http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
If you like to dabble in the world of DIY baked goods, you know the hobby comes with a lot of random tools. All those cookie cutters, wooden spoons, measuring cups, canisters of flour … the list goes on. Luckily, it’s all pretty cute stuff, which means it’ll look downright adorable on a pegboard. Here’s how to store your baking gear while also putting it on display.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Navigating the grocery store was a shock when I went to college. I grew up with my mom buying everything for the household, and suddenly I was alone and struggling to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner a reality. How did I create a budget? What’s the deal with leftovers? Just like everything in college, grocery shopping was a learning curve and I made plenty of mistakes along the way.
During my freshman year I had no concept of budgeting when it came to grocery shopping. Even though I was able to find a paid internship on campus, I still had to embrace frugality. Food was a high priority in my food budget, but once I added on the price of textbooks and transportation home for the weekend, I couldn’t justify spending money on expensive teas.
At my college, all freshman and sophomore students were required to have a meal plan, but that still didn’t stop the majority of us from stocking our tiny mini fridges with our favorite essentials. We were also not allowed to have hot pots, slow cookers, or rice makers in our room, so we got crafty with healthy microwaveable meals and to-go containers of lettuce from the dining hall.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Filling out two slices of sandwich bread is just the start of what a can of tuna has the ability to do. Keep a few cans tucked away in your pantry and know that you have a budget-friendly lunch or dinner on your hands at all times. Combined with veggies, pasta, whole grains, or a combination, canned tuna fish becomes much greater than the sum of its parts. Here are 10 of our favorite recipes that show off the star-power of tuna.
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(Image credit: Rachel Joy Baransi)
Chances are, you spend more time with your coworkers than the family you live with. (Thanks, corporate American culture and your never-ending deadlines!) Luckily, you probably have a work wife who helps you enjoy all those hours at the office. Maybe this person is on your team and she’s the one you go to when you need to bounce ideas off someone? Or maybe she just sits near the pantry and you’re constantly chatting her up while you wait for your coffee to brew? If we know you, you’ve got your person.
Show her how much you appreciate her (and that you think she’s doing a great job!) with a thoughtful little gift box. Fill it with goodies and leave it on her desk next to all those scary-looking memos. She’ll be delighted to find something on her desk that doesn’t require a follow-up PowerPoint presentation.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
The more connected we become, the harder it is to find space for consistent cooking. Everyday life means being constantly connected to tons of things and people simultaneously through texts, emails, Tweets, and Facebook and Instagram posts. The same goes with food. It’s far easier to rely on takeout — especially when there’s an easy app that can deliver meals to your door with a click of a button.
The thing is, cooking does take an amount of pre-meditation. To want to cook is to want to plan. Cooking means taking yourself away from instant satisfaction and immersing yourself in sounds and smells, which can be nourishing in ways that takeout isn’t.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
I fell in love with the idea of chai through the cartons of this drink mix from the grocery store. The milky sweetness partnered with the astringent black tea drew me in, but the warm spices that lingered between sips kept me drinking. It wasn’t long before the sweetness of those chai drink mixes became too much for me and I started experimenting with chai lattes at home.
This chai latte gives you complete control over your chai latte experience, from the tea and the spices, to the sweetener and type of milk. The result is a creamy cup of black tea subtly spiced and fragrant with cinnamon, black pepper, and ginger, and just the right amount of sweetness, so near perfect that you’ll skip the coffee shop chai (or the carton) and come home to make a pot of this at tea time.
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Everyone reading this knows about the macronutrients. You’re all eating enough protein, fat, carbs, and the various sub-categories, like fiber, omega-3s, MUFAs, SFAs, linoleic acid, and so on. You know the major micronutrients, like magnesium, calcium, vitamin B12, and most of the minor (but still vital) ones, like plant polyphenols, iodine, and vitamin K2. Today I’ll be talking about the truly obscure nutrients. The ones health food hipsters were super into like, five years ago (“I’m taking beta-1,3-glucan, you probably haven’t heard of it, there’s only one group at Hokkaido University doing any research, you can only get it off the DarkNet using bitcoins”). The ones Grok was super into like, 50,000 years ago.
