You’re probably well aware that there’s nothing much more flavorful than the combination of freshly cooked pasta, cheese and cream you get with fettuccine – or any shape pasta – Alfredo. The only problem, Alfredo sauce is usually very heavy, and the culprit is heavy cream.
There’s an easy fix to that. Just substitute unsweetened evaporated milk for heavy cream. As shown in the label comparisons below, ounce for ounce (1 ounce = 2 tablespoons), evaporated milk has fewer than half the calories and 1/5th the fat of heavy cream, though I find the cooking properties and flavor qualities to be the same, especially for a dish like this.
You’ll also notice in the ingredients pictured below that I use garlic and a shot of balsamic vinegar to pump up the flavor, which is entirely optional when you make this dish. Flavor always rules!
Click this link or any picture on this page for a complete Lighter Pasta Alfredo picture book recipe.
January 31st, 2022 Blog, Mindfulness, VideosComments Off on What is Mindfulness and What Can It Do For You?
Mindfulness is the key to living a fully aware, fully awake life
Mindfulness is being fully aware, fully conscious, fully awake. Being mindful (aware, conscious, fully awake) is the key to living a more focused, calm and clear life in the midst of the constant chaos of moment-to-moment impulses, thoughts, feelings, emotions and experiences that tend to sweep us away mindlessly.
The difference between mindlessness and mindfulness is the difference between absently bouncing on a hamster wheel while being bombarded with everything life throws at you – with incredible accuracy – and using fully engaged awareness to drop back and see that hamster wheel and all the mayhem that surrounds it for what it really is.
Mindfulness is not checking out of life. Not at all. Mindfulness is checking into life fully engaged with eyes open, razor sharp clarity.
The root of the word “mindfulness” is “mind”, and there’s nothing more important to us than our mind. Our mind is who we are and what we are – always – and it is not our brain. Instead, our mind is an active process. It is all the mental activity going on in our brain all the time that makes up our ability to think and be aware. That ability to be aware, or the state of awareness, is consciousness.
By nature, our minds have been built over millions of years to help us survive in a random world by processing streams of random thoughts and emotions that affect us from a range of a light flicker to a complete attention-consuming fire. We can’t stop that randomness and we never will.
The real problem, though, isn’t the randomness of thoughts and emotions as they appear constantly in our heads.
No, the big problem is our tendency to identify with those thoughts and the emotions connected to them. Identifying means that we let those thoughts and emotions tell us who we are, which then sweeps us away on a mindless hamster wheel run – all at the tremendous expense of missing the feet-on-the-ground, full-on life power of experiencing our here and now present.
The bright side of this story (there’s always a bright side!): everything mentioned above doesn’t have to be that way, and the key is mindfulness.
Sure, I’d heard of mindfulness years ago but never practiced it formally until my good friend, Jay, nudged me to do something about it not once but twice. And I greatly appreciate his persistence!
As Andy Puddicombe says in his very focused and equally entertaining 10-minute TED Talk that you can see by clicking this link or any picture on this page, “We can’t change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way we experience (them)”. Changing our perspective, relative to moment-to-moment experiences, thoughts and emotions through mindfulness practice and regular application in our lives, is the key to living a more focused, calm and clear life. And, wow, from personal experience, what a difference that makes!
When you watch Andy’s video, you’ll hear him talk about one of the formal methods of achieving mindfulness: meditation. All my life, my response to the idea of meditation was, “There is no way I’m gonna’ take time out to sit crosslegged, eyes closed and say “Ommmm…”. Now, again thanks to my good bud, Jay’s, persistence, I’ve learned that the meditation I now practice daily has everything NOT to do with that and is instead all about waking up and learning how to make the most of my moment-to-moment life as possible. To say that mindfulness and meditation have significantly affected my life is a gross understatement.
But more about that and the specific practice I’ve adopted soon! In the meantime, please give Andy’s video a look. There’s no doubt in my mind that what he says has the power to change your life.
High protein-high fiber pasta is an easy to make great addition to any meal routine
Last post showed how to cook great tasting, highly versatile wheat-based pasta to perfection. Future posts will show how to make fully flavorful easy pasta dishes, though you can certainly get a jump on that by clicking this pasta recipe page.
But, what if you’re wheat intolerant and can’t eat wheat-based pasta? Or, what if you want to add more fiber to your diet, which, as mentioned in another recent post, What is Fiber and Why Do We Need It in Our Diet?, is a great idea?
