Category: Food

Designing the right garden and yard space to suit your lifestyle can be difficult, but it’s certainly possible - especially if you work with a professional landscape designer. The first thing you need to consider is any large elements such as swimming pools or pool fencing that will influence your whole landscape design. Different pool fencing styles are suited to different landscape designs. For example, glass pool fencing from places like Clear Az Glass are probably most suited to open areas and well manicured gardens. On the other hand, something like tubular metal pool fencing usually works best with gardens that benefit from being separated into sections. With this in mind, let’s have a look at a few of the ways that the pool fence that you choose can influence the landscape design an expert landscape designers can produce. (more…)

While we all know the importance of a healthy diet, it is sometimes easy to forget that even the healthiest of foods can be spoiled by poor cooking, the addition of other less healthy accompaniments and even by the way we eat. Here are some tips to ensure you get all the nutrients possible from your healthy diet.

• Cooking – never overcook vegetables. They should be lightly steamed or sautéed to ensure all the nutrients remain in them. Boiling them reduces the nutrients most of which are tipped down the sink along with the water. Juicing vegetables is a good way to ensure a healthy addition to your diet, especially if there are some goodies you don’t actually like. Mixed in with other vegetables you’ll never notice the taste. Eating them raw is also a good way to keep all the nutrients from being spoiled by heat. However, not everyone can eat veggies raw and light cooking does make the nutrients more easily available in some cases.
• Less healthy additions – these can be added by the way you cook, e.g. frying vegetables or meat means they absorb some of the fat. Even frying in olive oil is not as good as steaming. Even though olive oil is a ‘good’ fat, heating changes it to some extent, although not as much as heating other kinds of vegetable oils.

While not many young people make cakes or slices from a basic recipe any more, often they are so quick and simple that it’s no more trouble to cook them than it is to make up a packet cake, especially when there are only five ingredients. If you decide to throw together a homemade slice your family are sure to come back for seconds, but that’s okay; home cooking in newly renovated kitchens is much healthier than anything processed and packet cakes come under that heading. Besides, making your own cakes is fun and satisfying, knowing you’ve created food from scratch that is much healthier than any processed food and tastes better as well. Many recipes found in magazines these days seem to be complicated and have ingredients that have to be searched for and bought especially. But when the ingredients can almost always be found in the pantry it all becomes a lot simpler. All you really need is a set of measuring scales so the quantities will be right. (more…)

Do you spend your days wondering what cake you’ll buy next, or dreaming of the delicious morsels of cake you had last time you were at Gran’s place? It is not easy to get good cake with just the right amount of moisture - and the flavour that you could die for. Making a cake is a skill that not many people have, but it’s not impossible, so don’t despair. It is all the fault of the education system that took basic cooking out of high schools and replaced it with the science of cooking, a much more complicated subject in which students rarely did any cooking. When they did it was some amazingly exotic food that looked wonderful and tasted disgusting. (more…)

Introduction to Cinco De Mayo Are you looking for creative ways to teach students about countries around the world? As teachers and school foodservice professionals, you can work together to make learning fun by combining food and history in the classroom. This is a sample lesson plan on how to bring Cinco De Mayo to life for your students. Lesson Overview: This lesson is designed to introduce students to the Mexican holiday, Cinco de Mayo. Students will have the opportunity to learn about typical foods of Mexico and explore the history and origins of some authentic Mexican foods.At the end of the lesson, students can make their own healthy tortilla wraps. (more…)

Below are some recommended children's books on food and good nutrition. Check one out at your local library today! The Amazing Milk Book by Paulette Bourgeois, Catherine Ross and Susan Wallace This book describe milk's chemistry, nutritional value, production and use as a component of cheese and other foods. It's enriched with anecdotes and humor. The Beastly Feast by Bruce Goldstone At the great animal feast, bears bring pears and mosquitoes bring burritos. (more…)