My college roommates and I were ahead of our times, as we ate cinnamon regularly in the early 1970's. Here is how we used it.
We mixed cinnamon with sugar in a bowl.
We toasted bread in the toaster.
We buttered each slice of bread and then sprinkled sugar/cinnamon mixture evenly over each slice. Thus we made our own "cinnamon toast."
We were also great rice pudding fans, each of us knew how to cook it from scratch ourselves, and we'd sprinkle cinnamon onto the top of each serving.
More recently I would keep the cinnamon shaker handy and add it to a number of foods. I like to sprinkle it on fish, especially where one might have used paprika alone.
I will also sometimes sprinkle it on omelets or scrambled eggs. If one has made an omelet with onions that have been cooked till they carmelize and then sprinkle cinnamon on the top of the completed omelet it is so savory that it is almost like a dessert, but without any sugar.
Showing posts with label nutrition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nutrition. Show all posts
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Saturday, August 9, 2008
More about food and nutrition "back then"
I think it helps young people when I explain how average life was fifty years ago, because it gives them more perspective and context about societal and health issues that you face today. So here is some more rambling thoughts about the topic of food. I'm going to describe small town perspectives (in contrast to farm life where food was at least partially self supplied).
There were no large box supermarkets in the 1950's at all. Each town or village tended to have a grocer. In the 1960's you started to see the beginning of the local grocer close down and the box supermarket open (we were excited by a Loblaws that opened, and that's where we shopped in the 1960's). But in the 1950's you had home delivery of milk (yes, the milk truck with the milk bottles brought early morning to your door and placed in your metal milk box) and the small local grocer.
Everyone drank milk, including tough grown men. Just read the Nero Wolfe mysteries and you'll see that the private detective Archie routinely orders milk in restaurants and buys it when shopping for him and Wolfe. Ordering a soda such as Coca Cola when eating out was unheard of, because having a soda was usually the objective of going out with friends or on a date. When families ate out, or when adults had work time lunch or dinner, they all drank milk. That's one reason so many people have wisdom teeth when previous generations did not, because milk being affordable and common was something that our ancestors did not have, and lacking milk inhibited growth of bone and muscle. So the number one item that virtually everyone had at every meal was a glass of milk.
Fruit juice was expensive so that is the reason that antique and vintage "juice glasses" are so small. In a way that was a good thing because as I've explained in other posts, there's a lot of calories in juice and people used to eat the fruit itself, not have a concentrated extract in the form of juice. Orange juice became common in the morning because eating a whole orange was slower work. But it was very common for kids to get a small orange juice in the morning and a whole orange as an after school snack, or in your lunch bag. Adults often opted for tomato juice or prune juice (there was not the sniggering that there is about prune juice today). Most adults during the 1950's were only one generation away from the farm. Potty humor just wasn't their thing. They had dietary habits that had formed by knowing what was healthy and what was available.
Kid's snacks were mostly fruit. A kid got an apple or a banana, plum, bowl of berries or small box of raisins as their snack and they loved it. It was not at all hard to get kids to eat healthy fruit. It was more seasonal than today (before foods were transported cross country) and so when fresh fruit seasons diminished families started using canned fruits, especially canned peaches, pears and the ubiquitous "fruit cocktails."
Speaking of kid's snacks, having a candy bar was very rare. What usually happened is that kids would stop at the small grocery walking home from school and buy one candy type of treat out of one's allowance. Sometimes this would be a candy bar, but usually it was more of a candy type of treat (like hard candy or soft candy), bubblegum or something silly and fun, like licorice or edible wax candy. As I got older and realized that I easily gain weight, I switched all on my own from buying candy after school to buying a fruit, like a plum (it took a little doing to convince the grocer so sell me one plum!) So I lost childhood "chubby" weight by switching to fruit from candy when I went to the store after school with my friends (yeah, I had friends).
Potato chips existed but they were not snack food. I know that sounds strange so that's why it's helpful for you to hear about "how it was." Potato chips were viewed as a "side dish" for summer or party food. For example, if a family was having hot dogs or hamburgers, potato chips were viewed as one of the side dishes rather than a snack food that was around the house all the time to nosh on. That's another HUGE difference between now and then.
Likewise cheese was not really a regular part of meals except in the form of cottage cheese. Many people (again, including adult men) regularly ate cottage cheese. It was not viewed as the "dieters food" until much later. So between being regular milk drinkers and eating cottage cheese (yogurt did not exist at all), people had a very good dairy intake.
People had pretty much stopped eating home made bread and had gone to store bought loafs, but those loafs often came from local factories. For example, as a child we took a field trip to the factory nearby where they made "Wonder bread" loafs. We each received a loaf to take home! It smelled so great in there.
People ate a lot of bread, toast in the morning, sandwiches at lunch, and often a slice of bread as a side to dinner. The average person did not have "dinner rolls" at home, which were viewed as upper class party food. They used the same bread they had all day, having a slice as a side to their dinner. So people LOVED having dinner rolls with pats of butter served to them at diners. No one except those with "extra money to spend" bought hot dog buns; we all used slices of regular bread.
I remember frozen foods as they were gradually introduced. I know, it is strange to imagine, but frozen foods were very rare in the 1950's. First of all, they were more expensive than canned foods or home made. In my town I remember that my friends who were lower class like me but had a bit more money might have a few frozen foods on their weekly shopping lists, but people all thought they were throwing away their money for what they could get cheaper as fresh or canned. When Sara Lee frozen desserts came out they were viewed as treats for "those with extra money to spend." My mom would roll her eyes whenever we walked past the frozen food aisle and she saw anyone in there (that was in the 1950's and trust me, she's living off of frozen foods now, ha). But back then people had to shop thrifty, and they always opted for fresh if possible.
I remember many years of 39 cents a pound chicken. 'Nuf said!
The standard expectation at dinner was meat and potatoes. And trust me, that was not boring. Everyone loved home made mashed potatoes and men relied on the protein of meat because many worked in blue collar jobs. So the typical household would cycle through "types of meat" in a typical week, such as several types of beef cut prepared different ways, pork chops, hot dogs or kielbasa, fish on Fridays with either boiled potatoes or mashed. There was no real desire for "ethnic" food variety. We all got to taste good home cooked ethnic food at Polish or Italian neighbors, friends or relatives. So an Italian household, for example, would not have as much of the meat and potato regime as others, but they did so more than one might expect. Ethnic cooking was viewed again, as I've mentioned before, as more of treat food than regular food. For example, my mother was a German cook but we rarely had German food. Ethnic food was made more for family celebrations, as treat food or as mainstreamed standard dishes.
Relish dishes of raw carrots, celery and olives were common and both adults and kids regularly munched on them with meals and as snacks.
I remember the first fast food restaurant (a Burger King I think) opening in "the city," about ten miles from our home. I didn't get to go because like I said, it was more of a date kind of thing, so my older brother checked it out with his date. So I remember when both going out for a soda and going to a fast food restaurant was a "special" activity like a date. Kids of my generation went to fast food restaurants at most a dozen times in their life before they were in high school. Imagine that. They really were different times.
By the way, I am not a reflex fast food restaurant basher at all. I think you can see why after reading this. I grew up in times where what one ate really was a matter of having time to prepare the food and economics (what you could afford). If people are not providing affordable home cooked meals then people have to eat somewhere, and I understand that. I'm just trying to share with you what it was like when everyone really cooked their own food and when choices were fewer but people actually ate much healthier and enjoyed what they had.
I hope you found this interesting even though its not about the great events of the century, LOL, but it is a small illustration of how things have changed.
There were no large box supermarkets in the 1950's at all. Each town or village tended to have a grocer. In the 1960's you started to see the beginning of the local grocer close down and the box supermarket open (we were excited by a Loblaws that opened, and that's where we shopped in the 1960's). But in the 1950's you had home delivery of milk (yes, the milk truck with the milk bottles brought early morning to your door and placed in your metal milk box) and the small local grocer.
Everyone drank milk, including tough grown men. Just read the Nero Wolfe mysteries and you'll see that the private detective Archie routinely orders milk in restaurants and buys it when shopping for him and Wolfe. Ordering a soda such as Coca Cola when eating out was unheard of, because having a soda was usually the objective of going out with friends or on a date. When families ate out, or when adults had work time lunch or dinner, they all drank milk. That's one reason so many people have wisdom teeth when previous generations did not, because milk being affordable and common was something that our ancestors did not have, and lacking milk inhibited growth of bone and muscle. So the number one item that virtually everyone had at every meal was a glass of milk.
Fruit juice was expensive so that is the reason that antique and vintage "juice glasses" are so small. In a way that was a good thing because as I've explained in other posts, there's a lot of calories in juice and people used to eat the fruit itself, not have a concentrated extract in the form of juice. Orange juice became common in the morning because eating a whole orange was slower work. But it was very common for kids to get a small orange juice in the morning and a whole orange as an after school snack, or in your lunch bag. Adults often opted for tomato juice or prune juice (there was not the sniggering that there is about prune juice today). Most adults during the 1950's were only one generation away from the farm. Potty humor just wasn't their thing. They had dietary habits that had formed by knowing what was healthy and what was available.
Kid's snacks were mostly fruit. A kid got an apple or a banana, plum, bowl of berries or small box of raisins as their snack and they loved it. It was not at all hard to get kids to eat healthy fruit. It was more seasonal than today (before foods were transported cross country) and so when fresh fruit seasons diminished families started using canned fruits, especially canned peaches, pears and the ubiquitous "fruit cocktails."
Speaking of kid's snacks, having a candy bar was very rare. What usually happened is that kids would stop at the small grocery walking home from school and buy one candy type of treat out of one's allowance. Sometimes this would be a candy bar, but usually it was more of a candy type of treat (like hard candy or soft candy), bubblegum or something silly and fun, like licorice or edible wax candy. As I got older and realized that I easily gain weight, I switched all on my own from buying candy after school to buying a fruit, like a plum (it took a little doing to convince the grocer so sell me one plum!) So I lost childhood "chubby" weight by switching to fruit from candy when I went to the store after school with my friends (yeah, I had friends).
Potato chips existed but they were not snack food. I know that sounds strange so that's why it's helpful for you to hear about "how it was." Potato chips were viewed as a "side dish" for summer or party food. For example, if a family was having hot dogs or hamburgers, potato chips were viewed as one of the side dishes rather than a snack food that was around the house all the time to nosh on. That's another HUGE difference between now and then.
Likewise cheese was not really a regular part of meals except in the form of cottage cheese. Many people (again, including adult men) regularly ate cottage cheese. It was not viewed as the "dieters food" until much later. So between being regular milk drinkers and eating cottage cheese (yogurt did not exist at all), people had a very good dairy intake.
People had pretty much stopped eating home made bread and had gone to store bought loafs, but those loafs often came from local factories. For example, as a child we took a field trip to the factory nearby where they made "Wonder bread" loafs. We each received a loaf to take home! It smelled so great in there.
People ate a lot of bread, toast in the morning, sandwiches at lunch, and often a slice of bread as a side to dinner. The average person did not have "dinner rolls" at home, which were viewed as upper class party food. They used the same bread they had all day, having a slice as a side to their dinner. So people LOVED having dinner rolls with pats of butter served to them at diners. No one except those with "extra money to spend" bought hot dog buns; we all used slices of regular bread.
I remember frozen foods as they were gradually introduced. I know, it is strange to imagine, but frozen foods were very rare in the 1950's. First of all, they were more expensive than canned foods or home made. In my town I remember that my friends who were lower class like me but had a bit more money might have a few frozen foods on their weekly shopping lists, but people all thought they were throwing away their money for what they could get cheaper as fresh or canned. When Sara Lee frozen desserts came out they were viewed as treats for "those with extra money to spend." My mom would roll her eyes whenever we walked past the frozen food aisle and she saw anyone in there (that was in the 1950's and trust me, she's living off of frozen foods now, ha). But back then people had to shop thrifty, and they always opted for fresh if possible.
I remember many years of 39 cents a pound chicken. 'Nuf said!
The standard expectation at dinner was meat and potatoes. And trust me, that was not boring. Everyone loved home made mashed potatoes and men relied on the protein of meat because many worked in blue collar jobs. So the typical household would cycle through "types of meat" in a typical week, such as several types of beef cut prepared different ways, pork chops, hot dogs or kielbasa, fish on Fridays with either boiled potatoes or mashed. There was no real desire for "ethnic" food variety. We all got to taste good home cooked ethnic food at Polish or Italian neighbors, friends or relatives. So an Italian household, for example, would not have as much of the meat and potato regime as others, but they did so more than one might expect. Ethnic cooking was viewed again, as I've mentioned before, as more of treat food than regular food. For example, my mother was a German cook but we rarely had German food. Ethnic food was made more for family celebrations, as treat food or as mainstreamed standard dishes.
Relish dishes of raw carrots, celery and olives were common and both adults and kids regularly munched on them with meals and as snacks.
I remember the first fast food restaurant (a Burger King I think) opening in "the city," about ten miles from our home. I didn't get to go because like I said, it was more of a date kind of thing, so my older brother checked it out with his date. So I remember when both going out for a soda and going to a fast food restaurant was a "special" activity like a date. Kids of my generation went to fast food restaurants at most a dozen times in their life before they were in high school. Imagine that. They really were different times.
By the way, I am not a reflex fast food restaurant basher at all. I think you can see why after reading this. I grew up in times where what one ate really was a matter of having time to prepare the food and economics (what you could afford). If people are not providing affordable home cooked meals then people have to eat somewhere, and I understand that. I'm just trying to share with you what it was like when everyone really cooked their own food and when choices were fewer but people actually ate much healthier and enjoyed what they had.
I hope you found this interesting even though its not about the great events of the century, LOL, but it is a small illustration of how things have changed.
Tips to encourage healthy vegetables eating
When I was a kid, I watched the "Popeye" cartoons. Popeye, a cartoon sailor, got great strength to do good and fight evil when he ate a can of spinach. Well, so as a pre-school girl, probably when I was around four years old, I asked my mom to get some spinach. Amazed she bought fresh spinach, cooked it into a hot green goo, and served it to me. As you can imagine I took one bite and said, "Yuck." It was many years before I ate spinach again! She was very annoyed (though not as much as usual) that she had bought a huge bag of spinach and gone through all the preparing and cooking (this was in the 1950's when things still took a lot of time to prepare). This is one reason why I became a very cautious eater and was not "adventurous" in trying out new foods. It's another difference between older generations and the new. When we were growing up mothers who cooked had to spend hours preparing things that people today just pop purchased from the store into the microwave. So people were more cautious about requesting food that they might not like (especially if dad got ticked off at spending his hard earned money on something "new" and mom had to do all the preparation and cooking). So there is a reason that older generations were more cautious in things that younger generations take for granted, and it's not because we were too dumb or lacked sophisticated taste!
Fast forward decades and I am a busy commuter in Manhattan. I'm in Penn Station and starved, so I look for a slice of pizza, but all they have left is spinach pizza. I buy one and to my amazement find I loved it. I reconnected with spinach and now will select it for a variety of dishes. The same with mushrooms. I really disliked them in my youth (partly because of the way they were prepared) and again, I was introduced to them via pizza topping and eventually use and enjoy them in all forms.
Parents need to remember this and be creative in adding vegetables to favorite foods while children are young. Do not introduce vegetables to them as goo or lumps of "healthy but not tasty." Adults develop a taste for vegetables, but children need help with continuity from when they are babies and will eat pureed vegetables, through the solid food stage, and yes, most definitely, as children and teenagers.
So be sure to add spinach, mushrooms, squash slices and other good vegetables to favorite foods from the very beginning so that kids develop a liking for their combined flavors. Spinach sauteed in olive oil and spooned onto pizza is a healthy way to get both spinach and olive oil into a pizza lover's dietary intake.
The second tip is to add cheese. Just about everyone loves cheese. Some years ago a cheese industry advert correctly showed that kids love even "healthy foods like vegetables" when they are topped with cheese. Also, real cheese (not pseudo cheese product) is a valuable source of daily and nutrients, especially as kids AND adults do not drink enough milk. So you can cultivate a liking for vegetables as a side dish for your children by slicing or shredding cheese over the prepared vegetable. Mozzarella in particular enhances the flavor of vegetables for children.
Fast forward decades and I am a busy commuter in Manhattan. I'm in Penn Station and starved, so I look for a slice of pizza, but all they have left is spinach pizza. I buy one and to my amazement find I loved it. I reconnected with spinach and now will select it for a variety of dishes. The same with mushrooms. I really disliked them in my youth (partly because of the way they were prepared) and again, I was introduced to them via pizza topping and eventually use and enjoy them in all forms.
