Home Made Cranberry Sauce that Will Wow Your Guests
If you grew up eating canned, jellied cranberry sauce, as I did, you have hopefully already discovered how amazing the home made version of this perpetual favorite can be. No holiday gathering would be complete without the deep red and tart richness of this treat.
This cranberry sauce was so good that my friends started eating it before I could get my camera out
Luckily, fresh cranberries are in season. Leave the cans in the store and bring home the ingredients for your own taste treat. While you can discover hundreds of recipes on the Internet, I have put together the following simple recipe that cooks in ten minutes. Even people who usually don’t like cranberry sauce will eat a plate of this.
Recipe for not-too-sweet cranberry sauce:
Ingredients
4 cups of cranberries (this is the amount in a 12 ounce package)
Where Does the Weather End and Climate Change Begin?
Weather is simple – rain, snow, hail, sun, wind, temperature. You can look out your window and see what it is right now.
If you’ve lived in the same place for a while, you can probably guess what the weather will be like in a few hours, too. You may even be able to predict ahead a day, and be right as often as the weatherman is. Unless you live somewhere with monotonous weather, though, you will have a hard time projecting the specific temperature and rainfall next week without help from scientific measurements.
Climate, in contrast, is a billion piece jigsaw puzzle. Climate is a pattern. Unless you keep detailed records over a long period of time, you can’t really tell for sure if the climate is changing. This is because the day-to-day weather
The gathering clouds of climate change threatens life as we know it
will bounce around all over the place.
You may have a hard time seeing the overall climate picture even for your own little corner of the world. So you can understand how much more difficult it is to determine climate patterns over millions of years for the entire planet. Yet a world wide network of scientists is engaged in this urgent task.
Climate scientists are not all on one formal team. Instead, these researchers are a loosely knit and shifting network communicating by email, published journal articles, data exchange, conferences, telephone, and meetings.
As with any group of people, climate scientists will have their differences of opinion. Sometimes a few of these researchers will say or do something that they wish would never be publicly aired.
Think about any team you’re a part of, whether at work, on a sports team, in a club or neighborhood committee, at your church, or even an informal circle of friends that meets for lunch every once in a while. Really, aren’t there differences of opinion, people who are less (more…)
Plant-Based Nutrition Has Never Been More Colorful
How would you like a winter get-away that is close, relaxing, gorgeous, and free? Your local farmers market will reward you with all this – and more! Don’t know where there is a farmers market near you? Not a problem. Simply bring up your favorite search engine and type in farmers market plus the name of your city, town, or county for the information you need.
I make the farmers market a weekly ritual, one that never fails to delight and surprise. How often do you find such reliable gratification in the current economy? The market is a visual poem, with bright and shiny colors and
Fuji apples are abundant and crunchy
alluring shapes. The contrast of fruits, vegetables, flowers, potted plants, and other plant foods such as corn or beans constantly entertains the eye.
The market also relaxes you with sound. Usually there is music, kids laughing, and happy people chatting to each other and the farmers. Kids don’t have expensive plastic toys or junk food to beg for, and they seem content to just revel in the colors and enjoy the outdoors. What a break for parents.
The wide variety of food available changes every week – determined by what the farmer harvested. This is how it should be. The relatively predictable sameness of grocery stores cannot compete. You can buy the
Heirloom tomatoes are still flavorful in November
freshest and tastiest food for your next not-meal and never miss the meat or dairy foods you leave behind.
Consider your local farmers market for your next weekend. If you already visit frequently, maybe bring a friend to share the bounty.
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Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.
Whole Foods at the Holidays Show Love and Abundance
Thanksgiving is a time for abundance. While many may find Thanksgiving without turkey to be lacking, an animal-free holiday maximizes love, caring, and great food.
