Do you understand what happened? Here they are, the most familiar faces on television, Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, Emeril Lagasse, and Cristeta Comerford from Philippines. She also became a new cooking star thanks to her job as the Chef of the White House. She creates there healthy and natural meals under a guidance of the First Lady Michelle Obama.

All started at the beginning of New Year with the produce that Iron Chef of America used on the Food Network’s two-hour special White House show. It was announced that all fresh fruits and vegetables were delivered from the White House Garden. As “Politics Daily” reported, the show did not disclose (probably being too modest) that “stunt double vegetables” were used, but not the produce from the First Family’s garden.

If you think logically, you’ll have a question, “How can you find fresh vegetables grown in a beautiful garden in winter time, in Washington D.C.?” Don’t worry. The White House segment was taped in October. The much promoted TV show made a valuable accent by featuring First Lady Michelle Obama who invited the chefs to harvest what their soul desired and creativity dictated from the famous White House garden.
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Want to have all year around fresh organic herbs that can compliment your home cooking? Watch this video and start your own hydroponic garden right on the windowsill in your home kitchen.

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Good food is our natural medicine. We continue our culinary adventures with fresh pumpkins and other winter squashes. Enjoy them now. The season for pumpkins will last only until the New Year’s Day.

Pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie are all part of the American tradition, as are faces carved from the pumpkin shell at Halloween and turned into an exotic light. As a child, I used to carve not pumpkins, but watermelons, and put inside of them big, white candles to celebrate a beautiful summer with its blue sky, warm sun, colorful  flowers, and moonless nights sending a gentle light to the earth from the shimmering stars.

Here are my family’s  recipes. Probably these meals  are new to your palate, but be open minded and try to make some of them. These dishes with an European flair will definitely enrich  your healthy and  natural diet.

Pumpkin Pure Delight

Ingredients:

• One-two slices pumpkin 
• 2 cups spring water, and more as needed
• 2 tbps organic brown sugar
•  1 tbsp unsallted butter   &   A pinch sea salt

Method:

1. Slice and peel pumpkin into slices (the same way as watermelons). Remove seeds.
2. Cut pumpkin flesh into small cubes and wash them.
3. Place pumpkin cubes into a pot.
4. Boil pumpkin in  little water for about 20 minutes until tender.
5. Add a pinch of salt, brown sugar and butter. Mix all together.

Serves 3-4 people. Eat immediately while it’s still warm.

Pumpkin Oatmeal

Ingredients:

• The same ingredients as in previous recipe.
•  Add 2 tablespoons Irish Steel Cut Oatmeal which can be cooked in 5 minutes. 

Method  is the same, but with a small addition: 

1. Let pumpkin cubes boil in a little water (2 cups) for 15 minutes.
2. Add water if needed.
3. Then pur oatmeal in a pot with pumpkin for the the last 5 minutes.
4. Total cooking time: 20 minutes.  

Serves 4.

Pumpkin Rice  is made the same way with the same ingredients.

• Just add 1/2 cup organic brown rice and cook with pumpkin for 20 minutes.

These three meals/porridges are warm, comforting and healthy breakfast meals for adults and children. From the ancient times porridge was a traditional food in Europe. Europeans eat them constantly as a breakfast dish made only with grains and add salt, sugar, honey, berries, milk  or cream. These meals can be also eaten at lunch or dinner, but not only as traditional breakfast.

A combination of pumkins and other vegetables with grains are the easiest ways to digest highly nutritious foods. This fact explains why these meals are used traditionally for centuries in many cultures as a healing food to nurse the sick and weak back to health.  

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” Beautiful soup! Who cares for fish. Game, or any other dish! Who would not give all else for two pennyworth only of beautiful soup?”– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Whatever are your food preferences or your mood to eat this or that, soup will always tempt and please you. It must be included in your diet because it improves digestion and overall health. Of all comfort foods, soup is number one. It fills fast the stomach when you are hungry, warms the heart and body, and satisfies in all ways. If you eat healthy, natural soups, you don’ t gain weight at all, too.

Soup is undisputed international champion of comfort foods everywhere you go. Every country has its own recipes for these fabulous meals. Many became classics. American cooks created New England Clam Chowder. Bouillabaisse was devised by Mediterranean fishermen and became a highlight of the cuisine in France, Italy, Spain and around the world. Borscht was initiated in Russia and became popular in other countries.

