on my mind monday 10.29.12

It's never the same two weeks in a row.  A collection of what I find interesting in the world of food, nutrition, and holistic health.  Here's what's on my mind.

Tofu allowed in school lunches - This is concerning for a couple of reasons.  The first being that soy products are one of the most heavily GMO contaminated crops in this country.  I'm guessing that schools won't be providing organic soy for school lunch.  Another concern is that too much soy is not healthy for you, especially if it's not fermented.  And yet we're going to feed it to our kids.

Medium or Large? - As I've shared before, we're REALLY BAD at "consumer math."  We think we know what we're doing but we trust the label a little too often.  When given the same size cookie but told it's medium, rather than large, we eat more.  The endless bowl of soup experiment showed that we really do eat with our eyes.  We need to be more mindful of what we eat, not only for food content, but also for amount.

Heading into the winter months more people have been asking me about drying, or dehydrating, foods. Living in Texas I can't dehydrate by drying in the sun; it's too humid here.  I air dry herbs inside my home and for other foods we use an electric dehydrator.  Here's a video with a succinct explanation about the process.



Two good resource books on dehydrating foods (and using them in recipes) are The Dehydrator Bible and Mary Bell's Complete Dehydrator Book.  Those who follow a raw food diet tend to use the dehydrator as a cooking method so looking at those books and recipes may be helpful as well.

One form of dehydration is to bake in the oven.  This recipe for these amazing looking beet chips is a great way to eat this this tasty, good for you root crop.  High in folate, manganese, fiber, potassium, vitamin C beets are easy to add to the diet.  So tasty any way you serve them (but especially in chip form) you'll be wanting to grow your own.