Health & Wellness Investigations

In the spirit of the recent posts about eggs, I thought I’d share some things that you can do with the egg shells . My mom always kept a container in her kitchen for used eggshells, and now I do the same thing. Saving the shells takes about two seconds, and it doesn’t cost anything - win win. In my house, the shells have two main uses… Plant Food: This is my most common use for the shells. I crush them and put them in the soil of my houseplants and herbs - the shells contain a lot of calcium which is good for the soil. My mom always swore by them for tomatoes especially - a lot of the time blossom end rot is caused by a lack of calcium in the soil, and eggshells can help with that. I don’t have tomato plants (yet), but I figure the shells can’t hurt my soil! People Food: When I make stock, I’ll sometimes grind up a few shells in my coffee grinder until they make a fine powder and add them to the stock. This extra calcium is important in my diet because I don’t get a lot of d...

With all my talk about leaving out vegetable oils (canola, soybean, corn, etc), I thought I’d share an olive oil Italian dressing that is easy, inexpensive, and very convenient. Store-bought dressing usually use vegetable oil, and many home-made recipes get complex and/or use vegetable oil anyway, so I’m sharing mine! It uses the flavor of olive oil to make a great dressing, and – bonus – there’s absolutely no sugar . I will usually make enough to last 2-3 weeks at a time; you can scale the recipe to make as much or as little as you want. Basic Italian Dressing w/ Olive Oil ½ c. olive oil ½ c. white wine vinegar 1 tbsp Dijon mustard 1 tsp oregano Salt & Pepper to taste (I usually use quite a bit of pepper) [I usually just make the base dressing listed above, but sometimes I mix it up by adding one or more of the following] Optional: Scallions (minced)* Optional: 1 clove garlic, crushed Optional: ¼ c. Parmesan cheese Whisk all of the ingredients t...

I mentioned in my previous post that I stopped using vegetable oil , and gave a brief layman's overview of why. Now I'm going to lay out the substitutions I made in my own cooking, as well as some some suggestions for eating out and purchasing stuff at the grocery store. Practical Considerations - Cooking Changes: Salad Dressings: You can’t directly substitute another type of oil for vegetable oil in salad dressing, because other oils have flavors - vegetable oil does not. However, you can re-work your salad dressing recipes to accommodate other oils. I use a mixture of olive, walnut, and avocado oil in my dressings, and have occasionally used sesame or flaxseed oil as well. It may take some trial and error to convert your salad dressing recipes to non-vegetable oil, but it’s TOTALLY worth it...and I actually like a lot of my new recipes better than my original ones! Hint: start with more acid/vinegar and go from there Frying: Peanut oil - this works just as well...