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We all know what it’s like to come home hungry at the end of a long day and not want to spend a ton of time in the kitchen. Instead, we’ll turn to our default dinners — the fast, familiar bites we can toss together with whatever’s in our fridge or pantry (with bonus points if the end result is quick, cheap, and, of course, delicious).

And famous food figures — from chefs, to TV hosts, to bloggers — feel that way too. After often spending entire days cooking with or thinking about food, it’s no surprise that when they get home, they also have their shortcut suppers to fall back on. All month long, we’re asking them to share them with us.

Up first? Nigella Lawson, the effortlessly chic TV host, food writer, and business woman who we’d all love to share a meal with. We chatted with her about her standby lazy dinner (yes, it’s true, even Nigella feels lazy sometimes!): a smart, inexpensive, and satisfying veggie bowl that comes together in no time at all. It’s full of hearty textures, like roasted veggies and crunchy nuts, and flavors, like salty sardines and zesty lemon. Best of all? The whole thing is super customizable too.

Here’s exactly how Nigella makes it.

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Let’s just cut to the chase: I’m here to tell you that spaghetti with meat sauce in the Instant Pot is nothing short of life-changing — and the very best thing to come out of my kitchen this year.

But I know what you’re thinking: Spaghetti … in the Instant Pot? Pressure cookers are great for things like quickly breaking down tough cuts of meat, but something as simple and classic as pasta (which is already pretty easy to make) seems like it’s best left on the stovetop. For the uninitiated, Instant Pot pasta just seems a little weird and unnecessary, right? Wrong.

Instant Pot spaghetti is way easier, faster, and, arguably, tastier than the version you make on the stovetop. It’s almost entirely hands-off; there’s no constant stirring or waiting for a big pot of water to boil. Instead, after quickly browning some beef directly in the Instant Pot, you’ll just toss in a jar of marinara sauce, a little water, and the dry spaghetti. In about 20 minutes of cooking (yes, including bringing the pot to pressure) actual magic happens: The meat becomes tender and the pasta lends its starch to the sauce, making the most luxurious version of this weeknight classic that you could ever dream of.

Honestly? You probably won’t go back to cooking spaghetti any other way.

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If you’re young, you’ve likely never given much thought and certainly never purchased denture tablets before. But it turns out that they can do plenty more than clean dentures. You can use denture cleaner to get rid of everything from coffee stains to clogged drains at home — using nothing more than a couple of tablets at a time.

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This is a surprisingly common question.

To get it out of the way: Yes, it does. Bone broth contains calories, and true fasts do not allow calorie consumption. You eat calories, you break the fast.

However, most people aren’t fasting to be able to brag about eating no calories for X number of days. They fast for shorter (often intermittent) periods of time for specific health benefits. It’s entirely possible that bone broth “breaks a fast” but allows many of the benefits we associate with fasting to occur.

As is the problem with so many of these specific requests, there aren’t any studies addressing the specific question. The scientific community hasn’t caught up to the current trends sweeping the alternative health community. But we can isolate the most common benefits of fasting and see how bone broth—and the components therein—interact.

Common Benefits of Fasting: Does Bone Broth Help or Hinder?

Ketosis

Fasting is a quick and easy (or simple) way to get into ketosis. You have little choice in the matter. Since you’re not eating anything, and your body requires energy, you break down body fat for energy. And because you’ve only got fat “coming in,” you’ll quickly start generating ketone bodies. If bone broth stops ketosis, it’s probably breaking the fast.

Bone broth doesn’t contain any digestible carbohydrates. Common additions like tomato paste and carrots might add a few tenths of a gram of carbohydrate to your cup of broth, but not enough to throw you out of ketosis.

Bone broth is quite high in protein, especially if you make it right or buy the right kind, but if it’s the only thing you’re consuming during your fast, the overall caloric load won’t be enough for the protein in broth to stop ketosis.

I can’t point to a paper. I know for a fact that I’ve consumed bone broth without affecting my ketones.

Fat Burning

Fat-burning is another important aspect of fasting. Since bone broth contains calories, you’ll probably burn slightly less fat drinking broth during a fast. But the calories come from protein, the macronutrient least associated with fat gain and most supportive of lean mass retention. And at any rate, your total calorie intake on a fasting+broth day will be under 100 calories—plenty low enough to promote fat loss.

Insulin Sensitivity

Over the long term, fasting is an effective way to improve insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance. Most things that make you better at burning fat and expending, rather than storing, energy—like exercise, low-carb diets, weight loss in general—tend to improve insulin sensitivity over time. But the sometimes counterintuitive piece to all this is that in the short term, fasting can reduce insulin sensitivity. This is a physiological measure the body takes to preserve what little glucose remains for the brain. All the other tissues become insulin resistant so that the parts of the brain that can’t run on ketones and require glucose get enough of the latter to function.