My favorite celebration is an annual Thanksgiving potluck in a casual San Diego home. The hosts are committed to a plant-based diet; so the many choices people bring are animal-free. Some of the dishes crowding every corner of three large tables were Tofurky® (of course) with gravy, several kinds of potatoes, large pans of stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, quinoa salads, polenta with pesto sauce and tomatoes, vegetables of all types,
Polenta topped with pesto, tomato, walnuts, and peppers was a huge hit at our animal-free Thanksgiving
yams, pasta dishes, garlic bread, rice paper rolls with spicy sauce, and way more. Too much to even take a forkful of everything.
A separate dessert table tempted with about eight pies of all types, several kinds of cookies, brownies, and cakes.
I basked on a sunny deck with dozens of relaxed friends, all enjoying the food, weather, and each other’s company. Laughter and quiet conversation created a pleasant background. A few dogs, ranging from an American bulldog to a standard poodle to a tiny Katrina rescue, roamed from person to person looking for pets and approval (and maybe a bit of Tofurky®).
For most of my life, I would have shuddered at a turkey-free Thanksgiving. I was the one who ate mounds of meat at dinner and nibbled at the leftovers for days.
Now I revel that Thanksgiving is animal-free. I LOVE a turkey-free thanksgiving. Then I can truly be grateful for the wonderful gifts in my life without damaging my own health or the planet. The food that would have gone to feed the turkey is now available to others, hungry and less fortunate, who deserve their own abundance. And I can eat way too much of the tastiest foods on earth – without guilt.
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Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.
It’s True – Something this Good Can Also Be Healthy
Okay, healthy in moderation only, but who wants to quibble. Let’s not dissect our chocolate. This incredible food, in its most unprocessed forms, contains over 350 biologically active compounds. As in all whole foods, the total effect is greater than the sum of the parts.
Theobromine, one of the best known chocolate constituents, is a mood enhancer and mild stimulant. Flavonoids are plant chemicals, strongly represented in chocolate, with numerous beneficial effects:
Anti-oxidant
Help balance inflammation
Protect the circulatory system and help prevent blood clots
None of these benefits have much to do with why I start my week with a large chunk of dark chocolate. On Mondays, the week seems endless. The weekend, already past, beckons strongly. A bit of pampering is irresistible. The health benefits are only a nice add-on.
So first thing Monday morning, I breakfast on whole grain cereal topped with fruit and two tablespoons of ground flaxseeds. This is my usual fast weekday breakfast. The Monday difference is using chocolate soy milk, not the usual vanilla, over the cereal.
About 9:30 or 10 am, it’s time for another dose – this time half a dark chocolate bar. My favorite way to relish this Monday chocolate is in small
Dark chocolate bar - don't settle for less
pieces, dipped into some soy yogurt stirred with nuts. I love everything about this hard dark chocolate: the aroma, the taste, the texture, how it makes me feel. I sniff my chocolate deeply before consuming. Anyone walking by might wonder what I was up to.
After finishing the chocolate, I still have a bit of soy yogurt and nuts to enjoy. Hot green tea is the last necessity of this weekly ritual. The rest of Monday just streams away, and soon the rest of the week as well.
Half of a 3.5 ounce chocolate bar is enough for the desired effect. My favorite is Equal Exchange Chocolates, mint flavor, which is both organic and fair trade. This delightful product is 67% cacao, which means that chocolate is the main ingredient.
Dark chocolate is REAL chocolate. The milk version, aside from the issues with dairy foods, dilutes the chocolate, making it almost flavorless compared to the real thing. Also, be aware that Dutch processed chocolate, in order to remove this food’s bitter edge, also strips many of the beneficial chocolate components.
Learn to love slightly bitter chocolate – you’ll get used to this flavor faster than you think. There’s no pay-off in tricking your body with common candy bars that have more milk, sugar, and chemicals than they do chocolate.
Dark chocolate is gourmet on a budget, feel-good without later mood crash, circulatory enhancer without prescription cost or side effects. Read the label to eliminate brands with milk or butter. Have fun trying all the others – new possibilities grace store shelves as more and more people discover dark chocolate as the best occasional junk food treat.
