I am Somer Canon: Shiftless lay-about, blog enthusiast, and more importantly, food lover. This blog will share my favorite recipes, cooking techniques, adventures in eating, and just about any subject pertaining to cooking and eating.
I know it’s only February, but I thought that now would be a good time to discuss nutrition. As you can probably tell from this website, I am not above eating the occasional horrendous meal consisting mostly of empty calories and exorbitant amounts of fat. However, since I cook most of the meals that my family eats, I try to make sure that most of them are nutritious and healthy. I’m not a nutritionist but I’d like to share with you a few of the simple things that I’ve learned where healthy eating is concerned.
Look at your plate.
How colorful is the meal you are about to eat? Is it mostly a beige and brown meal? Believe it or not, by eating a meal that is full of natural (i.e. they occur in the food naturally and not by process) color, you are pretty safe in assuming that you are eating a meal full of essential vitamins and minerals. You want to eat food that is dark and green, dark blue/purple, bright orange, and red. When you are eating processed food and fried food, the colors will tend to be a beige and/or brown color. While this is fine in smaller portions for certain meals, you certainly don’t want it to make up the bulk of your meal.
In general, the avocado is tasteless or very mild in taste. It’s very easy to punch up the flavor with herbs, citrus, and spices. Use simple mashed up avocado in place of mayonnaise on your turkey sandwich. Make a big bowl of creamy guacamole and serve it with pork chops or chicken breasts instead of just tortilla chips. Use it as a way to make a smoothie extra creamy and thick. Add it to a citrus based pasta salad for an extra punch. It’s recommended that you try to consume avocado at least 3 times a week. Since they can be expensive, though, try for a once a week consumption.
FISH FISH FISH FISH.
Fish is good….for the most part. Read this article. I’ll wait.
Fish is super good for you to eat, again for the most part. If you are pregnant or have a frail condition, you certainly want to avoid larger fish such as tuna, shark, swordfish, and other huge fish to avoid mercury poisoning. We like to hear about those lovely Omega 3 Fatty Acids and oily fish are one of the best places to get it. Salmon is good. Sardines are great. Mackerel is divine. The internet is flooded with thousands of recipes for fish.
If you’re still one of those people who hate fish? Look, you really ought to try to get your palate used to it. Start with a very mild fish like flounder and start working your way up. Try different recipes. Use fresh ingredients. Citrus and fresh herbs make almost any fish taste better.
Dark Leafy Greens
I know that I made mention of these above, but this category is seriously one of the most important. It’s a super food. No joke. Here, read this.
I’ll tell you one thing, my freezer ALWAYS has frozen broccoli and spinach. They can sometimes be flat and the taste can get old, so you turn to the internet to spice things up. One of my favorite ways to spice up a bag of frozen spinach is to add a can of stewed tomatoes and about a teaspoon of curry powder along with a pinch of salt and pepper. It makes a great side dish to any week night meal. And honestly, I prefer my broccoli steamed with no flavorings added.
In the summer, when all of those beautiful salad mixes are out, I like to buy some and have side salads with ever meal dressed with a simple lemon vinaigrette ( I almost never buy salad dressing).
Whole Grains
Hugely important in every diet. Here’s a short article.
One of the easiest grains to have access to is brown rice. I’ll be honest with you, I do not care for brown rice and planned to never buy it again. However, I’ve decided to give it another chance. I recently read that, instead of preparing brown rice the way you might prepare white rice, bake it. So, I’m going to give it a whirl.
My favorite whole grain is bulgur wheat. I love Tabbouleh. You can find so many recipes for it online and you can find bulgur wheat quite easily in most supermarkets.
Don’t forget about oatmeal. I try to eat oatmeal for breakfast every day. I get SICK TO DEATH of it, but I still try to eat it. I buy dried fruit and add a little bit every morning to make it more interesting.
Elementary School should have taught you the “elementaries”.
The rest of the important stuff, you should remember from elementary school. Do you remember the food pyramid? We need to remember that. Remember being taught the difference between processed sugars and natural sugars? Here’s a must read on that subject.
It’s still pretty simple. Eat your fruits and vegetables. Drink lots of water. You need calcium (either through dairy or other means). Beans are good for you. You don’t need more than 4 oz. of lean meat at your evening meal. Dessert is nice, but not needed. Snacks are recommended but should consist of nuts and fruit instead of candy bars and potato chips.
