holy cow sundae

If you want to have something light and fun for a quick meal, go down to the Newport Creamery restaurant and try a Holy Cow sundae.

We picked 10 scoops of ice cream and five toppings as well as banana, nuts, cherries, and whipped cream. Serves 5 diners.

Fun, outrageously good, and total social blast for all involved.

***

Review:

5 forks for filling

5 forks for glassy-eyed, ice cream feeling

spaghetti squash veggie bar

A fun variation on the old-fashioned, salad bar theme ---

Four servings:

• Wash, pierce, and bake 2 whole spaghetti squashes on a cookie sheet in 350 degree Fahrenheit oven for 1 and 1/4 hours.

• Carefully remove cookie sheet with squashes from oven. Slice spaghetti squashes in half, lengthwise.

• Remove seeds from center of squash.

• Serve each warm squash half on a plate. Use a fork to turn the spaghetti squash out of the shells to make it look more like strands of spaghetti!
  

• Provide plenty of condiments to season the squash to each diner's taste.

For instance:

grated Parmesan cheese
salt
pepper
hot sauce
butter
cinnamon
raw sugar
grated nutmeg

***

Review:

3 forks for flavor
4 forks for fun

best beef stroganoff

Really good!

For four servings:

• Slice 1 pound lean steak

into small,thin stir-fry pieces.

• Dice 1/2 onion.

• Heat about 1 1/2 Tbsp vegetable oil in large skillet. (Sesame oil is my favorite!)

• Add steak pieces and diced onion to oil. Stir as they cook.

• While steak and onion are cooking, heat a saucepan of water to rolling boil. Cook 1 pound dry pasta according to package directions. Drain. Set aside.
  

• When steak and onion are cooked through, add 1 cup sour cream and about 1/4 cup prepared mustard to mixture in skillet. Heat until warmed through, stirring constantly.

Serve cooked pasta into soup bowls. Top with ample beef stroganoff topping.

Enjoy!!

***

Review:

5 forks for yummy taste.
Everyone ate seconds.

As the

why coffee bean packaging works

Coffee is a truly unique food product. Fresh coffee beans need to be protected from exposure to 0xygen while they are giving off large quantities of carbon dioxide. Until relatively recently, it was impossible to package fresh coffee beans without risk of the product become prematurely stale from exposure to oxygen.

Today's food packaging industry successfully conquers this difficulty through the use of a one-way coffee degassing valve. The one-way degassing valve is glued to the inside of whole bean coffee packages.

To learn more, we saved an empty package of Dunkin' Donuts whole bean coffee and cut the plastic de-gassing valve from the package.















The plastic de-gassing valve peeled easily from the packaging material.















Using a screwdriver, the top and bottom of the de-gassing valve comes apart, revealing a soft piece of gray plastic sandwiched in the middle. Gas escapes through the valve from the coffee package, but oxygen is prevented from entering the package. What a great invention!



The valve we examined was manufactured by Fres-co System USA Inc. Fres-co is an innovative manufacturer of flexible food packaging systems. The mechanics of their coffee de-gassing valve are depicted here.

Aquanova AG

What do you think about this?

Aquanova AG of Germany uses their patented nanotechnology to stabilize ingredients in foods, health products, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.

For instance, some food additives including vitamins, colorants, and preservatives are lipophilic (only dissolve in fat). The Aquanova AG nanoparticles are ambiphilic (dissolve in water or fat). The company can produce energy drinks and nutritional drinks (functional food) which are cyrstal clear, although loaded with nanoparticles of ingredients.

What are your thoughts? Is this an amazing step forward?

food invention saves lives

If you think of the invention of milk chocolate, you might think of Henri Nestle (1814-1890), founder of the world's largest food and beverage company: Nestle S.A.

Actually, the invention which launched the young pharmacist Henri Nestle was an infant formula (Farine Lactee Henri Nestle) invented in the 1860's. The first life saved through use of the formula was a premature infant unable to tolerate mother's milk or any other substitute nutrition.

Henri Nestle's interest in developing infant formula was spurred by the high infant mortality rate. Of Henri Nestle's 13 siblings, 7 died before adulthood. His wife, the daughter of a charity doctor, was highly motivated to promote the research.

In the 1860's, Henri Nestlé and his friend, nutritionist Jean Balthasar Schnetzler, removed the acid and starch from wheat flour because they were hard for infants to digest. The infant formula, Farine Lactée Henri Nestlé, made of cow milk, wheat flour, and sugar was reconstituted with water just before use.

By 1870's, Nestle's Infant Food (malt, wheat flour, sugar, milk) was available in the United States of America, selling for 50 cents per glass bottle.

peach harvest

We harvested a beautiful, fully-laden peach tree last week -- and spent the next several days putting up gallons and gallons of peaches!

The bountiful tree yielded about 600 ripe organically-grown peaches.


By the time our appetites are ready for peaches again, winter will be upon us . . .

**

Recipe for freezing fresh peach slices:

We peeled, pitted and sliced the peaches. They were spooned into plastic Ziploc freezer bags.

We sprinkled each gallon of peach slices with about 1/2 cup sugar and about 1/2 cup lemon juice.

Then the air was squeezed out of the bags as much as possible.

The bags were zipped shut and placed in the freezer.

sodium benzoate plus vitamin c = damaged DNA

*

The bad news is:

that many soft drinks contain a combination of preservative sodium benzoate and ascorbic acid (vitamin c). Together in soft drinks they create benzene, a well-known extremely harmful substance which causes serious damage to the DNA of mitochondria in cells. Such mitochondrial damage leads to cirrhosis of the liver, Parkinson disease symptoms, and aging.

UK research studies detail the adverse effects of sodium benzoate plus ascorbic acid in soft drinks. Coca-cola is taking this harmful combination of ingredients out of its soft drinks in the United Kingdom -- but not, as far as I can tell, in the USA.

*

Additional bad news:

Sheffield University research links sodium benzoate and a group of artificial food colorings to hyperactivity in children:

Besides the preservative sodium benzoate (E211), the artificial colours tested in the study were tartrazine (E102), ponceau 4R (E124), sunset yellow (E110), carmoisine (E122), quinoline yellow (E104) and allura red AC (E129)

The preservative sodium benzoate, and three of the European food colors listed above are approved for use by food product manufacturers in the USA. They are:

tartrazine (FD&C yellow no. 5), sunset yellow (FD&C yellow no. 6), and allura red (FD&C red no. 40).

A word to the wise is sufficient, I am sure . . .

**

We will be avoiding soft drinks indefinitely.