What are they, what do they do for us, and, if they’re so great, how did Grok obtain them?
Beta-glucans are fibrous carbohydrates that make up the cell walls of certain organisms. They’re found in oats, yeasts, and—most relevant to you—mushrooms. Rather than just provide colonic bulk or prebiotic substrate, what makes beta-glucans so uniquely attractive is their ability to modulate the immune system.
Given to critically-ill patients on enteral feeding, they reduced CRP and improved immune function.
They may improve the immune system’s ability to fight tumors.
According to a recent survey of wild and cultivated mushrooms, both types contain appreciable levels of beta-glucans. Were our hunter-gatherer ancestors eating mushrooms? Almost certainly. Recent research into dental residues found that Neanderthals living in Spain ate gray shag mushrooms. They may even have used mushrooms for their medicinal properties, as gray shag contains an antimicrobial protein.
One of the hardest words in the English language to type, phosphatidylserine is probably my favorite stress-fighter. The body doesn’t make much of it and stress depletes what little we have. PS works on both mental and physical stress, improving mood and blunting cortisol after physical exercise. (And, yes, it’s why I include PS in Primal Calm.) Older folks in particular seem to benefit from PS, enjoying boosts to memory and cognitive function. Kids with ADHD show better attention when given PS, especially paired with fish oil.
After refined soy lecithin, an industrial product Grok never would have had access to, the best source of PS is ruminant brain. If that sounds like an arcane, unrealistic food source, guess again. Before we were top hunters, we scavenged. We ate the stuff the top carnivores couldn’t, like load-bearing bones and heads, both of which we’d shatter with rocks to obtain the marrow and brains inside. After brain, which is no longer available due to Mad Cow disease worries, the best sources are cold water mackerel, herring, and chicken hearts. A 100 gram (3.5 oz) serving of any of them will give you between 400-700 mg of PS, which matches or exceeds the dosages used in the studies.
To give you an idea of inositol’s importance, it used to be called vitamin B8. To give you explicit details of insoitol’s importance, I’ll discuss some research.
High dose inositol can reduce anxiety, even comparing favorably with some pharmaceuticals. It can also reduce insulin resistance and improve fertility in women with PCOS.
If you’ve got the right gut bacteria—and since Grok spent his entire life immersed in a decidedly un-sterile world of dirt and bugs and animal guts, he likely did—you can even convert phytic acid into inositol. Or, rather, they can. That means nuts and seeds effectively become good sources of inositol, provided you train your gut bacteria to make the conversion.
Carnosine is woefully underrated. Found abundantly in meat, it’s a combo of the amino acids beta-alanine and histidine. We can synthesize it in our bodies, but in-house synthesis isn’t always up to par. And if it is, adequate isn’t always optimal.
High levels of carnosine are linked to muscle endurance and it acts as an antioxidant in the brain. There’s something called chicken extract that can enhance mood and reduce anxiety, and speed up recovery from stress-related fatigue, and it’s basically a carnosine supplement.
There’s some evidence that taking beta-alanine as a precursor is more effective at increasing muscle carnosine content than taking carnosine itself. We can absorb carnosine, but it doesn’t seem to increase serum levels. Beta-alanine is one of the fitness supplements with the most support in the literature. If you can get past the pins and needles feeling it provokes, beta-alanine can provide:
Either way, you could just eat meat, the ultimate source of both beta-alanine and pre-formed carnosine. People with a history of athletics have higher muscle carnosine levels than non athletes, and researchers suspect this might be due to the former’s higher meat intakes.
ALA is created in the mitochondria (especially liver mitochondria) to assist in the creation of various mitochondrial enzymes and Acetyl-COA, which we need to metabolize fats, protein, and carbohydrates. In short, we use ALA to produce cellular energy and maintain cellular function. It’s extremely important.
Yes, we make it. We can still use some extra, some of us more than others.
Diabetics: ALA has also been shown to prevent the descent from glucose intolerance into full-blown type 2 diabetes and increase insulin sensitivity in type 2 diabetics. It may even reduce diabetic neuropathic pain.