As I said before, I am not a nutritionist. I’m just a mom and a housewife who has learned these very simple facts concerning nutrition. The most unfortunate thing about eating healthy is that it is so much more expensive than eating junk.
A few things that I always keep on hand to help me with this are frozen fruits and vegetables (not as perishable and more affordable in the long run), canned tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, and diced tomatoes. Don’t buy premade tomato sauce as it can contain a lot of unhealthy ingredients that you don’t want…and it’s way more expensive. I try to buy whole grain pasta (but read the labels on those. They aren’t always really whole grain). And I’ve always got both green and black tea on hand. Oh, did I forget to mention tea? Ok, here:
Drink Tea.
Green tea is thought to be great, but is lacking real world evidence. So what? It’s loaded with antioxidants! Read this.
Although it isn’t praised as much as green tea, black tea is super too! Read this.
As you know, I like to make homemade (i.e. not made from a pre-sweetened powder) iced tea. I also like to make iced green tea. We love it and drink it by the gallon!
There. That about covers all of my personal knowledge concerning nutrition. I’m by no means a professional and I’m sure I still have a thing or two to learn. I hope someone out there finds this helpful.
I took this from TW at Retro-Food. It looked fun so I’m taking part (since this blog is nearly dead).
1. Which expensive electronic device do you or your children most admire? Right now, it’s definitely the Wii.
2. Do you ever use your computer in the kitchen? Yes.
3. What ratio of new recipes cooked in your home come from the Internet vs from a cookbook you own? Only a very small amount come from the internet. Out of ten new recipes that I try, usually only 2 come from the internet.
4. Does your family regard a recipe as something printed from the computer, on a handwritten card or something on the kitchen netbook? That doesn’t really apply to me. Recipes in my kitchen come from cookbooks, a Word doc. on my computer, or a web page. A recipe is a recipe.
5. Do you have a television or other electronic entertainment in the kitchen? I have a radio/CD player.
6. What is the eating in front of the computer rule in your house? I do it. A lot. And get crumbs in my keyboard all of the time.
7. How many places can you order dinner online from in your area? I still use the phone to order out.
8. What is the BEST recipe you have ever made from the Internet? Probably Italian Bread. I don’t remember where I found it, but I was born and raised in a small Italian town (in WV, no less) and I missed perfect warm Italian bread and this recipe was very close.
9. What’s the least used kitchen gadget in your home? My Fondue pot. I love it, I just rarely make fondue.
10. What is the oddest recipe your family has tried after seeing it on the Internet? I don’t know. I’m boring and usually steer clear of the weird stuff.
I get in trouble a lot for all of the crumbs in the keyboard
Hello everybody! My posts on this site have been deplorable, haven’t they? I’m not updating and when I do, it is cheap and not very well put together. My deepest apologies.
Things around here have been crazy, to say the least. We are busy trying to get settled into our new house, working on fixing up a few rooms, and my laptop is broken. Why should this have any effect on this site? Well, allow me to vent/complain/explain.
There’s not much time to create any fabulous meals here. We’re eating your basic pork chops and chicken breasts quite a lot. And with my laptop being broken, I no longer have access to a lot of the recipes that I had set aside to try out specifically for this site. So I’m a little grumpy about all of this.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel. 1) It would appear that my laptop is not broken beyond repair and I am hoping to have it back up and running soon. 2) Sometime in late spring we will begin the renovations on the itty bitty teeny tiny kitchen. Since it is kitchen-related, I will be sharing the experience right here on this site. It will be lots of fun for you all to read even though it won’t be much fun for me to be doing…but we all love to watch a renovation take place, especially when we aren’t having to do the work. That will be fun, won’t it?
Until then, my friends, I will try to remember to get on here and leave the occasional food post with my sub-par photographs. Until then, Ciao.
The first two years that I had the darned thing, I had no idea how to use it. Back then, my pizzas came to me in a cardboard box via a pimply-faced teenager. It sat in my cabinet unused, taking up space. I considered many times giving it away. I had no use for it. Boy am I glad that I never acted on that completely stupid impulse.
My pizza stone is my very dear friend. First of all, I like to use it to make pizza. On homemade pizza, I prefer a thin and crispy crust and a pizza stone is really the only way to achieve that in a standard oven.
