The Best Foods to Eat at Mardi Gras

There is a lot to do at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, especially eat. Since the city was born, food has traditionally played a strong role in the culture of city, and still does today. Whether you're from out of town, or a life-long native, this wonderful discussion of food will either guide you in the right direction for planning your menu for guests during Mardi Gras, or give you an idea of where to eat while you're in town.

Fried Chicken

Fried chicken is a well-loved all around the United States, especially in the South. For some reason or another, any New Orleans native can tell you that they grew up eating fried chicken on the parade route. Fried chicken is the perfect parade food because it's cheap, portable and extremely satisfying. Since you don't need utensils (or anything but napkins for that matter) to eat chicken it's very convenient for the parade route. Whether it's McCardy's or even Popeyes, the people of NOLA love to eat chicken at parades.

King Cake

You can't discuss Mardi Gras food without mentioning king cake. King cake came from Europe, and has evolved into something unique to New Orleans. The cake is composed of a simple dough, twisted and coated with sugar and cinnamon, and usually topped with frosting and sprinkles. There are many bakeries that make this delicious treat in New Orleans, and everyone has a favorite. Haydel's bakery is definitely one of the most well-known options in the city, but even if it's a generic king cake from the grocery store, it's still a great addition to the parade route.

Red Beans and Rice

While Red Beans and Rice might be difficult to serve on the parade route, many people do it. Mardi Gras is as much a celebration of the city of New Orleans as it is a celebration of life itself, and there are few dishes more quintessentially New Orleans than red beans and rice. If you cook it right, it's one of the best things you could ever have. Nothing goes better with New Orleans than a little bit of red beans.

The Roast Beef Poor Boy

This may not have been everyone's first choice for a Mardi Gras must-have, but bear with me. If you're having people over to your house, it's actually a no-brainer. To cook the roast beef, just get any recipe for roast that you can find (leave out the carrots and celery), and cook it over night for 12 hours. When you wake up, get some french bread, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomatoes and pickles, and let people go to town. If you're not from New Orleans, the roast beef is still a great option. A properly executed roast beef will be served to you warm, slathered with gravy and mayonnaise; an extremely hearty dish. You can get it from many poor boy shops around the parade route, including Tracy's in the Irish Channel neighborhood.

Read more »

Posted in: Foods,Mardi

Hunting for Hidden Sugar in Foods: Become a Sugar Detective

Sugar is added to commercial foods for sweetness and because it acts as a preservative. You may think sugar is easy to spot on food labels. It may be. On the other hand, many commercial products contain sugar you don't know about. This sugar may contribute to weight gain over time.

I've put on 15-20 extra pounds n the last few years. To help me lose weight I am giving up sugar for two weeks. This is an easy decision for me because I don't eat candy and rarely eat desserts. Yet I am probably consuming more sugar than I realize.

Sugar has many names and "Prevention" magazine lists them in its website article, "Want to Cut Down on the Sweet Stuff? You have to Find it First." As the article notes, "Sugar hides behind many different names on food labels." These names include sucrose, fructose, glucose, dextrose, galactose, lactose, maltose, invert sugar, raw sugar, turbinado sugar, corn syrup, and high fructose corn syrup.

Commercial products may also contain honey, maple syrup, molasses, confectioner's sugar and brown sugar.

A WebMD article tackles the hidden sugar issue in its article, "Sugar Shockers: Foods Surprisingly High in Sugar." Obviously cake mixes, cookie mixes, jams, ice cream, and carbonated drinks contain sugar. "But it can be downright shocking to see 12 grams of sugar in bottled pasta or barbecue sauce," the article contends.

Consumers shouldn't be fooled by labels that say "whole grain," "fat-free," or "excellent source of calcium," the article continues. Worse, beverages that brag about being 100 percent juice may contain added sugar. The only way to ferret out hidden sugar is to read every food label.

Fruit chillers, apple sauce, canned fruit in light syrup, and pudding cups all contain sugar. So do snack cakes, muffin mixes, bakery products cereal bars, instant hot cereals, flavored milk, bottled tea, energy drinks, cocoa, yogurt, and frozen breakfast products, according to the article. Reading this list made me race to the pantry.

I am a careful shopper and made-from-scratch cook. Did I have sugar-packed products on the shelves? A few. Red pepper relish, a product I enjoy, contains 25 grams of sugar. Honey peanut butter contains honey and sugar and, according to the label, has 5 grams of sugar per serving. Four cheese spaghetti sauce, a jar that has been on the shelf for months, contains 6 grams of sugar.

Mayo Clinic warns about sugar and sweeteners in a website article, "Added Sugar: Don't Get Sabotaged by Sweeteners." Sugar is a natural ingredient in some foods, the article notes. It is used in commercial products to help yeast to rise, bulk up baked goods and ice cream, and balance the acidity of tomatoes. Too much sugar can lead to tooth decay, poor nutrition, weight gain, and an increase in triglycerides.

