http://www.thealternativedaily.com/
I used these squat toilets for ten years off and on in Southeast Asia, I’ll pass, using a bowl to gather water from a urn or trench is not how I prefer to flush the toilet. These would have to be greatly improved before I would use them on a regular bases. They are disgusting.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Tuesdays can easily become the best day of the week when there are tacos involved. And dinner is always easier when you know it’s something the whole crew looks forward to. Beyond the signature dish itself, though, it’s nice to have a side dish or two to round out the meal. We rounded up a few of our favorite slaws, salads, and rice dishes that pair perfectly with any and all tacos (and margaritas, too).
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Room service can be a beautiful thing. You, a robe, a king-size bed, and your favorite breakfast — what could be bad? Well, the food, for starters. Cold toast? Soggy salads? No thanks. Even five-star hotels often get room service wrong! (Think about what floor you’re staying on and how far away from the elevator your room is.)
But don’t worry — there are strategies to ensure your food tastes as good as those hotel sheets feel. Here are our top five tips for ordering room service.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
A few days before this past Thanksgiving, my parents got all new appliances in their kitchen. As the person who does all of the cooking for the holiday, I was a little annoyed. And by “a little annoyed,” I mean almost rant-y. “Why would they get new stuff (that no one knows how to operate) right before the biggest cooking holiday of the year?” I asked my husband.
Once we arrived at their house, though, I totally understood.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Mushy sweet potato fries make us sad. Far too often they’re flimsy and limp, and passed off as a more sanctimonious way to eat french fries. But sweet potato fries deserve better. They have all the potential to be as shatteringly crispy as any regular fry, with all the extra flavor and sweetness we’ve come to love in sweet potatoes.
You can have all this without deep frying, double soaking, twice baking, or anything so involved. For the crispiest oven-baked sweet potato fries, you need to walk over to the pantry and take out the cornstarch because that ingredient is the secret.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
When you’re a new mom and you actually manage to make it out the door with your infant, you feel like you have conquered the globe. Greasy hair and spit-up stained clothing, be damned — you’re out in the world!
When your baby needs to nurse, however, there’s a whole new layer of stress. Nursing in public, for some reason, is still something other people think they can comment on. Add to that the difficulty of learning how to nurse and you have a recipe for anxiety you just don’t need. You should feel free to nurse wherever and whenever you and your baby need, but it’s always good to know places that will make you feel welcome and comfortable.
Here are three companies that (after some serious missteps in the past) want to let you know normalizing breastfeeding is at the top of the agenda.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
Humans are competitive animals. We like a challenge because it compels us to rise to the occasion, prove ourselves, get better at something, or become a bigger version of ourselves. For people, challenges are like hormetic stressors—they often cause suffering and require hard, unpleasant work but provoke a beneficial response that makes us stronger than we were before the challenge.
How does that apply to the challenges I’ve laid out in today’s post, which are all about food, diets, and cooking? Each one unlocks a tangible benefit (eating more vegetables helps you obtain more nutrients, stopping the meal before you’re too full lowers energy intake), but there are also less obvious benefits to meeting a challenge.
Let’s get right to it:
In Japan, they say “hara hachi bu,” which translates to “eat until 80% full.” It’s the inverse of Louis CK’s philosophy of “eat until you hate yourself.” Don’t eat food just because it’s on your plate. Don’t cram in every last morsel. Ask for a to-go box, bust out the tupperware containers, push the plate away.
If you can figure out how to make this a regular habit, you may find that adhering to a healthy eating plan even easier. One study found that habitual “80% fullers” tended to eat fewer grains and more servings of vegetables.
The number just keeps climbing. First it was “3 a day,” and that didn’t do much. Then it was “5 a day,” and the results disappointed. Now they’re saying that 10 servings of vegetables each day is where the magic really happens. Is it true?
There is a study just out showing that people who ate 10 servings or more of vegetables each day had lower risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and early mortality. There’s definitely some “healthy user bias” going on here, but I suspect at least a touch of causality too. Maybe more convincing is the recent study where giving healthy 18- to 25-year-olds extra servings of fruits and vegetables across a two-week period led to improved psychological well-being.
You’ve cooked whole chickens. Maybe you’ve cooked a whole fish. (No? Go do that, too.) It’s time for the next step: cooking a whole mammal.
Get your hands on a small pig, lamb, goat, or, if you’re really adventurous, cow. I’ll even accept rabbit. Cook it whole. Roast it on a spit or a Patagonian cross over a wood fire. Cook it in the ground.
My only stipulation is that you keep it intact. Don’t dissemble the animal so it fits in your oven. That’s cheating.
