One Simple Tip to Cook Better Forever
Do you assess your seasoning by how well it pours? Stop! So-called “table salt” is rock or ocean salt that’s mined, heat blasted, chemically treated and fortified with iodine until it’s devoid of all essential minerals and nutrients. Use this simple tip to cook better, forever!
Is Heritage Turkey Worth It?
So you’re gearing up for Thanksgiving, the time when supermarkets practically—and sometimes, literally—give away turkeys in order to get you to shop in their stores. And unless you’re preparing for a vegan holiday meal, you’ll need to get your poultry order in stat. But then you look at the prices: This time of year, conventional turkeys can be purchased for as little as $.39 per pound, while at Williams Sonoma, a heritage turkey can ring up at nearly $200. Is it worth the price?
Jumpstart to Sustainable Food Habits
For years, I’ve been a total fan of Pamela Salzman, a certified holistic health counselor and a cooking instructor who shares healthful recipes and nutrition advice on her blog PamelaSalzman.com. A mother of three, Pamela lives in Manhattan Beach, but teaches all over Southern California. She has inspired me to create more sustainable food habits with my family. Want to join in the fun? Follow the advice that Pamela shared exclusively with Mommy Greenest in this post, or better yet sign up for one of her amazing classes! Much of the food we consume these days is a product of a broken and unsustainable food system. This food is dependent on…
Go Semi-Vegetarian! 2 Ways to Ditch Dioxins
My family is not vegan. We’re not even completely vegetarian. I serve the occasional organic, grass-fed hamburger, and I let them order conventional burgers in restaurants, if they want to. But I let my kids know that we eat very little meat—living a semi-vegetarian life—for one important reason: Dioxins. Now you may not have heard much about this group of roughly 75 related chemicals—unless you were an early adopter of alternative feminine hygiene products that touted their avoidance of the stuff. But I digress. As a parent, these are a few facts you need to know.
More Reasons to Eat Less Fish
Stories about radioactive tuna from the 2011 Fukushima meltdown that showed up 6,000 miles away on California’s shores sounded too crazy to be true. The FDA said the radiation was nothing to worry about in the United States, since you’d have to eat pounds of the stuff before being affected. But according to a 2011 Government Accountability Study, the FDA only inspects .1% of the fish we import for consumption.
Sulfites and Wine: The Headache Connection
I love wine. Unfortunately, wine no longer loves me—the long headache isn’t worth the short buzz. But according to wine expert Olivier Magny, it’s not the wine itself that’s the problem, it’s the type of wine I’m drinking. Cheap wine. American wine. Sulfites in wine. Olivier, who has taught the art of sommelier-ing to more than 100,000 students at his Paris-based O Chateau, has a problem with sulfites and wine. “Wine should never give you a headache,” he told me. “Good wine—which in my book doesn’t mean expensive but does mean well made—is guaranteed headache-free.”
5 Rules to a Healthy Eating Habit
My kids are sick of healthy eating. They don’t want organic soybean butter and Farmer’s Market fig jam sandwiches, they want Lunchables: crackers, processed cheese, salty disks that pass for lunch meat and a whole lot of chemicals wrapped up in a plastic box. My younger daughter confessed she dumps the organic carrot sticks the trash (and I thought the ranch dip was decadent). My oldest has been trading her edamame for candy. Forget the veggie chips I carefully stowed in wax paper bags—heaven for these children would be to open up their lunch boxes and spy a bright-orange bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
What is BPA? 6 Ways to Ditch It for Good
In 2012, the FDA announced a nation-wide ban on BPA in bottles and sippy cups. The following year, California placed the chemical on its Proposition 65 list, officially recognizing it as a reproductive hazard. So what is BPA? Simply put, it’s a chemical used to harden plastics, especially polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins. Despite federal and statewide action, our kids are still being exposed to BPA on a daily basis. The substance is still found in hard plastics, food-can linings and cash register receipts. In that year alone, studies linked BPA to: 1. Obesity: White children with the highest levels of BPA in their urine were six times more likely to…
