

Our philosophy is that by eating a little healthier everyday, you’re promoting a healthy lifestyle overall. It’s also an idea you can pass down to your kids, simply by putting healthier food on the table for them each day. You’re building a good foundation for them, that they can take and use in their own lives once they’re out of your home.

Faster Cooking

Since our first contact grill, George Foreman has streamlined time spent in the kitchen and we continue to innovate to offer faster cooking alternatives for your every day menus. Most dishes take less than ten minutes, so you can cook hot, healthy meals for your family even amidst the busy hustle of the rest of your life. We understand that most moms today don’t have time to spend all day in the kitchen, so we want to make it easy to get your family around the table for a good meal.

No-Fuss Cleanup

Another way George Foreman tries to simplify your time in the kitchen is with innovations that minimize cleanup. All of our accessories and even the removable plates on our removable plate grills are dishwasher-safe, so you can skip the sink and put the cleanup on an appliance, instead of you. We also created our Grill Sponges that let you clean a grill without removable plates with just a few easy wipes of the George Tough™ nonstick surface. This way, no matter which grill you have, you spend less time cleaning up and more time enjoying your favorite activities with your family after great meal.

Options to Suit Your Lifestyle

At George Foreman, we understand that not every mom likes to cook the same way. Some moms just want the food done, while some want to push their culinary boundaries and get creative in the kitchen. That’s why we offer such a wide range of products with so many different combinations of features – everything from our plug in and go models to full digital control, plus standard grill plates to entire expandable plate sets. This way, you can get the grill that fits you and how you like to cook.

Building on this idea, we developed this month’s Mother’s Day buying guide, so if you’re looking to replace your grill, you can print out the article and give it to your family to give them some ideas.

Products for the Future

This year, George Foreman is expanding the idea of simplified, healthy cooking by offering an even wider range of kitchen appliances designed to let you cook healthier without a hassle. From countertop skillets to a full-range of other innovative cooking products, you’ll be able to build your entire kitchen into a lean, mean healthy cooking machine. These new cooking products will be hitting stores throughout 2010, so stay tuned to our community through this newsletter, our blog and Facebook to find out the latest details.

Building a Healthy Cooking Community

On the subject of our online community, this is just another way that we’re working to help you in the kitchen. With today’s technology, many moms are turning to online resources to get ideas, find recipes and connect with our people that use the same products every day. In recognizing this, we’re striving to provide the best in online support with our monthly newsletters and weekly blog – resources designed to provide online tips, exclusive recipes and sneak peeks into the latest and greatest of what we offer.

In addition, we’re proud to say that our Facebook community is constantly growing and expanding to offer a daily meeting place for fans of George Foreman. If you haven’t joined our Facebook community already, simply find us at George Foreman Cooking and join us to get involved. We’re even asking our community to help us build the future of George Foreman, so you can join in on telling us what you think about new concepts and ideas, right as they’re being developed.

We’d also like to personally extend an invite to all of you to join the Facebook community and give us feedback on other ways George Foreman can help make your life easier, faster, healthier or simply more fun in the kitchen. If you have an idea of something you need or even just an issue you’re constantly working to overcome in the kitchen, let us know. If there’s a way to solve it, you can bet George Foreman will work to solve it!

Last month, George Foreman Healthy Cooking hit the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival presented by Food & Wine Magazine. The event ran the last weekend in February from Thursday to Sunday with an estimated 50,000 people attending over the 4-day period.

At the George Foreman booth in the Grand Tasting Tent right on the beach, our team was happy to personally meet and greet about 10,000 George Foreman fans. In addition to meeting some of the members of our team, visitors got to taste the recipe featured in this month’s newsletter, enjoy some free giveaways, sign up for a daily raffle of a 360 Grill™ and take a look at some of the latest and greatest grills – including the Power Grill™ Supreme featured in this month’s newsletter.

What was truly great for us was getting to meet all the longtime George Foreman grillers that came out to visit with us. Getting to reminisce about the first Champ™ Grill ever made and hearing all those fun stories about grilling burgers on a dorm room desktop in college is one of the best parts of our job here on the George Foreman team. It helps remind us that we work for a brand that’s been such a big part of people’s lives for a long time and that’s a really good feeling.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the visitors that stopped by and shared their stories with us. We’d also like to thank the Taylor Corporation – our partner at the event – for providing the complimentary meat thermometers we gave away with our gift bags. To all our foodie readers that didn’t get the opportunity to attend this event, George Foreman will be participating in more events like this in the future, so we look forward to meeting you there! We’ll keep you posted through this newsletter, our blog and our Facebook page, so stay tuned!