Parents need to remember this and be creative in adding vegetables to favorite foods while children are young. Do not introduce vegetables to them as goo or lumps of "healthy but not tasty." Adults develop a taste for vegetables, but children need help with continuity from when they are babies and will eat pureed vegetables, through the solid food stage, and yes, most definitely, as children and teenagers.
So be sure to add spinach, mushrooms, squash slices and other good vegetables to favorite foods from the very beginning so that kids develop a liking for their combined flavors. Spinach sauteed in olive oil and spooned onto pizza is a healthy way to get both spinach and olive oil into a pizza lover's dietary intake.
The second tip is to add cheese. Just about everyone loves cheese. Some years ago a cheese industry advert correctly showed that kids love even "healthy foods like vegetables" when they are topped with cheese. Also, real cheese (not pseudo cheese product) is a valuable source of daily and nutrients, especially as kids AND adults do not drink enough milk. So you can cultivate a liking for vegetables as a side dish for your children by slicing or shredding cheese over the prepared vegetable. Mozzarella in particular enhances the flavor of vegetables for children.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Depression nutrition advice
Dear friends, it has been a while since I last blogged advice for those suffering from depression, but you and your families are often in my thoughts. Here is some more advice on this topic. Remember, I am not advising any one step as a substitute for your regular regime of treatment, but I would not be surprised if you feel some relief from what I recommend.
This advice is for everyone with depression, but particularly for women. Women who are depressed should not be vegetarians. Vegetarianism, despite its other possible virtues, eliminates nutrition that is beneficial toward the prevent and curing of depression. Here I want to advise one food in particular, which is beef.
Women who are suffering from depression should have beef in the form of a steak or other whole meat cut several times a week. A fast food hamburger is not correct because of the other problems with its preparation (but if that's the only meat that you eat, don't quit). This is, by the way, one reason why burgers remain so satisfying to the public. It is not the calories or the fat, it is the benefit of beef toward mood balance and health that people instinctively feel. But as I said, there are other problems with the preparation, so unless that is your only form of beef intact, I recommend home cooking a steak or other substantial beef cut (such as chuck for stew).
I know that steak and other meat cuts are now priced so high. But if you are struggling with depression, view the money spent as a genuine investment in your body and mind's well being.
Prepare it simply in a way that you like. I fry mine in either butter or olive oil. After browning on all sides I add a sauce to simmer. Tonight I used three soy sauce packets left over from Chinese food! But you can add teriyaki sauce, barbecue, steak sauce (diluted with water) or whatever you like. I've blogged this before but as a reminder, the juice that canned goods contain is great for this purpose. For example, I had canned heart of palm as a side dish while preparing a steak several days ago. Instead of discarding the drained juice from the can, I added the palm flavored water to the frying steak and used that as its sauce. So you get the nutrition that is absorbed by the water or syrup that your canned goods contain.
I think many of you will see a remarkable change in how you feel if you reintroduced several nights a week of a good beef cut to your lunch or dinner (depending when you have your main meal). Dinner is best because evening and night is often a hard time for people with depression. Having a good beef based main dish at dinner is optimal if that is good for your schedule. There is a complexity of biological and nutrition reasons about why beef is so efficacious at the prevention and curing of depression. Just to summarize, beef organizes the body in a unique way in the process of digestion, in addition to the actual providing of beneficial nutrients. In other words, the body tunes itself with each food it digests, and thus for beef, the body tunes itself in a unique way just for digesting beef when you eat it that it does not do for any other food. Each food invokes a subtlety in variation in digestion and absorption of nutrients. So you are gaining benefit from not just the content of the beef but how your body goes about digesting it and breaking it down into useful components.
I really hope this helps! Do try it and you'll see.
This advice is for everyone with depression, but particularly for women. Women who are depressed should not be vegetarians. Vegetarianism, despite its other possible virtues, eliminates nutrition that is beneficial toward the prevent and curing of depression. Here I want to advise one food in particular, which is beef.
Women who are suffering from depression should have beef in the form of a steak or other whole meat cut several times a week. A fast food hamburger is not correct because of the other problems with its preparation (but if that's the only meat that you eat, don't quit). This is, by the way, one reason why burgers remain so satisfying to the public. It is not the calories or the fat, it is the benefit of beef toward mood balance and health that people instinctively feel. But as I said, there are other problems with the preparation, so unless that is your only form of beef intact, I recommend home cooking a steak or other substantial beef cut (such as chuck for stew).
I know that steak and other meat cuts are now priced so high. But if you are struggling with depression, view the money spent as a genuine investment in your body and mind's well being.
Prepare it simply in a way that you like. I fry mine in either butter or olive oil. After browning on all sides I add a sauce to simmer. Tonight I used three soy sauce packets left over from Chinese food! But you can add teriyaki sauce, barbecue, steak sauce (diluted with water) or whatever you like. I've blogged this before but as a reminder, the juice that canned goods contain is great for this purpose. For example, I had canned heart of palm as a side dish while preparing a steak several days ago. Instead of discarding the drained juice from the can, I added the palm flavored water to the frying steak and used that as its sauce. So you get the nutrition that is absorbed by the water or syrup that your canned goods contain.
I think many of you will see a remarkable change in how you feel if you reintroduced several nights a week of a good beef cut to your lunch or dinner (depending when you have your main meal). Dinner is best because evening and night is often a hard time for people with depression. Having a good beef based main dish at dinner is optimal if that is good for your schedule. There is a complexity of biological and nutrition reasons about why beef is so efficacious at the prevention and curing of depression. Just to summarize, beef organizes the body in a unique way in the process of digestion, in addition to the actual providing of beneficial nutrients. In other words, the body tunes itself with each food it digests, and thus for beef, the body tunes itself in a unique way just for digesting beef when you eat it that it does not do for any other food. Each food invokes a subtlety in variation in digestion and absorption of nutrients. So you are gaining benefit from not just the content of the beef but how your body goes about digesting it and breaking it down into useful components.
I really hope this helps! Do try it and you'll see.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Guilt free popcorn recipe
Warning: Experienced and careful adult cooks only please! This involves working with hot oil.
I don't like fake butter and I've read the same as all of you about the dangers of the ingredients that go into the yellow goop that bagged microwaveable popcorn contains. So here is how I make my popcorn.
I use a large frying pan with a transparent lid top. I use Emeril cookware and love it. Use popcorn that you buy in a jar or a sack that is not packaged for microwave, such as what I am using, "Orville Redenbacher's Original" that comes in a 30 oz plastic jar.
Pour olive oil into the cold frying pan to a depth that is more than coating the bottom. A good gauge is to put one kernel of popcorn in the center of the pan, the oil should come up about half way up the kernel in depth. Leaving the one kernel in the pan, cover and bring it to high heat (on my range I heat to 7 out of 10). Stand by and wait for the test kernel to pop. When it does, pour the remaining popcorn in quickly, which you have pre-measured (I find about 7-8 spoonfuls work in the large pan). Immediately cover. You don't have to shake the pan continually, but I tend to tip it from side to side so the oil moves a bit until the corn all starts to pop. It will pop quickly, and when the sound of popping stops take it off the heat right away. With a transparent lid you can also see how the popping is going, and that's always fun. Kids can peak but shoo them away before you remove the lid, for reasons I explain below. Also be sure the lid fits well and that you did not use too much popcorn. If the lid is not the right size for the pan it is very dangerous because hot oil will spatter through the crack. Likewise if you use too much popcorn it will force the lid upward as it expands, pushing it out of position and also creating a hot oil spatter hazard. Experiment with small amounts of popcorn first to see what amount fits your pan's capacity.
The pan will be enormously hot so be careful. When you remove the lid, tilt it slightly holding it over the popcorn still in the pan. Some hot oil will have collected on the lid and what you want is to tilt it so it runs back onto the popcorn. It will hiss and be very hot so be careful. When you've done that dump the popcorn from the pan into your serving bowl, and a glass one works great. Season the popcorn with salt (I like using coarse sea salt from a grinder). Serve.
See, you are not using butter or margarine (or fake goop) at all for the flavoring; it all comes from the olive oil, which is 100 percent healthy and safe. It's more subtle than butter but it is delicious. I'm eating some now in fact as I type this. If you just use olive oil instead of butter even half the times you have popcorn, it's a great improvement, since olive oil is one of those heart and other bodily organ healthy "miracle foods."
I re-emphasize only adult cooks experienced with cooking in grease or oil should do this. Remember that the pan will be very hot when you are done and will make a steam explosion if you put it into any water, so let it cool off first on one of the back burners of your stove. When you do start to cool it with water, use professional cook safety instructions which is to start with just a few drops of water to trigger the steam, very very VERY gradually dripping a few drops of water over the surface. One of the basics you learn in cooking is that a pan that has been heated with grease or oil becomes very hot and the remaining oil can create explosive and damaging steam if doused with water before it has completely cooled.
Enjoy! And please do this safely!!!
I don't like fake butter and I've read the same as all of you about the dangers of the ingredients that go into the yellow goop that bagged microwaveable popcorn contains. So here is how I make my popcorn.
I use a large frying pan with a transparent lid top. I use Emeril cookware and love it. Use popcorn that you buy in a jar or a sack that is not packaged for microwave, such as what I am using, "Orville Redenbacher's Original" that comes in a 30 oz plastic jar.
Pour olive oil into the cold frying pan to a depth that is more than coating the bottom. A good gauge is to put one kernel of popcorn in the center of the pan, the oil should come up about half way up the kernel in depth. Leaving the one kernel in the pan, cover and bring it to high heat (on my range I heat to 7 out of 10). Stand by and wait for the test kernel to pop. When it does, pour the remaining popcorn in quickly, which you have pre-measured (I find about 7-8 spoonfuls work in the large pan). Immediately cover. You don't have to shake the pan continually, but I tend to tip it from side to side so the oil moves a bit until the corn all starts to pop. It will pop quickly, and when the sound of popping stops take it off the heat right away. With a transparent lid you can also see how the popping is going, and that's always fun. Kids can peak but shoo them away before you remove the lid, for reasons I explain below. Also be sure the lid fits well and that you did not use too much popcorn. If the lid is not the right size for the pan it is very dangerous because hot oil will spatter through the crack. Likewise if you use too much popcorn it will force the lid upward as it expands, pushing it out of position and also creating a hot oil spatter hazard. Experiment with small amounts of popcorn first to see what amount fits your pan's capacity.
The pan will be enormously hot so be careful. When you remove the lid, tilt it slightly holding it over the popcorn still in the pan. Some hot oil will have collected on the lid and what you want is to tilt it so it runs back onto the popcorn. It will hiss and be very hot so be careful. When you've done that dump the popcorn from the pan into your serving bowl, and a glass one works great. Season the popcorn with salt (I like using coarse sea salt from a grinder). Serve.
See, you are not using butter or margarine (or fake goop) at all for the flavoring; it all comes from the olive oil, which is 100 percent healthy and safe. It's more subtle than butter but it is delicious. I'm eating some now in fact as I type this. If you just use olive oil instead of butter even half the times you have popcorn, it's a great improvement, since olive oil is one of those heart and other bodily organ healthy "miracle foods."
I re-emphasize only adult cooks experienced with cooking in grease or oil should do this. Remember that the pan will be very hot when you are done and will make a steam explosion if you put it into any water, so let it cool off first on one of the back burners of your stove. When you do start to cool it with water, use professional cook safety instructions which is to start with just a few drops of water to trigger the steam, very very VERY gradually dripping a few drops of water over the surface. One of the basics you learn in cooking is that a pan that has been heated with grease or oil becomes very hot and the remaining oil can create explosive and damaging steam if doused with water before it has completely cooled.
Enjoy! And please do this safely!!!
Sunday, May 11, 2008
To Scientology believers and ex-believers
An Urgent message to Scientologists, Ex-Scientologists and Freezoners
In this very important blog message I am not going to focus on either the argument that there is indeed one True God, whose will is the antithesis of what is presented in Scientology, or am I going to address what I’ve previously explained is geological and other proof against belief in aliens, reincarnation and so forth.
Today I have an urgent message to explain to you the harm in even using the most “innocuous” and “helpful” technical tools. And I do not mean what Anon correctly argues, which is the tools are harmful “fronts” in order to suck people into an insane set of beliefs and rob them of their money at the same time. Instead I am going to explain how the tools are unwittingly harming the physical and mental health of even the most ardent Scientology believer.
Understand that the human body and mind are incredibly sophisticated and polished organisms, achieving an incredible capacity for life over the millions of years of evolution. It is easy to take the human body for granted and even look down on it. But that blasé attitude, or even of contempt for body capabilities and functions, is an affectation and unconscious consequence of prosperity. People who still have to fight each day to provide a meal and housing for their family tend to have a greater and more accurate appreciation for the human body than, say, a jaded surgeon who actually sees how remarkable the body is first hand. Appreciation for how the human body has evolved tends to be directly correlated to people who still have to rely on the marvels of the human body, and its survival instincts, for their day to day existence. So far from being full of flaws, the body and the mind are optimized for LIFE. Far from being full of issues, rejects, flaws and failure, the human body and mind are AMAZING in their near perfection for BEING ALIVE. Even a birth defect is not a curse! It is the body’s attempt at introducing a new survival trait, but one that ends up hindering rather than helping survival. That is the pattern throughout biological evolution. New genes and even broken genes and mutations come spontaneously into being “just in case” that development becomes a survival advantage.
Now, before I explain the danger of the Scientology technical tools, let me introduce one valuable analogy. Suppose you have an incredibly engineered high performance racing car. I’m no car expert but let’s say a Porsche. This race car example is a low slung beauty that can reach high speeds and be very responsive to steering. You love this car and use it for both day to day enjoyment and some race car “motoring.” But suppose that someone, a friend who has nothing to do with cars and no knowledge of cars, tells you that you could “do better” if you modify the car. The friend points out that you don’t drive as perfectly as AJ Foyt did, or Jimmy Stewart. Now you are not a professional and in fact, you had been pretty happy up until then, though you have the usual stresses of life (let’s say the car payments, or nowadays the price of gas). But the friend insists and waves a book at you with a volcano on the cover that looks like it has a big car exhaust coming from it so you figure the friend (and the book) must know what it is talking about. You give him your car to “work on.”
He hooks up some tin cans and meters and reads them, shaking his head. He tells you that your car is “stressed” and “traumatized” because it is so low slung to the ground compared to other cars, especially SUV’s. He tells you that if the car was not so worried and depressed about being so “short” that it would be “balanced” and “perform better.” He convinces you to get a Plexiglas hood (kind of what is on top of the Popemobile) and place it on top of the Porsche, so that the car is now five feet “taller.” He plugs the meter in and “confirms” that “now the stress of being low slung has been removed from the car.”
Next he frowns and says, “But the meter tells me that the car is traumatized by being measured by you. It does not like the fuel gauge. That gauge has a meter that sticks into its gasoline and that is irritating and traumatizing. You need to get rid of the gas gauge. A fully actualized car does not need to have its fuel measured. And if YOU were a really balanced and good driver, you would KNOW when it needs gas. So we must get rid of the fuel gauge!” (He does not tell you that the sensor strip that sticks in the fuel to measure the level was actually an irritating device invented by evil aliens to agitate cars, since you are not sufficiently advanced to have that knowledge). So he removes the gas gauge and the accompanying equipment, like sensors, that were attached to the fuel tank. (He does not notice that in doing so he left a hole behind where the gauge had gone into the fuel tank, so now gas fumes leak through a tiny hole where the sensor was once installed).
He hooks the tin cans and meters once again and nods at you encouragingly. He tells you that the car is “much better” and feels “clear” about being low slung and irritated by that bad aliens (oops, he slipped) fuel gauge sensor strip. He tells you that while the car is better, it still needs much more work. But you’ve paid him handsomely for the work done so far, and now you can take it for a spin and use the car until the next “improvement session.” You schedule your next session. But first he makes you promise two things. One is to spread the message that low slung cars should have Plexiglas hoods bolted on top of them and that fuel gauges and their sensors should be removed from cars to AS MANY OTHER people that you can. You have to agree to spread these “improvements” to as many car drivers and owners as possible. And second, if anyone, especially car mechanics, “disagree” with you, you must cut them out of your life and never talk to them again. This includes anyone in your own family who questions the Plexiglas hood or the removal of the fuel gauge and sensor instrumentation.
