Chef Tip: Pot Boiling Over? Place a Wooden Spoon on It.

If you are like me, you are easily distracted in the kitchen, and not terribly patient. I've spent many a 5-minute interval waiting for that pot to boil. As soon as I turn my back to accomplish an actual task, the contents of the pot are all over the stove. 

A simple solution is a wooden spoon. Place it over the top of your pot, and it absorbs and bursts the bubbles enough to keep the liquid in the pot where it belongs. This actually works.

Your 5 minute intervals are no longer lost in wasted waiting. You're welcome.

Product Love: Allergy Tattoos

Allergy bracelets, necklaces.. and now tattoos? Here's another way to help alert others to your child's food allergies. What do you think, parents?

Safety Tats are water proof, smudge proof and last a few days. Great for a party, or when your kids are at camp if they have one or two severe allergies. If your child has multiple allergies, your little one could truly look like an air mailed package, and will run out of body parts to tattoo!

Here's Safety Tats website: www.safetytat.com

Here's the news story.

Visit Facebook: SafetyTat: Kids temporary safety tattoos

Two Advantages of Buying from Small, Local Farms

There are many, many advantages for you, for the farmer, and for society at large to buy from small, local farms.

Here are two: 1) if organic, the farmer helps control pesticide use, incl. GMO seed  2) Small farms help keep the soil's immune system healthy by rotating & heirloom crops and by employing other practices that large farms do not.  The soil's immune system is like ours - it needs variety & healthy bacteria and practices that continue to infuse it w/ nutrients (not strip).

Learn where your state ranks in local farming and food: The 2014 Locavore Index: See Where Your State Ranks in Local Food

A chemical in certain pesticides that are used world wide, including pesticide containing GMO seeds / plants that are allowed only in the United States, are suspected to play a part in the massive bee death that is occuring in the United States and around the world right now. We need our polinators, without them, we have no food.

Health Canada issued a report in September indicating that detectable residues of neonicotinoid insecticides used to treat corn and soybean seeds were found in large numbers of dead bee samples taken in 2013.

"Residues of neonicotinoid insecticides were detected in samples from approximately 80 per cent of the beekeepers for which samples have been analyzed."

Read more: http://london.ctvnews.ca/environmental-groups-want-pesticide-makers-to-release-bee-death-studies-1.1746839#ixzz30OOLvmK7

Here's a study being done on what this pesticide is doing to the gut bacteria of bees:

Pesticide exposure and pathogens may interact to have strong negative effects on managed honey bee colonies. Such findings are of great concern given the large numbers and high levels of pesticides found in honey bee colonies.

How to Read Egg Carton Labels

If you are confused and concerned by egg labeling, you are not alone. When you read what each label allows or disallows, it is in one moment comforting, and in the next, shocking. For instance, Cage-Free allows the chickens who lay the eggs to roam free, but does not guarantee that they are exposed to sunlight and also allows beak cutting, a gruesome practice to keep the chickens from pecking each other in close quarters.

So read more, and consider getting your eggs from a local farm with a reputation you can count on.

This simple graphic from Willy Blackmore, Take Part's food editor helps us make better decisions when we feel the chill of the refrigerator aisle and reach for those cartons.

 Click the graphic to make it bigger and more readable.

Via: TakePart.com

Exercise Brings Oxygen to Cells

It's spring, and if you are struggling with immune issues, or paralyzed when you think of putting on that bkikii this year, here is a little motivation to get you moving. It's important, even if you are struggling with your health.

When we move, it improves our circulation.  Circulation carries the nutrients and oxygen to our cells, the building blocks of our bodies.  Oxygen nourishes, but it also can help you ward off infection since, as Dr. Keri Topouzian puts it, "most bugs don't like oxygen".

If your body needs energy when you are ill, but is not getting the nutrients it needs because of malabsorption, for instance, one of the first places it goes for extra nutrients is the muscle. So help your body provide itself nutrients and find some activity that works for you.

More Articles Like This

Read more advice from Dr. Topouzian about Exercise & The Immune System and what exercise does for you sexy bod.

Try a few yoga poses to help improve circulation and release one of the toughest muscles in the body to get flexible (the psoas). Examples from Melanie McQuown of PeaceLab Yoga.