Using Seasonal Foods to Bring New Life to Your Menu

Spring is on its way and it’s a great time to bring new life to your menu with all the tasty seasonal items that are starting to become available. Not only do you get the chance to liven up your meals, but it’s also a great time to start incorporating more vegetables and fruits in your diet if you’re trying to keep up a healthy lifestyle. In addition, spring brings back a whole range of light, fresh tastes that help you have more energy and get over the heavy weight of those long winter months.

Traditionally, winter foods and dishes are often heavier – more savory flavors, lots of meat and starches, and not a lot of fresh vegetables or fruits since most are out of season. Historically, it’s the time we batten down the hatches for harsh cold, all but hibernating with a lot of really very weighty foods. In turn, spring refreshes, rejuvenates and revitalizes the world – and it’s the perfect time to do the same with your weekly menu plan.

First, keep an eye on your favorite produce and meat departments to see what they get in fresh each week. Then, plan your meals for that day or week around what you find. Not only will you get more fruits and veggies in your diet, but this will give you more options and wider variety to do something different for dinner. Also, focus on using more poultry and fish, since many of these dishes absolutely sing when made with freshest, most tender produce of spring.

Different regions will have different availabilities of produce items, but the lists below provides a general look at what’s around and best to eat during the spring months. It’s good to note that other produce will obviously be available, but the items listed below are in their peak season during spring.

Vegetables:

Asparagus, Artichokes, Beets, Broccoli, Cabbage, Carrots, Cauliflower, Chard, Kale, Leeks, Lettuce & salad greens, New potatoes, Peas, Radishes, Spinach, Rhubarb, Tomatoes,Turnips and Watercress

Fruits:

Pineapple, Gooseberries, Strawberries, Raspberries

While your standard chicken, pork and beef are always available in the meat department, there are also some seasonal meats you may want to incorporate for some fresher tasting spring fare. Small game like Cornish hens and squab are best during spring, as is lamb. Salmon, trout and some kinds of halibut are the best kinds of fish in spring and scallops, crab, mussels and clams are all in season as well¹.

http://www.allfoodsnatural.com/cookbook/113-seasonal/231-spring.html

For kids and college students, spring break is a whole week to just kick back and relax, but for moms it can mean a lot of extra meals and mouths to feed. College students come home, everyone has friends over and they’re (of course) all hungry for good home cooked food.

So how do you make everyone happy without spending your whole day cooking in the kitchen? It’s easy with your George Foreman grill! From crowd-pleasing burgers and hot dogs, to more interesting party fare, you can do a lot of meals on your George Foreman with minimal hassle and cleanup. That way, the kids and their friends get full and you still have time left in your day to do everything you need to get done.

Really, the nice thing about using your grill for spring break cooking is the minimal effort that it takes – one cooking surface to clean (even easier if you have removable plates that can be thrown in the dishwasher), minimal prep time to start and everything is typically done in under ten minutes. It’s just a matter of planning and buying ingredients for a few simple meals and you can be set for all those emergency Spring Break mealtimes that you know will pop up through the week.

For a regular George Foreman grill, here is a quick and easy top ten list of the best foods you can make to satisfy your Spring Break bunch:

1. Hamburgers / mini-burgers / sliders
2. Hot dogs
3. Grilled shrimp
4. Grilled chicken / steak sandwiches
5. BBQ steak bites
6. Kebabs
7. Bangers & mash / Bangers & mac (sausage and mashed potatoes, or substitute mac & cheese for a more kid-oriented meal)
8. Fajitas
9. Pork chops
10. Grilled cheese sandwiches  

Package brownies made in the Kitchen Bistro

If you have a multi-plate grill with a bake plate or other accessory plates, you have even more options to choose from. Here are some additional kid-friendly meals using some of the additional plates offered from George Foreman:

1. Pizza – classic pizza can be made using the pizza pan on your 360 Grill™
2. Quesadillas – used the 360 Grill™ quesadilla plates or the George Foreman Quesadilla Maker
3. Brownies – use the bake pan on the Kitchen Bistro™ Grill with a regular packaged brownie mix (may work with other bake plates, but you will need to adjust the size and cook time)
4. Lunch lasagna – you can make this with any George Foreman grill that has a deep-dish bake pan
5. Late breakfast – you can use the bake or griddle pan on any George Foreman grill to do sausage, eggs and pancakes; some grills also include waffle plates

No matter how many mouths you’ll have to feed, Spring Break cooking is just easier with a George Foreman grill. You can use the list provided and have the whole week’s worth of meals already planned, so you can make easy work of pleasing all the hungry kids at your house during their break.