You drive off in your car. Maybe the gas fumes ignite and blow you up that very day. Maybe they don’t because through grace and luck there is enough ventilation that the hole you have now put in your fuel tank never sparks. You can’t get the car to drive as fast and smooth, especially in windy weather, because of the hood. But you figure that rather than taking a step backward, a DANGEROUS step backwards, you are just a beginner learning to wield this awesome car renovation power and that is why it’s not working as well as it was before you began your modifications. You convince lots of people to do the same, especially the young people. You don’t notice that as time goes on, some of them die because their cars blow up from the pinhole leak in the gas tank where once the sensors were. They run out of gas a lot, but your “friend” opens a set of “approved gas stations” everywhere with an emergency service for those “believers” who run out of gas and are stranded. He makes more money off of them. So rather than leaving gas gauges in the car, he makes money building gas stations every mile and has a “rescue service” that brings gas to stranded believers, but at a high price per serving. Others you have persuaded have car accidents as their hood top heavy cars tip over on turns, over bridges, or cause collisions because of reduced visibility. You don’t notice because you feel “empowered.” Even though your car no longer performs as it once did, you feel good because “you are in control” and “have the answers.” You sneer at idiots who are still driving their unmodified Porsches. You mock when you are with your friends the vacant stupid smiles on their faces because they “just enjoy driving their cars” and ‘don’t know that they could do better; they don’t know the truth!” You even take pictures of other Porsche drivers in embarrassing positions, or looking especially dumb, to show to other potential believers that this is how stupid and crass are the “unenlightened” Porsche drivers. Your friend teaches you how to make money for yourself and the organization.
And one day you are driving and “BANG!” Your car explodes from gas fumes and you are dead. And before you know it you are facing God and find yourself in hell, because you are responsible for all the others you persuaded to remove their fuel gauges and leave the sensor gas tank holes unplugged.
Friends, your bodies and your minds are like the Porsche car and driver. These stupid technical stress tests and E-meters and other tools used by Scientology are used to numb, warp and overcome your body’s own healthy functioning and survival instincts. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are teaching your body’s white cells not to react to disease. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are taught to micromanage the body functions that you are focusing on, and reduce blood flow to the parts of your body and mind you just are not focused on. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are ignoring signs of pain or disorder that the body is trying to send to you so that they can be addressed and fixed while there is still time to treat a disease. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are trying to cleanse out hormonal and other bodily functions that you must have in order to survive by suppressing them thinking they are “bad.” The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you reinforce mental and bodily pathways that are unfavorable to survival, and allow atrophying the pathways and bodily functions that allow you maximum health and survival potentiality. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are stressing the bodily cells and nerve endings that you are focusing on “distressing,” since you are hindering them from doing their jobs. For example, adrenaline flow becomes hindered because some of the symptoms of adrenaline are viewed as “stressful.” So your body does not produce adrenaline when it should and/or it has to send the adrenaline to inappropriate places in your body, where it acts like a toxic acid. The more you are “purging” and “cleansing” the more you are sending your gas fumes out of the tank and into the car into random spots. The more areas you “remove stress from” the more you spray your brake fluid into the spark plugs, your oil into your fuel tank, your exhaust fumes into the passenger compartment, your windshield wiper fluid into your trunk to spew over your possessions and emergency tire changing kit. Of course your spare tire no longer matters or works because you were told that the E-meter indicates your spare tire was “too fat and therefore stressed” so you let the air out of your Porsche’s spare tire.
There has never been any validity to any “biofeedback” or other technical device. In fact, they are all harmful. They “feel good” because you think you are empowering yourself. I could have gotten the same effects if I told people that all stress comes from canned pineapples. Once people think that the stress in their life comes from canned pineapples, they feel empowered. They can avoid that aisle in the store. They can demonize the number of the aisle where canned pineapples are found at the local supermarket. They can “wisely” and “sagely” tell others of the evil of pineapples. They can sell special hemp aprons that are “anti-canned pineapple wave detectors” so that when people go into grocery stores they can wear these aprons if they must walk down the aisle where the canned pineapples are from. They feel less stress about their real problems, because now they are distracted in the war against canned pineapples (and the top guys make money off the aprons and other tools). When the canned pineapple people go out of business ,you nod wisely knowing you defeated some aliens. And you feel much less stress and when you do feel stress, you know it is the stress of the warrior, the one who “knows the truth” and “must fight the fight against the evil canned pineapple alien proliferators.” And then one day the true problems in your life that you had been feeling legitimate stress over strike you down and perhaps kill you, because you neglected, and even fought, your own body and mind’s attempts to warn you of the problems.
Technical devices destroy your body and your mind’s workings. I use the pineapple example for a reason. Traditionally the pineapple is a historic sign of hospitality and greeting. It tastes great and provides vitamin C. Stress tests and E-meters and other devices are just like taking a healthy symbol of hospitality and demonizing it. They make as much “sense” as declaring that a fruit that is a sign of health and abundance is a “hidden demon” in the body “causing stress.” When you fall prey to these so called technical tools you might as well declare war on breathing, white blood cell counts, vitamin C, hospitality and the chi flow within the body. I include the chi flow example for the benefit of legitimate Chinese medicine practitioners. They especially should appreciate what I am saying, as the use of Scientology devices is like telling the chi that it should not flow in the natural places it has always flowed in the body because chi “causes stress.” I mean, gosh it is so unfair, the chi flows where it has for millions of years, but other parts of the body are “deprived” and so let’s take the chi from where it should go and send it to the rectum to “expel it” in a “purging way.” I wish I was exaggerating or joking but I’m not.
The stress test in the street is the beginning of telling your body to become dysfunctional, rather than correct it. The stress test is the beginning because it doesn’t just hook you into an expensive scam, but it is the beginning of dark and evil indoctrination that survival instincts of the mind and body are “stressful,” “wrong,” and “should be overcome.” Let’s give the example of the widely laughed about “silent birth.” You fools! What if the body has evolved over the years so that the woman shouting during childbirth releases hormones and body chemistry that both mother and child need for good health! You idiots! All you think about is your daft “the baby should be born into comforting silence.” Well what if nature evolved so that “comforting silence” suppresses the release of healthy biochemical secretions? Panda watchers learned something about this when they watched the National Zoo panda mother give birth and the tiny baby squirted out and actually hit the wall. Everyone was horrified, but they learned that this happens to stimulate breathing. Likewise the giraffe baby drops like six feet to the ground when he or she is born. Nature evolves each organism so that the mother gives birth the “right way” just as she does. So a woman who might scream and rant during childbirth might have a natural detector that her muscles and hormones must go into a higher gear to safely deliver the baby. Quiet is not always “pleasant” and “stress free.” Stress tests and E-meters and whatever other stupid devices are used by Scientologists and other cults are the front line to disconnecting a person from his or her own properly functioning body and mind. The first time you answer one of their stupid questions you are being tacitly brainwashed into applying judgment calls to bodily and mental functions. These are judgment calls that humans are too ignorant to have. Because they are cult driven they are demented agenda driven, and thus pineapples and fuel gauges become “bad” and ignoring your body’s proper function and diverting its good health toward warped purpose is “good.” RUN don’t walk away from this crap.
In this very important blog message I am not going to focus on either the argument that there is indeed one True God, whose will is the antithesis of what is presented in Scientology, or am I going to address what I’ve previously explained is geological and other proof against belief in aliens, reincarnation and so forth.
Today I have an urgent message to explain to you the harm in even using the most “innocuous” and “helpful” technical tools. And I do not mean what Anon correctly argues, which is the tools are harmful “fronts” in order to suck people into an insane set of beliefs and rob them of their money at the same time. Instead I am going to explain how the tools are unwittingly harming the physical and mental health of even the most ardent Scientology believer.
Understand that the human body and mind are incredibly sophisticated and polished organisms, achieving an incredible capacity for life over the millions of years of evolution. It is easy to take the human body for granted and even look down on it. But that blasé attitude, or even of contempt for body capabilities and functions, is an affectation and unconscious consequence of prosperity. People who still have to fight each day to provide a meal and housing for their family tend to have a greater and more accurate appreciation for the human body than, say, a jaded surgeon who actually sees how remarkable the body is first hand. Appreciation for how the human body has evolved tends to be directly correlated to people who still have to rely on the marvels of the human body, and its survival instincts, for their day to day existence. So far from being full of flaws, the body and the mind are optimized for LIFE. Far from being full of issues, rejects, flaws and failure, the human body and mind are AMAZING in their near perfection for BEING ALIVE. Even a birth defect is not a curse! It is the body’s attempt at introducing a new survival trait, but one that ends up hindering rather than helping survival. That is the pattern throughout biological evolution. New genes and even broken genes and mutations come spontaneously into being “just in case” that development becomes a survival advantage.
Now, before I explain the danger of the Scientology technical tools, let me introduce one valuable analogy. Suppose you have an incredibly engineered high performance racing car. I’m no car expert but let’s say a Porsche. This race car example is a low slung beauty that can reach high speeds and be very responsive to steering. You love this car and use it for both day to day enjoyment and some race car “motoring.” But suppose that someone, a friend who has nothing to do with cars and no knowledge of cars, tells you that you could “do better” if you modify the car. The friend points out that you don’t drive as perfectly as AJ Foyt did, or Jimmy Stewart. Now you are not a professional and in fact, you had been pretty happy up until then, though you have the usual stresses of life (let’s say the car payments, or nowadays the price of gas). But the friend insists and waves a book at you with a volcano on the cover that looks like it has a big car exhaust coming from it so you figure the friend (and the book) must know what it is talking about. You give him your car to “work on.”
He hooks up some tin cans and meters and reads them, shaking his head. He tells you that your car is “stressed” and “traumatized” because it is so low slung to the ground compared to other cars, especially SUV’s. He tells you that if the car was not so worried and depressed about being so “short” that it would be “balanced” and “perform better.” He convinces you to get a Plexiglas hood (kind of what is on top of the Popemobile) and place it on top of the Porsche, so that the car is now five feet “taller.” He plugs the meter in and “confirms” that “now the stress of being low slung has been removed from the car.”
Next he frowns and says, “But the meter tells me that the car is traumatized by being measured by you. It does not like the fuel gauge. That gauge has a meter that sticks into its gasoline and that is irritating and traumatizing. You need to get rid of the gas gauge. A fully actualized car does not need to have its fuel measured. And if YOU were a really balanced and good driver, you would KNOW when it needs gas. So we must get rid of the fuel gauge!” (He does not tell you that the sensor strip that sticks in the fuel to measure the level was actually an irritating device invented by evil aliens to agitate cars, since you are not sufficiently advanced to have that knowledge). So he removes the gas gauge and the accompanying equipment, like sensors, that were attached to the fuel tank. (He does not notice that in doing so he left a hole behind where the gauge had gone into the fuel tank, so now gas fumes leak through a tiny hole where the sensor was once installed).
He hooks the tin cans and meters once again and nods at you encouragingly. He tells you that the car is “much better” and feels “clear” about being low slung and irritated by that bad aliens (oops, he slipped) fuel gauge sensor strip. He tells you that while the car is better, it still needs much more work. But you’ve paid him handsomely for the work done so far, and now you can take it for a spin and use the car until the next “improvement session.” You schedule your next session. But first he makes you promise two things. One is to spread the message that low slung cars should have Plexiglas hoods bolted on top of them and that fuel gauges and their sensors should be removed from cars to AS MANY OTHER people that you can. You have to agree to spread these “improvements” to as many car drivers and owners as possible. And second, if anyone, especially car mechanics, “disagree” with you, you must cut them out of your life and never talk to them again. This includes anyone in your own family who questions the Plexiglas hood or the removal of the fuel gauge and sensor instrumentation.
You drive off in your car. Maybe the gas fumes ignite and blow you up that very day. Maybe they don’t because through grace and luck there is enough ventilation that the hole you have now put in your fuel tank never sparks. You can’t get the car to drive as fast and smooth, especially in windy weather, because of the hood. But you figure that rather than taking a step backward, a DANGEROUS step backwards, you are just a beginner learning to wield this awesome car renovation power and that is why it’s not working as well as it was before you began your modifications. You convince lots of people to do the same, especially the young people. You don’t notice that as time goes on, some of them die because their cars blow up from the pinhole leak in the gas tank where once the sensors were. They run out of gas a lot, but your “friend” opens a set of “approved gas stations” everywhere with an emergency service for those “believers” who run out of gas and are stranded. He makes more money off of them. So rather than leaving gas gauges in the car, he makes money building gas stations every mile and has a “rescue service” that brings gas to stranded believers, but at a high price per serving. Others you have persuaded have car accidents as their hood top heavy cars tip over on turns, over bridges, or cause collisions because of reduced visibility. You don’t notice because you feel “empowered.” Even though your car no longer performs as it once did, you feel good because “you are in control” and “have the answers.” You sneer at idiots who are still driving their unmodified Porsches. You mock when you are with your friends the vacant stupid smiles on their faces because they “just enjoy driving their cars” and ‘don’t know that they could do better; they don’t know the truth!” You even take pictures of other Porsche drivers in embarrassing positions, or looking especially dumb, to show to other potential believers that this is how stupid and crass are the “unenlightened” Porsche drivers. Your friend teaches you how to make money for yourself and the organization.
And one day you are driving and “BANG!” Your car explodes from gas fumes and you are dead. And before you know it you are facing God and find yourself in hell, because you are responsible for all the others you persuaded to remove their fuel gauges and leave the sensor gas tank holes unplugged.
Friends, your bodies and your minds are like the Porsche car and driver. These stupid technical stress tests and E-meters and other tools used by Scientology are used to numb, warp and overcome your body’s own healthy functioning and survival instincts. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are teaching your body’s white cells not to react to disease. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are taught to micromanage the body functions that you are focusing on, and reduce blood flow to the parts of your body and mind you just are not focused on. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are ignoring signs of pain or disorder that the body is trying to send to you so that they can be addressed and fixed while there is still time to treat a disease. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are trying to cleanse out hormonal and other bodily functions that you must have in order to survive by suppressing them thinking they are “bad.” The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you reinforce mental and bodily pathways that are unfavorable to survival, and allow atrophying the pathways and bodily functions that allow you maximum health and survival potentiality. The more you are taught to numb and not react to “stresses” the more you are stressing the bodily cells and nerve endings that you are focusing on “distressing,” since you are hindering them from doing their jobs. For example, adrenaline flow becomes hindered because some of the symptoms of adrenaline are viewed as “stressful.” So your body does not produce adrenaline when it should and/or it has to send the adrenaline to inappropriate places in your body, where it acts like a toxic acid. The more you are “purging” and “cleansing” the more you are sending your gas fumes out of the tank and into the car into random spots. The more areas you “remove stress from” the more you spray your brake fluid into the spark plugs, your oil into your fuel tank, your exhaust fumes into the passenger compartment, your windshield wiper fluid into your trunk to spew over your possessions and emergency tire changing kit. Of course your spare tire no longer matters or works because you were told that the E-meter indicates your spare tire was “too fat and therefore stressed” so you let the air out of your Porsche’s spare tire.
There has never been any validity to any “biofeedback” or other technical device. In fact, they are all harmful. They “feel good” because you think you are empowering yourself. I could have gotten the same effects if I told people that all stress comes from canned pineapples. Once people think that the stress in their life comes from canned pineapples, they feel empowered. They can avoid that aisle in the store. They can demonize the number of the aisle where canned pineapples are found at the local supermarket. They can “wisely” and “sagely” tell others of the evil of pineapples. They can sell special hemp aprons that are “anti-canned pineapple wave detectors” so that when people go into grocery stores they can wear these aprons if they must walk down the aisle where the canned pineapples are from. They feel less stress about their real problems, because now they are distracted in the war against canned pineapples (and the top guys make money off the aprons and other tools). When the canned pineapple people go out of business ,you nod wisely knowing you defeated some aliens. And you feel much less stress and when you do feel stress, you know it is the stress of the warrior, the one who “knows the truth” and “must fight the fight against the evil canned pineapple alien proliferators.” And then one day the true problems in your life that you had been feeling legitimate stress over strike you down and perhaps kill you, because you neglected, and even fought, your own body and mind’s attempts to warn you of the problems.
Technical devices destroy your body and your mind’s workings. I use the pineapple example for a reason. Traditionally the pineapple is a historic sign of hospitality and greeting. It tastes great and provides vitamin C. Stress tests and E-meters and other devices are just like taking a healthy symbol of hospitality and demonizing it. They make as much “sense” as declaring that a fruit that is a sign of health and abundance is a “hidden demon” in the body “causing stress.” When you fall prey to these so called technical tools you might as well declare war on breathing, white blood cell counts, vitamin C, hospitality and the chi flow within the body. I include the chi flow example for the benefit of legitimate Chinese medicine practitioners. They especially should appreciate what I am saying, as the use of Scientology devices is like telling the chi that it should not flow in the natural places it has always flowed in the body because chi “causes stress.” I mean, gosh it is so unfair, the chi flows where it has for millions of years, but other parts of the body are “deprived” and so let’s take the chi from where it should go and send it to the rectum to “expel it” in a “purging way.” I wish I was exaggerating or joking but I’m not.