No problem.
There are now many wheat-based pasta alternatives in stores, and here are two that I use regularly, edamame (green soybean) and black soybean pasta.
Edamame and black soybean pasta
Here’s how these pastas clearly separate themselves from each other regarding carbohydrate, fiber and protein content. Serving for serving, traditional wheat-based pasta has more than twice the carbohydrates, which is no problem if you live an active life, and…
…only a fraction of the fiber and protein content of high protein-high fiber pasta as shown in the nutrition label comparisons above and below.
Click this link or the picture below for easy to follow How to Cook High Protein-High Fiber Pasta picture book directions.
How to Cook High Protein-High Fiber Pasta picture book directions
Next post will be a bit different: What is Mindfulness and What Can It Do For You? I’m a year into daily practice, and it has made a terrific difference. More soon!
Pasta: loved by most, goes with just about anything, and is incredibly easy to make.
First, what is “perfectly cooked” pasta? It’s pasta that’s cooked “al dente”, which is Italian for “to the teeth” and means that the pasta still has a little uncooked whiteness at the core of the cooked pasta piece, as (almost) shown below, which makes the pasta slightly firm, not mushy, to chew.
Here are the keys to cooking pasta to perfection:
Knowing how to measure pasta serving sizes
Heating water to a rapid boil before adding pasta
Using the correct amount of water and knowing how long to cook the pasta
Serving size: Plan to use 1 ounce of dry pasta per person as a side dish and 2 ounces of dry pasta per person as a main dish. To get a visual idea of what 1 or 2 ounces of dry pasta looks like in your hands as well as how much 1 ounce of dry pasta makes when cooked, see the photos directly below.
Here’s how rapidly boiling water should look before adding pasta: The photo on the left shows how real rapidly boiling water should look before putting pasta in the pot to ensure that the cooking time you use will give you the result you want. The photo on the right shows what I call a “soda fizz bubble” that is a clear sign the water is not yet hot enough to cook pasta.
Amount of water needed to cook pasta and pasta cooking time: I use about half the water recommended in the chart below – and have gotten the thumbs up for that from Italian cooks. I also subtract 1 minute from the pasta package recommended cooking time, even if the package cooking instructions, like the one below, specify an “al dente” cooking time, to ensure my pasta still has a “to the teeth” slightly chewy texture.
Click this link or any picture on this page for How to Cook Pasta to Perfection picture book directions.
January 17th, 2022 Bar Drinks, BlogComments Off on Hickory Snow and Glühwein (Mulled Wine) Picture Book Directions
Hickory snow + Glühwein (mulled wine) = great combination
Here’s how it looked in Hickory, NC, yesterday and today.
Hickory, NC
My heart raced the whole day, especially when I was outside, just as it did in my younger childhood days decades ago. I then made this with dinner: Glühwein (pronounced “glue-vine”), which is German for mulled wine – and very easy to make.
Glüwein (mulled wine)
All you need is a robustly flavored red wine, some sugar, lemon rind, cinnamon stick(s) and whole cloves, like what I used last night.
Last night’s Glühwein ingredients
Click this link or any picture on this page for complete picture book directions.
This mix of flaxseeds,chia seeds and nutritional yeast is an excellent fiber and vitamin B boost to any meal
Last post talked about fiber and why we need it in our diet. This post shows how to make a practical mix of high fiber flaxseeds and chia seeds with the added optional benefit of nutritional yeast.
As I mention in the “Tips” section of the picture book directions you can get here, the mix of ground flax and chia seeds with nutritional yeast you see here is no “magic bullet”, but it sure helped improve both my gut health and vitamin B12 levels. My gut was in bad shape years ago due to poor stress management and a long history of prescribed antibiotic use, mostly for frequent middle ear infections. My vitamin B12 level was low due to not eating much animal protein.
I’ve since learned – and continue to learn – a lot about what goes on in our gut, how to manage stress much better and have changed my eating habits. More about both gut health and stress management soon. Regarding food, once I got “clued in” to the very new science of gut health 10-15 years ago, I’ve been eating a varied, well-balanced high-fiber whole food diet that is mostly plant based but is also strong in fish, poultry and meat. And I still use the mix of seeds and nutritional yeast you see here everyday as a fiber and vitamin B complex boost. Here’s how I had it this morning for breakfast with fresh fruit and yogurt.
Here’s how I’ve used it recently with both sweeter or more savory meals – all fully flavorful.