Cooking an entire mammal marries two Primal inputs we no longer get enough of: the starting of and caring for a large fire over the course of five to six hours, and the transformation of large animal into food.
It’s an incredibly powerful experience.
What? Sisson, you’ve gone too far this time….
Hear me out. I’m not urging you to do this to save the world, cut down on emissions, save your life, save a cow’s life, strike fear into the CAFO industry, or anything particularly high-minded. I just think it’s an interesting thing to try. And for a great many of you, it will be an entirely new, entirely foreign. Pure novelty.
What would this even look like?
Well, grains and sugar and vegetable oils are still out. I foresee a lot of coconut, avocado, leafy greens, nuts, and seeds. Add in your favorite veggies for taste. Maybe this is a good time to experiment with legumes. Well-prepared, creative vegan food can be among the best tasting—truly.
Ketogenic dieting isn’t for everyone. It may not even be for the majority. But you won’t know unless you try. So ditch the sweet potatoes, the bowl of berries you enjoy after dinner, the white rice on cheat days, the honey in your coffee. It’s only two weeks. See how you feel. Hard-charging athletes have more leeway with the carb intake, as they’re burning through loads of glycogen and creating glycogen debt.
Coming off a Primal eating plan, you’re not starting from scratch. Your fat-burning machinery should be well-oiled and humming along, so full-blown ketosis won’t be a huge leap. Chances are, you’ll slip right in without missing a beat.
Get really good at making five things. These would probably be my five. Yours will vary.
Roast chicken. A roast chicken with carrots, shallots, onions, and garlic cloves in the roasting pan? With gravy made from the drippings? Nothing better.
Steak. Learn how to sear a good steak.
A soup of some kind. The key to most great soups is a great broth, so you’d better learn to make that too.
A stew/pot roast/chili. Something meaty and fall-apart tender with rich flavors and hearty sauce/broth that you can slip veggies into without anyone caring.
Something “ethnic,” for lack of a better word. Check out the post I did a few months ago and master one of those if you’re coming up blank.
Keep random veggies around—bags of kale, asparagus, broccoli, spinach, beets—that you can quickly steam or sauté alongside any of these dishes, and you’ve got yourself a solid dinner.
The Big Ass Salad is my nutritional anchor. It’s my insurance for the day. If I eat poorly for my other meals, I don’t feel too bad because I know I’ll be eating—or will have eaten—an enormous bowl of leafy greens, nuts, seeds, avocado, meat, cheese, healthy dressing, and whatever else I want to include.
Get yourself a huge mixing bowl, either stainless or glass. Plan your BAS every week in advance. Have greens on hand (currently digging a blend of baby kale, spinach, and butter lettuce), plus chopped veggies, protein, seeds, nuts, cheese, hard boiled eggs, avocado, and dressing. Almost everything but the avocado can be prepared days in advance. The easier it is to build a salad, the more likely you are to eat one.
Everyone talks about the importance of probiotics and fermented food, but few want to shell out $15 for a pint of kraut or pickles from the farmer’s market. It’s easy to make your own. Way easier than you think.
I recommend sauerkraut (basic recipe at the link). It’s easy to make, requires just two ingredients (cabbage and salt), and you can embellish it with all manner of extra ingredients. Try this mix: purple and green cabbage, diced garlic, sliced beets, shaved ginger, grated carrot, salt.
Kefir is another option, but you’ll need kefir grains to make your own. Craigslist is your friend. Pickles or kimchi work, too.
You now have your assignments. Choose at least one, but ideally several, and go try them. If it all works out, you’ll find yourself several months down the line with a slew of awesome new food habits.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Which food challenge are you going to take on? Others you’d offer up to the group?
The post 8 Primal Food Challenges You Can Take appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
We love a peg board around here. In fact, we’re going to be covering all things peg board this entire month. But just as we were about to dive into them, we came across this amazing photo by Camille Storch, a beekeeper and the blogger behind Wayward Spark.
It’s basically a custom bulletin board/peg board for her impressive (and heavy!) cast iron collection.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
If you’re suffering from lettuce fatigue, it’s time to look further down the produce aisle to sweet Swiss chard. This hearty but tender green is the base of our favorite winter weeknight salad. It’s filled with shaved fennel, cubed sweet potato, and sliced cucumber and tossed with an orange vinaigrette. No need to get too fancy here — we want this to be a side dish that goes with everything from skillet pork chops to a hearty lasagna. It might be a reach, but I wouldn’t be surprised if enjoying this salad once a week helped chase all the winter blues away.
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