Quick Cooking Tips - 2 Basic Recipes to Create Unlimited Amounts of Healthy Meals Fast

By Bettina Berlin

We all have days where we don't have much time to cook, and then it can be a challenge to still provide healthy and tasty food for our loved ones. I love using my recipe books and trying new recipes, but I figured out that cooking with a recipe takes more time. When I'm in a hurry, then I'm simply faster without using a recipe because this saves me the time of reading and memorizing the recipe, or going back at times to check what to do next.

So, I've developed a few very basic recipes that I can easily remember and adapt in any way I need. When I'm in a hurry, then all I do is open my fridge or check my pantry, grab some vegetables or cans and throw a nice healthy meal together within half an hour. No need to follow a complicated or long written recipe.

Here are 2 of my secret cook-in-a-hurry recipes. Both make four servings and are quick and easy to make, especially the pasta

Basic recipe #1: Vegetarian Stew

Use foods that only have a short cooking time and are quick to prepare, for example marrows, aubergines, mushrooms, tomatoes. You can also use canned or frozen vegetables which will make it even quicker.

Ingredients

* 2 tbsp. oil
* 1 onion, chopped
* 1,5 kg mixed vegetables, cut into small pieces or thin slices
* 250-500 ml water or vegetable stock
* 300 g starchy foods (rice, pasta, potatoes, couscous) or 4 rolls


Steps

Cooking the vegetables:

1. Heat the oil in a large pot and fry the onions until golden.
2. Add the vegetables and half of the water.
3. Cover and allow simmering for about 15-20 minutes until the veggies are done.
4. Season with your favourite spices and serve.


Starchy foods:

* If you are using rice, start cooking it before cooking the vegetables.
* When cooking pasta, start after adding the water in step 2.
* Potatoes can be added with the other vegetables in step 2.
* Couscous can be prepared about 5 minutes before the vegetables are done.
* If you decided on rolls, simply serve them with the vegetables


Basic recipe #2: Pasta with Tomato and Mixed Vegetable Sauce

Ingredients

* 300 g pasta
* 2 tbsp. oil
* 1 onion, chopped
* 4 cans of various vegetables, e.g. 2 cans of peeled chopped tomatoes and 2 of mushrooms (add peeled tomatoes and baked beans with the sauce, but drain all other vegetables)
* 50 g grated cheese


Steps

1. Start cooking the pasta.
2. Heat the oil in a large pan and fry the onions until golden. Add the canned veggies, mix well and warm it until everything is hot.
3. Season, sprinkle with cheese and serve with the pasta.


As you can see, these recipes are very basic and can be prepared with nearly everything you find at home. They allow you to create a wide variety of different meals, so you could use one of these recipes seven times without eating the same food every day. That's what makes them so great. You don't even have to think a minute about what to cook, you just decide on one of your basic recipes, grab some ingredients and go. Half an hour later, dinner is ready.

Bettina Berlin is a health professional specializing in healthy nutrition even on a tight schedule. Eating healthy and thus maintaining a healthy weight can significantly improve your health and help prevent many diseases. Is your life so hectic that preparing healthy food often seems impossible? Then visit http://www.elishas-quick-recipes.blogspot.com today and get your FREE fast cooking tips and much delicious quick easy recipes!

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Healthy Eating and Why You Should Develop a Healthy Eating Plan

Now firstly, I do not wish to get people yawning at the thought of another boring piece of text that preaches doom for anyone who actually enjoy eating. In fact, I hope to dispel the widely held but totally false belief that healthy eating and enjoyable eating are completely incompatible.

There is so much media hype concerning food and how to control what and how we should eat that we lose sight of the fact that ... FOOD IS THERE TO BE ENJOYED.

In fact, Healthy Eating is not about strict dietary regimes, or depriving yourself of the foods you really enjoy in order to attain a body shape that is quite unnatural. Rather, it's about feeling really good by having more energy, and keeping yourself as healthy as possible so that you can enjoy life to the full.

This can all be achieved by learning some simple nutritional basics and incorporating them in a way that works for you. Then it is all about choice.

