Healthy Living Cuisine Recipes and Articles

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Traditional Italian Food

When you think of Italian food, the first thing that comes to mind is bound to be pasta: spaghetti, linguine, fettucine, penne and the like, all of which sort of seem to have no difference except the shape they come in, but they all taste good. Pizza is the other big dish that people associate with Italian food, but there

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Are Nutrition Facts Labels Factual?

You never know everything that

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Eating A Low Glycemic Diet

As of late, I have been doing a large amount of research into various diets, to investigate their health connotations as well as effectiveness. One diet that is receiving a large amount of press is the “low glycemic diet,” but is it truly a workable way to lose weight? I spent some time researching the essential principles of the diet and the various commercial enterprises that use it as a basis, and I

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A new kind of diet program that allows you to eat the foods you love: it’s all about food portion sizes!

With the holiday season fast approaching, we’re all looking forward to those holiday meals, decked with more than the usual portions of calories. With all these goodies, it takes a person with discipline to burn, to avoid overindulging during the holiday season offerings. Of course, we all know this means putting on some extra weight. Here we’ve got a strategy that allows you to partake of virtually all of the delicious treats of the season, while gaining perhaps just a pound or two by the time New Year’s rolls around.

So what’s this miracle of a strategy? It’s simple. Beginning around Halloween, or sooner, you embark on a food training program, which is not a diet, but retraining in your food portion sizes. In addition, you make some modifications to your eating patterns. Instead of the usual three meals a day, split your meals in to five or six smaller meals each day.

Everyone’s had the experience of sitting down to a big Thanksgiving feast, your plate piled high and heavy with the bird, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and muffins. Everything seems irresistible. By the end of the meal, you can barely move. Oh, but it was so delicious!

What happens to your stomach? In order to accommodate every last bite, your stomach actually stretches out to become a larger organ than it was! Therein lies the rub.

On the other hand, if you were to assume your eyes are indeed, bigger than your stomach and cut your food portion sizes in half, for each and every dish on your plate, eat slowly and chew your food well, your stomach gets clues as to how comfortably full it is. Using smaller food portions in this way, it’s almost a certainty that you’ll feel full before you’ve finished off the plate. Yet you’ll have had the satisfaction of tasting everything!

If you begin using this strategy well ahead of the holiday festivities and temptations, your stomach will actually start to shrink to a normal size. For example, if your usual pre-holiday menu consists of meatloaf and gravy, roasted potatoes and salad with a side of bread, reducing your food portion sizes

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Staving off facial wrinkles the natural way

The last thing any woman wants to see in the mirror is facial wrinkles! Sure, you can’t stop time, but then again, there’s no reason to be aiding and abetting the onset of this natural aging process! With proper care for your skin, you can ward off all but the most insignificant facial wrinkles

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A few new takes on the garden salad recipe for year-round variety

Who doesn’t like a garden salad? Even children, faced with a choice between a hot veggie plate and a garden dinner salad, would opt for the salad. So popular is this little side salad, some of us serve the same old garden salad recipe several days a week. This can lead to diner boredom. Variety is the spice of life, after all, so before the family starts eyeing that salad with a groan, let’s take a look at ways you can just as quickly put together a salad that’s enticing, tasty and nutritious.

Back in the day (or at least in mine , iceberg lettuce was the only game in town. Fortunately, we now have many choices in lettuces at the local supermarket. Iceberg lettuce is nice and crunchy, but is the least nutritious among lettuces. If you serve garden salads often, try a mix of several types of lettuces to keep things interesting, more nutritious and colorful. Along with the Iceberg, toss in some butter lettuce, Romaine, spinach, and a little Mesclun.

The usual garden salad recipe relies on tomatoes, cucumbers and perhaps some croutons. This can be a tasty salad when those tomatoes and cucumbers are in season, but come winter, these veggies become pricey and rather tasteless when trucked hundreds or thousands of miles from warmer climes.

When fall and winter sets in, it’s time to devise some new garden salad recipes from seasonal ingredients. Thinly sliced broccoli florets and julienned carrots make a colorful salad. Add some finely diced onions, grated cheese and some hard-boiled egg slices and you’re in business. During the cold months, canned kidney beans, whole pitted olives, marinated artichoke hearts, garbanzo beans and canned kernel corn provide good looks and a nutrient dense garden salad recipe.

During any season, all garden salad recipes are enhanced with just a small mound of salad shrimp, diced chicken breast or tuna salad in the center. Croutons work year around, as do mushroom slices, celery and hard boiled eggs.

Another idea for new ways to jazz up the garden salad recipe are the tubs of ready made, freshly diced mixed vegetables now available in almost every supermarket. This can be a great time saver for the busy cook.

Most people tend to stick with their ‘usual’ salad dressings, albeit family favorites. Have you checked out the salad dressing aisle lately? There are salad dressings I’ve never heard of, with dozens of choices with which you can transform the same garden salad recipe you’ve been serving for years. My latest discovery is a Fire-roasted sweet red pepper vinaigrette, which combines excellently with tomatoes, avocado, minced garlic and my beloved garlic croutons.

So you can see that there’s no reason to get stuck in a rut with the dinner salad. A garden salad recipe is a mix and match affair, one of the most versatile recipes you have.

