Healthy Living Guide… Health Food Recipes…

There is no need to follow an exact recipe to make a flavoursome chicken stock. You may find it
convenient to reduce the stock to a smaller volume before storing it in the fridge or freezer. Remember, before freezing, to remove the fat from the surface of cold stock.
Here are two ways to make 6 cups of chicken stock:
•    Put aside 6 cups of the strained flavoursome broth that has served to simmer a chicken with vegetables (carrots, celery, onion, leek etc.) This is simple and constitutes good planning.
•    Place about 800 g chicken bones (carcasses, necks, wings, or inexpensive chicken pieces) in a saucepan. Cover with 8 cups cold water. Add 1 sliced carrot, 1 sliced onion, 1 sliced stick of celery or a piece of leek, a small pinch of salt (this helps to extract the flavour from the bones), a couple of crushed black peppercorns and 1 clove. The addition of a bouquet garm (a few sprigs of parsley, half a bay leaf and a small sprig of thyme tied together with kitchen string) gives a delicate, aromatic flavour to your stock. Bring it to the boil, simmer for 1 hour, adding a little water if necessary during cooking. Skim the surface and strain.

Health Guide Recipes

The artichoke is a favorite spring vegetable in Mediterranean countries is becoming popular in many countries. Eating this delicate vegetable calls for a little patience as the leaves are savored one by one. However, the reward is certainly worth the effort.

Select unblemished, firm artichokes and preferably those with a stem as they will be fresher.

Preparation: Wash and trim loose outer leaves around base and rub base with lemon juice to help retain color. Steam or cook in boiling water for about 30 mins, or until you can easily detach the leaves.

Eating artichokes: Detach the leaves and carefully dip each one in a sauce or dressing before nibbling off the thin coating leaves have been removed you will notice a little soft hairy part, which is to be discarded. Below this is the heart — the best part of the artichoke.

Suggested Seasoning: Lemon juice and a dot of butter or margarine, freshly ground black pepper.

Health Guide Recipes

Refined sugar is a major cause of dental decay, and foods containing sugar often also contain fat. Examples of such foods are biscuits, chocolate, pastries, desserts and cakes.

Refined sugar contains no nutrients other than carbohydrate.

Some practical steps:

• Explain other members of the family, in particular children, that overeating of sugary foods affects the rest of our diet. Provide your family with drinks that have no added sugar.

• If you normally take sugar in tea or coffee, gradually reduce its quantity. Follow the recommendations for weekly fat consumption.
• Cutting down on sugar in our diet will lead to a reduction in fat consumption as well. (Butter and sugar, and cream and sugar, form the basis of many cakes and desserts.)  Avoid or limit foods high in sugar, such as ice-cream, and jam, and carefully read the labels on foods you suspect of containing sugar. “No added sugar” applies only to sucrose. Other calorie-containing sweeteners such as glucose or fructose are permissible additives.

Sugarless sweet bakes apples recipe

Weight-reducer’s icing recipe

Poor or “fluff” foods clog up the sparkling, pure rivers of the blood, just as pollution will clog up any pond or lake. Toxic-bearing foods include: artificial sweets, white breads, pastries, crackers, macaroni, malted milks, ice cream sodas. As  excess if sweets will deplete the vitamin B-complex store, so that sugars burns incompletely to pyruvic aics, rather than to carbon dioxide and water. Pyruvic acid is a form of debris and mucuslike sludge that is related to lactic acid in that it creates fatigue; it tends to choke up your free-flowing bloodstream and pollute your internal health. These should be eliminated.

Healthy Recipes, Healthy Guide

Progressively cut down on salt in your cooking and replace it with other seasonings. To start with, you may use seasonings that your family already knows and likes. Pinch of curry powder is especially effective in soups, vegetable dishes, casseroles and salad dressings. Mustard powder and sweet paprika go well with roasts, while a little red wine, port, madeira, brandy or whisky complements gravies nicely. Fish is enhanced by the use of lemon, ginger, sherry, vinegar or white wine, and pepper can be used to season most ingredients and dishes. Of course, chopped fresh herbs, especially parsley, are wonderful. For example, you can use thyme and vegetables, fish and meat.

