What Is It?

Water, Sugar, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed oil, and less than 2% sodium caseinate (a milk derivative), natural and artificial flavors, dipotassium phosphate, disodium phosphate, mono- and diglycerides, cellulose gel, cellulose gum, color added, carrageenan.

 

Time again for the mystery “food.”  I put food in quotations because packaged food is fake food.  Let me know what you think this might be.  I will reveal in a few days.

Drink Orange Juice?

It is time for another post about a recommended read, but this came across my desk today.  This is a video clip, but I think the book mentioned will be my recommended read for this month.  I know I want to check it out.  This is a prime example of my basic philosophy–that processed food is not as nutritious as we are led to believe and it certainly isn’t equal to the unprocessed counterpart.

 

Check it out.

 

Whipped Cream

Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org

Don’t buy fake substitutes! We learned here what is in Cool Whip. It’s loaded with trans fat.  When I was a kid, I had a real thing for Cool Whip.  Now that I’m grown and I read my labels, I won’t touch the stuff!  It just grosses me out to realize it’s just Crisco that is whipped. Have you ever noticed how it never changes if it’s left out at room temperature? I have noticed it on a spoon in the sink, the morning after serving a dessert, and it hasn’t melted like real whip cream will. And it is hard to rinse off a spoon–because it’s grease!



So make it from scratch instead. It really only takes about 5 minutes and tastes fabulous!



1 cup heavy cream (I use raw)
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 Tb sugar



This make about 2 cups of whipped cream. That is plenty for our family of four (with leftover). If you need more, just double this recipe.



I have learned that cream will not whip very well if it is too shallow. So don’t use a big Tupperware bowl. I use one of those square Ziploc disposable containers. This way, when I whip just one cup of cream, it is deep enough to whip in the air.



I fit a collar of foil around the bowl to catch the splatters of cream.



Whip the cream and vanilla on high until thickened, but not stiff. Add 2 tablespoons of sugar and keep beating until it’s as thick as you want. I like my whip cream really thick (thicker than in the photo), but you have to be careful.  If you whip it too much, it will separate into butter and whey.



The only disadvantage I see of real whipped cream to Cool Whip is it’s ability to keep.  This will keep for a while in the fridge, you can make it ahead, but I’ve noticed it’s a bit runny the next day.  Not sure if it would re-whip.  I usually make it as close to serving time as I can.



Enjoy!



[Concerned about the saturated fat?  Click here.]

Shopping

We headed to Whole Foods yesterday, I thought I’d let you peek at my shopping cart.

 

I bought -
-Organic grains:
  5 lbs. whole oats (called groats)
  1.5 lbs. brown rice
  1 lb rye berries

(We grind the oats in the blender and soak overnight to eat for breakfast.  Click here.  We also make blender batter pancakes, my recipe coming soon, or go to www.suegregg.com to see the original.)

-Store brand (365) baking powder – because it is aluminum-free (I hope it’s good, I usually buy Rumford, but it was over a $1 more.)

-2lb. bag of Sucanat – a true whole sugar, unrefined, we like it in our oatmeal and other things.

-Bragg raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar – great source of enzymes

-Blackstrap molasses – I take a few spoonfuls a week, it’s very high in iron and calcium.)

-bacon (my family loves this, but I HATE buying the nitrate/nitrite filled variety at Walmart, so we are going to try this.)

-hot dogs (see above)

 

Going to Whole Foods is a special occasion for us.  It’s so far away, we don’t go that often, so we will pick up a treat or two.

-I picked up a Lara Bar for myself.  These are really good and they don’t have any junk in them, not even sugar, they are sweetened with dates and raisins and such.  I glanced at a Luna Bar and it was full of junk.  Just goes to show you that you still have to read labels, even in the health food store.

-I also splurged on some crystallized ginger.  It’s good on it’s own, but a friend of mine adds some to her kombucha and it tastes very similar to ginger ale.  I’m going to try this.

-My son picked out some ginger snaps

-My daughter loves those date pieces sold in the bulk section.  I don’t really care for them, they don’t have any added sweetener and they look like puppy chow, but she likes them, so she gets them.  :)

 

Hope you enjoyed seeing what I buy at Whole Foods.  You will notice that I don’t really buy any packaged food here.  That stuff is unhealthy, whether you buy it at Walmart or Whole Foods.  Processed is processed.  :)

Why?

I am going to start a series called Why?  In it I will select a few things I do/supplements I take/food I eat and explain why.

 

While I was mulling over things to include in this series, I ran across this post on Cheeseslave – Top Ten Reasons to Drink Raw Milk.  This post is wonderful!  It includes all the reasons why I love raw milk.  I love all the Powerpoint slides, especially the one regarding food-borne illnesses.  Thank you, Ann Marie, for putting this together!