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Dominican Chicken: A Quick and Easy 30 Minute Meal

I love to cook, but there just isn

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Tuna fish recipes and tips to transform this inexpensive canned staple into a family treat

Canned tuna has been a staple of the American pantry for decades. Most often, it becomes the standard tuna sandwich on white bread, packed into lunch bags as a once-a-week regular. When tuna is on sale, most shoppers stock up, with that sandwich in mind. However, served too often, tuna sandwiches can easily become a disappointing addition to your menus. Here we’ve got some suggestions on how to prepare some interesting variations of tuna fish recipes, for lunch and dinner entrees, as well as a few tips which will leave the family wondering if your new dish is really that old, boring canned tuna.

Canned tuna is available packed in oil or water. There’s no difference in price, but tuna packed in water is definitely superior in taste. Tuna packed in oil leaves an oily and unappealing taste that remains, no matter how well you drain it. Tuna packed in water and well drained simply has a fresher taste. Most people who dislike canned tuna attribute their dislike to the oily, mushy texture of the product. The moral to this story is that tuna fish recipes made with tuna packed in water always deliver a better result.

The second key to successful tuna fish recipes is what type of tuna you buy. The difference between tuna and albacore is enormous. When you shop the canned tuna section, you have probably noticed that the fish is available as ‘chunk light tuna’ or ‘albacore’. Both are tuna, but the albacore is a much better grade. While albacore is more costly, the texture is quite firm, with a cleaner taste. To my way of thinking, it’s worth the extra price. Albacore is similar in the ‘bite’, to chicken or a firmly fleshed fish, such as halibut.

Adding a teaspoon of lemon juice brightens the taste and eliminates that ‘fishy’ taste some people find objectionable. Snip a couple of tablespoons of fresh parsley and add to the mix. Preparing canned tuna fish in this way gives all tuna fish recipes a good start.

Instead of just mixing up the tuna with some mayo and slapping it on the bread, try one of these variations, using the preparation outlined above: add your mayo or salad dressing and set the tuna aside. Thinly slice a tomato and a small red onion. Spread the tuna on a hoagie roll and top with the veggies. The crunch brings a nice contrast of textures to the sandwich. You might also add a small can of sliced olives, or a finely sliced stalk of celery to your tuna mix and pack it in some pocket bread, lined with a crispy lettuce leaf. Add finely diced tomatoes for a delicious, juicy sandwich. Why stop there? Alfalfa sprouts are another winning topping to the pocket bread style sandwich.

For lunch or dinner, a chef’s salad made with chilled tuna salad as the centerpiece makes a tempting and economical meal. This is also a good recipe for diet conscious people, full of protein, fiber and antioxidants, almost absent of fat and low in calories, which means you can enjoy a little extra dressing! Pile your greens on the salad plate, heap a generous serving of tuna in the center and surround it with tomato wedges, avocado, hard boiled egg slices and thin slices of onion. Serve with a chunk of crusty bread and you’ve got a veritable feast.

Tuna fish recipes, in the form of hot entrees, give you yet another way to serve an inexpensive and quick, but hearty dinner. Boil a batch of egg noodles and drain, removing the noodles to a large bowl. Butter a 2-quart casserole dish. To the noodles, add 2 cans of tuna, 2 cans of cream of mushroom soup and a cup of milk. Slice 5-6 large white mushrooms, 2 stalks of celery and dice 1 red bell pepper. combine the veggies into the tuna-noodle mixture, mixing well. Spoon into the casserole dish and top with a small bag of crushed potato chips. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, or until heated through. Delicious!

Sadly, I haven’t yet come up with tuna fish recipes suitable for breakfast! That may take some doing …

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Food quality determines the success or failure of every recipe!

With food costs rising and budgets shrinking, it’s tempting to take shortcuts on to make your dollars stretch. However, sacrificing food quality for quantity isn’t a smart move, for a couple of important reasons. Buying food of inferior quality means you’re not getting all of the nutritive value you should expect and this factor is also reflected in the resulting taste and texture of the finished dish. The quality of the food that goes into your recipes is arguably the most important factor in determining your success or failure as a cook. Let’s look at some examples, using common ingredients in every day recipes and let you decide for yourself.

You may know that chefs in better restaurants are absolute sticklers for food quality. When you start with high quality ingredients, the finished product can’t help but outshine a dish made with the same basic ingredients, but of a lesser quality.

Freshness is a major consideration when assessing food quality. A tomato from the supermarket, picked when still green, injected with red coloring and then transported hundreds of miles, may look essentially the same as one picked fresh from your garden. However, the moment you taste that tomato, the difference is worlds apart. The tomato which is picked unripe, does not contain the full complement of nutrients contained in the freshly picked tomato. Why? The inferior tomato was not given the chance to develop as nature intended. Anyone who has compared the taste of the two types can tell you which is superior. Many cooks describe the difference as being that one tastes like ‘cardboard’, with a mushy texture and sallow color, while the tomato of true food quality is bright, vibrant and full of juicy flavor.

When it comes to cooking, paying a little extra for quality is smart. A small dinner salad, made with organically grown produce that has not been sprayed with pesticides, picked unripe or injected with chemical coloring, tastes far better than a large dinner salad made with inferior ingredients. This means it’s going to be a more pleasurable experience for the diner. We eat for the pleasure of the taste