Magdalen

Kitchen Survival Recipe Guide

Have you ever open a cookbook and see a recipe title or photo that tempts your taste buds? For those who don’t know what this experience is like, I can’t wait to get your views – it’s one of the most awesome feeling ever.

Although it’s been a while since we put thoughts down for our regular readers, today, I decided that enough is enough and simply get straight to the point of introducing you to the wonderful concept of Kitchen Survival Guide.

Most people are very imaginative without trying and if you are tempted by the thought of delicious recipes, then this includes you too. Let’s deep dive into the aforementioned cookbook recipe title / photo scenario. 

Imagine for a moment that you start to read the recipe, realise that the preparation is more difficult than you first thought, and put the book back on the shelf.

Sound Familiar? Well here’s a simple guide to help get you started:

1. Abbreviations for Measuring

• Tsp. = teaspoon
• Tbsp. = tablespoon, which equals 3 teaspoons
• C = cup.

Tip: Get a set of measuring spoons. The set will usually have 1/4 tsp., 1/3 tsp., 1/2 tsp., 1 teaspoon and 1 tablespoon.

Dry measure cups look like little saucepans and can be levelled off with a knife or other straight-edged tool. They come in sets like the measuring spoons. Liquid measuring cups have ounce marking lines so you can measure however many ounces you need.

Tip: Some recipes require exact measurements to turn out right so learn to measure correctly.

2. Common Ingredients

Make sure you know what you need.

Tips:- Baking powder and baking soda are not the same.

• Ask the produce manager at the market about fruits and vegetables, the meat manager about cuts of meat.
• When trying something new, buy ONE. You can always go back for more if it turns out well.

3. Common Terminology

• Bake: Dry heat in the oven. Set oven control to the desired temperature while you’re preparing the dish to be baked. Once the light that says it’s heating turns off, the oven is at the proper temperature. Then put in the food–for best results, centre it in the oven.

• Boil: Heat a liquid until it bubbles. The faster the bubbles rise and the more bubbles you get, the hotter the liquid. Some recipes call for a gentle boil–barely bubbling–or a rolling boil–just short of boiling over. Watch so it doesn’t boil over.

• Braise: A moist cooking method using a little liquid that barely bubbles on the top of the stove or in the oven. This is a good way to tenderise cheaper cuts of meat. The pan should be heavy and shallow with a tight-fitting lid to keep the liquid from boiling away. There’s a lot that can be done for flavouring in your choice of liquid and of vegetables to cook with the meat.

• Broil: Turn the oven to its highest setting. Put the food on broiler pan–a 2 piece pan that allows the grease to drain away from the food. In an electric oven on the broil setting only the upper element heats, and you can regulate how fast the food cooks by how close to the element you place it. Watch your cooking time–it’s easy to overcook food in the broiler.

• Brown: Cook until the food gets light brown. Usually used for frying or baking. Ground beef should usually be browned (use a frying pan) and have the grease drained before adding it to a casserole or meat sauce.

• Fold: A gentle mixing method that moves the spoon down to the bottom of the bowl and then sweeps up, folding what was on the bottom up over the top. This is used to mix delicate ingredients such as whipped cream or beaten egg whites. These ingredients just had air whipped into them, so you don’t want to reverse that process by mixing too vigorously.

• Simmer: Heat to just the start of a boil and keep it at that point for as long as the recipe requires. The recipe will usually call for either constant stirring or stirring at certain intervals.
  
  Now you are ready to do the shopping and prepare that recipe that you’ve always wanted to try!
  
  Happy cooking…

The shocking truth about many “healthy” diets

Attention “healthy” eaters: Your diet may not be as healthy as you think.

We tend to make certain assumptions about diet: If it’s organic (or all-natural), it’s good for us.  A meatless diet is a healthy diet.  Vegans are all skinny.

People, this isn’t necessarily so!  Junk food comes in all varieties, including organic, raw, and vegan. And simply eliminating certain foods or classes of foods from your diet does not automatically yield a balanced, nutritious diet.

Nutrition counselors are reporting an increase in the number of obese vegans, including children.  Their diets are found to be extraordinarily high in sugar, fat, refined carbohydrates and highly-processed junk food.  Ironically, many vegans don’t eat anywhere close to the recommended servings of fruits and vegetables.

Scientists also make false assumptions about “healthy” diets.  A study recently published in the International Journal of Obesity notes that “A food pattern rich in vegetables is associated with lower risk of obesity and non-communicable chronic disease in Western countries.”