Sweet and savory meals topped with a mix of flaxseeds, chia seeds and nutritional yeast
Click this link or any picture on this page for picture book directions that show how to make this flaxseed, chia seed and nutritional yeast boost.
What you see here sure works great as is but is really intended to inspire your fully flavorful imagination.
When I put together the last few posts that showed how to make quickly cooked fresh fruit toppings, I’ve said that they go great on pancakes, waffles, French toast, over warm or cold cereal – and much more. This post is about providing a concrete example that works with warm pineapple coconut topping on a leftover pancake.
Now, though the recipe you can get here works great as is – I’m sure a big fan – the real purpose here is to inspire your imagination to use this or any fruit topping in a way that satisfies your own personal taste.
For more details, click this link or either picture on this page for a complete pineapple coconut topping on pancake picture book recipe. Then use what you see in that recipe to fire your imagination!
This warm pineapple coconut topping is just an example of how you can easily improvise on the warm fruit topping theme.
Last two posts showed how to make warm fruit toppings that go great over hot or cold cereal, with yogurt, on pancakes, waffles or French toast. Your imagination is your only limit.
This post is about a variation on the fruit topping theme I’d never tried before but put together on-the-fly for breakfast with my good Hickory, NC, buds a little before Thanksgiving. The key to this warm pineapple coconut topping recipe is using a fully ripened pineapple, and the picture book recipe you can get here shows exactly how to check a pineapple for ripeness and ripen a pineapple that will most likely be under-ripe when you buy it at the store.
Here’s what you need to to make a warm pineapple coconut topping.
Click this link or any picture on this page for this warm pineapple coconut topping picture book recipe.
Next post will show an example of how I use this topping and toppings like it to power me through a morning that almost always includes a good rip on the bike.
3 easy-to-make variations on the warm apple cranberry fruit topping recipe theme
Last post showed how to make a warm apple cranberry fruit topping that goes great on warm or cold cereal, pancakes, French toast, waffles and much more. I mentioned in that post that the recipe is a base or building block recipe that can be easily varied by using different ingredients to meet your personal taste. This post shows three specific examples that work great as is and can also be used to fire your imagination.
The first two recipes are direct riffs on warm apple cranberry fruit topping. The third is berry based.
Apple, Kiwi, Cranberry Topping: This recipe just adds kiwi to the topping, which you can substitute with any other fruit: pear, grapes, berries and more. Click this link or the picture to get the recipe.
Here are 3 easy-to-make variations on the warm apple cranberry fruit topping recipe theme
2. Apple and Papaya Topping: Quickly cooking papaya is my favorite, most flavorful way of eating this tropical fruit. The recipe for this topping that you can get by clicking this link again is just an example of exchanging one ingredient for another either for the fun of it (I mean that) or to suit your personal taste.
3. Warm Berry and Kiwi Fruit Topping: This is an example of a more dramatic variation on the apple, cranberry topping theme. Again, you can substitute the berries or any fruit in this recipe to suit your specific taste. Click this link or the picture below for a picture book recipe.
Next post: Pineapple Coconut Topping. Made it recently. Friends asked for the recipe. I’ll get that out later this week.
This easy to make fruit topping tastes great and can be made with different fruit combinations to your taste.
Winter’s coming – or maybe for you, it’s already here.
Like I’ve mentioned before, there’s nothing much more comforting on a dark, cold morning than the smell of apples and cinnamon cooking fragrantly on the stove.
The easy-to-make fully flavorful warm apple cranberry fruit topping recipe you see here that goes great over pancakes, French toast, waffles, hot or cold cereal, with yogurt and jam, and much more is what I call a base or building block recipe. As a base recipe, you can use the prep and cooking techniques shown here and then use your choice of ingredients to make the topping just the way you want to suit your taste. Next couple posts will show examples that do exactly that.
Here’s what you need to make this recipe:
Here’s how I used it this morning to power a 25+ mile bike ride with good Hickory, NC, buds. I scooped a big spoon of the topping in a bowl and topped it off with yogurt, fig jam, some ground seeds (flaxseed and chia seeds), kefir and dried fruit – along with a pancake topped with nut butter, jam, yogurt and more dried fruit. That and a coffee/hot chocolate mix. Killer!
Click this link or any picture on this page for a complete warm apple cranberry fruit topping picture book recipe.
Next post: a couple easy variations on this apple cranberry fruit topping theme. All easy, all flavorful!
February 4th, 2022 