The stress test in the street is the beginning of telling your body to become dysfunctional, rather than correct it. The stress test is the beginning because it doesn’t just hook you into an expensive scam, but it is the beginning of dark and evil indoctrination that survival instincts of the mind and body are “stressful,” “wrong,” and “should be overcome.” Let’s give the example of the widely laughed about “silent birth.” You fools! What if the body has evolved over the years so that the woman shouting during childbirth releases hormones and body chemistry that both mother and child need for good health! You idiots! All you think about is your daft “the baby should be born into comforting silence.” Well what if nature evolved so that “comforting silence” suppresses the release of healthy biochemical secretions? Panda watchers learned something about this when they watched the National Zoo panda mother give birth and the tiny baby squirted out and actually hit the wall. Everyone was horrified, but they learned that this happens to stimulate breathing. Likewise the giraffe baby drops like six feet to the ground when he or she is born. Nature evolves each organism so that the mother gives birth the “right way” just as she does. So a woman who might scream and rant during childbirth might have a natural detector that her muscles and hormones must go into a higher gear to safely deliver the baby. Quiet is not always “pleasant” and “stress free.” Stress tests and E-meters and whatever other stupid devices are used by Scientologists and other cults are the front line to disconnecting a person from his or her own properly functioning body and mind. The first time you answer one of their stupid questions you are being tacitly brainwashed into applying judgment calls to bodily and mental functions. These are judgment calls that humans are too ignorant to have. Because they are cult driven they are demented agenda driven, and thus pineapples and fuel gauges become “bad” and ignoring your body’s proper function and diverting its good health toward warped purpose is “good.” RUN don’t walk away from this crap.
Monday, May 5, 2008
"Fat" genes, some scientific perspectives
Just a quick comment on this. Modern people have somehow slipped into the erroneous belief that body fat is "dangerous" and "unhealthy." Excess weight may be unhealthy, but fat itself is not unhealthy and if it were not for body fat there would be no humans alive today.
Researchers have found two genes that influence the amount of fat an individual will retain, even if the individual diets strenuously. The second gene is even being called a "rogue gene," like it popped up just to cause trouble. Well, evolution and biology don't work that way. If there was no evolutionary or survival advantage to having a "rogue" gene, it would die out.
Fat exists to tide a human body over a time of diminished food supply. It's what keeps people from dropping dead after a few days without food. If one were able to go back and look at genetics of people who survived great famines, for example, I would not be surprised if a time traveling geneticist would discover that survivors had more, not less, of those "rogue fat genes."
There is a great danger in manipulating the body's survival devices, especially for vanity reasons, which, let's be honest, lies behind much of the "leaner is healthier" hand wringers. I'm not for grave obesity but that is a life style and food supply problem, not "rogue genes." The fattest people who retain fat would probably be the favored ones to survive a famine and pass on those "rogue genes" to their LUCKY children!
I urge both trend setters and researchers to stop being so short sighted regarding how life actually works and continues. Meddling with a gene that works to help humans survive during a famine is a really, really, really stupid idea. Research and understand it, but don't do what humans seem to be constantly doing, which is to "overcome" some "bad" part of the human body, thus medicating people (and by pissing it out, the whole environment) with drugs that work against survivability and true "natural health" rather than for it.
\facepalm/
Researchers have found two genes that influence the amount of fat an individual will retain, even if the individual diets strenuously. The second gene is even being called a "rogue gene," like it popped up just to cause trouble. Well, evolution and biology don't work that way. If there was no evolutionary or survival advantage to having a "rogue" gene, it would die out.
Fat exists to tide a human body over a time of diminished food supply. It's what keeps people from dropping dead after a few days without food. If one were able to go back and look at genetics of people who survived great famines, for example, I would not be surprised if a time traveling geneticist would discover that survivors had more, not less, of those "rogue fat genes."
There is a great danger in manipulating the body's survival devices, especially for vanity reasons, which, let's be honest, lies behind much of the "leaner is healthier" hand wringers. I'm not for grave obesity but that is a life style and food supply problem, not "rogue genes." The fattest people who retain fat would probably be the favored ones to survive a famine and pass on those "rogue genes" to their LUCKY children!
I urge both trend setters and researchers to stop being so short sighted regarding how life actually works and continues. Meddling with a gene that works to help humans survive during a famine is a really, really, really stupid idea. Research and understand it, but don't do what humans seem to be constantly doing, which is to "overcome" some "bad" part of the human body, thus medicating people (and by pissing it out, the whole environment) with drugs that work against survivability and true "natural health" rather than for it.
\facepalm/
Friday, April 25, 2008
Corrections about body image, fasting, spirit
I'm reading a book, "Wisdom from the Monastery," edited by Peter Sewald (who is known as the interviewer of Pope Benedict XVI when he was still a Cardinal). I'm enjoying the book and think it's quite good. But I'm commenting early, even though I'm just part way through the first third, because I see a repeat of a great error that has crept into the whole concept of humankind's body image and the benefits of fasting.
First of all, remember that the human body is made in God's image and that it is the temple for each person's soul as it sojourns in life until returning to God, either in eternal reward or outside of God's salvation and into hell. So the body is fine the way it is; there is no reason to have all of the self loathing that has taken over the sanity of much modern day society. I do not need to go into detail, you are all aware of how many ways Western humans hate their own body images and functions.
I have been boggled by the extremes of this self loathing, with colonic and "toxic cleansers" being one of the most startling modern addictions and distortions that I've observed. This is why I am distressed by what I read in the book; much discussion about the fantasy that fasting and toxic "cleansers" are performing some sort of good or necessary "cleaning" of the body. That's crazy talk!
Um, read the Bible. Who was it who lived for hundreds of years, even as Methuselah? The early fathers and Bible people who were close to God, just as they were, and not using toxic cleansers. The body is fine the way it is, assuming that you are eating a normal unpolluted diet. This stuff about "toxins" "clinging to the intestines" and so forth is crazy talk that is more about human self loathing than biology, nutrition or science. In fact, one of the problems in the 1950's was that people discovered that as food became increasingly refined (white bread instead of whole wheat, for example), that people did not consume enough roughage, which is all that intestines need for good health. So those of you too young to remember, this is why in the 1960's there was a big return to less processed and more natural food, for "roughage." People ate only highly processed white bread, mashed potatoes, pureed vegetables and so forth. They then noticed not only irregularity problems in bowel movements, but also the beginning of so many polyps being discovered. "Rough" food "scours" intestines, and that is the only "cleansing" the body needs.
This is not to say that fasting is not a great and spiritual thing. It is, but it is a spiritual thing, not a health thing. Even modern monks have grown up to lose their perspective. For example, this idea of toxic waste relieved by fasting is pushed very much in this book by the religious practitioners. Just because you are a monk does not mean you are correct! Here is the specific deviation. The monk who is quoted in the book explains that because in medieval times food was unreliable according to harvest, some gorged on food, including supposedly holy people, becoming real gluttons. This is true and shows some sense of history and understanding of culture and life pressures. But by only thinking of fasting in terms of a "too much" or "not enough" quantity and cleansing aid, these same monks are not as well formed in understanding the true roots of the fasting's spirituality. They got tantalizingly close to explaining it a few times, but then veered off into the self loathing/dirty body brainwashing that so much in the past thirty years have absorbed from poor formation and pop culture.
Much of the Old Testament is about how God instructs humans to perform burnt sacrifices to him of animals and food. I've written about this most recently as I educate people about how the Catholic Mass is a continuation of God's requirement for sacrifice. Why did God require food sacrifice to him? Notice he did not say, take one fourth of what you would have eaten today and sacrifice it to me. He's not giving people dietary implications, only spiritual. God required animal and plant sacrifices to him for two reasons. One is that food was the single most important quantity in a human's life, and it is God given. The only way humans can truly remember and appreciate God is to take a percentage of what they rely on for life, and give the finest part of it back to God in acknowledgement and worship. God is not taking food out of someones' mouth, nor is he hinting that fasting or dieting is a good thing. To the contrary, the poor are able to sacrifice just a few grains of wheat, or a bit of oil that they can afford. God does not cause hunger (or dieting) by anything he mandated for the sacrifice. By offering sacrifice humans remained mindful of the proper priorities and order of their life on earth.
The second reason God stipulated sacrifice is that he wanted humans to cultivate the habit of trying for the very best in animals and plants. Remember, God is a gardener in addition to being a carpenter! By stipulating the purity of the hair color, or of the age or bodily health of the animal that would be sacrificed to him, God is subtly also teaching humans to DEVELOP THE BEST out of the best that God has given to humans. By offering the best to God humans pull themselves up in developing the gifts of animals and plants that God has graced humans with. It is a discipline that lifts people up to be good stewards of plants and animals. Everyone benefited from the knowledge and cleanliness that went into breeding or providing the best for sacrifice to God, because this knowledge applied to giving humans the best nutrition too.
So, think about it. Food is the greatest gift to humans from God because it is the day to day source of life. (Air is really something that is taken for granted, and you can't control having air or not. The same with water, which is either drinkable and available or not). But food is something that is extraordinary in grace. It has to be sought out, yet it is given by God freely.
God points out that because of original sin, humans are cast out of the Garden and have to "toil" for their food. But at the same time, Jesus reminds people that the lilies of the field do not spin flax, and the birds on the wing do not toil for their food. Food is the great gift and mystery of God, because it is freely given, but also must be toiled for and sought by humans.
Therefore fasting was understood by the earliest practitioners to be the willful giving up of God's greatest gift. It was viewed as "one step beyond offering food sacrifice to God," in a manner of speaking. Fasting was viewed by the earliest practitioners as the ultimate act of faith in God, because they are forgoing in total, for the fasting period of time, the very thing that they must, through human's own disobedience, toil to obtain, but also, through God's grace, have available in abundance through the natural order of life. It was this that drove the first who fasted to do so as a spiritual statement. It was later that practitioners noticed general health benefits from fasting along with the spiritual. They discovered real benefits (for example, soothing the system by having, for example, easy to digest bread or water fasts... I like rice fast days myself). But they also developed "theories" as they speculated, through their lack of understanding of the biology of the body, about purities and impurities.
When the body suffers during a fast it is not because of the "toxins." It is because the body is saying, "Hey, stupid, you haven't eaten."
The body has what scientists today well understand as an kind of "emergency plan" that it puts into effect when people stop eating. First it sends all the signals that you should eat (stomach growls, cravings, pain, etc.) The body fully expects you to respond by eating. When you don't eat the body goes into a mini crisis mode. That's when your failure to consume the calories that you need starts to affect your ability to move, think, and be at ease. You've cut off your calorie supply. So once the body "realizes" that you are "seriously" not getting enough food calories, it goes into what it thinks of as "starvation mode." To the regret of dieters scientists have in the past few years measured how rather than dieting have immediate effects, the body falls back on the ancient primitive ability that all animals share, which is to go into a "starvation" plan, meant to keep them alive on what little they are consuming. It varies from person to person and animal to animal, but some people can stick in "starvation mode" for quite a while and actually not lose weight if they are not exercising. Eventually the body must keep you alive by going into your fat reserves. So this is when the body starts to burn fat, even if you are not exercising, to keep you alive. If you still do not eat, then the body goes into it's last ditch plan, which is to burn your actual muscles when it has run out of fat to use. This is when people, and animals, reach the point of no return and starve. So the unpleasantness that you feel through a fast is nothing to do with "eliminating toxins," duh. It is the pain of the body increasing the severity of its survival mode response over time.
Repeat fasters do not experience ease because they've "gotten rid of the toxins." They experience subsequent ease because the body has adjusted to the types of fast you do and "knows what to expect." The only way "toxins" come into the picture is that if you have eliminated your varied sources of food in order to fast on one food, you can give your body a break from more complicated processing of varied foods (which is not a bad thing unless you have been ingesting a food with pollution). But remember that bodies evolved over millions of years to DO "hard work" of "digesting" a wide variety of food. This is why humans are called "omnivores." Humans eat both plants and animals. "Herbivores" are animals that eat only plants. (No, "herb" does not mean weed, for all you dope heads). "Carnivores" are animals that eat other animals. Being an omnivore is considered a great survival and evolutionary gift because it means that a wide variety of foods will sustain you. It's not an example of poor poor little old tum tum and poo poo being strained by the awful hard work of digesting all those big mean old complicated yum yums. *Sigh* In fact, to get serious for a moment again, one of the things that the nutritionists who discovered the starvation mode that frustrates dieters also determined was that eating "hard to digest" food like celery is a good thing to do, because it actually is a form of beneficial calorie burning exercise, just this act of digesting. That was pretty common knowledge in my college days, but I guess it took until recently for people to find some way to measure its effect and therefore consider it to be real.
Who would have thought that "modern" society would demonize the body, its functions, its self image and also apply "magical thinking" to the eating of food? God got people off to such a good start and they just don't seem to want to keep things simple and good.
I hope this helps.
First of all, remember that the human body is made in God's image and that it is the temple for each person's soul as it sojourns in life until returning to God, either in eternal reward or outside of God's salvation and into hell. So the body is fine the way it is; there is no reason to have all of the self loathing that has taken over the sanity of much modern day society. I do not need to go into detail, you are all aware of how many ways Western humans hate their own body images and functions.
I have been boggled by the extremes of this self loathing, with colonic and "toxic cleansers" being one of the most startling modern addictions and distortions that I've observed. This is why I am distressed by what I read in the book; much discussion about the fantasy that fasting and toxic "cleansers" are performing some sort of good or necessary "cleaning" of the body. That's crazy talk!
Um, read the Bible. Who was it who lived for hundreds of years, even as Methuselah? The early fathers and Bible people who were close to God, just as they were, and not using toxic cleansers. The body is fine the way it is, assuming that you are eating a normal unpolluted diet. This stuff about "toxins" "clinging to the intestines" and so forth is crazy talk that is more about human self loathing than biology, nutrition or science. In fact, one of the problems in the 1950's was that people discovered that as food became increasingly refined (white bread instead of whole wheat, for example), that people did not consume enough roughage, which is all that intestines need for good health. So those of you too young to remember, this is why in the 1960's there was a big return to less processed and more natural food, for "roughage." People ate only highly processed white bread, mashed potatoes, pureed vegetables and so forth. They then noticed not only irregularity problems in bowel movements, but also the beginning of so many polyps being discovered. "Rough" food "scours" intestines, and that is the only "cleansing" the body needs.
This is not to say that fasting is not a great and spiritual thing. It is, but it is a spiritual thing, not a health thing. Even modern monks have grown up to lose their perspective. For example, this idea of toxic waste relieved by fasting is pushed very much in this book by the religious practitioners. Just because you are a monk does not mean you are correct! Here is the specific deviation. The monk who is quoted in the book explains that because in medieval times food was unreliable according to harvest, some gorged on food, including supposedly holy people, becoming real gluttons. This is true and shows some sense of history and understanding of culture and life pressures. But by only thinking of fasting in terms of a "too much" or "not enough" quantity and cleansing aid, these same monks are not as well formed in understanding the true roots of the fasting's spirituality. They got tantalizingly close to explaining it a few times, but then veered off into the self loathing/dirty body brainwashing that so much in the past thirty years have absorbed from poor formation and pop culture.
Much of the Old Testament is about how God instructs humans to perform burnt sacrifices to him of animals and food. I've written about this most recently as I educate people about how the Catholic Mass is a continuation of God's requirement for sacrifice. Why did God require food sacrifice to him? Notice he did not say, take one fourth of what you would have eaten today and sacrifice it to me. He's not giving people dietary implications, only spiritual. God required animal and plant sacrifices to him for two reasons. One is that food was the single most important quantity in a human's life, and it is God given. The only way humans can truly remember and appreciate God is to take a percentage of what they rely on for life, and give the finest part of it back to God in acknowledgement and worship. God is not taking food out of someones' mouth, nor is he hinting that fasting or dieting is a good thing. To the contrary, the poor are able to sacrifice just a few grains of wheat, or a bit of oil that they can afford. God does not cause hunger (or dieting) by anything he mandated for the sacrifice. By offering sacrifice humans remained mindful of the proper priorities and order of their life on earth.
The second reason God stipulated sacrifice is that he wanted humans to cultivate the habit of trying for the very best in animals and plants. Remember, God is a gardener in addition to being a carpenter! By stipulating the purity of the hair color, or of the age or bodily health of the animal that would be sacrificed to him, God is subtly also teaching humans to DEVELOP THE BEST out of the best that God has given to humans. By offering the best to God humans pull themselves up in developing the gifts of animals and plants that God has graced humans with. It is a discipline that lifts people up to be good stewards of plants and animals. Everyone benefited from the knowledge and cleanliness that went into breeding or providing the best for sacrifice to God, because this knowledge applied to giving humans the best nutrition too.
