Yield:  3.5 qts

 

2 Tbsp unsalted butter

2 Tbsp olive oil

4 c chopped yellow onions (3 large)

2 Tbsp mild curry powder

5 lbs butternut squash

1 ½ lbs sweet apples (such as Macs)

2 tsp kosher salt

½ tsp pepper

2 c water

2 c apple cider or juice

 

Warm butter, oil, onions, curry powder in large stockpot uncovered over low heat 15-20 minutes until onion is tender.

Peel & seed squash & apples.  Cut into chunks.  Add to pot with salt, pepper, & 2 c of water.

Cook over low heat approx 30 minutes or until very soft.  Puree and return to pot.

Add apple cider and enough water to make soup consistency you like.

 

This is the recipe as written.  When I make it, I use only olive oil and no salt.  I start with a tablespoon of curry powder.  I also don’t measure the cider and just balance how it tastes when finished.  I’d always prefer adding a good cider to water.  I check for salt at the end to see if any is needed.  

We all love clean, and now you can enjoy clean dishes for a screaming deal--that's right.

Only 65 cents for 100 loads of clean dishes! 

 

2 cups Borax

2 cups Baking Soda
4 Tbsp. Citric Acid or 4 small packets sugar-free lemonade Cool Aid

In a container, mix all ingredients and use 2 Tbsp. detergent per load.
For sparkling glassware, add 1 tbsp. white vinegar to your rinse aid dispenser.

Enjoy clean dishes for less!

 

Get to know my good friend, Anitra, who has a lot of great tips on healthy eating!

Check out this short video and subscribe to her free newsletters on her website!

In Defense of Food By Michael Pollan

A review:  Okay, I'll say it: If you read one book about food this year, it should be Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. It's not a diet book in the traditional sense--Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, doesn't concern himself with calorie counting, nor does he take a narrowly prescriptive approach to eating. He does, however, set out to determine why the so-called Western diet is the unhealthiest in the world; how, despite a full-fledged societal obsession with food and nutrition, Americans have gotten to the perverse point where we are both overweight and undernourished.

Pollan's conclusions align so completely with the approach to food for which Portland is known that actually reading the book might seem unnecessary. After all, we're already aware of the benefits of eating fresh, local food--in a town that practically coined the term "farm to table," these concepts are hardly revelatory.

Pollan builds his case systematically, beginning with a societal shift in the last century toward "nutritionist" thinking (i.e., the idea that foods themselves are less important than the nutrients they contain). Drawing from numerous examples of botched nutrition science (remember when margarine was a health food?), Pollan argues that by removing nutrients from foods, and removing foods from their natural ecosystems, we fundamentally distort our relationship to the things that we eat.

By the end of the book, he has constructed a solid intellectual framework for an intuitively sensible approach to eating: the idea that foods are a system, full of complex components that interact in ways that scientists barely understand, and that the best way to attain the maximum health benefit from what you consume is not by eating "low-fat," "low-carb," or "fortified" processed foods, but by eating the whole foods from which the human animal has obtained the necessary nutrients for thousands of years.

Pollan's tone throughout makes the book a fast, entertaining read: He's exasperated that he has to say this stuff at all, and bemused that political machinations and a blinkered scientific community have so distorted the way Americans eat that good old-fashioned food needs defending. But it does, and it's a good thing we have Pollan around do it.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life  By Barbara Kingsolver

A review: It is possible to live off the land. The Kingsolver family are proof of that. They grew their own food for a year on a farm in Virginia's Applachian mountains. It only cost 50 cents a meal to feed the Kingsolver family of four for a year, and I found that to be amazing. It is much healthier to eat organic foods which are foods produced without chemicals. This is one of the main ideas of this insightful book. I love Camille's Kingsolver's contributions in this book. She is the college age daughter of the primary author. Camille's reflections about food are thoughtful, and her recipes sound delicious. I loved her essay about how she learned to love asparagus. I learned that asparagus is an excellent source of vitamin C, which I did not know before. There is a recipe in here for an asparagus mushroom bread pudding. I never thought of putting these ingredients together. Another interesting recipe in the book is one for zucchini chocolate chip cookies. The recipe sounds so unusual, I am tempted to try it. The recipe for pumpkin soup and sweet potato quesadillas sound yummy too. Everyone in the Kingsolver family contributed in this local food project. Barbara raised and bred turkeys, while her nine year old daughter raised her own chickens and provided the family with eggs for a year. They even made their own cheese.

