Trivia Time!

This has absolutely nothing to do with food, not quite, but I figure we could all use some fun trivia facts at dining table, especially when we eat with friends and family and we need to change the subject quickly after we eat too much of that delicious chili (Check out why beans hate us here).

We share 98% of our genes with our close relative bonobos and chimpanzees.

We share 99% of our genes with other human beings.

We share 99.5% of our genes with our mother, yeah, the other 0.5% is from our father.

No surprise that identical twins share 100% of the same genes.

Isn't that interesting?  Well, it is for me.

Enjoy!

Desserts after the Grill!

A meal without something sweet at the end isn't quite complete for me.

Check out the dessert recipes I put up for you. They are the lighter versions of what they serve in most restaurants.

Pick your Desserts!

Dessert Disaster!

When we eat a big helping of dessert calories packed with refined sugar and carbohydrates, which pass through our digestive system quickly and load up our bloodstreams with sugar in the form of glucose, our food mechanism would turn that big surge of glucose into energy and store it for later use, yes, in and around our bellies.

That means, 100 calories from syrup isn't the same 100 calories from a handful of almonds or from a bowl of brown rice in terms of how our body responds to them.

Foods with high GI, high sugar content and no protein or other nutritional value are usual a great quick fix for your hunger pangs, or boredom snacking, but they’ll leave you more tired, hungry and dissatisfied than you were to begin with.

The better way to eat is to choose snacks that will nourish your body and your mind – and keep your hunger at bay.

We all need tasty treats to keep us swinging until work is done in the afternoon and we don't have to give up all desserts, we just have to select a better kind, if not the right kind.

Note: 

Glycemic Index (GI) - 

It measures how a carbohydrate-containing food raises blood glucose. Foods are ranked based on how they compare to a reference food — either glucose or white bread. A food with a high GI raises blood glucose more than a food with a medium or low GI. The lower is better and generally, foods with glycemic index of 55 or lower is considered low, 56 – 69 as medium; and 70 and above as high.

Brown rice has much lower GI than white rice, while white rice has a lower GI than glutinous rice (the sweet sticky rice that makes mochi or rice dumpling.)

The same food can have different GI reading when prepared in different ways, for example, white rice porridge has lower GI than steamed rice.

When you eat rice with protein, that can lower the GI of the whole dish, as you can imagine the protein can slow down the break-down process for rice to turn sugar so it can't rush to our bloodstream as fast. That's why the same calories in a cup of sugar water as opposed to that in a handful of almonds have quite different impact to our body.

Barbecue Ribs!

What a gorgeous long weekend. I hope you are inviting your friends and family for barbecue tomorrow. I wanted to send the recipes yesterday but couldn't get around to.

I hope you'll enjoy them no matter what. Feel free to add some orange zest from the bargains to the recipe. I did.

Barbecue Baby Back Ribs, Bake or Grill them.

Barbecue Spareribs, Smoked with wood chips.

Barbecue Sauce


Happy grilling!

When Evolution Is Outpaced ...

Why do we eat too much and even continue to eat when we are full and consciously know we are undermining our health and shortening our lives? Why does our eating mechanism seem to be malfunctioning and going against our best interests?

The answer is, human beings have an evolved mechanism to eat whenever food is available.

Human nature evolved mostly on the plains of Africa, where our ancestors wandered around as nomadic scavengers, gatherers, and hunters, long before we settled in communities. Our days were spent looking hard for food. When we found some, it made a lot of sense to eat as much as we could because we had no way to store or carry extra food, and we didn't know how long it might be until we would eat again.

These days we have much more food than we need. We can eat as much as we want, 24 hours a day.

To make matters worse, we seem to have a particular penchant for sweet and fatty foods. Maybe these are fairly common on the plains when we evolved, so we did not need to be a glutton for vegetables. However, sweet fruits and fatty animal flesh were hard to get. When our prehistorical ancestors found sweet fruits and killed an animal, it was advantageous to eat as much as possible. So unless we work very hard to control ourselves, we feel fine and happy to finish that juicy hamburger and head off for dessert.

Our food industry has made so much progress while we still have the same stone-age brain that we inherit from our gatherer-hunter ancestors, with a hard-wired mechanism telling us to eat as much as possible. We are so out-dated, out-paced, out-numbered and out-smart'ed that it is for sure a tough battle to fight, but we have to try no matter what.

If we don't know how our food brain works, if we don't know what we are dealing with, there is no chance we can prevail.

To read more, go to Your Stone Age Brain.

Yes, I know. You want the recipes for good food. They are on the way...

Did you check out my salt page yet?

Enjoy.

Weekly Sale Till May 31st, Memorial Day!

Having a barbecue on long weekend? Check these out!

More recipes coming up! Stay tuned.

Enjoy Your Berries!

Double Berry Soda (yield one serving): 

Ingredients: 

• Strawberry 50g
• Raspberry 50g
• Preferrably honey 20g (or sugar 12-15g)
• Lemon juice 2 tsp
• Soda water

Directions:

1. Cut strawberries into small dices. 
2. Put strawberries, raspberries, honey, lemon juice into container, mix well and chill in refrigerator for 5-6 hours.
3. Add soda water to dilute and serve.

