Posts Tagged ‘healthy cooking’
Popular Kitchen Gadgets For Moms Who Want Healthy Kids
Visit a more sophisticated health nut’s home and you might find a Jack Lalane juicer positioned on their kitchen counter top. Using a juicer is a terrific way to get more raw vegetables into your diet. When vegetables are raw, they contain more of the natural plant enzymes that have been proven to be so beneficial to you. Trying to consume enough of them every day can be burdensome. Juicing is the answer. One cup each day is plenty.
If you have a choice between plastic or stainless steel bowls go with the stainless steel. Plastics are composed of ultra refined petroleum based materials. Over the years, some of the plastic will break down and release byproducts into whatever it touches. You would not want any of that tainting your food.
Healthy people prefer glass containers over plastic ones. This is because of the plastic’s properties. Glass doesn’t have the petroleum based components that could allow some seepage of unwanted materials into your stored food. Glass containers are normally pretty smooth and easier to clean. Food particles have a much harder time sticking inside of glass containers as most of the other ones. Cleaner containers means less bacteria growing on the particles left behind after washing dishes.
Food dehydrators are an appliance you will often find in the kitchens of health conscious people. Dehydrating allows you to keep the nutrient rich foods that you love to snack on without cooking away all of the really beneficial enzymes of the food. If you have healthy things to snack on, it will be a lot easier to watch what you eat when hunger strikes. Why not make it easier to stick to a healthy lifestyle?
Healthy refrigerators, sinks and pantries often have something in common. They have filtered water on hand. Water filtering is one of the simplest ways to upgrade the health of a kitchen. The popularity of filtered water has caused many companies to get into this market. That benefits all of us by driving the cost of these products down due to competition. If you do some research online, you will see that there are a tremendous number of toxins that can be found in measurable quantities in some water sources. It just makes sense to take simple steps in filtering the stuff that your body must have to live.
Look inside a healthy cook’s kitchen and you’ll usually see a variety of cookbooks. In order to keep things interesting, you need to try new foods. Otherwise, you will get tired of eating the same old things. Spend a few dollars and get your family some great healthy cookbooks.
If you want to make types of healthy foods like hummus and pesto, you are going to need a food processor. If you are making a lot of soups or casseroles, having an electric gadget to do some of the chopping will make meal preparation a lot less of a chore. A food processor drastically speeds up the process of chopping and grating. This is great when you’re short on time but you still want to eat healthy. They are a worthwhile investment.
Olive Oil Basics - How The Stuff Is Made
For many many years, going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, people have used presses to extract olive oil from the olive, the press is used to separate the olive oil and vegetation water from the solid body of the olive. Once these two have been separated, a decanter is used to separate the oil from the water. In able to gain a fine olive oil, there is a process that must be used before the olive is pressed.
First of all the olives should be harvested and the bad olives removed from the bunch. The olives are then put under a special stone called millstone or in some areas a ground stone. The olives should stay under the stone for just over a half an hour to turn them into a paste, also to guarantee that the paste collects the right aromas and smell that come from the fruit enzymes and forms into the olive oil drops.
Once this process is over and the olives are converted into a paste, the past is spread onto fiber disks. Once fully and evenly spread onto the disks the paste is placed into the press machine. The press will then apply the necessary pressure needed to compact the past and percolate the oil forms and the water in the paste. Water is placed in the sides of the press to simplify the process of percolation.
When the pressing is finished the oil and water must be separated to achieve a pure olive oil. With the traditional process both the oil and the water a put into a decanter but there is another process that is a lot quicker than the decanter. The faster process is one called vertical centrifuge and is used to complete the whole process of oil and water separation a lot faster.
Once the extraction process has been fully completed, the cleaning process begins. This process has to be done thoroughly because if not the remaining past will begin to ferment on the millstones and disks causing other oils to get contaminated and change the taste of the oil completely. Every time new oil is to be made, a complete check that the press and millstones are completely clean must be done.
Using this traditional method of making olive oil has some advantages, these include that the olives are very well ground and easily pomaced. But the complication at the time of cleaning, the hours of extra manual labor and the time it takes to wait after the harvesting to the time of pressing the olives to make the oil can be classed as disadvantages when using this method, and because of this people have invented other methods that save time.