I also enjoyed the contributions of Steven L. Hopp in this book. He is a professor who teaches environmental science at Emory and Henry College. His short contributions in the every chapter are very insightful. He really compliments the main text written by Kingsolver. I enjoyed reading his thoughts about the popularity of agricultural education in public schools. This is a fascinating and informative book about food.

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler

A review: From Publishers Weekly
Conditioned hypereating is a biological challenge, not a character flaw, says Kessler, former FDA commissioner under presidents Bush and Clinton). Here Kessler (A Question of Intent) describes how, since the 1980s, the food industry, in collusion with the advertising industry, and lifestyle changes have short-circuited the body's self-regulating mechanisms, leaving many at the mercy of reward-driven eating. Through the evidence of research, personal stories (including candid accounts of his own struggles) and examinations of specific foods produced by giant food corporations and restaurant chains, Kessler explains how the desire to eat—as distinct from eating itself—is stimulated in the brain by an almost infinite variety of diabolical combinations of salt, fat and sugar. Although not everyone succumbs, more people of all ages are being set up for a lifetime of food obsession due to the ever-present availability of foods laden with salt, fat and sugar. A gentle though urgent plea for reform, Kessler's book provides a simple food rehab program to fight back against the industry's relentless quest for profits while an entire country of people gain weight and get sick. According to Kessler, persistence is all that is needed to make the perceptual shifts and find new sources of rewards to regain control. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Kessler surveys the world of modern industrial food production and distribution as reflected in both restaurants and grocery stores. To his chagrin, he finds that the system foists on the American public foods overloaded with fats, sugars, and salt. Each of these elements, consumed in excess, has been linked to serious long-term health problems. Kessler examines iconic foods such as Cinnabon and Big Macs, all of which have skilled marketing machines promoting consumption. Such nutritionally unbalanced foods propel people who already tend to eat more than mere physical need might otherwise warrant into uncontrolled behavior patterns of irrational eating. These persistent psychological and sensory stimuli lead to what Kessler terms “conditioned hypereating,” which he believes is a disease rather than a failure of willpower. There is hope, however. Kessler identifies the cues that lead to overeating and offers some simple, practical tools to help control one’s impulses. --Mark Knoblauch

This is a well-written, easily understandable, interesting book on the very serious subject of overeating. The book is broken into six parts with relatively small chapters ranging in size from approximately three pages to eleven pages in length with many in the four to seven page range. The first part, for example, has 13 chapters so there is much information but it is presented in a way which flows well together.

When I got this book I was interested in the subject matter but I was worried that the book would be boring or so technical that I would lose interest. I read this book in two days and it has changed my approach to eating.

Part One of the book, Sugar, Fat, Salt, talks about why people eat and overeat. It looks at the physical as well as psychological aspects of overeating.

Part Two of the book (my favorite), The Food Industry, gives specific examples of how restaurants and the food industry contribute to the problem by creating food that people want to eat but is not healthy. For instance I never new that bread had so much salt because it takes away the bitter taste of the flour and brings up the flavor. The author also addresses how nutrition information on packaging is manipulated by the food industry. For instance if a food contains more sugar than any other ingredient it must go first on the list but if you use a number of sources of sugar like brown sugar, corn syrup and fructose each is listed individually and goes lower on the list.

Part Three, Conditioned Hypereating Emerges, talks about how we get trapped into an overeating pattern. It references numerous studies and explores whether overeating is nature, nurture or both.

Part Four, The Theory of Treatment, talks about theoretical ways people can break the overeating habit.

Part Five, Food Rehab, offers practical ways individuals can stop overeating. The advice is great.

Part Six, The End Of Overeating, talks about the challenges ahead to end overeating. While it will not be easy, each individual has the power to end his or her overeating despite roadblocks created by the food industry or our own physical or mental makeup.

This is a great book that has started me thinking differently about food. It is well written and the best on the subject I have ever read.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

A review: From The Washington Post
Most of us are at a great distance from our food. I don't mean that we live "twelve miles from a lemon," as English wit Sydney Smith said about a home in Yorkshire. I mean that our food bears little resemblance to its natural substance. Hamburger never mooed; spaghetti grows on the pasta tree; baby carrots come from a pink and blue nursery. Still, we worry about our meals -- from calories to carbs, from heart-healthy to brain food. And we prefer our food to be "natural," as long as natural doesn't involve real.