So, think about it. Food is the greatest gift to humans from God because it is the day to day source of life. (Air is really something that is taken for granted, and you can't control having air or not. The same with water, which is either drinkable and available or not). But food is something that is extraordinary in grace. It has to be sought out, yet it is given by God freely.
God points out that because of original sin, humans are cast out of the Garden and have to "toil" for their food. But at the same time, Jesus reminds people that the lilies of the field do not spin flax, and the birds on the wing do not toil for their food. Food is the great gift and mystery of God, because it is freely given, but also must be toiled for and sought by humans.
Therefore fasting was understood by the earliest practitioners to be the willful giving up of God's greatest gift. It was viewed as "one step beyond offering food sacrifice to God," in a manner of speaking. Fasting was viewed by the earliest practitioners as the ultimate act of faith in God, because they are forgoing in total, for the fasting period of time, the very thing that they must, through human's own disobedience, toil to obtain, but also, through God's grace, have available in abundance through the natural order of life. It was this that drove the first who fasted to do so as a spiritual statement. It was later that practitioners noticed general health benefits from fasting along with the spiritual. They discovered real benefits (for example, soothing the system by having, for example, easy to digest bread or water fasts... I like rice fast days myself). But they also developed "theories" as they speculated, through their lack of understanding of the biology of the body, about purities and impurities.
When the body suffers during a fast it is not because of the "toxins." It is because the body is saying, "Hey, stupid, you haven't eaten."
The body has what scientists today well understand as an kind of "emergency plan" that it puts into effect when people stop eating. First it sends all the signals that you should eat (stomach growls, cravings, pain, etc.) The body fully expects you to respond by eating. When you don't eat the body goes into a mini crisis mode. That's when your failure to consume the calories that you need starts to affect your ability to move, think, and be at ease. You've cut off your calorie supply. So once the body "realizes" that you are "seriously" not getting enough food calories, it goes into what it thinks of as "starvation mode." To the regret of dieters scientists have in the past few years measured how rather than dieting have immediate effects, the body falls back on the ancient primitive ability that all animals share, which is to go into a "starvation" plan, meant to keep them alive on what little they are consuming. It varies from person to person and animal to animal, but some people can stick in "starvation mode" for quite a while and actually not lose weight if they are not exercising. Eventually the body must keep you alive by going into your fat reserves. So this is when the body starts to burn fat, even if you are not exercising, to keep you alive. If you still do not eat, then the body goes into it's last ditch plan, which is to burn your actual muscles when it has run out of fat to use. This is when people, and animals, reach the point of no return and starve. So the unpleasantness that you feel through a fast is nothing to do with "eliminating toxins," duh. It is the pain of the body increasing the severity of its survival mode response over time.
Repeat fasters do not experience ease because they've "gotten rid of the toxins." They experience subsequent ease because the body has adjusted to the types of fast you do and "knows what to expect." The only way "toxins" come into the picture is that if you have eliminated your varied sources of food in order to fast on one food, you can give your body a break from more complicated processing of varied foods (which is not a bad thing unless you have been ingesting a food with pollution). But remember that bodies evolved over millions of years to DO "hard work" of "digesting" a wide variety of food. This is why humans are called "omnivores." Humans eat both plants and animals. "Herbivores" are animals that eat only plants. (No, "herb" does not mean weed, for all you dope heads). "Carnivores" are animals that eat other animals. Being an omnivore is considered a great survival and evolutionary gift because it means that a wide variety of foods will sustain you. It's not an example of poor poor little old tum tum and poo poo being strained by the awful hard work of digesting all those big mean old complicated yum yums. *Sigh* In fact, to get serious for a moment again, one of the things that the nutritionists who discovered the starvation mode that frustrates dieters also determined was that eating "hard to digest" food like celery is a good thing to do, because it actually is a form of beneficial calorie burning exercise, just this act of digesting. That was pretty common knowledge in my college days, but I guess it took until recently for people to find some way to measure its effect and therefore consider it to be real.
Who would have thought that "modern" society would demonize the body, its functions, its self image and also apply "magical thinking" to the eating of food? God got people off to such a good start and they just don't seem to want to keep things simple and good.
I hope this helps.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
food talk: advice about emergency storage/hoards
I’ve heard a lot of interest in emergency food storage, modernly known as “food hoarding.” It’s a subject I have great interest in because it is a traditional skill that home providers grew up being very familiar with in previous generations. Here’s some quick background before my advice.
For all generations of humanity, until the past two generations, people generated much of their own food by farming, raising livestock, gathering, or buying in open air farmers markets. You need to realize that fields of vegetables, for example, only yield food during a very short time of the year. This is called the “harvest” time. It is the same with livestock. Most people kept livestock for the continuing giving of milk and chickens for eggs, and one or two animals would be a personal supply of the family’s meat. Obviously it takes years to have what would be a once or twice a year slaughter of an animal, and then the preparation of meat for both day to day eating and also for storage (such as salted meat, or sausages that are highly spiced for their preserving). So there is a time each year, or season, that certain foods become available, it becomes harvested, and then it is prepared so that it can last the family until the next harvest of that food. Potatoes and apples were prized, for example, because they could last up to a year in what was called “root cellars,” which were stone and dirt cool temperature cellars.
Every family who participated in its own food generation had someone who knew how to can food. While it’s called “cans” back then (and now) the cans are actually glass containers. Look up Ball containers on the web and you can see what they look like. I used to grow my own food and can it, just as my grandparents did. (It skipped a generation because my parents lived during the transition from living off their parents’ canned goods to finding all that they need in the grocery store). But I wanted to can goods so that I could have fresh, year around, access to food that I had grown myself. I made strawberry jam by picking strawberries at “pick yourself” farms. I grew tomatoes and canned them whole. I grew squash and learned how to can it, but typically kept it in frozen containers in the fridge for better flavor and freshness. I also made fantastic Concord grape chutney. Chutney is like a relish but with large chunks of fruit and vegetables. I also canned pickles from food I had grown. I even grew the dill that gives the dill flavor to the pickles. I also grew “cutting flowers” for having daily cut flowers for the table’s decoration. If you are going to have a food garden it’s a shame not to also have a cut flower garden in the same space. You learn to plant flowers that like your food come continually to bloom so you have a continual supply to harvest through each growing season. (And even during the winter I cut branches from evergreens and holly, or other ornamental plants).
The reason I describe my experience and how food storage traditionally worked is so that you can understand the reasoning behind the tips that I give, and how to adapt them to your own food storage or emergency hoarding endeavors.
1. Store food that is the exact same food that you would want to eat anyway. Do not waste your money on panic buying of either specialized “survival” food or on food that your family would enjoy eating only if they had a gun to their head. So do not buy green beans if everyone hates green beans. Buy what you would eat anyway.
2. Then, arrange your pantry or storage space so that you put the most recently bought food of each type toward one end, and the oldest stored food on the other end. So for example, if you buy tuna fish cans, you get in the habit of stocking the tuna in order that you buy it in a row along the shelf. This way you know at a glance for each food when you bought it and what it’s “shelf life” is, because you have it arranged from freshly bought to oldest bought.
3. Then, use your emergency food for day to day cooking, taking from the oldest bought end. This ensures that you are cycling through the emergency food and keeping it fresh, and not wasting your money on food that will rot in the basement if, God willing, the emergency that you are planning for never comes. This is why I tell you to buy only, for the most part, food that you would use in your regular cooking anyway. So whenever you make a tuna dish, you take the oldest can from your emergency supply and then make a note to buy a replacement can when you are next at the store doing your weekly grocery shopping. This is how people learned over thousands of years to provide for themselves and their families. When women canned food and when the men smoked the meat or harvested the food for storage, they arranged it in “oldest to most recent” order also, and women marked the actual dates with ink on the lids of the canning jars. I would eat the frozen or canned food that I had prepared also in order of eating the older food first.
4. You can involve the kids, and it’s a positive learning experience that is not like showing them a video tape of the world being destroyed by an asteroid and telling them that is “disaster preparation.” This is good stewardship and home making skills, and how to be a good provider. So when the kids are eating from their jars of peanut butter and jelly in their normal day to day lives, they learn how you took those jars from the supply, put on your shopping list to replace it, have them help you find the replacement jars in the store, buy them, and then put them in the right place in the pantry or storage shelves. There is an abundance of good learning and fun when kids learn to “keep part of the pantry stocked.”
If you are blessed to be someone with a great income and a generous heart, you could cycle your emergency food storage through your local food pantry. So instead of eating the food you have stored in your regular meals, you periodically take the older stored items to the food bank and replace the items through your personal shopping.
5. When selecting food that your family likes for inclusion in your pantry or hoard, remember that electricity and clean water may be a shortage during whatever emergency that you are planning for. Many people think that just stocking lots of water is the solution, but if you cannot heat the food in cooking, like bring water to a boil, it takes hours if not days to prepare some foods, even if you have filled water bottles. So my advice is to plan for foods that come in their own water, oil, syrup or other fluid and consider that part of your balanced diet (as you should anyway). For example, canned corn comes in nutritious storage water. If you are in an emergency, when you eat the canned corn be sure to also drink the water that it came canned in, because must nutrition is in the water anyway. The same with canned tuna. If you are in the actual emergency you will want to use the oil or water that the tuna is canned in also, and not drain and throw it away. Canned fruits, such as peaches, come in syrup that is good emergency “fruit juice” along with the eating of the actual canned food product. Soup is the obvious example, and chicken soup should be a “must have” for any emergency pantry.
6. Make sure that your emergency pantry has bags of salted chips and nuts and also cookies with real sugar. When you are in an emergency that is the time to forget about crazy diet schemes. Salt and sugar are essential to have in larger supplies than normal when under stress in an emergency.
7. If you have infants or young children, while you should of course store baby food and other food that is appropriate to their normal diet (and like I said, rotate the emergency food through your normal cooking cycle), think ahead of the adult foods that you have and how easy that, in emergency, you could prepare for infant or child appropriate food. It never hurts to research ahead of time (and even to test) how easy it would be to hand mash canned peaches, for example, if you had to provide adult food in an emergency to an infant. Read up on the Internet how people make their own baby food, not because you, God willing, need to do that on your own, but because it gives you rehearsal tips and tools that you might want to include in your pantry. For example, few homes have what every home used to have at least one of, and sometimes two or three of, which is a hand potato masher. People have food processors but no longer have the non electric hand kitchen utensils that every kitchen used to have. So if you imagine different scenarios, such as having to mash adult food into infant sized pieces or puree, and imagine having no electricity, you can think ahead to what utensils would be of great assistance. Most people bump into this problem when they have cans and no hand operated can opener, LOL. But if you want a real food hoarding and pantry system, you need to imagine a number of food provision scenarios and what kitchen utensils or tools you would need for each situation. Even if you don’t have an infant or child, what if your extended family or neighbors had to rely on your supply and then have one or more infants or children? Men and women of our previous generations knew how to handle each of those situations through experience, family lore, and planning.
8. Invest in sets of those ubiquitous home storage plastic containers with lids. But before you spend your money, think ahead of various uses. What if you have to leave your house and take your car to move your family and food to another location? Get storage containers that fit well in your fully loaded car, and practice in advance learning how much food you can pack in each one. If you really want to get organized, when you test what you can load into each container, keep a list that you write of type and quantity of each food and leave it in the storage container. Thus you will know in advance of the emergency that say 30 cans of tuna, 12 jars of peanut butter, 10 jelly jars, etc fits in say an 85 quart size container or whatever. So if you have to leave in a hurry, you open the plastic container and there is your checklist already inside of what would fit in it. Backpacks are great, especially if you imagine “being on foot running for the hills,” which is all very modern and science fiction, but it is easy to forget the baby food or pet food, or some other essential, if you are leaving because of fire, earthquake, natural disaster and so forth where you have time to organize but must move pretty rapidly. Some art supply containers are plastic, like giant shoe box sized, with handles. Those are great for the “backpack” scenario. One reason I prefer plastic boxes to back packs is that they can be floatation devices, while a backpack pulls you down, should you have to encounter water. So sure, have backpacks, but also have a plastic container for each member of the family.
9. I don’t want to jump ahead to non-food articles, but I would be remiss to not mention that each container should have a bottle of aspirin (whether you can tolerate it or not, other people will need it) and chewable Pepto-Bismol tablets. Pain relief (especially the anti-fever capabilities of aspirin) and diarrheal relief are essential to plan for in advance. When you have stress, a sudden change in food source and water, and possible contamination, fever and diarrhea are real possibilities and are more than just inconvenient. If you have children ask your pediatrician in advance that in a civil emergency, what dose of aspirin or Pepto-Bismol you could give to your under 12 child in such a scenario. If they have trouble imagining giving you open ended advice, give them the Katrina scenario. For example, say, “What if my family was one of the ones trapped for 5 days before rescue and my child got diarrhea? What dosage of Pepto-Bismol could I have given him or her in such a scenario where no medical aid is available?”
I could write a book, LOL, but I hope this is a good start for you. You are not crazy or paranoid to want to provide for your family and have an emergency supply. It is actually what homemakers used to do as part of their routine family life. But you need to plan for realistic scenarios and not for fantasy sci-fi hero scenarios, which, God willing, will not be required. And if they are, trust me; this country has not seen what war and panic will do to even the most well stocked family with food and guns. Dudes and chicks like to imagine that they can hole up in their house and fend off looters, but that’s just not what has happened throughout history. As Ben Franklin said, we stick together or hang separately. I think Katrina is a reasonable model for the type of situation that every family should plan for. It has both elements of possibly having to hold out without food or water in your home for weeks, or the possibility of having to leave home in a hurry in a survival type of mode. So while I’m not saying everyone should plan for a hurricane, I’m saying the Katrina model is a good imaginary template that includes lots of the scenarios that some genuine natural or civil emergency would contain.
For all generations of humanity, until the past two generations, people generated much of their own food by farming, raising livestock, gathering, or buying in open air farmers markets. You need to realize that fields of vegetables, for example, only yield food during a very short time of the year. This is called the “harvest” time. It is the same with livestock. Most people kept livestock for the continuing giving of milk and chickens for eggs, and one or two animals would be a personal supply of the family’s meat. Obviously it takes years to have what would be a once or twice a year slaughter of an animal, and then the preparation of meat for both day to day eating and also for storage (such as salted meat, or sausages that are highly spiced for their preserving). So there is a time each year, or season, that certain foods become available, it becomes harvested, and then it is prepared so that it can last the family until the next harvest of that food. Potatoes and apples were prized, for example, because they could last up to a year in what was called “root cellars,” which were stone and dirt cool temperature cellars.
Every family who participated in its own food generation had someone who knew how to can food. While it’s called “cans” back then (and now) the cans are actually glass containers. Look up Ball containers on the web and you can see what they look like. I used to grow my own food and can it, just as my grandparents did. (It skipped a generation because my parents lived during the transition from living off their parents’ canned goods to finding all that they need in the grocery store). But I wanted to can goods so that I could have fresh, year around, access to food that I had grown myself. I made strawberry jam by picking strawberries at “pick yourself” farms. I grew tomatoes and canned them whole. I grew squash and learned how to can it, but typically kept it in frozen containers in the fridge for better flavor and freshness. I also made fantastic Concord grape chutney. Chutney is like a relish but with large chunks of fruit and vegetables. I also canned pickles from food I had grown. I even grew the dill that gives the dill flavor to the pickles. I also grew “cutting flowers” for having daily cut flowers for the table’s decoration. If you are going to have a food garden it’s a shame not to also have a cut flower garden in the same space. You learn to plant flowers that like your food come continually to bloom so you have a continual supply to harvest through each growing season. (And even during the winter I cut branches from evergreens and holly, or other ornamental plants).
The reason I describe my experience and how food storage traditionally worked is so that you can understand the reasoning behind the tips that I give, and how to adapt them to your own food storage or emergency hoarding endeavors.
1. Store food that is the exact same food that you would want to eat anyway. Do not waste your money on panic buying of either specialized “survival” food or on food that your family would enjoy eating only if they had a gun to their head. So do not buy green beans if everyone hates green beans. Buy what you would eat anyway.
2. Then, arrange your pantry or storage space so that you put the most recently bought food of each type toward one end, and the oldest stored food on the other end. So for example, if you buy tuna fish cans, you get in the habit of stocking the tuna in order that you buy it in a row along the shelf. This way you know at a glance for each food when you bought it and what it’s “shelf life” is, because you have it arranged from freshly bought to oldest bought.