You actually will benefit from and enjoy dark chocolate most when you choose moderate amounts. Half a bar a week – any day you’d like – should be enough to reward yourself without gaining weight. Okay, maybe twice a week, but then treat yourself with other whole foods instead….
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Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.
Can you feel better simply looking at plants? Just about everyone knows that plant-based nutrition is the healthiest way to eat. But what about just spending time in green spaces? Scientists have found that merely being out in nature, even without exercising, boosts energy, makes you feel relaxed, and adds to longevity.
When my older daughter Rebecca was visiting last weekend, we dedicated a day to getting away from the city into gorgeous mountain scenery. We decided to hike at Mt. Palomar State Park. A two-hour drive took us back hundreds of years to the time that trees were everywhere and wild animals shared our everyday lives. We saw two large deer and a woodpecker with a spectacular red head diligently pecking at a five-story pine tree.
A fallen tree about five feet across became our delightful playground as we
Mt. Palomar State Park peaceful meadow
climbed among its branches. A few minutes walk from there, a peaceful open meadow invited us to stay and share its quiet solitude for a timeless century.
Sadly, because of California’s budget crisis, this extraordinary park will be closed for one third of the year: from December 1st through the next April. What a loss for all of us. Many other state parks will also close. Where will people get to rejuvenate in green spaces? How will we maintain our roots in the natural world?
Isn’t this counterproductive, at a time when health care costs are severely straining government budgets at all levels? Parks enhance health, mood, and productivity. How can anyone think we will save money, even in the short-run, by closing them?
If everyone ate a whole foods, plant-based diet, the national health care expenditure would shrink so drastically we could open every park every day with so much money left over! Wouldn’t that be a better choice for all of us? Live free of chronic illness in places that delight the eyes and the soul – simply by making a new choice the next time you are hungry.
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Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.
Enjoying Loving Family and Great Food Any and Every Day
Our family, bonded around plant-based nutrition and love of nature, is very close. My younger daughter lives in San Diego with me. We were so happy when Rebecca, my older daughter, could visit to celebrate Thanksgiving – even though the visit was a few weeks early.
Rebecca drove down from Northern California with her boyfriend Jan and their rescued American bulldog, Rikki. This goofy and ultra-friendly canine
Rebecca and Rikki the American bulldog
is a poster child for why adopting from a shelter is the best way to add a furry family member.
On the first Saturday night in November we enjoyed a tasty and low-budget Thanksgiving feast. When you stick to plant-based options, you can eat way too much delicious food for Thanksgiving and stick to your spending limits.
Actually, we did splurge a little, as you can see from our menu and costs. By cooking totally from scratch, we could definitely have saved money. But all four of us ate to oblivion on Saturday night and had enough food left over for several days. So the total covers much of the food we all ate for about three days.
Two Tofurky roasts (animal-free and delicious) $17
Potatoes, onion, carrots roasted with Tofurky $3
Gravy (animal-free mix) $1
Stuffing (two bags of animal-free stuffing mix liberally boosted with fresh onions and celery) $5
Homemade cranberry sauce (meal highlight for me) $2
Homemade veggies medley stir fry (in broth) $3
Homemade winter squash pureed with spices and a little miso $3
Pumpkin pie (animal-free from Whole Foods) $13
Dairy-free whipped topping $4
Total for four people eating for several days: $51. A homemade pumpkin pie would have brought the total down to about $40, or $10 per person. Not bad for a healthy and loving Thanksgiving. No one missed the poor turkey. In fact, we were all hugely thankful that the bird was celebrating, too, happy and enjoying another day.
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Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.
Five Ways that Raising Animals for Food Accelerates Global Warming More than We Thought
In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published the groundbreaking Livestock’s Long Shadow. This historical report focused attention on environmental facts that were long-known but studiously avoided by both consumers and policymakers.
Livestock’s Long Shadow documents the horrific environmental consequences of raising farmed animals for people to eat. Water shortages. Air and water pollution. Degraded soil. Deforestation. Extinction of wild plants and animals.