There’s also the matter of sleep, fasting, and insulin sensitivity to consider. Some people report sleep disturbances during fasts, especially longer fasts. This is common. If the body perceives the fast as stressful, or if you aren’t quite adapted to burning fat, you may interpret the depleted liver glycogen as dangerous and be woken up to refuel in the middle of the night. Some people just have trouble sleeping on low-calorie intakes in general, and a fast is about as low as you can get. If that’s you, and your fasting is hurting your sleep, it’s most likely also impairing your insulin sensitivity because a bad night’s sleep is one of the most reliable ways to induce a state of insulin resistance. There’s some indication that total sleep deprivation creates transient type 2 diabetes.

That’s where bone broth comes in. A big mug of broth is one of my favorite ways to ensure a good night’s sleep. It’s a great source of glycine, an amino acid that has been shown in several studies to improve sleep quality and reduce the time it takes to fall asleep. It may “break” the fast by introducing calories, but a broken fast is preferable to bad sleep and the hit to insulin sensitivity that results from it.

Autophagy

Things fall apart. Cars, tools, buildings, toy trucks, civilizations. That’s entropy, which dictates that all things are constantly heading toward disorder. And people aren’t exempt. Our cells and tissues are subject to entropy, too, only we can resist it. One of the ways our bodies resist entropy is through a process of cellular pruning and cleanup called autophagy.  There’s always a bit of back and forth between autophagy and our cellular detritus, but it occurs most powerfully in periods of caloric restriction. Fasting enhances autophagy like nothing else because it’s a period of total caloric restriction.  If bone broth destroys autophagy, that’d be a big mark against drinking it during a fast.

Amino acids tend to be anti-autophagy signaling agents. When we eat protein, or even consume certain isolated amino acids, autophagy slows. Bone broth is pure protein. It’s almost nothing but amino acids. The key is: Which amino acids are in bone broth, and have they been shown to impede autophagy?

The primary amino acids that make up the gelatin in bone broth are alanine, glycine, proline, hydroxyproline, and glutamine.

Let’s say you’re drinking a mug of strong, really gelatinous bone broth with 15 grams of gelatin protein. How do those amino acids break down?

• 5 grams of glycine. In piglets, dietary glycine activates mTOR, the pathway that triggers autophagy.
• 1.5 grams of alanine.
• 2.4 grams of proline.
• 2 grams of hydroxyproline.
• 1.75 grams of glutamine. 30 grams of glutamine inhibits autophagy.

So it’s a mixed bag. The most prominent amino acid in bone broth—glycine—seems to allow autophagy, but the less proinent amino acids may not. It’s unclear just how much of each amino acid it takes to affect autophagy either way. The absolute amounts found in bone broth are low enough that I’m not too concerned.

What Else To Know…

Okay, so while bone broth technically “breaks” the fast, it may preserve some of the most important benefits. Is there anything else related to bone broth and fasting that deserve mention?

If you’re the type to train in a fasted state and eat right after, you might consider incorporating some bone broth right before the workout. Just like my pre-workout collagen smoothie does, bone broth (plus a little vitamin C to aid the effect) right before a workout improves the adaptations of our connective tissue to the training by increasing collagen deposition in the tendons, ligaments, and cartilage. You’ve already done most of the fast honestly. What’s shaving off a half hour of fasting time by drinking some broth or collagen, especially if you stand to improve your connective tissue in the process? Ask any older athlete and they’ll say they wish they could.

Some spices and herbs that are often added to bone broth can have effects similar to fasting. Take curcumin, found in turmeric. Research shows that it’s an independent activator of mTOR, which in turn can activate autophagy. Ginger and green tea (what, you haven’t tried steeping green tea in bone broth?) are other ones to try. Bone broth with turmeric, green tea, and ginger might actually combine to form a decent autophagy-preserving drink during a fast. Only one way to find out!

That’s about it for bone broth and fasting. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask down below.

References:

Xu X, Wang X, Wu H, et al. Glycine Relieves Intestinal Injury by Maintaining mTOR Signaling and Suppressing AMPK, TLR4, and NOD Signaling in Weaned Piglets after Lipopolysaccharide Challenge. Int J Mol Sci. 2018;19(7)

De urbina JJO, San-miguel B, Vidal-casariego A, et al. Effects Of Oral Glutamine on Inflammatory and Autophagy Responses in Cancer Patients Treated With Abdominal Radiotherapy: A Pilot Randomized Trial. Int J Med Sci. 2017;14(11):1065-1071.