3. Then, use your emergency food for day to day cooking, taking from the oldest bought end. This ensures that you are cycling through the emergency food and keeping it fresh, and not wasting your money on food that will rot in the basement if, God willing, the emergency that you are planning for never comes. This is why I tell you to buy only, for the most part, food that you would use in your regular cooking anyway. So whenever you make a tuna dish, you take the oldest can from your emergency supply and then make a note to buy a replacement can when you are next at the store doing your weekly grocery shopping. This is how people learned over thousands of years to provide for themselves and their families. When women canned food and when the men smoked the meat or harvested the food for storage, they arranged it in “oldest to most recent” order also, and women marked the actual dates with ink on the lids of the canning jars. I would eat the frozen or canned food that I had prepared also in order of eating the older food first.
4. You can involve the kids, and it’s a positive learning experience that is not like showing them a video tape of the world being destroyed by an asteroid and telling them that is “disaster preparation.” This is good stewardship and home making skills, and how to be a good provider. So when the kids are eating from their jars of peanut butter and jelly in their normal day to day lives, they learn how you took those jars from the supply, put on your shopping list to replace it, have them help you find the replacement jars in the store, buy them, and then put them in the right place in the pantry or storage shelves. There is an abundance of good learning and fun when kids learn to “keep part of the pantry stocked.”
If you are blessed to be someone with a great income and a generous heart, you could cycle your emergency food storage through your local food pantry. So instead of eating the food you have stored in your regular meals, you periodically take the older stored items to the food bank and replace the items through your personal shopping.
5. When selecting food that your family likes for inclusion in your pantry or hoard, remember that electricity and clean water may be a shortage during whatever emergency that you are planning for. Many people think that just stocking lots of water is the solution, but if you cannot heat the food in cooking, like bring water to a boil, it takes hours if not days to prepare some foods, even if you have filled water bottles. So my advice is to plan for foods that come in their own water, oil, syrup or other fluid and consider that part of your balanced diet (as you should anyway). For example, canned corn comes in nutritious storage water. If you are in an emergency, when you eat the canned corn be sure to also drink the water that it came canned in, because must nutrition is in the water anyway. The same with canned tuna. If you are in the actual emergency you will want to use the oil or water that the tuna is canned in also, and not drain and throw it away. Canned fruits, such as peaches, come in syrup that is good emergency “fruit juice” along with the eating of the actual canned food product. Soup is the obvious example, and chicken soup should be a “must have” for any emergency pantry.
6. Make sure that your emergency pantry has bags of salted chips and nuts and also cookies with real sugar. When you are in an emergency that is the time to forget about crazy diet schemes. Salt and sugar are essential to have in larger supplies than normal when under stress in an emergency.
7. If you have infants or young children, while you should of course store baby food and other food that is appropriate to their normal diet (and like I said, rotate the emergency food through your normal cooking cycle), think ahead of the adult foods that you have and how easy that, in emergency, you could prepare for infant or child appropriate food. It never hurts to research ahead of time (and even to test) how easy it would be to hand mash canned peaches, for example, if you had to provide adult food in an emergency to an infant. Read up on the Internet how people make their own baby food, not because you, God willing, need to do that on your own, but because it gives you rehearsal tips and tools that you might want to include in your pantry. For example, few homes have what every home used to have at least one of, and sometimes two or three of, which is a hand potato masher. People have food processors but no longer have the non electric hand kitchen utensils that every kitchen used to have. So if you imagine different scenarios, such as having to mash adult food into infant sized pieces or puree, and imagine having no electricity, you can think ahead to what utensils would be of great assistance. Most people bump into this problem when they have cans and no hand operated can opener, LOL. But if you want a real food hoarding and pantry system, you need to imagine a number of food provision scenarios and what kitchen utensils or tools you would need for each situation. Even if you don’t have an infant or child, what if your extended family or neighbors had to rely on your supply and then have one or more infants or children? Men and women of our previous generations knew how to handle each of those situations through experience, family lore, and planning.
8. Invest in sets of those ubiquitous home storage plastic containers with lids. But before you spend your money, think ahead of various uses. What if you have to leave your house and take your car to move your family and food to another location? Get storage containers that fit well in your fully loaded car, and practice in advance learning how much food you can pack in each one. If you really want to get organized, when you test what you can load into each container, keep a list that you write of type and quantity of each food and leave it in the storage container. Thus you will know in advance of the emergency that say 30 cans of tuna, 12 jars of peanut butter, 10 jelly jars, etc fits in say an 85 quart size container or whatever. So if you have to leave in a hurry, you open the plastic container and there is your checklist already inside of what would fit in it. Backpacks are great, especially if you imagine “being on foot running for the hills,” which is all very modern and science fiction, but it is easy to forget the baby food or pet food, or some other essential, if you are leaving because of fire, earthquake, natural disaster and so forth where you have time to organize but must move pretty rapidly. Some art supply containers are plastic, like giant shoe box sized, with handles. Those are great for the “backpack” scenario. One reason I prefer plastic boxes to back packs is that they can be floatation devices, while a backpack pulls you down, should you have to encounter water. So sure, have backpacks, but also have a plastic container for each member of the family.
9. I don’t want to jump ahead to non-food articles, but I would be remiss to not mention that each container should have a bottle of aspirin (whether you can tolerate it or not, other people will need it) and chewable Pepto-Bismol tablets. Pain relief (especially the anti-fever capabilities of aspirin) and diarrheal relief are essential to plan for in advance. When you have stress, a sudden change in food source and water, and possible contamination, fever and diarrhea are real possibilities and are more than just inconvenient. If you have children ask your pediatrician in advance that in a civil emergency, what dose of aspirin or Pepto-Bismol you could give to your under 12 child in such a scenario. If they have trouble imagining giving you open ended advice, give them the Katrina scenario. For example, say, “What if my family was one of the ones trapped for 5 days before rescue and my child got diarrhea? What dosage of Pepto-Bismol could I have given him or her in such a scenario where no medical aid is available?”
I could write a book, LOL, but I hope this is a good start for you. You are not crazy or paranoid to want to provide for your family and have an emergency supply. It is actually what homemakers used to do as part of their routine family life. But you need to plan for realistic scenarios and not for fantasy sci-fi hero scenarios, which, God willing, will not be required. And if they are, trust me; this country has not seen what war and panic will do to even the most well stocked family with food and guns. Dudes and chicks like to imagine that they can hole up in their house and fend off looters, but that’s just not what has happened throughout history. As Ben Franklin said, we stick together or hang separately. I think Katrina is a reasonable model for the type of situation that every family should plan for. It has both elements of possibly having to hold out without food or water in your home for weeks, or the possibility of having to leave home in a hurry in a survival type of mode. So while I’m not saying everyone should plan for a hurricane, I’m saying the Katrina model is a good imaginary template that includes lots of the scenarios that some genuine natural or civil emergency would contain.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Food talk & some traditional good earth know how
It’s time for another blog post about good nutrition, and the wisdom about how to live a balanced life that has been lost, forgotten, or distorted over the past forty years. Here’s an example of how to view food AND what is good for the earth.
When I was growing up, if you went to the store to buy nuts to eat, they virtually all came with their shells on. People bought the traditional bag mix of almonds, hazel nuts, walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts and then when they wanted a handful of nuts to eat as a snack, they sat there with a bowl with a nut cracker and picks. Shelled nuts such as cashews and macadamias were an exotic treat, and not found on every shelf like they are today. The Brazil nuts came from Brazil, and the almonds and hazel nuts were grown in the USA. I have this lesson in mind because last week I bought a bag of Brazil nuts at Wal-Mart for $3.69 and while I’ve been eating them I realize that knowledge I take for granted is no longer common. Here’s how I think when I buy them.
Nuts are one of THE most beneficial foods for humans. There is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t have nuts, often in the form of a handful of walnuts added to my cereal or oatmeal. If I don’t have cereal that day I will usually have a serving of nuts as they are. Sometimes I eat the walnuts but for variety I try to have other types in my pantry. Hence I bought the Brazil nuts. Now, nuts are healthy as they are raw. If they are cooked in oil they lose some nutrition but more important you gain all the calories and the possibly harmful ingredients of the oil, depending on the type and amount of oil used. So it is best to eat raw nuts but do not skip having nuts because of the oil used on some roasted nuts, just shop and consume wisely in that regard. So one reason I chose Brazil nuts for the pantry last week is that they are obviously raw and uncooked, being still in their shell.
Here is the second advantage of shells. People know that pesticides are a concern. Pesticides are a necessary tool, like it or not, for much of the world and many of the world’s crops. People alive today have forgotten what it is like to grow the food you depend on day to day (or starve otherwise) without pesticides. Billions of people are alive today because of pesticides. However, like all things with humans, the pendulum has swung too wildly in both directions. People demonize all pesticides (without actually rolling up their sleeves and picking worms off of crops of the poor people themselves) so that extreme is wrong, but of course the planet has become foolishly pesticide saturated, and that is the wrong extreme too. In the 1950’s-1960’s people started gaining wisdom on this problem by laying new insight about the worries of pesticides ON TOP OF the traditional wisdom about how to grow crops. Today there are VERY few people who have both insights, and that is a real worry. Both sides have been forced to polarize. Pesticide salespeople cannot be moderate because if they admit a problem the other side leaps on them as that argument being in support of no pesticides at all. And the anti pesticide people are so fearful and indignant about pesticide side effects that they lose their heads over the pesticides in total, not remembering that people still need to be fed with reliable food sources. When humans live all year off of the summer’s crops, a wave of pests can destroy in a matter of days a year’s worth of survival food for thousands of people. This is why people seem to “pour on” the pesticides “before they need to.” Once pests arrive the crop is ruined and destroyed and people starved. I remember those days very well, as does anyone of the World War II generation. So while I buy (expensive) organic when I can, I also am pragmatic that pesticides are going to be with humanity for a long, long time. So here is the nut lesson. When people use pesticides on vegetables, fruit and nuts, they usually use it early in the growth of the plant so the pesticide is not actually ON the food you are consuming. It was usually used on the young blooms or shoots. However, people know to wash all their foods before eating. Here is something, though, that environmentalists who were well rooted knew. If your food absorbed pesticides, the pesticides themselves tend to be concentrated in the skin, peel, rind or shell. So if you eat an apple that has been exposed to pesticides, peeling it makes you very safe from the effects, because if any pesticide residue was absorbed into the fruit, it tends to be concentrated in the peel, not in the interior. This is why I’ve made the decision to peel fruits that I have concern about. Now, there is a dilemma because the peel often contains the best nutrition, such as apples and potatoes. Yeah, think about it potato lovers, those great stuffed potatoes and potato skins. I’m not accusing (in fact, potatoes are quite safe regarding pesticides, unless things have changed since I last looked at it). I’m sharing with you the knowledge we all obtained in that generation, which is that pesticides, when present, tend to concentrate in the outer surface, being a rind, skin, peel or shell, and if removed you have a safe bet even if you don’t know the origins and treatment of the food regarding pesticides. So this is a long way of explaining that when I shell the Brazil nuts myself, I know that I am removing the surface that has been collecting “whatever” handling contaminants it received and I’m left with a relatively pure interior food. It’s not the same guarantee as getting pre-shelled nuts, since obviously you don’t know what standards of washing and so forth are used in the shelling and the mixing of the shelled with the pre-shelled.
So if you were reading my mind you’d not pick this up because it’s like brushing your teeth or washing your hands; you don’t think, “Now I pick up the toothbrush. Now I uncap the toothpaste. Wow I bought this toothpaste because it has this ingredient at that price. Now I use the tap water. I know the tap water has been purified to this or that degree.” You make lifestyle habits and choices based on your upbringing and your life education, and then you automatically and reflexively make wise choices without thinking about it. So when I buy a bag of unshelled nuts, part of it is the reflex of knowing that I am in control of the sanitation as best as I can because I will be removing the shells myself.
I also automatically think in terms of thrift, but not in the way that some today may think of it. I still think in terms of food benefit and cost per serving. I mentioned that the bag of Brazil nuts cost $3.69. The label indicates that there are about six servings of ten nuts each. Ten nuts is a filling and generous serving and gives you 200 calories. So if you get 6 servings out of a bag that means that healthy and clean Brazil nuts cost 62 cents a serving! That is not expensive at all. It’s less than a candy bar, and while it is generous in calories, it has fewer calories than a candy bar or chips snack AND the calories are all beneficial and helpful. Nuts, especially Brazil nuts, have a high percentage of fat, but this is the good fat that people need to have a healthy day. Fat provides slow burning and lasting nutrition that is for the long haul during the day, rather than a sugary carbohydrate boost. Now I eat lots of carbohydrates and sugars, so I’m not arguing against them. I’m just explaining how to get the balance right, instead of always glorifying or demonizing food groups and ingredients. It is wise to have one snack or meal serving that has nuts as its basis.
Brazil nuts are of course one of the fundamental ways out of poverty for their growers. It was one of the obvious way that young “environmentalists” in this country promoted being consumers of foods that helped poor agriculturalists around the world, and in this case Brazil. This was the fundamental thinking before the “fair trade” movement. Sometimes you need to go back and think about where your food comes from in the first place, and who you are supporting by virtue of your purchase, before you worry about the price. The price is important but this generation sees “fair trade” and they figure, wow, this is a good thing. But they don’t know if the crop itself is sustaining the local economy or individual farmers, just because the price is fair. Maybe “fair trade” locks them into growing a certain crop rather than something else. You just don’t know unless you take a look and have some education in these matters. Anyway, with Brazil nuts you KNOW that this is indigenous crop that benefits the Brazilian farmer and the grassroots economy.
So I grew up in a generation of kids that could wield nut crackers and thus put a little sweat equity in getting their own snack. Kids eat less if they are cracking each nut one at a time. They are also getting a little exercise, and I’m not being silly here. Well, maybe a little silly, but not too much. I laugh when yuppies do arm curls with expensive exercise gear but they would cry that they are deprived if they actually had to sit down with a basket and crack nuts for their snack, or shell the peas. People used to stay fit because they lived against a background of physical activity. Moms and dad used to sit with the kids and peel apples and cut them into slices for their kids. Kids would sit down and work their way through a bowl of nuts, doing the work of cracking the nuts open themselves. This is funny: recent health studies show that “fidgeting” is good because it burns off excess calories. Well, hello! With so much “convenience foods,” people are less and less active, and they fidget as they sit glued to their desk chairs, airplane seats, and couches in front of the computer or widescreen. Parents would actually stand in the kitchen for a half an hour or so preparing food, rather than drop it into a microwave and then flopping down in a chair again. So one of the “automatic” thoughts that I have when I buy something like Brazil nuts is satisfaction, not frustration, in the buying of a food that actually requires some activity to prepare. I never view peeling vegetables and so forth as a “waste of time” or a punishment. I view it as being a good cook who has good food quality and preparation control, and is staying active doing so. True it doesn’t give me “abs of steel,” but that sure ought to not be the point of having a bipolar existence of extreme activity with extreme inactivity.
Here’s another point about why it is important to eat nuts, and actually, this applies to all foods, including meat, vegetable, fruits, grains and beverages. A given food cannot be dissected down to its “healthy” and “unhealthy” components. I mean, yes, you do need to observe and discern based on the information on the label (protein, carbohydrates, fat, etc and vitamin/mineral composition). But it is the entire content of the food that is of benefit to humans, with many micro level ingredients that people are not even aware of nor realize their benefits. Yes, people have started to identify them, like antioxidants and riboflavin and so forth, but the usual result is to glom onto a “miracle ingredient” or “food” and hype the entire food based on that ingredient. Or worse, people try to extract the ingredient and think a pill contains the same benefit. Here’s an analogy of the healthy way to think. The food is the “piece de resistance,” the epitome of the animal or plant’s life force production. It is maximized to have beneficial ingredients, and has expelled all that is not good (obviously I’m talking about food fit for humans, not poisonous or tainted foods). As a rose is the culmination of the plant’s “beauty production,” so is the food the culmination of the plant’s “nutrition production.” All of the food is of benefit to the consumer in its totality. If scientists distilled the components of the rose flower into the chemicals that give it color, fragrance, and its form and then gave the viewer plates containing piles of those ingredients instead of the rose bloom itself, it would not be the same. Also, think of the wall of a house. A house wall contains the framework, the surface material, the interior material, and electrical outlets. If you bought a house, what if one wall was missing because the “electrical outlets” were the most “useful” part of it, so they did not bother giving you the rest of the wall, just the dangling wiring instead? That would be crazy. Well, this is how it is with healthy food and living. It is the wisdom to discern and select the “entire package” that is the epitome, the peak of goodness in total. So a Brazil nut is an example of a complete food selection and people do not need to concern themselves with extracting any further from it. Another example is how people call bananas the “perfect food,” because in total it contains so much of benefit.
