Healthy Recipes

21. Pole bean or out-of-control bean?

By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, August 2, 2007 in The Washington Post



If pole beans are allowed to get into trouble, they will. Early on, they are like a good baby that sleeps through the night. You poke the conveniently fat seeds into the ground, then let the warmth and easy moisture of late spring nudge forth the young shoots -- big healthy-looking things grouped in tidy circles at the base of their poles or lined up in long rows.

A vine will sometimes seem to hesitate in its upward climb, poised like an acrobat a few feet above the soil as if looking for a trapeze to clutch. That's your cue to guide it gently in the direction of the pole, trellis or fence you have provided for its support. Sometimes a lethargic plant will need to be lifted bodily from the ground and taught to twine. But from then on it's go, go, go.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Aug 8, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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22. Water: Tap is the new Bottled

Just as in the world of high fashion, trends come and go in the world of food and drink. It was once seen as the height of food fashion to buy "designer water". It was what the rich and famous did and, therefore the logic goes, what the rest of us should aspire to do. Now, however, tap water is enjoying a renaissance in popularity.

Some of the most chic restaurants in the US - such as Chez Panisse in the Bay Area and Del Posto in New York - now serve only their own filtered still and sparkling tap water. This gushing new popularity comes amidst admissions on the part of many bottled water makers like Pepsi (maker of Aquafina) that their waters do not originate from some pristine mountain spring, but from a public tap as well. Below you'll find The New York Times' take on the issue which, to us, reads like a drink of cool water on a hot, summer day. Tap water, that is.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Aug 8, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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23. Making home-made mayo

Home-grown veggies cry out for home-made mayo as a dipping sauce or as a spread for those delicious tomato sandwiches many of us are enjoying this month. KGI's friend, Chef John of Foodwishes.com, is with us in the good fight against sugary, corporate mayo. Check out his video above and recipe below.

Ingredients:
2 egg yolks
1 tbl fresh lemon juice
1 tbl white wine vinegar
3/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp sugar
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup olive oil

Warning: watching John's video is likely to give you a bad case of stick blender envy if you don't have one already.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Aug 8, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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24. Italian town slims down by fattening residents' wallets

Overweight residents of an Italian town will be paid to lose weight, the mayor said on Monday.

Men living in the northwestern Italian town of Varallo will receive 50 euros ($70) for losing 4 kg (9 pounds) in a month, Mayor Gianluca Buonanno said. Women will get the same amount for shedding 3 kg (7 pounds).

If they can keep the weight off for 5 months, they will get another 200 euros ($280), he told Reuters.

"Lots of people are saying, 'I really need to lose some weight but it's really tough.' So I thought, why don't we go on a group diet?" said Buonanno, who said he was about 6 kg (13 pounds) overweight.

The town of 7,500 people started the campaign on Friday and some residents have already signed up, he said.

Around 35 percent of Italians are overweight or obese, according to European Union figures, with waistlines expanding as the country's healthy Mediterranean diet has given way to processed foods rich in fat, sugar and salt.

Source: Reuters

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Aug 13, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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25. 50 Ways to reduce your carbon footprint

"Just hop on the (biodiesel) bus, Gus. Make a new (home energy) plan, Stan..."

We know from singer songwriter, Paul Simon, that there are 50 ways to leave your lover, but did you know that there also 50 ways to leave your carbon-wasting ways? The Metro Silicon Valley News has recently published a helpful list of 50 things we can do to reduce our carbon footprint. Remarkably, 10 out of the 50 had a connection to food, drink and gardening. Maybe it's time we all found a new plan.

26. READ LABELS AND BUY LOCAL. Organic from Canada or overseas isn't as easy on the environment as locally produced products. Buying anything imported across an ocean means a container ship transported it. "Just one container ship traveling one mile produces NOx emissions equaling 25,000 cars traveling the same distance," says Anthony Fournier of the Santa Barbara County Pollution Control District. Foreign manufacturers often use carbon-intensive industrial and environmental practices that are illegal here. Many imports are made in sweatshops where people labor in dangerous work environments and aren't paid fairly. Reducing the demand for imports not only reduces our carbon footprint but also sends a message to big business that we want better for everyone.

34. BECOME A LOCAVORE. When you choose out of season organic food that's from journeyed overseas instead of locally grown anything, the pollution caused by the container ships outweighs any benefit you're going to get. Locavores say eating what's available locally is healthier anyway. Cooking dinner? Make a few meals at the same time and stash them in the fridge.

35. SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL FARMER. Visit www.localharvest .org and find the farmers market nearest you. Even better, find a CSA and get your produce from a sustainable local family farm.

36. MAKE YOUR OWN SALAD. Live Earth Farm's Debbie Palmer says make your own organic salad mixes from scratch and use less bagged and precut produce because they use a lot of resources to produce.

37. DON'T BE A SLAVE TO CONVENIENCE. We'll all be paying later for using convenience foods like packaged mixed salads, because they use a lot of resources to produce.

38. AVOID FAST FOOD. Methane-producing factory farming and long-distance shipping are the heart of its business model and they're clear-cutting rain forests to graze their cows.