But as time wore on and my cooking diversified (compared to what it used to be) I found another really awesome use for my pizza stone. I can use it to make Naan!
In case you are unaware, Naan is a leavened Indian flat bread. It’s usually made in a tandoor oven, but since most American kitchens do not have a tandoor, I discovered that my pizza stone can help me achieve the crazy hot surface that I needed to make a perfect Naan.
I put the pizza stone into a cold oven, and then crank the heat to the max. I let the pizza stone sit in the maximum heat of my oven for 30 minutes before putting the Naan dough on the stone. (WARNING: This thing is insanely HOT! Use every precaution when doing this. It only takes a microsecond of contact for you to get a very nasty burn…trust me…I know.)
Once the Naan is on the pizza stone, I turn the broiler on high so that the top of the bread will cook. It only takes about 3 minutes for the bread to cook fully in this fashion.
Once the Naan is through cooking, I like to finish it by basting a small amount of vegetable oil over the top, sprinkling with some finely minced garlic, and sprinkling with some chopped fresh cilantro.
There are many wonderful recipes for Naan out there and I suggest you try it out. Pizza stones are readily available here, here, here, and here. Take your pick. Just don’t underestimate the power or a porous stone that you can heat to a bajillion degrees. I’m sure I’ll find many more uses for this thing in the years to come.
Also, remember that these tools don’t mix well with soap. Just wipe them down if you can.
Go and get one! Start making your own pizza crusts with whole grain flour! Make some Naan! French fries work well on this baby too!
I hate shopping. For anything and everything. I’ve had furious arguments with horrible insensitive men who assume that all women want to shop all day for clothes and shoes because I really don’t think that there are many people out there who hate shopping more than I do.
Alas, it is a necessity in my life. I have to do it at least once a month. I can handle those enormous once a month trips, I can handle it. What irritates me are all of those smaller trips in between where only one or two things need to be procured. A gallon of milk. Diapers. A special ingredient for the dinner I want to make. I hate those trips.
Luckily, as time goes on, my shopping has become more efficient and I am able to minimize the number of those small runs. I’ve learned to stock my home in such a way that it lasts the full month, but I’ve also learned to make a lot of things homemade so that I don’t have to worry about buying them. One of these things is yogurt. My son eats yogurt for breakfast every morning and I like to always have yogurt on hand because I LOVE Indian food and yogurt is a big part of that cuisine.
It was actually from an Indian cookbook that I was able to first learn how to make yogurt. I messed it up quite a few times, but I figured out a few tricks that might help.
Start off with a quart of milk. You can use any milk you like, I use whole milk, but you can use 2% or 1%.
Bring the milk to a boil in a large heavy pot and stir constantly. When the milk starts to rise, remove it from the heat. Allow the milk to cool slightly. Don’t let it get to room temperature, you want it to be warm to the touch, but not hot.
You need some “starter” for this. Starter is about 2 Tablespoons of yogurt that you have. You can use purchased yogurt from the dairy aisle. That’s what I use.
Put the yogurt in a heat-safe large bowl and whisk it until it is smooth. Slowly add the warm milk, whisking all the while.
Make sure that the yogurt and milk are thoroughly incorporated.
Now you need to let the yogurt set up. You need a warm place for this. I like to use my oven. If your oven has a “WARM” setting, start this while the milk is still boiling. If your oven doesn’t, the simply set the oven to it’s lowest temperature (mine goes only as low as 170 degrees F.) and let it preheat while you are preparing the yogurt. Turn the heat off before you put the bowl inside and make a warm and snuggly place for the bowl to sit.
I put a thick dish towel on the oven rack, the bowl on the towel, and then another thick towel over the bowl. This needs to be a gently warmed environment so the yogurt sets up correctly. It’s not as hard as it sounds. It takes 8 hours for the yogurt to set up. Take a peek about 4-5 hours in and if the oven isn’t warm, set the warmer on again for 5 minutes and turn it off before it gets too hot.
Do this right and you’ll have your own homemade yogurt. And you won’t have to go to the store to buy one lousy little tub. Your welcome.
I am Somer Canon: Shiftless lay-about, blog enthusiast, and more importantly, food lover. This blog will share my favorite recipes, cooking techniques, adventures in eating, and just about any subject pertaining to cooking and eating.