Remember I mentioned how parents would take the time and sit to peel food for their kids, such as apples? Well, here is another thing I remember from those lost times. Parents would shell nuts and then show their children how to make toys out of the nut shells. When I was little the best thing one could strive for was to get a perfect walnut shell half, clear the inside out, and make of the hull a toy boat out of it. Parents would show their children how to crack the nut so that the shell would be as complete as possible (or do it for the kids) and how to put a toothpick in the center with cork and glue, making it a mast, and then preparing sails for the nut boat using tissues or paper. Kids would color and decorate the sails and the hulls themselves. This was back to when people didn’t buy plastic throw away toys, or put kids in front of the TV with videos. Parents actually showed children not only how to live but also how to learn and play. I used to make toy boats out of walnut shell halves and also tiny hazelnut halves. The maple tree out in front would shed winged seeds and I’d use them as sails too, and collect the beautiful pink seeds for decorations.
I hope that the juveniles and alien wannabes have been able to read this so far without going crazy over the use of favorite double entre words such as nuts and bananas. People would have starved to death and died out a long time ago (and maybe that would have been a good thing) if they lived on anagrams and double entendres like they do today. We want entrées to feed our children and ourselves, not double entendres. Also, kids were taught to use their imaginations and to learn crafts, such as the nut boats I describe, and not to sob into their beers thinking that they were interested in toy boats because they were “reincarnated from the Titanic.” Gosh, I wish I could speak to anyone sane and human without having to constantly include these mind freak disclaimers, but so far, obviously I can’t. I am hoping that my blog is read by people who are on their way back to sanity, though, and that I can share some of the learning and lore that the World War II generation had.
So I’m not trying to move the stock market or influence Brazil nut futures LOL. I could have written about my Zen about celery too (another double entendre food, oh no). But because I waste my time here actually trying to teach serious and real advice based on what I’m really doing and actually thinking, I thought it would be helpful to write about the Brazil nuts. I hope you find this helpful.
Food Caution:
As I've repeatedly told people, do not obsess with consuming a specific food, because anything (even water) is poisonous at worst or imbalanced at best if taken in extreme quantities. Here is a great website that contains a caution against excess consumption of Brazil nuts.
http://www.dolenutrition.com/articleDetails.aspx?RecId=158
It is exactly the presence of a needed and beneficial component, in this case selenium, that makes some people think, "if one is good then ten is better," which is a substance abuse or OCD mentality. Brazil nuts should be a part of an overall sensible balanced VARIED diet in moderate quantities of all foods. It should not be eaten "because of selenium" or avoided "because of selenium." Like the poor lady who died in the water drinking contest, people need to use common sense and not obsess. You cannot go wrong if you eat from all of the "food groups" a wide variety of specific foods with MODERATE PORTIONS.
Glimpse at my menu
For example, three days ago I had a generous handful of pistachios as my daily nut snack. Two days ago I had about eight Brazil nuts. Today I am eating my Fruit Loops cereal (yeah, I know) with a handful of walnuts added. This way I automatically have the "best of all worlds" by having a wide range of beneficial nuts, but not settling into overdoing one variety or the other and possibly causing an imbalance, allergy or dangerous accumulation of one nutrient or the other.
Developed countries are blessed with the ability to select among a wide variety of healthy foods every day. Poor folk have to eat the same food that they grow or can afford day after day, and therefore are vulnerable to repeat exposures to anything that might not be of constant benefit, to say nothing of growing in polluted areas.
The body is the soul's temple, and so people should be more mindful of what they eat. Mothers used to teach their children, "You are what you eat," which in more cynical times became the punchline of the obligatory jokes. But the basic message is that food is what you refresh and nourish your body with every day and therefore is worth much more consideration than it receives today, but not in the "magic thinking" that has permeated so much un-scientific and un-home making thinking that is rampant today. For example, I am all for identifying harmful human produced food additives, such as transfats, and making large scale decisions based on that. However, where people today get in trouble is that they try to do the same thing about natural foods (for example, warring against meat), which has no true scientific basis and veers very close to "magical thinking."
When I sold my house a few years ago the man who bought it is delightful. I liked him very much and was glad to sell the house to him and his son so that they could afford it, even though I lost money on the property. I joined his family that year for the holidays. But one odd thing stuck in my mind, which is not all that uncommon. He told me that he was moving toward a vegetarian diet. And his evidence for it's benefits? Um, not to be indelicate, but he noticed a nicer, um, odor of his output than when he ate meat. Um, if you study biology you will learn that the anal port is intended to expel the materials that the body cannot use from the food. The scent of the expelled matter is not an endorsement of the food that you have or have not consumed. But this is the type of thinking that infests the media and comes from poor science and home making formation. The body basically divides each piece of food into the "part it can use" and the "part it cannot use." Even the part it cannot use performs a valuable role, for example, fiber scours the lining of the intestines while it is "on its way out" and therefore is a natural cleanser and limits the growth of items such as polyps.
If you study biology and evolution you will remember one fundamental thing. Human life, as all life, started out as single cell organisms. One of the first huge steps of sophisticated life occurred over a billion years ago when single cell life organisms developed an anal port. If you look at microscopic photos of life at that time (as my science class did in college), you observe your basic blob of early life, a single cell, but one end has a dot or a gap in the cell wall that "takes in" the nutrition that it needs to survive and the other end has a dot or gap in the cell wall that "flushes out" the unusable part of the nutrition. It's simply a matter of what goes in, in total, is divided into the part the organism can use to survive and to grow, while the part that it cannot use is pushed out of an opening for that purpose. That was a HUGE development of life when it occurred. Goodness, the knowledge that people have at their fingertips and yet ignore or distort into magical thinking is so very sad and destructive.
When I was growing up, if you went to the store to buy nuts to eat, they virtually all came with their shells on. People bought the traditional bag mix of almonds, hazel nuts, walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts and then when they wanted a handful of nuts to eat as a snack, they sat there with a bowl with a nut cracker and picks. Shelled nuts such as cashews and macadamias were an exotic treat, and not found on every shelf like they are today. The Brazil nuts came from Brazil, and the almonds and hazel nuts were grown in the USA. I have this lesson in mind because last week I bought a bag of Brazil nuts at Wal-Mart for $3.69 and while I’ve been eating them I realize that knowledge I take for granted is no longer common. Here’s how I think when I buy them.
Nuts are one of THE most beneficial foods for humans. There is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t have nuts, often in the form of a handful of walnuts added to my cereal or oatmeal. If I don’t have cereal that day I will usually have a serving of nuts as they are. Sometimes I eat the walnuts but for variety I try to have other types in my pantry. Hence I bought the Brazil nuts. Now, nuts are healthy as they are raw. If they are cooked in oil they lose some nutrition but more important you gain all the calories and the possibly harmful ingredients of the oil, depending on the type and amount of oil used. So it is best to eat raw nuts but do not skip having nuts because of the oil used on some roasted nuts, just shop and consume wisely in that regard. So one reason I chose Brazil nuts for the pantry last week is that they are obviously raw and uncooked, being still in their shell.
Here is the second advantage of shells. People know that pesticides are a concern. Pesticides are a necessary tool, like it or not, for much of the world and many of the world’s crops. People alive today have forgotten what it is like to grow the food you depend on day to day (or starve otherwise) without pesticides. Billions of people are alive today because of pesticides. However, like all things with humans, the pendulum has swung too wildly in both directions. People demonize all pesticides (without actually rolling up their sleeves and picking worms off of crops of the poor people themselves) so that extreme is wrong, but of course the planet has become foolishly pesticide saturated, and that is the wrong extreme too. In the 1950’s-1960’s people started gaining wisdom on this problem by laying new insight about the worries of pesticides ON TOP OF the traditional wisdom about how to grow crops. Today there are VERY few people who have both insights, and that is a real worry. Both sides have been forced to polarize. Pesticide salespeople cannot be moderate because if they admit a problem the other side leaps on them as that argument being in support of no pesticides at all. And the anti pesticide people are so fearful and indignant about pesticide side effects that they lose their heads over the pesticides in total, not remembering that people still need to be fed with reliable food sources. When humans live all year off of the summer’s crops, a wave of pests can destroy in a matter of days a year’s worth of survival food for thousands of people. This is why people seem to “pour on” the pesticides “before they need to.” Once pests arrive the crop is ruined and destroyed and people starved. I remember those days very well, as does anyone of the World War II generation. So while I buy (expensive) organic when I can, I also am pragmatic that pesticides are going to be with humanity for a long, long time. So here is the nut lesson. When people use pesticides on vegetables, fruit and nuts, they usually use it early in the growth of the plant so the pesticide is not actually ON the food you are consuming. It was usually used on the young blooms or shoots. However, people know to wash all their foods before eating. Here is something, though, that environmentalists who were well rooted knew. If your food absorbed pesticides, the pesticides themselves tend to be concentrated in the skin, peel, rind or shell. So if you eat an apple that has been exposed to pesticides, peeling it makes you very safe from the effects, because if any pesticide residue was absorbed into the fruit, it tends to be concentrated in the peel, not in the interior. This is why I’ve made the decision to peel fruits that I have concern about. Now, there is a dilemma because the peel often contains the best nutrition, such as apples and potatoes. Yeah, think about it potato lovers, those great stuffed potatoes and potato skins. I’m not accusing (in fact, potatoes are quite safe regarding pesticides, unless things have changed since I last looked at it). I’m sharing with you the knowledge we all obtained in that generation, which is that pesticides, when present, tend to concentrate in the outer surface, being a rind, skin, peel or shell, and if removed you have a safe bet even if you don’t know the origins and treatment of the food regarding pesticides. So this is a long way of explaining that when I shell the Brazil nuts myself, I know that I am removing the surface that has been collecting “whatever” handling contaminants it received and I’m left with a relatively pure interior food. It’s not the same guarantee as getting pre-shelled nuts, since obviously you don’t know what standards of washing and so forth are used in the shelling and the mixing of the shelled with the pre-shelled.
So if you were reading my mind you’d not pick this up because it’s like brushing your teeth or washing your hands; you don’t think, “Now I pick up the toothbrush. Now I uncap the toothpaste. Wow I bought this toothpaste because it has this ingredient at that price. Now I use the tap water. I know the tap water has been purified to this or that degree.” You make lifestyle habits and choices based on your upbringing and your life education, and then you automatically and reflexively make wise choices without thinking about it. So when I buy a bag of unshelled nuts, part of it is the reflex of knowing that I am in control of the sanitation as best as I can because I will be removing the shells myself.
I also automatically think in terms of thrift, but not in the way that some today may think of it. I still think in terms of food benefit and cost per serving. I mentioned that the bag of Brazil nuts cost $3.69. The label indicates that there are about six servings of ten nuts each. Ten nuts is a filling and generous serving and gives you 200 calories. So if you get 6 servings out of a bag that means that healthy and clean Brazil nuts cost 62 cents a serving! That is not expensive at all. It’s less than a candy bar, and while it is generous in calories, it has fewer calories than a candy bar or chips snack AND the calories are all beneficial and helpful. Nuts, especially Brazil nuts, have a high percentage of fat, but this is the good fat that people need to have a healthy day. Fat provides slow burning and lasting nutrition that is for the long haul during the day, rather than a sugary carbohydrate boost. Now I eat lots of carbohydrates and sugars, so I’m not arguing against them. I’m just explaining how to get the balance right, instead of always glorifying or demonizing food groups and ingredients. It is wise to have one snack or meal serving that has nuts as its basis.
Brazil nuts are of course one of the fundamental ways out of poverty for their growers. It was one of the obvious way that young “environmentalists” in this country promoted being consumers of foods that helped poor agriculturalists around the world, and in this case Brazil. This was the fundamental thinking before the “fair trade” movement. Sometimes you need to go back and think about where your food comes from in the first place, and who you are supporting by virtue of your purchase, before you worry about the price. The price is important but this generation sees “fair trade” and they figure, wow, this is a good thing. But they don’t know if the crop itself is sustaining the local economy or individual farmers, just because the price is fair. Maybe “fair trade” locks them into growing a certain crop rather than something else. You just don’t know unless you take a look and have some education in these matters. Anyway, with Brazil nuts you KNOW that this is indigenous crop that benefits the Brazilian farmer and the grassroots economy.
So I grew up in a generation of kids that could wield nut crackers and thus put a little sweat equity in getting their own snack. Kids eat less if they are cracking each nut one at a time. They are also getting a little exercise, and I’m not being silly here. Well, maybe a little silly, but not too much. I laugh when yuppies do arm curls with expensive exercise gear but they would cry that they are deprived if they actually had to sit down with a basket and crack nuts for their snack, or shell the peas. People used to stay fit because they lived against a background of physical activity. Moms and dad used to sit with the kids and peel apples and cut them into slices for their kids. Kids would sit down and work their way through a bowl of nuts, doing the work of cracking the nuts open themselves. This is funny: recent health studies show that “fidgeting” is good because it burns off excess calories. Well, hello! With so much “convenience foods,” people are less and less active, and they fidget as they sit glued to their desk chairs, airplane seats, and couches in front of the computer or widescreen. Parents would actually stand in the kitchen for a half an hour or so preparing food, rather than drop it into a microwave and then flopping down in a chair again. So one of the “automatic” thoughts that I have when I buy something like Brazil nuts is satisfaction, not frustration, in the buying of a food that actually requires some activity to prepare. I never view peeling vegetables and so forth as a “waste of time” or a punishment. I view it as being a good cook who has good food quality and preparation control, and is staying active doing so. True it doesn’t give me “abs of steel,” but that sure ought to not be the point of having a bipolar existence of extreme activity with extreme inactivity.
Here’s another point about why it is important to eat nuts, and actually, this applies to all foods, including meat, vegetable, fruits, grains and beverages. A given food cannot be dissected down to its “healthy” and “unhealthy” components. I mean, yes, you do need to observe and discern based on the information on the label (protein, carbohydrates, fat, etc and vitamin/mineral composition). But it is the entire content of the food that is of benefit to humans, with many micro level ingredients that people are not even aware of nor realize their benefits. Yes, people have started to identify them, like antioxidants and riboflavin and so forth, but the usual result is to glom onto a “miracle ingredient” or “food” and hype the entire food based on that ingredient. Or worse, people try to extract the ingredient and think a pill contains the same benefit. Here’s an analogy of the healthy way to think. The food is the “piece de resistance,” the epitome of the animal or plant’s life force production. It is maximized to have beneficial ingredients, and has expelled all that is not good (obviously I’m talking about food fit for humans, not poisonous or tainted foods). As a rose is the culmination of the plant’s “beauty production,” so is the food the culmination of the plant’s “nutrition production.” All of the food is of benefit to the consumer in its totality. If scientists distilled the components of the rose flower into the chemicals that give it color, fragrance, and its form and then gave the viewer plates containing piles of those ingredients instead of the rose bloom itself, it would not be the same. Also, think of the wall of a house. A house wall contains the framework, the surface material, the interior material, and electrical outlets. If you bought a house, what if one wall was missing because the “electrical outlets” were the most “useful” part of it, so they did not bother giving you the rest of the wall, just the dangling wiring instead? That would be crazy. Well, this is how it is with healthy food and living. It is the wisdom to discern and select the “entire package” that is the epitome, the peak of goodness in total. So a Brazil nut is an example of a complete food selection and people do not need to concern themselves with extracting any further from it. Another example is how people call bananas the “perfect food,” because in total it contains so much of benefit.
Remember I mentioned how parents would take the time and sit to peel food for their kids, such as apples? Well, here is another thing I remember from those lost times. Parents would shell nuts and then show their children how to make toys out of the nut shells. When I was little the best thing one could strive for was to get a perfect walnut shell half, clear the inside out, and make of the hull a toy boat out of it. Parents would show their children how to crack the nut so that the shell would be as complete as possible (or do it for the kids) and how to put a toothpick in the center with cork and glue, making it a mast, and then preparing sails for the nut boat using tissues or paper. Kids would color and decorate the sails and the hulls themselves. This was back to when people didn’t buy plastic throw away toys, or put kids in front of the TV with videos. Parents actually showed children not only how to live but also how to learn and play. I used to make toy boats out of walnut shell halves and also tiny hazelnut halves. The maple tree out in front would shed winged seeds and I’d use them as sails too, and collect the beautiful pink seeds for decorations.