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes about how our food is grown -- what it is, in fact, that we are eating. The book is really three in one: The first section discusses industrial farming; the second, organic food, both as big business and on a relatively small farm; and the third, what it is like to hunt and gather food for oneself. And each section culminates in a meal -- a cheeseburger and fries from McDonald's; roast chicken, vegetables and a salad from Whole Foods; and grilled chicken, corn and a chocolate soufflé (made with fresh eggs) from a sustainable farm; and, finally, mushrooms and pork, foraged from the wild.

The first section is a wake-up call for anyone who has ever been hungry. In the United States, Pollan makes clear, we're mostly fed by two things: corn and oil. We may not sit down to bowls of yummy petroleum, but almost everything we eat has used enormous amounts of fossil fuels to get to our tables. Oil products are part of the fertilizers that feed plants, the pesticides that keep insects away from them, the fuels used by the trains and trucks that transport them across the country, and the packaging in which they're wrapped. We're addicted to oil, and we really like to eat.

Oil underlines Pollan's story about agribusiness, but corn is its focus. American cattle fatten on corn. Corn also feeds poultry, pigs and sheep, even farmed fish. But that's just the beginning. In addition to dairy products from corn-fed cows and eggs from corn-fed chickens, corn starch, corn oil and corn syrup make up key ingredients in prepared foods. High-fructose corn syrup sweetens everything from juice to toothpaste. Even the alcohol in beer is corn-based. Corn is in everything from frozen yogurt to ketchup, from mayonnaise and mustard to hot dogs and bologna, from salad dressings to vitamin pills. "Tell me what you eat," said the French gastronomist Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "and I will tell you what you are." We're corn.

Each bushel of industrial corn grown, Pollan notes, uses the equivalent of up to a third of a gallon of oil. Some of the oil products evaporate and acidify rain; some seep into the water table; some wash into rivers, affecting drinking water and poisoning marine ecosystems. The industrial logic also means vast farms that grow only corn. When the price of corn drops, the solution, the farmer hopes, is to plant more corn for next year. The paradoxical result? While farmers earn less, there's an over-supply of cheap corn, and that means finding ever more ways to use it up.

Is eating all this corn good for us? Who knows? We think we've tamed nature, but we're just beginning to learn about all that we don't yet know. Ships were once provided with plenty of food, but sailors got scurvy because they needed vitamin C. We're sailing on the same sea, thinking we're eating well but still discovering nutrients in our food that we hadn't known were there -- that we don't yet know we need.

We've lost touch with the natural loops of farming, in which livestock and crops are connected in mutually beneficial circles. Pollan discusses the alternatives to industrial farming, but these two long (and occasionally self-indulgent) sections lack the focus and intensity -- the anger beneath the surface -- of the first. He spends a week at Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley, a farm that works with nature, rather than despite it. Salatin calls himself a grass farmer, though his farm produces cows, chickens, eggs and corn. But everything begins with the grass: The cows nibble at it at the precise moment when it's at its sweetest and are moved from pasture to pasture to keep the grass at its best height. Their droppings fertilize the grass, and the cycle is under way. There's a kind of lyrical symmetry to everything that happens on this farm. Even the final slaughtering of chickens is done quickly and humanely, in the open air. It isn't pleasant, but compared to the way cattle are fattened and slaughtered in meat industry feedlots and slaughterhouses, it is remarkably reasonable.

We needn't learn how to shoot our own pigs, as Pollan does; there's hope in other ways -- farmers' markets, the Slow Food movement, restaurants supplied by local farms. To Pollan, the omnivore's dilemma is twofold: what we choose to eat ("What should we have for dinner?" he asks in the opening sentence of his book) and how we let that food be produced. His book is an eater's manifesto, and he touches on a vast array of subjects, from food fads and taboos to our avoidance of not only our food's animality, but also our own. Along the way, he is alert to his own emotions and thoughts, to see how they affect what he does and what he eats, to learn more and to explain what he knows. His approach is steeped in honesty and self-awareness. His cause is just, his thinking is clear, and his writing is compelling. Be careful of your dinner!

Ingredients:

Big Zucchini

Sour Cream

Romano Cheese

Paprika

Directions:

For Zucchini slice them down the middle, lengthwise, and then into pieces about 3" long. Scoop out the seeds (or make a trough if there are no seeds). Steam them until almost done. Then fill with sour cream, sprinkle with grated Romano cheese, and a little paprika, and broil them, watching to see that they do not burn. People who don't like zucchini enjoy it when it's done this way!