However, the researchers went on to discover that in certain parts of China a diet rich in vegetables is linked to increased rates of obesity. Why?  The researchers concluded that it’s because all those healthy vegetables are stir-fried in oil, which makes these vegetable-rich diets higher in calories.

But as pointed out by numerous nutrition influencers, vegetable-rich diets weren’t all that much higher in fat or calories. They were, however, substantially higher in refined carbohydrates. Whatever the explanation, it’s clear that eating more vegetables doesn’t necessarily make your diet healthier.

Or, consider recent studies, which found that a “Prudent” diet pattern (higher in low-fat dairy, whole grains, fruit and fruit juice, legumes, and vegetables) were associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. A “Mediterranean” diet pattern (higher in liquor consumption, poultry, seafood, vegetables, salad greens, and high-fat salad dressings) was associated with a lower risk of breast cancer.

This is, of course, a very surprising result that contradicts previous findings. Investigators acknowledge that more research is needed to figure out what it was about the “Prudent” diet pattern that seems to have contributed to higher breast cancer risk in this study.  But the fact that scientists chose the value-loaded word “prudent” to describe this dietary pattern demonstrates that they are making certain assumptions about what makes diets healthy.

The real point here is: We tend to think that our healthiest habits (such as eating a lot of vegetables or not eating meat) characterize the quality of our entire diet. Some might argue that it is our worst habits (such as drenching those vegetables in oil or eating a lot of junk food) that actually characterize the quality of our diets.

Perhaps best to take the middle road: You’ve got to look at the whole picture to really see what’s going on.

Here are the key learning points for all of us:

1. Vegans, vegetarians, raw foodists, and “health-food” aficionados still need to pay attention to the number of calories, fat, and refined carbohydrates in their diets to maintain a healthy body weight.
2. Just because foods are organic, natural, vegan, or raw does not mean that they aren’t fattening or that they are nutritious.
3. Even if all the foods in your diet are healthy ones, your diet is only healthy if it is balanced. Using Nutrition Data’s diet tracking tools can help you ensure that your diet is balanced and meeting your nutritional needs.

Coffee and Diet Plan

Addicted to coffee as well as wish to drop weight? If that’s exactly what you want, then there’s no problem keeping that. Diet coffees are already offered for you to think about and they now can be found in varieties, so you may find it simple to try to find them.

The diet regimen coffees, nonetheless, are not that solid to help you drop weight by just drinking a few cups of it. Still, they must be integrated into a healthy and balanced diet plan for far better outcomes. However prior to considering them, it is best to keep in mind initially the rules kept by the diet regimen plan you are presently thinking about and also drink a cup of diet regimen coffee inning accordance with the criteria preserved by your diet strategy.

If, as an example, you are using the South Coastline diet regimen which is but one of the most preferred diet regimen programs understood to male, after that keep in mind that during the stages of South Beach, just sweetening agent as well as a low fat milk can be used in your coffee. Search for those diet regimen coffees that help maintain the level of insulin in your body. The decaffeinated coffees can do excellent wonders, so drink a cup or two of it a day.

If Atkins Diet regimen is your preference, then keep in mind that there are particular policies to adhere to when using or consuming coffee. Prior to understanding the fundamentals, it is interesting to understand first that Atkins Diet regimen is just one of the very best competitors of South Beach. This diet regimen is a reduced carb, high healthy protein diet that sets limitations to your carbohydrate intake. Being a reduced carb diet, the Atkins kept that a diet regimen coffee with sugar is not the most effective choice. So when you are utilizing Atkins, do not make use of sugar on your coffee. There are artificial sweeteners available that you can utilize to maintain your degree of carbs reduced. Seek them and delight in a good cup.

In Addition To South Coastline and also Atkins, there is also an additional popular diet plan that most individuals have actually been thinking about– the Area Diet. Essentially, the dieters following this plan are permitted to drink coffee that is caffeine-free. As you could see, this is likewise true with the South Beach diet plan. Well, you’re right! Similar To South Beach, the guidelines kept by the Zone diet plan when it involves coffee talks hold that coffees with high level of high levels of caffeine are not the very best option. To see much better outcomes, the dieters ought to switch over to caffeine-free coffee to maintain the insulin from spiking. Prevent sugar as well as make use of the sweetening agents, and even low fat milk for a far better taste.

Finally worth keeping in mind is the use of diet regimen coffee in Blood group Diet Plan. Blood Type diet regimen is the diet regimen strategy that has nothing to do with reducing your carbohydrates. Rather, it was established based upon the concept that your blood type has a lot to do with dropping weight only if you comply with certain restrictions on food consumption. In terms of coffee, it is preserved that a diet coffee can be good for those with a blood type of An and Abdominal Muscle. The type O provider, nevertheless, is not enabled to drink coffee while following this diet plan. As well as, similar to the above mentioned strategies, sugar can be used for your cup of diet coffee as they serve for all blood group.