This is Ridiculous

I am making caramel sauce this weekend.  I buy raw milk, cream and cheese from a local dairy, but I wasn’t sure that I needed anything this week so I didn’t order.  Then I realized I needed cream for this caramel sauce.  I thought pasteurized cream wouldn’t make a difference since the sauce is cooked anyway, so I went to my local Walmart to buy some.  I picked up three different brands and was very disappointed to find that none were pure cream–they all had additives.  Here is the listing of ingredients that I found–cream, skim milk, less than 1% of each of the following: mono and diglycerides, polysorbate 80, and carrageenan.  I thought this was ridiculous that I couldn’t just buy plain cream, so I told myself I would go to our local Braum’s (local dairy and ice cream shop).  I thought SURELY they would carry pure cream.  They do advertise that their products are hormone-free.  Well, sad to say, their cream was the exact same as all the others.  So, lesson learned, If I can at all help it, I will never buy cream at the grocery store again.  Only pure unadulterated cream for my family, especially after researching those ingredients!

But isn’t it natural?

I mentioned last week that I don’t reach for chips, granola bars, snack mixes, or pretzels when I need a snack.  One of the reasons is that the oil in these products is highly processed.

 

You may ask, though, “Isn’t is natural?  It’s vegetable oil, or it comes from corn, or soybeans, or sunflower seeds, those are natural things?  What can be wrong with that?”

 

Well, I’m glad you asked!  Read on.

 

The oil used in packaged food DOES come from natural things, like corn, soybeans, sunflower seeds, safflower seeds, and rape seeds (canola), to name a few; the problem comes in HOW the oil is extracted.  If you tried to press corn you wouldn’t get much oil.  The same goes for soybeans.  The oil we get from these plants is a modern product, a product of the industrial age.  The ancient presses people used thousands of years ago to extract oil from olives would not give the same results with corn or soybeans.

 

You may be thinking, “God has given men creative minds and those men have come up with some fabulous inventions!”  So what could be wrong with this invention that allows us to extract oil from corn and soybeans?

 

Well, simply the motivation.  If the motive were to help mankind, they would do the proper research and see what effect this new invention had on the oil and on our health.  Unfortunately, the motive was selfish, a way to increase the bottom line.  With this new ability to use these vegetable oils, cakes and cookies had a much longer shelf life, thus opening up a whole market for packaged foods that didn’t exist before.  These items made with the traditional fats like butter, didn’t last nearly as long and therefore could not be mass marketed.

 

When you eat an olive, you know that it’s oily, you don’t think of corn as an oily food.  I heard of a fun experiment for kids once, to take a nut and rub it on paper to see the oil coming from it.  I doubt you could do the same experiment with corn or soybeans.  I know that corn and soybeans aren’t fatty, but I didn’t know for sure how much or little fat they had, so I did a little searching on the Internet and this is what I found.  Corn oil is taken from the germ, one bushel yields 1.55 pounds oil (2.8% by weight).  Soybeans are 90% water, 3% protein, 6% carbohydrate and ONLY .0018% fat!  So you have to grow a LOT of soybeans to produce soybean oil!  (Also known as vegetable oil.)  The yield from olives will vary from year to year depending on many factors (as I’m sure it does from corn and soybeans, as well), but the range is from 10 to 30%!  Also, my package of almonds says that the oil content is 50% (by weight), not sure how much comes out by pressing.  So it seems I was right in saying corn and soybeans are not oily.

 

So how do processors extract oil from things like corn and soybeans and what is the BIG deal?

 

Dr. Don Colbert writes in What Would Jesus Eat? –

“Seeds are heated to high temperatures of approximately 250 degrees Fahrenheit, and then the seed is pressed to expel the oil.  The oil in this process is unavoidably subjected to heat and pressure, which increase the rancidity of the oil.

 

Then, solvents—similar to gasoline—are added to the oil to dissolve the oil out of the grain.  The oil is then heated to more than 300 degrees to evaporate the solvent.

 

In the next step, the oil is degummed, a process that removes most of the nutrients—including minerals such as calcium, magnesium, iron, and copper, as well as chlorophyll, phospholipids, and lecithin.

 

By this time the oil has a yellowish tinge, so it is bleached at high temperatures, which cause more rancidity and more lipid peroxides to form.  The damaged oil is then deodorized at temperatures of more than 500 degrees for thirty minutes to an hour.

 

The end result is an odorless, clear oil that appears sterile and pure, but is in fact full of toxic lipid peroxides that can cause significant free-radical reactions leading to cardiovascular disease and cancer.”  (Emphasis mine.)

 

So we see that the big issue here is that in this process the oil becomes damaged and when we ingest it, it causes havoc.