It is not difficult to choose between foods that can increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes and even cancer and foods that will actually improve your health. Then by choosing from an extensive range of healthy options and by following some simple guideline, you can create and maintain a healthy and satisfying diet that will include a wide variety of delicious foods.

In the past healthy eating might mean "bland, tasteless and boring" but today, with all the choices we have available, it really can be both "delicious and enjoyable". It is important that we adopt a positive attitude to our food and ensure that food really is one of life's pleasures.

It is not within the scope of a short article to explore all the ways in which we can ensure that we really are enjoying a diet that is both healthy and satisfying. But there are three basic components that any healthy eating plan should be built around and these are Variety, Balance and Moderation

• Variety - it is extremely important that every diet should include foods of all types, as no one type of food can supply all the essential nutrients that the body needs to grow and remain healthy.

• Balance - means that you eat the correct amounts of food from each food group in order to obtain the nutrients and calories essential to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

• Moderation - it is obvious that any guide to a healthy diet would warn against eating too much of any one particular type of food. Too much is as bad as too little in any Healthy Eating plan.

As variety is one of the basic components of a healthy eating program, then there is absolutely no reason why anyone should feel unduly restricted in their choice of food. There are certainly sufficient options to choose from so as to ensure that their diet is completely healthy, varied and satisfying.

Furthermore, as we now have easy access to foods from all around the world we can benefit from a huge variety of tastes and flavors that were not available in days gone by. More importantly, many of the cultures in places such the Near and Far East have developed cuisines, over the centuries, which are recognized as being particularly health promoting, where variety and balance are vital components of their dishes.

So you can now combine the healthiest dishes from around the world to ensure that your healthy eating plan is completely well balanced and varied.

There are many books, articles and websites devoted to Healthy Eating that provide important guidelines which will help to ensure that the correct choices are made when deciding to adopt a completely healthy way of eating. So there is no reason why you cannot enjoy your food and maintain the healthy lifestyle that you know is so important.

So, go ahead, enjoy your food, enjoy a healthy lifestyle.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits of Healthy Eating and acquire many healthy eating tips that could help you develop your own healthy eating plan then a great place to begin is Complete Guide to Delicious Healthy Eating. Discover how to make Healthy Eating enjoyable, delicious and fun CLICK HERE.

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Nutritional People - How Can You Tell Who is the Real Deal?

There are often many nutritional people appearing on the TV, radio, internet and newspapers. These people may be nutritional scientists, reporters or possibly even just a person who has a new theory about nutrition. Some of these crazy theories in the past would have lead us to believe that Vitamin C gives you hives, artichokes cure cancer and not to eat berries and cheese in the same meal.

So how do you know which nutritional people to trust?

There are several groups of people who will provide you with nutritional information that you can use with confidence. The best information comes from nutrition scientists. These people have degrees, usually in biology, chemistry, biochemistry or physics and are primarily engaged in conducting research relating to the effects of food on humans and animals.

Nutrition information can also come from nutrition researchers. There are people who are professionals in their field, such as sociology or medicine and study the effects of food. There are also nutritionists who focus on the study of nutrition. In most places, a nutritionist must have a degree in a basic science course related to nutrition.

There are also dietitians who can provide accurate nutrition information. These are people who have degrees in food and nutrition and science. If the person has R.D. after his or her name, that person has completed a dietetic internship and passed an American Dietetic Association licensing exam.

Finally there are nutrition reporters and writers. These people are likely to provide you with information on the medical or scientific aspects of food. For example, a reporter who concentrates on sports medicine.

Regardless of the source of your nutrition information, it should always pass the reasonable test. Which basically means that if something is too good to be true, or if it sounds ridiculous is probably is.

James has been a nutritionist for 18 years. Please visit his website on rubber car mats which will help you find the best prices on rubber car floor mats for your vehicle.

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Diners: Healthy Eating Survival Guide

Have you ever wondered how in the world you can practice healthy eating while dining out? Wonder no more as I share with you my 9 surefire ways of mastering your dining experience so you not only walk out feeling satisfied, but lean too.