39. EAT LESS MEAT. Especially beef. The Worldwatch Institute says growing numbers of intensively farmed livestock are responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and account for 37 percent of emissions of methane, which has more than 20 times the global warming potential of CO2, and 65 percent of emissions of nitrous oxide, another powerful greenhouse gas, coming from manure.

41. GREEN COFFEE IS DELICIOUS. Barefoot Coffee Roasters' Andy Newbom says that when you buy fair trade or organic coffee you're supporting sustainable farming practices that don't clear-cut trees or use pesticides or chemical fertilizers and that makes a big difference. "Buying fair trade coffee rewards and supports sustainable farming, reducing developing nations' carbon footprint," he says. "It's easy for the first world to say let's reduce our carbon footprint, but it's harder for farmers in developing countries to do this." Buy fair trade beans whole or ground, get a press or cloth filter and make your own.

42. DISPOSABLE CUPS? Really? Do the math: Buying coffee every day in a disposable cup generates at least 20 pounds of paper a year plus several hundred megaindustrially produced plastic covers. Styrofoam cups are worse. Dr. Theo Colborn, in "Our Stolen Future," says researchers have found traces of polystyrene in 100 percent of human tissue tested, because it migrates from the cup into hot food and beverages. Yuk! Bring your own coffee cup!

47. YOUR GARDEN ISN'T AS GREEN AS YOU THINK. Alrie Middlebrook designs and builds native plant gardens locally. She says take out your water-guzzling lawn and replace it with native plants. They use less water and nourish birds and bees.

Photocredit: Andy

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Aug 19, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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26. Building a simple compost sifter

By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, August 16, 2007 in The Washington Post



If compost is the holy grail of organic gardening, what's holier than thou? Sifted compost.

What you want in a perfect mature compost is, of course, organic matter so fully broken down that the original ingredients -- whether straw, weeds, kitchen scraps or goat droppings -- are no longer recognizable. Finished compost looks like very rich, dark, fine soil. But even the best soil contains stones, twigs and the like. Sifted compost doesn't. It is the 400-thread-count soil amendment.

Grade-A sifted compost has many uses. Let's say you want to renovate the lawn in the fall. Using a shovel, you scatter sifted compost over the worst patches, rake it into the iffy grass growing there (if any) then sow seeds and water it thoroughly. The fine-textured compost provides an excellent seed bed. In fact, it is a good seed bed for anything, especially small, hard-to-germinate seeds such as carrot and onion. One trick is to dig a planting furrow, then fill it with sifted compost. You can even use it to start seeds in flats -- although compost must be completely mature and mellow for this purpose -- too much high-test nitrogen can burn tender seedlings. It is also a wonderful top-dressing for a vegetable garden, a luxury mulch that provides a good nutritional multivitamin while making your garden's soil look as dark and lustrous as a mink coat.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Aug 19, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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27. Fire roasting red peppers

You've read about this, seen the technique on TV, and now it's time to give it a try at home using those red peppers that your garden (or local farmers' market) is so generously providing. And who better to demonstrate it than Chef John of FoodWishes.com?

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Aug 19, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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28. Kitchen Garden Day Celebrations

For those of you new to Kitchen Gardeners International, we organize a global garden party on the fourth Sunday of August each year which we aptly named Kitchen Garden Day. The day started as a tongue-in-cheek challenge to the snackfood makers of the world who have claimed the entire month of February as "Snackfood Month". Our logic was that if the fluorescent orange cheese-puff makers of the world could have an entire month to celebrate their vision of good eating, home gardeners and cooks deserved at least a day. The video above was some local press coverage we had in Maine.

What started in one backyard in Maine is slowly, but surely spreading to others and a few frontyards too! Kitchen Garden Day this year (August 26th) will be recognized in different places and in different ways: a street parties, picnics , potlucks, gardening workshops, and locally-sourced dinners cooked by area chefs.

Why not join the fun and organize a gathering of your own with friends and good food? But, please, no artificially-flavored bacon snacks or foods containing "blue #40". Those are for another day month.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Aug 19, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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29. Global food crisis looms as climate change and population growth strip fertile land

by Ian Sample, printed in the Guardian, August 31 2007



Climate change and an increasing population could trigger a global food crisis in the next half century as countries struggle for fertile land to grow crops and rear animals, scientists warned yesterday.

To keep up with the growth in human population, more food will have to be produced worldwide over the next 50 years than has been during the past 10,000 years combined, the experts said.

But in many countries a combination of poor farming practices and deforestation will be exacerbated by climate change to steadily degrade soil fertility, leaving vast areas unsuitable for crops or grazing.

Competition over sparse resources may lead to conflicts and environmental destruction, the scientists fear.

The warnings came as researchers from around the world convened at a UN-backed forum in Iceland on sustainable development to address the organisation's millennium development goals to halve hunger and extreme poverty by 2015.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Sep 3, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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30. Food fight (of the red and juicy sort)

You won't catch kitchen gardeners doing this with their hard-won tomatoes! The footage comes from "La Tomatina", an annual tomato-throwing festival in the town of Bunoi, Spain where residents and visitors turn five truckloads of tomatoes into puree in the span of one juicy hour.

For more info on the festival,see http://www.latomatina.es/

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Sep 3, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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