Oxidative stress: In patients with metabolic syndrome and endothelial dysfunction, 300 mg/day reduced several markers of inflammation and improved vasodilation. In healthy exercising men, it reduced lipid peroxidation and increased glutathione.
Kidney has between 3-4 mcg of ALA for every gram. Liver, around 1-2 mcg/g and beef heart, about 1 mcg/g. Spinach, tomato, and broccoli are the best sources of ALA in the vegetable kingdom. If you try to get ALA through food, you’re looking at a dose far smaller than you’d get through supplementation, and far smaller than the doses used in research. Then again, the amount of oxidative stress we face as modern humans is unprecedented, whether it’s from the diets we eat, the psychological stress we undergo, the exercise we don’t get, the lack of sleep, the absence of meaning, the loneliness, the disjointed manner in which so many of us lead our lives. Hunter-gatherers by and large didn’t have these problems. They had other problems, more immediate ones. But they weren’t bogged down by the chronic oxidative stress that requires supplementation.
You’ve probably noticed that the research I cite to support the importance of these obscure nutrients almost always uses supplemental doses unachievable through natural sources. Does this mean we can’t benefit from taking them?
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a wider variety of plants, all wild. Wild plants are exposed to more environmental stressors than domesticated plants. To stay robust and survive, the wild plants produce higher levels of polyphenols. They were effectively consuming superfoods in every bite. Supplements can play that role.
Our ancestors lived lives punctuated by short bouts of extreme stress. If they survived, they were more resistant to future stressors, with less inflammation. We don’t have that. We have chronic stress that breaks us down, makes us more vulnerable to future stressors, with more inflammation. If we want similar stress resistance, we must manufacture it and then make sure we get ample recovery time, all while getting a handle on the chronic stress. Supplements can help with that.
Our ancestors likely didn’t deal with the kind of existential crises and psychosocial stress we embroil ourselves in. They break us down and deplete reserves of critical nutrients required for stress resistance. Supplements can replenish them.
If I’ve done my job, you’ll be rushing out in the next few hours to grab chicken hearts, kidneys, almonds and Brazil nuts from the grocery store and forage for mushrooms out in the woods. Right?
Thanks for reading, everyone.
What are your favorite nutrients that few people know about (or ones you’d like me to write about in the future)? What vitamin, mineral, or phytonutrient were you taking before it was cool? Take care.
The post 5 Obscure Nutrients: Why We Need Them and How Grok Got Them appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
You know the drill.
It’s 5:45 p.m. and you’ve had a long day at work. You stop at the grocery store to pick up some essentials (yes, ice cream on a Monday is essential) and hope you can make it home before your hangriness takes over.
Then, you see it: a beautiful plastic dome atop the cheese counter offering a taste of grass-fed ricotta with a dollop of fig jam. You take one sample, but are dying for another. Should you go for it? And actually, you want to try some blue cheese, but it’s not on sample. Also, why is that person coming up and — yikes, did he just wipe his nose with his sleeve and then reach in with his hands to take a sample? How many germs did you just consume?
It can be exhausting and gross, but Rachel Hewlett, who works for Whole Foods’ supplier demo program for the global grocery team, is here to share how best to navigate the free food at the grocery store.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
You probably (hopefully!) don’t buy new kitchen appliances all that often, so when it’s actually time to take the plunge — on an appliance of any size — it can be overwhelming. Maybe you’ve never even bought so much as a toaster and you have no idea where to start? Or you bought a new fridge once, back in 1985, when you were basically lucky to get a box with a door.
These purchases can be expensive and you never want to make a costly mistake, ordering something you hate using.
Luckily for you, we’ve spent most of the month posting tons of stories all about buying new appliances — large or small. Here’s all of that helpful advice in one place.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Chicken-nugget aficionados and chicken-finger enthusiasts be warned — nearly one million pounds of chicken from an Oklahoma-based manufacturer may be contaminated with “extraneous materials.” What kind, you ask? The kind nobody wants in their body: metal.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), Ok Food Inc. has issued a recall of their chicken products. After five customers reported finding metal objects in their food, an investigation took place to reveal the metal pieces came from the belting of a metal conveyer.
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