No wonder why people today are more concerned about healthy restaurant eating. A recent study of 300 American chefs showed that 50% didn't even consider the caloric content of the foods they served. As a matter of fact, only 1 out of 6 American chefs feel calorie content is important. Therefore, as expected, a typical chef's main goal is to provide you with an excellent, but not necessarily a healthy, dining experience so you will tell your friends, and come back wanting more. Healthy eating is not on the top of chefs to-do lists. With that said, loading the dishes up with fat, salt, and sugar is of very little concern to most chefs. They are simply willing to do whatever is necessary to show the customer extreme value focusing on the main goals of making their food taste and look great, even if it is at the expense of our health. This extreme perceived value goal has lead to our "super size portion generation" as we sadly see today.

Do to the fast pace seen in today's society, Americans are now getting over one third of there calories from dining out. How many of those calories are actually healthy dining calories? Probably not too many.

In today's society we, as diners, must take on more of a personal responsibility than ever before focusing on healthy restaurant eating. The chefs, restaurants, and our friends are not going to look out for our health. Thus, it is our personal responsibility to preserve our health by eating right while dining out.

Here are 9 surefire health eating tips to help you take personal responsibility by eating right while dining out.

1. Don't arrive ravenous. It is best to have a small snack a couple of hours prior to dining out. This will ensure that you don't enter the restaurant ready to eat the whole bread basket. Don't worry about spoiling your dinner. It is a bad healthy eating habit to come into a restaurant ravenous.

2. Box it up. When an extra large portion comes to the table request a doggy bad immediately before putting a bite of food in your mouth. Cut the extra large portion in half, take it home, and enjoy it tomorrow.

3. Dine at healthy eating establishments. Patronize healthy dining restaurants so you won't be caught in a situation of not being able to find anything healthy on the menu. Don't set yourself up for failure.

4. Tell servers what you want. Be specific to the server about what you want to substitute. It never hurts to ask about getting your food prepared in a healthy dining manner. An example would be replace the mayonnaise with mustard. It never hurts to ask.

5. Dressing on the side. Another healthy eating tip is to order your salad dressing on the side. Be a dipper. You will save yourself added fat, and calories.

6. Beware of the beverage. As you know, wine, beer, and regular sodas all have calories too. Look at the water option to conserve calories. Why drink your calories when you can eat them.

7. Healthy eating means avoid these terms: alfredo, au gratin, breaded crispy, french fried, pesto, hollandaise, light cream sauce, sauteed, or pastry.

8. Don't clean your whole plate. A good healthy eating exercise is to always leave a bit of food on your plate. You don't have to clean your plate. If you follow the doggy bag rule, of course, this may not apply.

9. Eat slowly. Eating slowly is proven to decrease the amount of food you eat. Thus, the caloric content will be less.

By following each of these 9 healthy restaurant eating rules you will have a better chance of taking responsibility of eating right for the preservation your overall health.

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Jim O'Connor is an Execise Physiologist, and celebrity fitness trainer who publishes a popular health and fitness multimedia newsletter called Wellness Word. He is passionate about empowering people with the absolute fitness truth. To discover the secrets of obtaining greater fitness results in less time sign up for his FREE multimedia email minicourse by clicking fitness program.

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Healthy Eating - Is This Practical in America?

United States of America. This is the nation of which one of it's former presidents publicly said, "I don't like broccoli," and another political figure misspelled the word potato. It's also the place where TV commercials make a mockery of buying healthy vegetables at the supermarket when you can get your nutrients from vitamin supplements.

What is healthy eating anyway? Aren't we confused yet? Consider the orange (fruit). We try to improve its health-giving properties as a food, by juicing it and reconstituting it from concentrates and additives. Where is the fiber?

Oh that? We buy fiber supplement pills. And where did the fiber from the orange go? Who knows... It might be fertilizer or landfill.

Invariably, anyone who seems to be encouraging your to eat healthy is trying to sell you something.

You don't even have to have good eyesight (nor have to like eating carrots) to see that our reasons for eating healthy in America have been tainted by our quest for making money.