I hope that the juveniles and alien wannabes have been able to read this so far without going crazy over the use of favorite double entre words such as nuts and bananas. People would have starved to death and died out a long time ago (and maybe that would have been a good thing) if they lived on anagrams and double entendres like they do today. We want entrées to feed our children and ourselves, not double entendres. Also, kids were taught to use their imaginations and to learn crafts, such as the nut boats I describe, and not to sob into their beers thinking that they were interested in toy boats because they were “reincarnated from the Titanic.” Gosh, I wish I could speak to anyone sane and human without having to constantly include these mind freak disclaimers, but so far, obviously I can’t. I am hoping that my blog is read by people who are on their way back to sanity, though, and that I can share some of the learning and lore that the World War II generation had.
So I’m not trying to move the stock market or influence Brazil nut futures LOL. I could have written about my Zen about celery too (another double entendre food, oh no). But because I waste my time here actually trying to teach serious and real advice based on what I’m really doing and actually thinking, I thought it would be helpful to write about the Brazil nuts. I hope you find this helpful.
Food Caution:
As I've repeatedly told people, do not obsess with consuming a specific food, because anything (even water) is poisonous at worst or imbalanced at best if taken in extreme quantities. Here is a great website that contains a caution against excess consumption of Brazil nuts.
http://www.dolenutrition.com/articleDetails.aspx?RecId=158
It is exactly the presence of a needed and beneficial component, in this case selenium, that makes some people think, "if one is good then ten is better," which is a substance abuse or OCD mentality. Brazil nuts should be a part of an overall sensible balanced VARIED diet in moderate quantities of all foods. It should not be eaten "because of selenium" or avoided "because of selenium." Like the poor lady who died in the water drinking contest, people need to use common sense and not obsess. You cannot go wrong if you eat from all of the "food groups" a wide variety of specific foods with MODERATE PORTIONS.
Glimpse at my menu
For example, three days ago I had a generous handful of pistachios as my daily nut snack. Two days ago I had about eight Brazil nuts. Today I am eating my Fruit Loops cereal (yeah, I know) with a handful of walnuts added. This way I automatically have the "best of all worlds" by having a wide range of beneficial nuts, but not settling into overdoing one variety or the other and possibly causing an imbalance, allergy or dangerous accumulation of one nutrient or the other.
Developed countries are blessed with the ability to select among a wide variety of healthy foods every day. Poor folk have to eat the same food that they grow or can afford day after day, and therefore are vulnerable to repeat exposures to anything that might not be of constant benefit, to say nothing of growing in polluted areas.
The body is the soul's temple, and so people should be more mindful of what they eat. Mothers used to teach their children, "You are what you eat," which in more cynical times became the punchline of the obligatory jokes. But the basic message is that food is what you refresh and nourish your body with every day and therefore is worth much more consideration than it receives today, but not in the "magic thinking" that has permeated so much un-scientific and un-home making thinking that is rampant today. For example, I am all for identifying harmful human produced food additives, such as transfats, and making large scale decisions based on that. However, where people today get in trouble is that they try to do the same thing about natural foods (for example, warring against meat), which has no true scientific basis and veers very close to "magical thinking."
When I sold my house a few years ago the man who bought it is delightful. I liked him very much and was glad to sell the house to him and his son so that they could afford it, even though I lost money on the property. I joined his family that year for the holidays. But one odd thing stuck in my mind, which is not all that uncommon. He told me that he was moving toward a vegetarian diet. And his evidence for it's benefits? Um, not to be indelicate, but he noticed a nicer, um, odor of his output than when he ate meat. Um, if you study biology you will learn that the anal port is intended to expel the materials that the body cannot use from the food. The scent of the expelled matter is not an endorsement of the food that you have or have not consumed. But this is the type of thinking that infests the media and comes from poor science and home making formation. The body basically divides each piece of food into the "part it can use" and the "part it cannot use." Even the part it cannot use performs a valuable role, for example, fiber scours the lining of the intestines while it is "on its way out" and therefore is a natural cleanser and limits the growth of items such as polyps.
If you study biology and evolution you will remember one fundamental thing. Human life, as all life, started out as single cell organisms. One of the first huge steps of sophisticated life occurred over a billion years ago when single cell life organisms developed an anal port. If you look at microscopic photos of life at that time (as my science class did in college), you observe your basic blob of early life, a single cell, but one end has a dot or a gap in the cell wall that "takes in" the nutrition that it needs to survive and the other end has a dot or gap in the cell wall that "flushes out" the unusable part of the nutrition. It's simply a matter of what goes in, in total, is divided into the part the organism can use to survive and to grow, while the part that it cannot use is pushed out of an opening for that purpose. That was a HUGE development of life when it occurred. Goodness, the knowledge that people have at their fingertips and yet ignore or distort into magical thinking is so very sad and destructive.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Food Talk: Homemade fish sandwich recipe
Here's what I'm having tonight and it's a fun and healthy food for individuals or families.
Select sandwich size fish fillets. Defrost if frozen by running under warm water a few minutes.
(I used 1 small cod fillet from the bag of frozen fillets I bought at Walmart).
Place the fillet in a microwavable glass pan. Include enough fluid (water, milk or fish fluid) to have the bottom of the glass pan coated. Sprinkle on the top of the fish either paprika (for the taste) or cinnamon (for the taste and its a traditional health wise spice). Microwave for about a minute and a half until it's cooked through (flakes with fork).
(I used the fluid from the inside of the cod fillet's plastic bag and I used cinnamon).
Toast two regular slices of bread. Put on them a spread of your choice, such as butter, mayonaise, or mustard. Steer away from cocktail or tartar sauce because they overpower the taste of the fish and thus it's not very zen, since you're only tasting the very strong tangy sauce and not the individuality of the fish. Also it's a way to avoid yet another processed food additive.
(I used butter because I love the taste of cod and wanted subtle. Otherwise I would have used the wonderful Zatarain's Creole Mustard).
Place the filet on one toast and salt and pepper to taste. Put the other slice of toast on top and cut the completed sandwich in half. Serve.
(Here's a tip if your fish is very flaky. Cut the toast into halves before you put the fish on it. That's what I do so I don't mash the whole sandwich when cutting it into halves. I cut the toast into the sizes I want to serve, halves for example, apply the spread, then cut the fish in the pan and put matching sized pieces on each part of toast).
Additional suggestion: If you really like the taste of the fish itself, halve the use of bread by making open faced sandwiches. So you serve the fish on the bottom slice of bread and don't use a topper slice of bread. This allows you to taste the fish itself more. But if you are cooking for your kids I'd give them a good size of fish and both slices of bread per sandwich.
If you are trying to get your kids to sit down at table with you here's a suggestion. Bring the toast and the pan of cooked fish fillets to the table and let them choose from among a variety of spreads that you have collected. If you have interesting variety of mustards, barbecue sauces, and spreads often kids will enjoy even "healthy" fish sandwiches when they customize them to their own taste, and it's something to talk about during dinner. Even if you have to resort to a cheese sauce option for the really fast food and picky eater, that's fine because the sauce can be a little fattening in the service of getting them to eat the healthy fish and good nutrition bread! Just think how great it could be if you get your kids to eat one fish sandwich a week and they enjoy it with their own spread.
Remember, by microwaving fish cooks up VERY fast (even a thick fish takes only about 3-4 minutes) and you are not frying! You are avoiding all that grease and fat. Instead of "breaded" fillets with fat, grease, food additives and un-nutritious bread crumbs you are cooking the fish with no fat or additives and then putting it on clean and wholesome slices of bread of your choice.
Select sandwich size fish fillets. Defrost if frozen by running under warm water a few minutes.
(I used 1 small cod fillet from the bag of frozen fillets I bought at Walmart).
Place the fillet in a microwavable glass pan. Include enough fluid (water, milk or fish fluid) to have the bottom of the glass pan coated. Sprinkle on the top of the fish either paprika (for the taste) or cinnamon (for the taste and its a traditional health wise spice). Microwave for about a minute and a half until it's cooked through (flakes with fork).
(I used the fluid from the inside of the cod fillet's plastic bag and I used cinnamon).
Toast two regular slices of bread. Put on them a spread of your choice, such as butter, mayonaise, or mustard. Steer away from cocktail or tartar sauce because they overpower the taste of the fish and thus it's not very zen, since you're only tasting the very strong tangy sauce and not the individuality of the fish. Also it's a way to avoid yet another processed food additive.
(I used butter because I love the taste of cod and wanted subtle. Otherwise I would have used the wonderful Zatarain's Creole Mustard).
Place the filet on one toast and salt and pepper to taste. Put the other slice of toast on top and cut the completed sandwich in half. Serve.
(Here's a tip if your fish is very flaky. Cut the toast into halves before you put the fish on it. That's what I do so I don't mash the whole sandwich when cutting it into halves. I cut the toast into the sizes I want to serve, halves for example, apply the spread, then cut the fish in the pan and put matching sized pieces on each part of toast).
Additional suggestion: If you really like the taste of the fish itself, halve the use of bread by making open faced sandwiches. So you serve the fish on the bottom slice of bread and don't use a topper slice of bread. This allows you to taste the fish itself more. But if you are cooking for your kids I'd give them a good size of fish and both slices of bread per sandwich.
If you are trying to get your kids to sit down at table with you here's a suggestion. Bring the toast and the pan of cooked fish fillets to the table and let them choose from among a variety of spreads that you have collected. If you have interesting variety of mustards, barbecue sauces, and spreads often kids will enjoy even "healthy" fish sandwiches when they customize them to their own taste, and it's something to talk about during dinner. Even if you have to resort to a cheese sauce option for the really fast food and picky eater, that's fine because the sauce can be a little fattening in the service of getting them to eat the healthy fish and good nutrition bread! Just think how great it could be if you get your kids to eat one fish sandwich a week and they enjoy it with their own spread.
Remember, by microwaving fish cooks up VERY fast (even a thick fish takes only about 3-4 minutes) and you are not frying! You are avoiding all that grease and fat. Instead of "breaded" fillets with fat, grease, food additives and un-nutritious bread crumbs you are cooking the fish with no fat or additives and then putting it on clean and wholesome slices of bread of your choice.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Food talk
I've been buying ingredients to bake bread. I'm going to make what is called a sweet bread or a nut bread, which is a bread that is not made with yeast and does not rise. So while at Winn-Dixie earlier today to buy fresh organic eggs what do they announce? That a new batch of hot French and Italian loaves of bread have just come out of the oven. Mmmm. So I bought the eggs but I also bought a loaf of Italian. I ate a huge piece of it while it was hot as soon as I got the groceries into the car!
And my dinner tonight is four slices of the bread, two with butter, and two with olive oil, and a sliced tomato in olive oil, with pepper and salt. Bread is called the staff of life for a reason. It is about the healthiest day to day thing that you can eat. People were healthier and had less diabetes and so forth when they had home made full grain bread (though Wonder bread remains a favorite of mine) and most importantly, they had it in sandwiches, or like me, Italian style, drizzled with olive oil (another wonder food of health) and with glasses of milk. Men drank milk back in the World War II generation and rarely soft drinks. Coffee or tea helped with waking up. But men and women often ordered a glass of milk with their lunch or dinner. Have you ever wondered why dieters are so against bread? Modern dieters are against bread because they recognize that it has a lot of nutrition. Dieting has become so insanely unbalanced. Rather than having healthy moderation in all the way past generations lived, now there are phoney food wars with people looking for magic weight loss remedies and as a result turn away from the healthiest and most stable of foods, like bread. If you truly have Celiac or some other syndrome that is one thing, But if you are not allergic or sensitive to wheat you ought to eat good healthy bread at least once a day and twice is even better. I don't get fancy like having dinner rolls (especially just cooking for myself) but often I have a slice of toast as a "side dish" for my main meal!
Bread also stabilizes the digestive system. So many people with heartburn and bathroom issues don't realize that bread helps to stabilize all of those problems. (Again this applies to the vast majority of people who are not allergic). It takes an effort to reintroduce what used to be the staple of our food now that pressures of fast food and health nut faddish style of eating take people away from classic bread and toast. Grabbing a muffin instead of toast could result in your consuming an extra, yes, not a typo, 500 calories! A slice of bread is about 100 calories before adding butter, peanut butter, or jam. A muffin ranges from 400-700 calories and has unhealthy oils and other additives. When I commuted if I had to "grab a muffin on the way to work" I would always go for a corn muffin, figuring it was tasty but also still marginally healthier. But when I have time I always make toast. So try to get in the habit of having more toast of a good healthy bread and less of pre processed buns, muffin and so forth that are packed with calories and often chemicals and are less nutritious. Also on light nights when you want a simple dinner, you can't do better than what I just did, such as having fresh baked Italian bread with olive oil and a fresh vegetable like a tomato on the side.
I just remembered something about how we ate in the 1950's that will help with this understanding. We never bought hamburger or hot dog buns, we always used slices of bread! So when we made hamburgers at home they were served on toast, and when we made hot dogs we wrapped a slice of bread around it as the "bun." First of all it was expensive and wasteful to buy buns so being poor we'd never think of doing it. But secondly they ("store bought buns" as we called them) are empty bread products, valued more for their shape than their bread content. So here is another example to help you see how toast worked its way into many meals back in those days. In the 1960's we started making "minute steaks," which are those thin sliced cuts of beef that you can fry and you guessed it right, we served each slice on a piece of buttered toast. It was a cheaper and tougher cut of meat so by putting it on buttered toast it became really tasty and easy to digest and very healthy, as the only fat was the healthy and good small bit of dairy butter. I still remember as a kid when we'd have hot dogs and we'd wrap the bread around the dog and it was great tasting, unlike the "cardboard of store bought."
And my dinner tonight is four slices of the bread, two with butter, and two with olive oil, and a sliced tomato in olive oil, with pepper and salt. Bread is called the staff of life for a reason. It is about the healthiest day to day thing that you can eat. People were healthier and had less diabetes and so forth when they had home made full grain bread (though Wonder bread remains a favorite of mine) and most importantly, they had it in sandwiches, or like me, Italian style, drizzled with olive oil (another wonder food of health) and with glasses of milk. Men drank milk back in the World War II generation and rarely soft drinks. Coffee or tea helped with waking up. But men and women often ordered a glass of milk with their lunch or dinner. Have you ever wondered why dieters are so against bread? Modern dieters are against bread because they recognize that it has a lot of nutrition. Dieting has become so insanely unbalanced. Rather than having healthy moderation in all the way past generations lived, now there are phoney food wars with people looking for magic weight loss remedies and as a result turn away from the healthiest and most stable of foods, like bread. If you truly have Celiac or some other syndrome that is one thing, But if you are not allergic or sensitive to wheat you ought to eat good healthy bread at least once a day and twice is even better. I don't get fancy like having dinner rolls (especially just cooking for myself) but often I have a slice of toast as a "side dish" for my main meal!
Bread also stabilizes the digestive system. So many people with heartburn and bathroom issues don't realize that bread helps to stabilize all of those problems. (Again this applies to the vast majority of people who are not allergic). It takes an effort to reintroduce what used to be the staple of our food now that pressures of fast food and health nut faddish style of eating take people away from classic bread and toast. Grabbing a muffin instead of toast could result in your consuming an extra, yes, not a typo, 500 calories! A slice of bread is about 100 calories before adding butter, peanut butter, or jam. A muffin ranges from 400-700 calories and has unhealthy oils and other additives. When I commuted if I had to "grab a muffin on the way to work" I would always go for a corn muffin, figuring it was tasty but also still marginally healthier. But when I have time I always make toast. So try to get in the habit of having more toast of a good healthy bread and less of pre processed buns, muffin and so forth that are packed with calories and often chemicals and are less nutritious. Also on light nights when you want a simple dinner, you can't do better than what I just did, such as having fresh baked Italian bread with olive oil and a fresh vegetable like a tomato on the side.
I just remembered something about how we ate in the 1950's that will help with this understanding. We never bought hamburger or hot dog buns, we always used slices of bread! So when we made hamburgers at home they were served on toast, and when we made hot dogs we wrapped a slice of bread around it as the "bun." First of all it was expensive and wasteful to buy buns so being poor we'd never think of doing it. But secondly they ("store bought buns" as we called them) are empty bread products, valued more for their shape than their bread content. So here is another example to help you see how toast worked its way into many meals back in those days. In the 1960's we started making "minute steaks," which are those thin sliced cuts of beef that you can fry and you guessed it right, we served each slice on a piece of buttered toast. It was a cheaper and tougher cut of meat so by putting it on buttered toast it became really tasty and easy to digest and very healthy, as the only fat was the healthy and good small bit of dairy butter. I still remember as a kid when we'd have hot dogs and we'd wrap the bread around the dog and it was great tasting, unlike the "cardboard of store bought."
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