The American Heart Association has set standards for sugar consumption. Women should eat no more than 100 calories from sugar a day. Men should eat no more than 150 calories. One hundred calories equals about six teaspoons of sugar and 150 calories equals about nine. Many Americans exceed these recommendations.

Giving up sugar for two weeks has turned me into a sugar detective and I will probably be one for the rest of my life. I avoid sweetened cereal (hot and cold), fruit drinks, condiments, including salad dressings, sweetened tea, and baked goods made with sugar. "By limiting the amount of added sugar in your diet, you can cut calories without comprising nutrition," Mayo Clinic explains.

Do you need to lose a few pounds? Become a sugar detective and cut back on sugar. It's easier than you think!

Read more »

Posted in: Become,Detective,Foods,Hidden,Hunting,Sugar

Infant Nutrition With Organic Foods

Infants need baby food just as adults need their favorite food. But baby nutrition has been deeply affected by the growth of non-organic foods. The concept of organically produced foods has caught wind in the past decade, tracing its emergence to the mid 1990's. Would you like it if somebody told you to drink a gallon of nitrate fertilizer: would you even do it? Well, you might be shocked to know you might have consumed more than a gallon after eating fertilizer-laden produce for all your life. The concept of fertilizer was used to get rid of pests and insects in the soil. They destroyed the crops and so fertilizer industries blossomed all over the place.

But the same tool that got rid of the insects has now turned its fire on the human population. Years of crops smothered with fertilizer makes the fertilizer go right down into the soil. The soil holds this fertilizer for years which makes it all the more harmful as the fertilizer is now expired and has become downright deadly to grow any more crops in.

Ripple effect

Chemically potent soil gives rise to chemically harmful crops. If you remember your school science, you will recollect that roots absorb mineral salts and water from the soil. If the soil is tinged with nitrates, the water will be tinged with nitrates too. This alarming transplanting of chemicals affects the crops grown; this deadly crop travels down to the supermarkets in trucks and finally sits in our shopping bags to come home with us.

Fertilizers are used to boost crop outputs. Large crop outputs lead to big money. So the obsession with making money has led to the sacrifice of health. A carrot or an apple today is scientifically proven to contain only 50% of the nutrition it used to hold about 50 years back - which means you think you're eating a wholesome carrot but you are not. What you are eating is a carrot look-alike - with nitrates in it.

Effect on meat

Animals that live on the farm graze on the grass there which means they also get contaminated. Then again in a lot of farms dairy and poultry animals are force-fed with anti-biotic medicine to increase production of milk and eggs. Disease can also spread from eating such farm products. When these animals die, they decompose into the soil and leave the remnants of the anti-biotic and the chemically eaten grass back into the soil; and the story begins all over again. So meat, milk and poultry products are not exempt either.

Organic baby food

With adults in danger, it makes it imperative to make babies safe from this kind of chemical attack. Babies need to be fed only with organic baby snacks like Earth's Best products to protect them from diseases. Babies' bodies are delicate and vulnerable to disease as their physical systems are still in the early stages of development. The parents may buy baby food unsuspectingly from the supermarket, but that might not be natural baby food at all but baby food prepared with the same chemically treated ingredients.

Real dangers from eating chemically treated crops

The list of diseases that can spring up from eating fertilizer doused crops begins with cancer. The growing number of cancer cases all over the world is a strong pointer to this. Other diseases related to increased chemical toxicity in the body are obesity and Alzheimer's disease.

Turning back the clock

Now luckily due to growing awareness, every supermarket has organic sections where organic produce is displayed for purchase. Organic food refers to crops grown without fertilizers. Naturally these crops are more expensive as the organic farms strive to produce crops without artificially inflating their rate of growth. But if this extra money means a healthier body with an improved immune system then the money is an investment not expenditure. Perhaps this explains why people of olden days lived longer and healthier lives though the medical facilities were not so far advanced back then. They didn't need the medication!

Perhaps it's time to undo some of the negative effects of modernization and turn back to the good old methods of farming.

Read more »

Posted in: Foods,Infant,Nutrition,Organic

Asian Foods You Must Try

Are Asian foods healthier and less caloric than Western foods? It depends. Certainly, a bowl of dashi garnished with cubes of tofu and chopped scallions isn't very caloric, but a similar bowl of chicken soup isn't either. But here are some Asian foods you must try before the bucket is kicked.

Sushi and Sashimi

Yes, some people are a bit revolted by the idea of eating raw fish, but these two Japanese dishes are oh so good, especially when the vinegared rice is prepared just right and the fish is so fresh that it's still in rigor mortis. Fish and seafood used for sushi include salmon, tuna, though not the overfished bluefin, eel, flounder, octopus, shrimp, abalone and salmon roe. If the dieter really can't bear raw fish, they can have sushi made with avocado, sweetened egg, or cucumber.

Dashi

Dashi is a broth made with a sheet of kombu seaweed and dried bonito flakes, bonito being a fish. It has a delicate taste and aroma and is the basis for many Japanese soups. It is wonderful to drink with nothing in it on cold winter nights.

