“What?” I hear you cry out in shock and dismay. “But I love the crunch!” “But the one I eat is organic and whole grain!” “But it’s so easy!”
Sorry. Really, I understand. But this stuff just isn’t good for you. In fact, it’s kind of, um, really bad for you. So here’s my recommendation on how much boxed breakfast cereal to have:
Not. One. Bite.
Let’s talk about how breakfast cereal is made. Continue reading
I’m thinking about the inevitability of bugs. Specifically, the ones that populate us humans. And about how people seem determined to paint all bugs with one brush – the “bad bug” brush.
I got thinking about this again after reading one of a number of articles about the possibility of a man in Massachusetts having been infected with brucellosis from drinking raw milk from a local farm. Brucellosis is a disease that has not been seen pretty much anywhere for decades, so it was exceedingly odd to have a possible case show up out of nowhere. But there were several stories about it, along with the usual reminders of “you see what can happen if you drink unpasteurized milk!” (This morning the news quietly came out that it wasn’t brucellosis after all, and that the milk was clean. I say “quietly” because there was only one brief article about it in Food Poison Journal – no mention from all the other sources.)
What I thought particularly revealing about the original article, and why it inspired this post, was its title: “I’ll Take Some Bacteria With my Raw Milk.” Continue reading
Call me plebeian, but I really love a good meatloaf. (Let’s not discuss the bad ones, nobody likes those.) Juicy, savory, full of a blend of mouthwatering flavors in which none dominate but all support one another, like a good choir, the unromantically named meatloaf is good eating!
It’s also really easy to make a good one. Continue reading
I think it’s worth taking a fresh look at the issue of mercury contaminating some of the high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) we process in this country, because it reflects on so many different threads running through our collective consciousness.
Here’s the article; it draws its content from a study by the very respectable Environmental Working Group in 2008. Their research scientists found that just about 45 percent of the foods containing HFCS that they sampled were contaminated with mercury. Continue reading
As an ardent cook and card-carrying member of the Weston A. Price Foundation (well, OK, so they don’t have cards…but if they did, I’d wear it on my sleeve), I’m sold on broth as one of the foundations of my kitchen.
Howzat, you say? You mean the stuff in cans or aseptic packages at the store? Or you mean the little cubes you dissolve in boiling water?
No, no, no. I mean the long-simmered, fragrant, nutrient-packed, digestion-enhancing kind you make yourself. From bones. Nothing adds flavor or nutrition to a meal more quickly than good broth. And it’s one of the easiest things to make, too. The internet is just lousy with broth recipes, and some of them are good, too. And I’m going to add one more, right here, right now. Continue reading
No photos this time, sorry – it was cold and we were hungry!!! I’ll take some photos tonight and do a second post.
Last night, we had:
It was just lovely, and the main course took maybe half an hour. Even the cake took only about 20 minutes to mix up, so I put it in the oven around 5 so it would have time to cool nicely after baking, and we ate dinner about 7.
Easy basic vegetable sauté Continue reading
When I was at the Weston A. Price conference last November in Dallas, I got a few of Cultures for Health‘s outstanding – and beautifully packaged – cultures. I’d gotten a couple of their sourdough cultures last year, and they were terrific. So I sprang for a buttermilk culture. I love buttermilk. I can never find it made from raw milk, so the idea of culturing my own yummy buttermilk from some good Organic Pastures or Clavarale Dairy milk – well, how could I possibly resist?
(By the way, nobody ever mentions the fact that one takes on a certain amount of responsibility when starting to play with renewable cultures. Continue reading
Like many people, I’ve been concerned about consuming mercury in fish.
So I was fascinated to run across this report from Vital Choice providing some interesting clarification on the issue (it was originally posted a little over a year ago). As a born-again media skeptic, I’ve noted all too often that when the simplest (and usually most alarming) part of a health issue is presented, a new “common sense guideline” is born. Mercury in fish would seem to be a case in point. Pregnant women are encouraged to limit their consumption of many kinds of fish; and, in particular, tuna.
Here’s the overview: Continue reading