Berry Fruit Salad (yield one serving):

Ingredients:

Salad:

• Strawberries (cut in halves), blueberries, raspberries about 10-20g of each in equal parts
• Romaine lettuce or any greens 20-30g, cut into 1 inch pieces
• Celery 20g or half stalk, chopped.
• One kiwi sliced
• 1/4 apple sliced or cut into chunks

Dressing:

• Strawberries, blueberries, raspberries in equal part, about 15g of each
• Celery 15g or half stalk, diced
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 tsp honey or sugar

Directions:

1. Put all ingredients in dressing in blender and blend until smooth.
2. Combine all fruits and vegetables in a mixing bowl and pour the dressing on the salad. Mix gently and transfer to a plate. Sprinkle chopped celery on top an serve.

Cold Fruit Medley Soup with Chickpeas (yield one serving):

Ingredients:
For soup:

• 1/2 red grapefruit, about 100g, peeled and diced     
• Six strawberries, halved
• 30g raspberries (about 6-8)
• 10 dried Goji berry
• 1/8 tsp salt



Dried Goji Berry

• 1/8 tsp black pepper

• Honeydew 50g, cut into bite-size dices
• 2 tbsp cooked chickpeas or beans

Directions:

1. Soak dried goji berries in a little water to soften.
2. Put half of total red grapefruit (50g), half of total strawberries (3 strawberries),  raspberries, 10 dried goji berries, salt black pepper in blender or food processor and blend until smooth.
3. Combine the mixture with honeydew dices, the other half of red grapefruit dices, the other three strawberry halves, and cooked chickpeas. Serve.

I hope you enjoy these recipes.

Go Nuts! Go Bananas!

I have a huge sweet tooth. I love nuts, fruits, cakes and the combination of all three, but today, I am going to focus on fruits since summer is around the corner and I don't want you to miss all the goodies coming our way.

Not only do fruits taste great by itself, they detox, cleanse and nourish us in many ways. For many people who dislike vegetables, it's the only thing they would eat uncooked and unprocessed.

A lot of nutrients found in the fruit peels and skins, such as the resveratrol in red grape, are very beneficial to us. Most of them have the same nutrients in flesh as well. To me, with or without the skins, they rock either way. Best of all, they satisfy my sugar cravings without the fat.

Check out more facts about fact about pythonutrients.

Since we got gorgeous berries at bargain prices this week, I am going to give you some recipes based on that. Stay tuned.

Weekly Sale Till May 24th.

Hey, thanks for reading my long detox posting.

Like I promised, look at this week's good deals that I found. How much are you paying for these at your favorite stores?

Enjoy!

Note: I live in northern California (San Francisco Bay Area) and the prices certainly could be a lot more expensive than those in other cities elsewhere in the U.S., but hey, that's what we pay for the weather.

Did I tell you boxes of 1 pound strawberries are three for $5 dollars this week?
The point I want to make is, if you know better, you pay less and eat well.

Detox, is it for real?

Detox, is it really difficult? Is it necessary?

Do you feel moody, exhausted, stressed and unhappy most of the time but have no idea why? Do you want to stay healthy, energetic but can not find enough time to shop, cook or exercise, so you just grab whatever and gobble it up, hoping that will fix it for you.

The diet we have today is very different from what it used to be, so is its availability, quality and the amount we consume. On top of that, we have a very different life style. Without some understanding in the food we eat, the art of cooking we can manage, the nutrition our human body needs to function at its best, we really are just shooting in the dark, are we not?

I intend to write short articles in this blog, focusing on where to find the best deals and prepare the food in the most delicious way I know of, but since I put up "Detox" as the first word in my description line, I feel I owe it to you to explain my food philosophy before posting anything further.

You must know that some people release their pressure through emotional eating, but that starts an evil cycle of stress, eating and guilt until many chronic deceases destroy our overall wellbeing.

Most of us are not to that extreme but when it comes to something so easy to see, so tempting to grab and so ready to jump into our shopping cart. Unwittingly, we have put a lot of those in us before we find our skin dehydrated, our hair losing quickly and our metabolism slowing down.

The problem maybe that we overeat, eat the wrong things, eat in the wrong way, and eat it for the wrong reason. Maybe the real question is, what is eating us that is causing us to feel hungry and in need of instant gratification from food all the time?

Fresh food doesn't necessarily cost more. Food, doesn't have to be expensive to make us healthy, to be sustainable for our planet earth. Cooking doesn't have to take up a lot of time to make it great, soothing and relaxing after a long hard day. That's the meaning behind my description line: "Detox, Easy, Fresh, Affordable and Sustainable."  That's my idea how food should be.

To read more...

Food is One's Own Personal Experience.

Food doesn’t have to be expensive to be good.

You could compete for a reservation at a hot, high-end, high-tech, three star restaurant, or you could stay home and cook the million dollar spaghetti from your mom’s secret recipe.

 I live in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S., with very little time to cook and shop but I refuse to dumb down my taste buds and settle with processed food. I hunt for good deals and good recipes and I make the most out of it.

If you are like me, this blog is for you. I’d be happy to share my hunt for deals and my recipes with you. Let us all eat well, no matter how much we can afford to spend on it. Trust me. There is always a way.