The list is heart breaking for anyone who cares about the future of our planet. I worry every day about the world my daughters are inheriting. How long
Global warming and climate change are here now
can we sustain even basic necessities on a plundered planet?
Most famously, this United Nations report documents that 18 % of greenhouse gas emissions can be directly traced to raising animals for food. This staggering impact is more than all transportation combined. You could scrap every truck, car, plane, and train on the planet – or you could stop raising farmed animals and have an even greater effect on climate change.
Now two respected researchers document that the impact of animal agriculture on global warming is almost three times worse that the UN estimated in 2006. The respected, independent nonprofit World Watch Institute published this analysis in their November/December 2009 magazine.
The study’s authors thoughtfully question what the United Nations left out or ignored. These pros have really done their homework. Their article demonstrates five major sources of greenhouse gas emissions from farmed animals left out of Livestock’s Long Shadow. The mistakes the authors found include overlooked sources of greenhouse gases, undercounted methane, and global warming contributors put into incorrect categories.
So what’s the bottom line? Over half – 51% – of global warming is directly caused by farming animals. You can have a direct, immediate impact on your kids’ future just by changing what you eat for dinner. Can you think of a single valid reason not to do this?
Changing what you eat is not nearly as hard as you think it might be. It’s not as painful as watching droughts, floods, disease, famine, and hurricanes rip people’s lives apart as global warming accelerates. Thank you World Watch Institute for these fearless insights. We don’t want to confront our comfortable habits, but we must.
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Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.
Halloween Nostalgia – How You Can Have More Fun Than the Kids!
We adults may pretend Halloween is for the kids, but deep down there is nostalgia for the excitement of our own childhood on October 31. For me, the best part of Halloween was the anticipation. What costume would I wear? How about my friends? Would it be raining on that crucial night?
Healthy and fun Halloween
Most of all, my anticipation was all about what our neighbors were going to hand out as treats. How many houses could I go to? What goodies would layer our table when I dumped out the Halloween candy bag?
Actually eating the candy was anti-climatic. Much of our sweets collection ended up in the trash.
You can get that same anticipation now by leaving yourself open to chance, stepping out of the ordinary. The fun is in the process of change, seeking the new the same way a kid plans a cool costume for trick-or-treat.
Step into the world of whole foods, healthy eating, and permanent weight loss. Yes, you can still enjoy that sweet surprise of Halloween. Open your favorite plant-based cookbook to the dessert section, close your eyes and choose a recipe at random, cook and enjoy.
If you don’t have a suitable cookbook, online is just as good. Head over to the dessert section of Fat Free Vegan and let your mouse randomly choose the recipe that was meant for you. Halloween can get better every year if you make this your new tradition.
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Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.
These Are the Health Facts, Whether We Want Them to Be or Not
Walk into your doctor’s office and find a coupon for cigarettes. Or maybe even a sample pack to “ease your stress.” As foreign as it may seem, this could have happened not that long ago. Physicians, well-meaning and helpful, pushed tobacco on their patients because industry assured them this was the right thing to do.
Millions of addicted people and their doctors yearned to believe smoking was healthy, or at least harmless. Public relations dollars on an unprecedented scale fueled their fantasy. Government agencies dozed in the back room, educating and protecting no one.
The dragonfly is there whether you see it or not
The tobacco industry manufactured confusion right along with cigarettes. Yet, as the English author Aldous Huxley so wisely observed, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Nor do these facts cease to exist for choosing a healthy diet and spurning foods that can be as harmful as tobacco is. Billions of ad dollars paint a mass fantasy of what people should eat, but all the money in the universe can’t change the basic facts of human biology and nutritional needs.
You have a naturally perfect body. Learn the real facts to protect yourself and turn your health around with a whole foods, plant-based diet. When you find out, you will want to tell everyone you know the simple secrets to losing weight and reversing chronic disease.
As Aldous Huxley also said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”
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Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.
Home Made Cranberry Sauce that Will Wow Your Guests