Read the labels on all packaged food, including bottled sauces. Select those marked LOW SALT or NO ADDED SALT and avoid using salted products. Sodium-containing compounds add to the saltiness of food. Limit your intake of salt-cured and pickled foods, salted meats and smoked foods, which both contain sodium, and monosodium glutamate.

And avoid overcooking of food, especially in a liquid, as this results in a loss of natural salts and prompts further seasoning. Similarly, avoid prickling meat and fish, and slice them at the last moment to retain the maximum flavor. Keep all meat juices, serving them with the food or in a gravy.

Salt Free Recipe: Oven-Flavored Baked Beans

Salt Free Recipe: Fillet of Sole Bonne Femme

Family members who do not yet understand fully the dangers of using too much salt may not at first be very cooperative. Many of us season our food out of habit or because we addicted, little realising that we could easily do without it.

It is a mistake to add  salt to children’s food. Young children do not care for salt at all unless, of course, they have been unnecessarily introduced to it. Even our body eats and loves almost every food that is cooked simply and without salt. It is good to keep in mind that the bad habits we establish in our children’s diets may over the years contribute to the development of disease in later life. By acting responsibly from the beginning we can point our children in the right direction. They will undoubtedly be grateful to it.

To some extent the family cook can help all members of the family to cut down on salt consumption by seasoning the food with other condiments and by using cooking techniques that retain as much of the natural flavor of food as possible.

Healthy Diet and Health Guide

I love letting my girls holding butter knives, casseroles, and what not for preparing food. From as small as 3 years old, my girl will learn how to cut vegetables with butter knife. At the age of 7 years old, little JE has already know how to sliced and chopped garlic into small pieces.

They really enjoy such jobs as making sushis, pouring mayonnaise, spreading butter on the toasted bread. Children really see at all as a game without realising that they are learning to cook.

When I look back on my own children, I now understand that all the little cooking games we played at home in our kitchen provided me with knowledge ! cherish every day of my life. But most importantly, they made me  appreciate cooking as one of life’s most pleasurable tasks and one that keeps me in good health. I feel endless gratitude to my mother for having allowed me to participate in all the small kitchen jobs. For me and my family they were moments of joy, togetherness and love.

Health Guide and Healthy Recipes

Ordinarily, meat is a potent source oh highly concentrated protein. Many people are unable to properly assimilate this dynamite-source of protein and have painful digestive spasms. Their systems become overloaded with toxic wastes and residues of incompletely assimilated meat proteins. This may lead to problems of gastrointestinal distress as well as an impure bloodstream. Intestinal putrefaction is frequently caused by an overloading of such residues. To improve assimilation, meatless cookery provides a gentle form of protein that is not as highly concentrated as that found in meats but is nevertheless as beneficial when thoroughly assimilated.

Healthy Vegetarian Recipes

Fishless Tuna Recipe

JJ has always dislike the taste of zucchini. The best thing that I would do to make this as one of the food that she will take was to make sushi. Yes, you spell it right, S-U-S-H-I, the Japanese Sushi! Be it the sushi roll or california roll, I  will need to slice the zucchini into long slices and slot it in together with other vegetables such as carrot, etc. And she will be happily taking them without even spitting it out!

Water chestnut is another horrible food to her. I would chopped it into small pieces, together with other vegetables such as carrot, grated soy bean, and some corn flour, and salt — I make patties out of it. And she would not even know that I have put the water chestnut in the tasty patties. Haha!

A research team has found that using natural water offers some protection against forms of heart disease. A team of doctors reported to The Lancet, a medical journal, that in areas where there is natural water, the residents have a lower cardiovascular death rate, not to mention lower blood vessel damage. An explanation is that natural water contains large amounts of calcium and magnesium. The doctors report, “These findings would suggest of calcium and magnesium content of drinking water is of importance in relation to the concentration of these mineral elements in the tissues. ”

The researches further point out that vegetables boiled in soft water lose an appreciable amount of their calcium content to the water, while the calcium content of vegetables boiled in natural or hard (untreated) water may be conserved or even increased. In addition, it has been recorded that blood cholesterol levels may be lowered by increasing calcium intake.

Great-tasting Chicken Gumbo Soup Recipe

Leek and Potato Soup Recipe