French cooks also came up with the Onion Soup. Chinese inspired Shrimp Wonton Soup with Vegetable Flowers. Thai Crispy Fish Spicy Soup was born in Thailand. Seafood Gumbo came from Creole Cuisine. Pasta e Fagioli, of course, was created in Italy. Gazpacho, which is really a salad in soup form has Spanich heritage, and Chicken Soup with Matzo Balls came from Jewish heritage to cure what ails you.

There are so many other cold and hot soups, but hot Pumpkin Soup is one of the most popular. Now is a season for pumpkins and other winter squashes, so take advantage of this time and make your delicious soups using these nutritious vegetables.

I selected three videos that will show you how to make pumpkin soup with a different twist from three creative cooks.
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by Svetlana Konnikova

To make natural, homemade bread?! It sounds like a myth about old housewives’s hobby or at least, a modern offer to fly to the Moon…  Is that so? It is well known, packaged loafs provoke lots of problems for bread lovers, such as weight gain and other ills.

Making your natural bread at home became a necessaty today for people who love good bread, but want to stay healthy and slim.   Just try once to make your healthy bread! It’s not very difficult and time-consuming. After that, you’ll never want to buy any bread in a store.

Are time demands your excuses? So, do it during your weekend. Here is the recipe for olive and sun-dried tomato bread. Healthy, delicious, tasteful and flavorfull, this bread is freshly baked every day in many houses in Mediterranean countries for centuries.

INGREDIENTS: 

14 oz (400 g) or 2,5 cups organic whole wheat or rye flour; 1 packet active dry yeast; one half tsp sea salt with iodine; 1 tsp brown sugar; 1 tbsp chopped fresh thyme; 1tbsp chopped Italian parsley; 7 fl.oz (200 ml) or 1 cup warm spring water; 4 tbsp. organic olive oil;  about 2oz (50 g) or one third cup pitted and sliced black olives; about 2oz (50 g) or one third cup pitted and sliced green olives; 3,5 oz (100 g) or about 1 cup drained and sliced, organic sun-dried tomatoes in oil or 1 can organic diced tomatoes; 1 whipped, organic egg yolk.

METHOD:

• Place the flour, salt, and yeast in a bowl. Mix together. Then stir in the sugar, thyme and parsley. Make a well in the center. Slowly stir in enough water and oil to make a dough. Mix the olives and dried or diced tomatoes, and add in. Knead the dough for 5 minutes, then form it into a ball. Brush the ball with with oil and cover with a plastic wrap. Let the dough rise in a warm place for about one and a half hours. It should double in size during this time.
• Prepare a clean cookie sheet. Dust it with flour. Knead the dough lightly. Then cut into two halves and shape into circles. Place them on the cookie sheet, cover with plastic wrap again. Let the dough rise second time in a warm place for 40-45 minutes, or until two halves doubled in size.
• After two halves doubled in size, make 3 diagonal cuts on the top of each piece of “puffed” dough. Brush these pieces with a whipped egg. Your artisan bread is ready to be baked.
• Bake in a preheated oven at the temperature 400 degrees F/200 degrees C. Baking time –40-45 minutes, or until your bread is cooked through. Wait until the loaf looks golden on the top and sounds hollow when tapped on the botton. When it’s ready, take the cookie sheet with the loaf out from the oven. Let it cool a little bit. Then transfer on the wooden board. Your bread is ready to serve 4 people.

This delicious bread is made with clean, pure products and doesn’t contain any sodium, very little fat and  salt.

If you don’t have a desire or don’t have time to make your homemade bread, and buy it in a store, and then you blame this bread on your weight gain, you should know at least what’s the difference between two ingredients–salt and sodium that are present in packaged breads and  in your diet overall:

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Can you imagine your diet without good, freshly baked, the whole grain bread? I cannot. Several of my friends tried, as usual, to loose weight with help of heavily advertized diets. They lost weight in a short time, but gained more even faster. Now they decided to avoid eating bread. I don’t think it is a smart decision. The whole grain, artisan or freshly baked bread is our friend, but not our enemy. Unfortunately many people don’t make any difference. You can see in specialty or delicatessen stores how many customers buy freshly baked, white-flour, popular French baguettes. Don’t they realize that French baguettes are made from white flour which doesn’t give us any good nutrition?

