Nuked edamame??

NUKED edamame??? EEEEEWWWWW! We went to a sushi restaurant last night - conveyer-belt style in Issaquah. *sigh* It's one of the only times I eat white rice. No one can be perfect 100% of the time! LOL Anyway, we don't normally get edamame because it's SOOO bad for you, but I just had to comment on this. As we're sitting there, the owner is near the back NUKING little bowls of edamame and then putting them on the conveyer belt.

This is a fricking RESTAURANT! Can't they COOK THEIR FOOD properly??? Have restaurants gotten so lazy??? Ugh, I know that seems trivial, but it just royally grossed me out. Why can't they BOIL or STEAM them?

I'm not totally against microwaves... They have a purpose... sometimes. I do try to avoid using it though. It just creeps me out knowing what it does to food and how it heats it.

If we remodel our kitchen though *fingers crossed*, I will hopefully get rid of it completely and replace it with a nice convection oven. However, since there is a microwave in my kitchen now... I use it to heat water or re-heat left-overs. I never use it on fresh food. I know left-overs aren't much different than fresh food, but I'm ok with that. LOL I keep telling myself that somehow makes sense. LOL Can't wait to get a convection/turbo oven. Mercola recommends a counter-top style turbo oven, but I'm hoping to find one that can be installed and not just be another appliance to clutter my counters...

That's all for now!

Who needs to walk when you can roll???

I tell ya, it just floors me that these shoes are so popular. Walking is so important to child brain development and every new invention for kids always seems to be something that hinders that. Many of you already know how much I HATE strollers. I owned one, but very rarely used it. I mostly used it to push my youngest SO I could take my oldest running. It was impossible to run with her otherwise. It's sad though... They even make ATTACHMENTS for existing strollers so big kids *gasp* don't have to walk and can ride along. Ugh!

Anyway, I could ramble on and on about strollers so back to the roller shoes. And no, I'm not talking about rollerskating or rollerblading. I'm talking about the new everyday sneakers that have a wheel (or two wheels) built into the heel...

These awful contraptions are so popular right now. Kids effortlessly rolling everywhere - not walking in a cross pattern at all. And God forbid they get some exercise!!! Cross pattern walking/running plays an ENORMOUS roll in organizing the developing brain. The other bad thing about these ridiculous shoes is they don't allow for natural foot movement. So if the child isn't rolling into a tree or mowing someone down, then they're walking funny because of the wheel and the stiffness of the shoe itself.

Bad for foot development, bad for muscle development, bad for brain development.

I'll have 153 grams of non-trans fat per serving to go please

Isn't this just sick!? I found this article about food choices at Burger King. Part of the article was trying to make it sound better (by calories) to order small fries versus the king size fries. The title of the article was "Drive Thru at Burger King Without Driving Up The Fat." Nice.

Suppose you arrived at the drive thru window and ordered a Triple Whopper with cheese, a King size fries with a King size chocolate milkshake. This meal packs in 3090 calories and 153 grams of fat, which is over 1.5 times more calories and fat than the typical American needs in a whole day! Even if you chose a King Coke instead of a milkshake, which would cut your calories down to 2220 and fat down to 115g, you'd still get more than required for a whole day.

Related to this... have you heard the recent news about KFC removing trans fat from their cooking oil? I heard about this several months ago and thought "good for them" for removing trans fat. I still won't eat there due to the chickens they use, but was happy they removed the trans fat.

GET THIS!! I was watching TV the other night and saw a KFC ad that featured cooking with no trans fat oil. I quickly shouted to Ferbit "hey, they are advertising no trans fat now."

Then the shocker... "...now with zero grams of trans fat per serving!"

Just when we thought one of the big chains got rid of trans fat, they too fell into the same scam and loop-hole as the chip makers and others by saying "per serving."

Today I found this stupid article by ("the drive-by media" as Rush calls it) ABC News totally falling into the trap thinking KFC is so wonderful for doing this and don't actually investigate further and realize there is still trans fat.

I'm sure if the average person ate food daily that said "no trans fat per serving" they would end up eating about 10-20 grams of trans fat per day. Do yourself a favor and be careful about what you see. Read the labels and look for hydrogenated oils. That's trans fat no matter what the company says on the package.

It IS possible to have a healthy kids birthday party!

My youngest just turned 3 last weekend and I'm proud to say we had a very fun, HEALTHY (except the alcohol, LOL) birthday party for her. Here's how we did it:

Appetizers:

• Organic, blue corn tortilla chips with organic, natural salsa (no HFCS)


• Veggie Bootie

Dinner:

• Salad greens and sprouts with choice of three organic, healthy dressings (my 3YO and 4YO both go crazy over broccoli sprouts!!)


• Natural, pasture-fed Silver Springs Cattle Company hamburgers served on Rudi's organic, unbleached hamburger buns.


• Applegate Farms preservative-free, natural hot dogs served on Rudi's organic, unbleached hot dog buns.

Dessert (Strawberry Shortcake - sort of *wink*):

• PCC Angelfood Cake (only $4.99!!!!!) made with organic unbleached flour, crystalized cane juice and Stiebers Farms free-range egg whites, topped with...


• ...sliced local organic strawberries (gooey from soaking in Rapadura all day)


• ...Alden's organic, all natural vanilla ice cream (the only ice cream I've found sweetened with dehydrated cane juice rather than sugar)


• ...and homemade organic whipped cream (whipped with cinnamon, Rapadura & vanilla).

Introducing Horus

I just thought I'd take a quick moment to introduce my wonderful, supportive, die-hard republican, nutrition-crazy, nationally-ranked-swimmer hubby. He's been posting more frequently in the past month. His username is Horus and mine is Ferbit. To see who's written a blog, look just below the blog where it says "POSTED BY...".

Bee killer could damage food supplies

I have been hearing about this, but didn't realize it has hit National news. I found this article today on FoxNews.com about something killing off the Bee colonies. Before jumping to conclusions that it's human caused, I will continue to follow the topic.

From Fox News:

Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have.

Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.

There is also history of this happening before so there might be some sort of cycle involved:

First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.

The article didn't say it, but my guess it's only a matter of time before the libs blame Bush for the bees dying and relating it to Global Warming.