Lose Weight by Choosing a Diet That Works

Finding that our clothes have become tight or that our weight has reached new heights is what motivates many of us to resolve to slim down. But how many of us stop to think that there may be other reasons for losing our surplus weight which are even more deserving of our attention, such as high blood pressure or high blood sugar? The right diet may be all that’s needed to prevent the heart disease and diabetes for which these are warning signs. Sadly, however, this message often fails to get through, doctor and patient alike believing that medications for life are the only answer.

What many of us fail to realize is that high blood pressure and high blood sugar are not the cause of heart disease and diabetes. They are the result of our body’s response when the damage that causes heart disease and diabetes is already being done. Taking blood pressure or blood sugar lowering medications may be better than doing nothing, but they do nothing to stop the underlying damage from continuing. If we wish to escape the long-term complications of these conditions, surely it is better to tackle the diet and lifestyle factors that are causing the damage in the first place? The pills can also have side-effects, and they are expensive. So, if we have been told our blood pressure or blood sugar is edging upwards out of the normal range, then here’s another great motivator for us to change to a healthier diet.

Lose Weight by Choosing a Diet That Works

The big question is, just what is a healthy diet? Most sources of healthy eating advice tell us it means reducing fat and sugar. And if we wish to lose weight, we should strictly limit our calorie intake by basing our diet on carbohydrate foods such as whole grain bread, rice and other cereals, pasta, baked potatoes and fruits, and keeping fats and fatty foods such as meat and cheese as low as possible.

This advice is based on the calorie theory – that to lose weight all we need to do is reduce our calories. However, modern research shows that the so-called calorie theory is a gross oversimplification of how our bodies work. Reducing calories or going ‘low fat’ may work in the short term for some people. But researchers believe that for up to 60 per cent of people a diet based on carbohydrates disrupts their blood sugar and insulin balance, causing them to store calories more easily than burn them off for energy. For those of us who are carbohydrate sensitive in this way, a ‘healthy eating’ weight loss diet based on bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, breakfast cereals and fruit juices, even if they are whole grain and high fiber, is entirely the wrong advice.

Researchers are also now beginning to understand that those of us who are constantly dieting by reducing calories risk getting caught in the ‘famine syndrome’ trap. Our metabolism is programmed to become more efficient when calorie intake is low, and our bodies can become so good at running on fewer calories that further weight loss can become almost impossible.

Unfortunately, this new scientific understanding of why many people fail to lose weight permanently on standard low-calorie diets is only just starting to filter down to mainstream medicine and the dieting public. The first sign of this is the suggestion in some sources of dietary advice that we should focus on ‘low GI’ carbohydrates (low glycemic index carbohydrates, or described another way, types of carbohydrates which are less likely to make our blood sugar shoot up rapidly and upset our blood sugar/insulin balance). This is the first acknowledgment in healthy eating advice that losing weight is not just about counting calories, and that the type of carbohydrate matters.

Eating ‘low GI’ is undoubtedly healthier than eating food densely packed with sugars, refined white flour and rice and other highly processed carbohydrates. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help the many people whose tolerance for carbohydrates is lower than the average low GI diet allows for. How do you know if you’re affected in this way? Well, have you have struggled to lose weight in the past on a standard low calorie or ‘healthy eating’ diet? If so, there is a good chance you are one of the 60 per cent of us who cannot handle a diet based on carbohydrate-rich foods, even ‘healthy’ whole grain, high fiber ones. And if a low GI diet hasn’t worked for you either, then it’s more than likely that you are very sensitive to carbohydrates, which makes a low carb diet a more effective (and healthier) diet for you.

This time, then, let’s not to go back to our old diets which have failed to work for us. Let’s give ourselves the best chance of reaching our weight loss goals and reducing our risk of heart disease and diabetes into the bargain by getting informed and making smart choices. Let’s not continue to be fooled by the diet food industry, whose products cater almost exclusively to the ‘low calorie’ theory (and very profitable it is for them, too, as we fail to lose our weight permanently and keep coming back for more).

There is another way that we can lose weight permanently.
• We can avoid the risk of heart disease and diabetes.
• It is possible to improve our long-term health.
• We can avoid the need to take prescription medications for the rest of our lives.
• Best of all, by cleaning up our own diets and providing a good example of eating healthily, we can avoid inflicting the epidemics of obesity, diabetes and heart disease that our generation has created on our children.