Tempura

The calorie count with this dish might be fairly high because it involves dipping food in batter and deep frying it. The great thing about tempura is that it can be made out of anything, including chunks of seafood, sliced Japanese eggplant, carrots, tofu, green squash, slices of lotus root and green onions. It should be drained and eaten while it's hot, for cold or left over tempura has lost much of its appeal.

Hot and Sour Soup

This delicious soup is made from tree fungus, dried tiger lilies, dried shiitake mushrooms and tofu in beef stock. All of the ingredients can be found easily in an Asian market and they're inexpensive. The dieter shouldn't worry about the tree fungus. It's also called cloud ears and is a black mushroom that's grown on logs. It's dried and when it's rehydrated it seems to grow ten times its size, then it's sliced and added to the soup. The soup only needs one or two to suffice.

Peking Dust

This dessert is a bit fussy to make, but it's heavenly. It uses raw chestnuts, sugar, a pinch of salt, heavy cream, one orange and glaceéd walnuts. The chestnuts are pureed, then garnished with the orange and walnuts and slathered with whipped cream in a mold.

Lamb Korma

This is an Indian dish where chunks of lamb are cooked in a creamy curry sauce and served with rice, chutney, raita or onion sambal. Made with coriander, cumin, cardamom seeds, ginger, cloves, red pepper and garlic, it smells as good as it tastes.

Wontons Stuffed with Pork, Cabbage, Scallions and Ginger

Though a lot of people may have bought wontons at their take-out place, there's nothing like making some at home. They're not that hard to make, and practice makes perfect.

Onigiri

These are rice balls and are very popular in Japanese picnic boxes. The ingredients include fresh salmon fillet, one sheet of dried nori, which is also used for wrapping sushi, bonito flakes and umeboshi, pickled and salted plums. Onigiri are a bit labor intensive to make, but, again, worth it.

Miso Soup with Oysters and Bean Curd

Miso is soy bean paste and this dashi-based soup uses red and white miso, fried bean curd, regular bean curd, about 16 oysters, Japanese parsley, fresh ginger root and sansho powder. It's very, very delicious indeed.

Read more »

Posted in: Asian,Foods

Foods That Act As Aphrodisiacs

Down the ages there have been many foods which have been considered aphrodisiacs; some are still considered to be so; but others? They are very common foods and not at all sexy. The humble swede is one of these and celery is supposed to be a natural Viagra, lasting for a few hours. If you boil five or six celery stalks to a pulp, then your man should be able to conquer any erectile dysfunctions if he eats them hot.

Oysters and other seafood allegedly have aphrodisiac properties, as does caviar. However, could it be that the cost of these items and the rituals around eating items such as caviar give them a potent sexual aura? Lobsters are reported to be aphrodisiacs, but not necessarily crayfish, whereas a friend of mine swears by prawns. What is it that these foods have in common? The answer is quite simple- the minerals zinc, potassium and selenium combined with vitamin B1 thiamin. Oysters also have iodine, iron, calcium, manganese and phosphorous packed into them, but it would seem that males need zinc and potassium especially to help them.

Throughout the centuries saffron has been regarded as an aphrodisiac as have cinnamon, vanilla, sesame seeds, pistachio nuts, almonds and walnuts, pomegranates, pine nuts, avocado, angelica, lychees, bamboo shoots, and the oils of patchouli and jasmine, along with the most expensive oil of all - oud oil. Then there is kiora or kewra which is obtained from the screw pine and can be used in cooking, particularly in desserts.

One of the foods that you can find in the wood is the pignut, earth nut or earth chestnut, and Nicholas Culpeper, the 17th century English herbalist says of this tuber: -

"They are called earth-nuts, earth-chesnuts, ground-nuts, ciper-nuts, and in Sussex pig-nuts. A description of them were needless, for every child knows them.

Government and virtues. They are something hot and dry in quality, under the dominion of Venus; they provoke lust exceedingly, and stir up to those sports she is mistress of; the seed is excellent good to provoke urine; and so also is the root, but it doth not perform it so forcibly as the seed both."

Remember that these could be an endangered species, where you live, so check before you rush out to forage for them. They grow in bluebell woods and the roots look similar but bluebell roots are poisonous.

The easiest aphrodisiac to find is celery or swede, and of course, tomatoes, once called "Love Apples" also had a reputation as an aphrodisiac. We now know that tomatoes contain lycopene which is best heated and this can enhance a man's sexual prowess as well as helping to reduce the risk of prostate problems. Any red fruit also contains lycopene, watermelons, red raspberries and strawberries for example.

While some foods undoubtedly have an aphrodisiac effect on some people, it may be that they do not work in he same way for everyone. You can set the mood with a few glasses of champagne which will serve to lower inhibitions of course, and then compose a meal of any of the foods mentioned above. Combine this with jasmine-scented candles, and with some patchouli oil somewhere in the room, but not too much as it can be overpowering, have a candlelight dinner which I hope you will remember for its good points.

Read more »

Posted in: Aphrodisiacs,Foods