 

Here is a prime example of something that WAS natural, but was destroyed by man and therefore isn’t healthy for us.  Vegetable oils are in most packaged foods, especially frozen meals, chips, cookies, crackers, and snack cakes, which is one of the reasons why I have placed them near the bottom of The Ladder of Healthy Eating.

 

It is much better for your health to stick with traditional fats, things people have been eating for thousands of years, things that Jesus even ate, things like butter, olive oil, coconut oil, and animal fats.  These fats are very stable and there is plenty of research showing many healthy benefits.  This is why you can make many of the things that you would find in a store, at home, from scratch and they will be healthier.  Things like cookies and cakes.  We obviously don’t want to eat these foods all the time, but if they are made at home with traditional fats, they will be healthier for you.

 

Remember the motto – If God created it, it is healthy; if man has adulterated it, it is unhealthy.  Enjoy whole food and enjoy health!

Macaroni and Cheese

Update 1/8/09

All kids love macaroni and cheese.  My son never cared for the powdered cheese variety so I started buying him the creamy kind, which I liked better, too.  I am a cost-conscience mother though, so after a few boxes at $2.86 each, I decided we needed another option.  I did the math and realized I could buy a pound of Velveeta and some generic macaroni and make an individual portion of macaroni and cheese for about 25 cents!  Much better and he liked it, too (he is a bit picky).

 

I was not raised on Velveeta, I knew full well that it was processed junk food, but I just ignored my better judgment.  We did this for a few years and then one day a friend mentioned how Velveeta has a shelf life of many, many years, unopened.  It can not possibly be even remotely like real cheese if it can last that long at room temperature.  Velveeta is basically like plastic!  I knew this, but it was really helpful hearing it again.  Sometimes we have to hear things a few times and from a few different sources for it to sink in.

 

I decided then, no more Velveeta.  So I found a wonderful recipe for macaroni and cheese with REAL cheese and it tastes fabulous!  It did take my son a few times of trying it to forget about the Velveeta.  J  Not only has he forgotten about the Velveeta, he LOVES this recipe!  Sometimes when we switch our family off of a packaged food item we just need to not have that food item for a while, so they can forget about it.  Then introduce another version and if they still do not go for it, wait a while longer.

 

This recipe is practically as easy as a boxed variety.  It makes about 6 servings as a main dish; it will be more as a side dish.  We enjoy ours with a side of broccoli with plenty of butter on it.  If you have extra time, you can add an extra special touch – toss some fresh bread crumbs with melted butter and toast in the oven till golden brown, 375°F for approximately 15 minutes.  Use these as a yummy, crunchy topping.  Mmm, so good! 

 

Bring 2 quarts of salted water to boil in a medium saucepan.

 

Add 3 cups macaroni or other small shaped pasta (14 oz.), cook until al dente; drain.  Pasta is a compromise food regardless of whether it is whole grain or not.  Do not be fooled by the new higher fiber varieties that promise Omega-3 and such.  They are still packaged food.  Pick pasta you enjoy and just do not eat it every night.  J  If you have issues with wheat you can find pasta made out of other grains at the health food store.

 

After you have drained the pasta, return it to the pan and add 2 tablespoons of butter.  Turn the heat back on to medium and stir until the butter is melted.  Add 1 cup half and half or whole milk and salt (I use abut ½ teaspoon) to the pan and keep stirring.  (You can add an optional few dashes of mustard powder here.  I know it seems strange, but it is really good, even the kids like it, it adds a bit of depth.)  Add 8 ounces grated cheese (we like White Sharp Cheddar), 1 tablespoon flour (omit if you do not eat wheat), and stir until melted and creamy.  Add an additional ½ cup of half and half or whole milk and keep stirring till heated through.  Serve immediately.

 

Note:  The key here is salting to taste.  Taste your cooking before it gets to the table.  I didn’t used to do this and now that I do, it makes a big difference.  I can salt my food once it’s at the table, but a child is not likely to, they just know the food does not taste quite right.  Especially when we introduce new foods to our families and try to cut out some of their packaged food favorites, we want that food to taste it is best, so do not be afraid of this important seasoning!

 

Update – Food made with real cheese versus Velveeta can be hard to clean off dishes.  I have learned a trick that makes it easy.  Fill the pan with warm water and generously sprinkle in baking soda.  Add a couple squirts of dish soap.  Let soak for a bit (10 min.).  Scrub the pan WITH that baking soda liquid still in it, it seems to work better than if you empty the pan out.  The cheese should come off easily.  Make sure you have most of it scrubbed off before rinsing, the baking soda really helps release the cheese.  For the plates and bowls I just sprinkle a bit of baking soda on and then scrub.