Wheat, rye, rice, barley and steel cut oatmeal are the main ingredients of the modern diet. Used as whole grain, these natural cereals represent very nutritious food coming directly from Mother Nature. Today our problem is that huge baking plants use modern miling techniques and produce refined, white-flour, different pastas, and other cereal-based foods which have very low nutrient level. Some white flours are bleached. This procedure doesn’t make any sense and it’s dangerous, too.

Refined grains have the sugars which are released quickly into the blood stream. The result of this absorbtion is such health disorders as diabetes and weight-gain. Eat whole grain brown bread, wholemeal pasta and wild brown rice. If you bake, use organic whole wheat, rye or buckwheat flour and make these products an important part of your clean, pure-foods diet.

References: photo of bread from www.clipart.com; photo of grains by Petr Kratovchil

Why did our ancestors have their diets different than ours now? To answer this question, let’s go back only a hundred years. As a matter of fact, our ancestors generally ate from the land producing mostly organic produce. The land was kept natural. Farmers and gardeners fed it with essential nutrients by mulching, adding manure, and crop rotation.

When I was growing up in southeastern Europe, I watched how my grandfather did exactly the same. He used these simple, natural means which benefited his land and the crop, and served to maintain the quality of the soil. As a result, the plants, fruits and vegetables on our fields grew natural and full with nutritional ingredients, and so the cows, pigs, chicken and other animals that fed on.

The same way farmers operated almost everywhere in Eastern European countries. They did not have any other choice. Industrial plants were destroyed during the war.  Local manufacturers could not continue to produce any chemicals and  did not have any reserves of these poisons left. Fortunatelly, farmers did not have hard currency to buy chemicals from the West. There was really great, healthy time for consumers who could benefit from eating pure, natural foods because farmers were forced to fed the land with natural means, in  the old-fashioned way.

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First step in our clean and green diet: learn how to read food labels. It is very important because food companies try to confuse consumers with carefully designed nutrition panels. Maybe you thought you did understand all numbers in food labels. Truth is, probably you don’t. Is it not nice if you can hear this valuable information from Jeff Novick, MS, RD, the former executive of one of the biggest and ‘fattest’ American food corporations, Kraft Foods? Click on the arrow below and watch this video.

Source: www.youtube.com

Most of us have busy lives and highly pressing schedules. We don’t have time to pay enough attention as we should to support our health–physical, emotional and mental. However, our health largely depends on how we eat and what we put in our body. Very often we go for frozen or other packaged foods that require a little preparation and cooking time.

Do you know that your saving time and an effort to put any food on a table has little to do with your health? Processed and packaged foods have little to none of the vitamins and minerals–nutrients we need to keep ourselves healthy. As a matter of fact, these foods have an abundance of preservatives, additives, hormons and “spices” — chemical ingredients that may damage our health. 

Nutrient-depleted, these chemical ingredients (instead of natural) are included in many products by their producers to help them bring down cost of convenience foods.  Chemicals are very cheap in modern times. We cannot blame these huge food companies. They are in a fierce race for higher revenues and profits that satisfy their own greed and make happy their shareholders. So, what the rest of us should do to protect ourselves?  We should do our own homework, gather necessary information, and keep our healthy goals in mind.

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Let’s start at first by watching this video. Click on the link below.

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Now you don’t think that it’s difficult to reach this goal. I’ll remind you, there are several simple steps, according to USDA:

• Eat whole grains. 
• Vary your superfoods–veggies. Eat them fresh. Light steaming is the best way to cook vegetables and is preferable to boiling as the food loses no minerals at all, and the process does less damage to the food’s fragile vitamins and enzymes. Do you know that we lose about 25 per cent of the vitamin C in vegetables through boiling food–even for only a few minutes?
•  Focus on sweet superfood–fruits.
• Get your calcium-rich foods: milk, yogurt, kefir and cheese.
• Go lean with protein by eating meat and beans.  
•  Choose you fats carefully. Use olive oil when you prepare your meals.
•  Don’t forget about your physical activities: walking or jogging, swimming and playing baseball or soccer, and exercising.

Knowledge is power, don’t you know that?  So, if you want to to build a healthier you and keep it this way, follow up these recommendations. Good luck to you on the road to good health!

Source: http://ww.mypyramid.gov