Shaw G, Lee-barthel A, Ross ML, Wang B, Baar K. Vitamin C-enriched gelatin supplementation before intermittent activity augments collagen synthesis. Am J Clin Nutr. 2017;105(1):136-143.

Zhao G, Han X, Zheng S, et al. Curcumin induces autophagy, inhibits proliferation and invasion by downregulating AKT/mTOR signaling pathway in human melanoma cells. Oncol Rep. 2016;35(2):1065-74.

Hung JY, Hsu YL, Li CT, et al. 6-Shogaol, an active constituent of dietary ginger, induces autophagy by inhibiting the AKT/mTOR pathway in human non-small cell lung cancer A549 cells. J Agric Food Chem. 2009;57(20):9809-16.

Zhou J, Farah BL, Sinha RA, et al. Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), a green tea polyphenol, stimulates hepatic autophagy and lipid clearance. PLoS ONE. 2014;9(1):e87161.

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When it comes to holiday baking and sweet treat season, it’s true that chocolate, peppermint, and gingerbread often get all the holiday press. But here’s the thing: citrus is the true shining star of winter. Don’t believe me? Try a batch of these sunny, sweet-tart lemon cookies — made with an ultra-smart supermarket shortcut — and you’ll be met with all of the acclaim and accolades at this year’s cookie swap. I promise.

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If you love food (and we’re guessing you do, simply because you’re on this website!), you probably wouldn’t mind a few food-themed ornaments on your Christmas tree. Probably something a little more creative than the classic pickle ornament, right? That’s where we (and the sellers on Etsy) come in!

We combed through the site to find the very best food-themed ornaments — the ones that go a little beyond knitted doughnuts and burgers. Here are five of the coolest, most creative and ooh-inducing options we could find.

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Two summers ago, less than six months after an eBay bidding war over a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto resembling Harambe (the late Cincinnati Zoo gorilla turned Internet meme) reached upwards of $100,000, I found myself standing in a hall of mirrors filled with an assortment of oddly shaped Flamin’ Hot Cheetos submitted by people all across the country. The cheese dust-covered oddities were affixed to mini pedestals in plexi-glass display cases just begging for tourists of the most highly trafficked area of New York City to Instagram them.

It was there, in a limited-time-only Cheetos exhibit in a corner of the Times Square Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!, that I asked myself: How on earth did we get here? Let’s look at the facts.

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A lot of my childhood memories revolve around going to the grocery store with my dad. And not just any grocery store — we always went to Rodman’s Discount Store. Established in 1955, and family-run (first by founder, Leonard Rodman, and then by his sons, Roy and Yale), Rodman’s has long been a Washington, D.C. landmark — and a uniquely peculiar retail spot.

It’s hard to describe without just having you walk into the store, but here goes: They sell everything under the sun and also, seemingly, whatever they feel like.

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This recipe takes the ingredients from stuffed peppers (rice, ground meat, bell peppers) and turns them into a meal that’s easier and faster to make. (And if you made and saved part of the delicious bolognese from last week’s Bolognese Sauce With Spaghetti Squash recipe, you’re more than halfway done with dinner!)

After tasting this flavorful one-pot meal you’ll probably never bother to stuff peppers again.

Ingredients:

• Leftover Bolognese Sauce
• 2 tablespoons avocado oil or extra virgin olive oil (30 ml)
• 3 bell peppers, seeded and cut into 2-inch strips or 8 ounces frozen, chopped bell peppers
• 4 cups raw cauliflower rice (12 ounces/340 grams)
• 1 teaspoon smoked paprika (5 ml)
• 1 jalapeno pepper, thinly sliced
• 3 scallions, chopped

Instructions:

Select the sauté setting on the Instant Pot and heat the oil. Add bell peppers and sauté about 5 minutes, until soft.

Add the cauliflower rice and sauté about 5 minutes more, until just tender. Season the cauliflower rice and bell peppers with salt and smoked paprika.

Add the leftover Bolognese sauce to the pot. Mix in well and cook until the Bolognese is completely heated.

Garnish the dish with sliced jalapenos and scallions.

The post Instant Pot Un-Stuffed Bell Peppers With Meat Sauce appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

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Every single year, despite my best efforts to plan ahead, I wind up with a lot of last-minute gifts to buy. As hard as this is to admit, when absolute desperation strikes there’s one last resort: the grocery store. (Please make me feel better and say that you’ve been there too.)

While perusing my local Trader Joe’s for some fun holiday finds, I found one grocery store gift that is, dare I say, actually kind of cool and might just save my butt in a pinch: the chocolate passport.

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