We put out food guides that claim to encourage us all to eat healthy. But the messages are mixed. Maybe we should try to find out how "sponsors" influenced Harvard's designing of the Healthy Eating Pyramid. I often wondered why they put alcohol and red meat in a healthy dietary guide.

Count the benefits of eating healthy
There are many benefits to healthier eating, personally, nationally, and globally. One can readily think of

* Increased longevity
* Increased national and personal productivity
* Lower costs of national healthcare
* Spend less for drugs and medicines
* Cleaner environment, since we process less food
* Decrease shortage of medical care personnel
* ...and on, and on...

We need a healthy eating plan

There are many "healthy" eating plans sitting on thousands of wasted pages of health publications. We scarcely need more national healthy eating advice. What we need is more effort on an individual level.

I am advocating personal interest and responsibility for our own health. Most people already know that eating lots of fruits and vegetables, getting adequate rest, regular exercise, and avoiding the use of harmful substances are ways of maintaining good healthy. But how many of us find these things easy to do?

How many of us find it easy to resist the influences of fancy advertising instead of falling for the same junk food temptations every time? How many of us had a healthy eating plan that we have followed from youth?

It seems that by nature we are prone to be resentful of what has been scientifically and reasonably more beneficial and instead, inclined to adopt what is harmful.

It's an individual choice

One has to conclude that when it comes down to healthy eating, this is an individual choice. All the sayings, writings, and plans of government health agencies, research organizations, and any other interest groups amount to noise.

Healthy eating is an individual's choice made daily. Our habits are governed by tastes, environment, and what foods are readily available. We do have some control over those factors, though. Let's not wait until some health issues (sickness and disease) come our way. By then, we will be forced to make healthy eating a matter of survival. I know this from experience.

Copyright © 2006 by Bentley Thompson

Bentley writes about lifestyle-related conditions such as diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol, and cardiovascular diseases. He advocates the anti-diabetes diet which he describes on his website. You may visit his website and blog using the following URLs: http://www.anti-diabetes-diet-supplements.com/ and http://choosehealthtoday.blogspot.com

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Why Are Vegetables Losing Their Nutrition? Find out now and save your health!

by: Emily Morris


If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a zillion times. “If you want to be healthy, eat your vegetables!” Certainly, this is still good advice, but there’s a problem creeping in. Vegetables and fruits are losing their nutritious qualities. They may not be providing you with the healthy kick they used to. Sure they look the same, and they might even taste the same, but did you know…

“You’d have to eat 10 servings of spinach to get the same level of minerals from just one serving about 50 years ago.”

That’s what Elmer Heinrich found out when he did his research for his book “The Root of All Disease”. It’s amazing, but it’s also terrible because no one is ever going to eat 10 servings of spinach in one day. To get your ‘optimum nutrition’ according these new statistics you’d have to be an elephant! Or at least eat as much as one….

But why is all this happening?

It sounds rather far-fetched at first that a vegetable or fruit could look and taste the same, but be so lacking in nutrients you need. However, there are several reasons, which most people would never think of. It’s important to know the cause behind something as vital as your own nutrition. You try to eat right, you try to have your ‘required servings’ of fruits and vegetables each day—but what are they really doing for you?

Over-farming causes depleted soil-

Despite farmers’ best efforts with chemical fertilizers and crop rotations, the huge human population’s demands on the soil causes ‘over-farming’. Nutrients you need are depleted from the soil by 100s of previous crop cycles—and if they’re not there, the plants can’t absorb them. This is especially true for the trace-minerals we all need to maintain good health.

Crops are now being bred for the wrong thing-

Fruits and veggies are chosen for several reasons…none of which are their nutritional value. The important thing about them is how they look, how long they stay fresh, how much they weigh, and how they can resist weeds and pests. Are any of those factors helping YOUR health? No, they’re just helping the bottom line. These are no ‘franken foods’ either (genetically modified crops) they’re your usual 100% natural crops which have gone through selective breeding for money making, NOT nutritional qualities. Sure, some genetically modified crops like the black tomato are super-nutritious, but they’re still years away from a real market release.

An experiment for you:

If you look around on TV, do you see commercials for ‘grow at home tomatoes’? Have you ever enjoyed a tomato from a vine at a friend or neighbors’ house? These ‘home grown’ fruits (yes a tomato is a fruit) often taste MUCH better than the ones you find in the supermarket. That’s why kits and vines are so popular in gardens. Supermarket tomatoes are raised only to look good, stay fresh and make the high “weight grade”. They’re NOT bred for taste or nutrition quality.

It’s easy to demonstrate this with something like a tomato, because they have a specific flavor that everyone recognizes, and are easy to grow at home in many climates—unlike spinach or peaches. The point is, that this type of ‘all style no substance’ is afflicting more than tomatoes and affecting much more than flavor.

These statistics show various losses from 1975 compared to 2001. The USDA came up with the facts, and Life Extension Magazine is quoted on the following statistics:

Apples- Vitamin A is down 41%

Broccoli- Calcium and Vitamin A are down 50%

Cauliflower- Vitamin C is down 45%; Vitamin B1 is down 48%; and Vitamin B2 is down 47%

That’s a big drop, and other fruits and vegetables are also affected to varying degrees. So what can you do about it? You want to eat healthy to stay healthy so taking action in your diet is a step to take right away. Vitamin supplements are a great idea. Because vitamins are made, not grown, they are held to nutritional standards, and must contain exactly what you see on the label. But, one cannot live on pills alone! First, consider organic foods and using a home garden. Chances are, your yard was never the site of a huge company farm featuring depleted soil. The foods you grow at home can still pick up necessary minerals from your soil.

But what about apartment or condo dwellers in the city?

No time for a garden? Next, small farms and local growers are also more likely to be farming on land that is not nutritionally deficient, or using “Maximum shelf life” variety plants. Local farms don’t have to ship long distance, and they know you’ll be back for more if you like their produce’s FLAVOR.

Another easy solution is the Chia Seed.

This seed is packed with a full range of B vitamins, trace minerals such as Boron, and it even has more calcium by weight than milk. The seed of the chia plant also has omega 3 oil (the same as that found in fish) and complete protein, just like what is found in meat. These seeds also have both soluble and insoluble fiber and more magnesium than broccoli. They don’t spoil or go rancid like flax, and you can make them taste like whatever you want….but more on that later.

Why is the Chia Seed still a good option for you?

Chia plants only grow in areas most other plants hate. You couldn’t grow a peach or an apple where chia likes to grow. It only grows where it’s hot and dry all the time. This means the land used to grow it hasn’t already been stripped of nutrients. Worried about pesticides? Don’t be. The plant takes care of itself like no other—producing an oil in the leaves and stems that insects and other pests can’t stand. Chemical pesticides don’t even need to be touched when you’ve got chia growing. The plants are still pulling in all the nutrients you need while being free from toxic chemical pesticides.

So by looking to a food that’s unusual and new, you can still get the nutrients your body needs despite depleted soil in many areas. These seeds have no flavor of their own, so they’re not prepared like the food you’re used to. No one sits down to a pile of chia as they would rice. Instead, they’re super easy in an all-new way. You simply add them to food you already like to eat. The flavorless seeds then absorb moisture from that food (whether it be yogurt, salad dressing, cereal with milk, tomato sauce, or your favorite drink—almost anything will do!) and take on the taste of the food or drink. You won’t have any problems with “I don’t want to eat my vegetables” when these nutritious seeds can taste like anything from orange juice to chocolate pudding without ever diluting the flavor. There are even many easy and fun Chia Seed Recipes that you can use to make both new and familiar meals lower in fat and higher in nutrients by adding chia. All the nutrition is still there just waiting to be eaten in the way of your choice.

Don’t let these startling statistics stop you on your quest for greater health, energy and longevity. You can still take control of your nutrition and improve your health.


About The Author
You can learn much more about how the Chia Seed can help you with photos, videos facts and more at MySeeds Chia Seeds , plus, don't forget about our 2 free chia cook books and free shipping too! This article can be reprinted so long as it is not altered and the links are kept intact.

The author invites you to visit:
http://www.mychiaseeds.com

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