Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Rouxbe Online Cooking School
As I am sure you can tell cooking is one of my all time passions. Since I was a little girl I just loved the artistic challenge of taking different ingredients and merge them to create a delicious delight. It is something I never grow tired of. But there have always been huge learning curves in my cooking history that have led to kitchen disasters. On more then one occasion a meal has turned out so bad we had to go out to eat. It happens to everyone, but no matter how much you know that it always is a frustrating situation. For years I toyed with the idea of going to culinary school. And even now when I drive by the Culinary Institute near my house, or when I hear of a friend making the leap to go I get that ache to go. But I made decisions in my past that has made it a financial impossibility and that is something I understand. But it doesn't take away my desire to learn and thankfully for that there are avenues out there that I can turn to. Sites like allrecipes and reading other blogs has been a huge source of teaching materials for me. But something that I was introduced to by my friend Kimbery Schaub of Peas on Moss has opened the doors to learning things that I only dreamed of.
Rouxbe is an online cooking school for anyone that wants to learn how to improve their cooking skills. They provide video tutorials that takes you step-by-step through a process and then provide you with exercises to test you on what you have learned as well as a quiz. You also have access to the schools team of instructors to ask any questions that you might have. You get all of the benefits of going to a school but you can do it in your own time, and for a lot less money. Two of my favorite things.
You wouldn't use a map to teach you how to drive, it is a tool that we use to get to where we are going once we lean the skills needed to drive. But many people, myself included have relied entirely on recipes to teach them how to cook. Recipes are a wonderful guide that helps us when we are creating our meals. But what if the recipe calls for you to braise your meat. Do you know how to properly braise? How big of a difference would it be to your meals if you knew how to properly saute vegetables so that you have the delicious flavor and not have your veggies overcooked and limp? There is so much to learn and I have barely touched the surface with my subscription. I challenge you to take a look at the site and see what it can offer you. Tell them I sent you.
Rouxbe is an online cooking school for anyone that wants to learn how to improve their cooking skills. They provide video tutorials that takes you step-by-step through a process and then provide you with exercises to test you on what you have learned as well as a quiz. You also have access to the schools team of instructors to ask any questions that you might have. You get all of the benefits of going to a school but you can do it in your own time, and for a lot less money. Two of my favorite things.
You wouldn't use a map to teach you how to drive, it is a tool that we use to get to where we are going once we lean the skills needed to drive. But many people, myself included have relied entirely on recipes to teach them how to cook. Recipes are a wonderful guide that helps us when we are creating our meals. But what if the recipe calls for you to braise your meat. Do you know how to properly braise? How big of a difference would it be to your meals if you knew how to properly saute vegetables so that you have the delicious flavor and not have your veggies overcooked and limp? There is so much to learn and I have barely touched the surface with my subscription. I challenge you to take a look at the site and see what it can offer you. Tell them I sent you.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Important things to know about sodium and the nutrition label
I am not a nutritionist, but I don’t think that you need to be an expert to learn important nutritional information so that you can make better decisions in your life. In the past 5 years my attention has been drawn very strongly to two things, nutritional information that we have on our food packaging and sodium. I am not entirely sure where it all started, but I do know once the glory the teenage ability to eat whatever I wanted and work off the weight gain easily left me nutrition became very important for me to learn. When I was little I would often read the nutritional information on my cereal as I ate breakfast, not really because I was interested, it was because I was bored and wanted something to read, but it did get me wondering. I mean what good is that information if you don’t know how it affects you, is it good that it has 6% of Vitamin A, what does 6% even mean. So I started researching how to best understand this strange chart that we are given. One of the biggest eye opening moments for me came when I read about the importance of the serving size. I have been guilty of looking on the back of a package and reading the information and thinking to myself oh that isn’t too bad, but careful re-examination of the label I soon realized that I was making terrible choices without even realizing it. Now again I am not an expert so I am not going to try and teach you all of the important things about this subject, this truly is something for either your doctor or nutritionist to really lecture you about. But if you are like me and want to learn what you can without having to pay someone for that information then you can take a look at Mayo Clinic, they have a wonderful interactive guide to learning to read a nutrition label that will help get you on the right path.
Now onto obsession number two, sodium. I am actually very blessed with a family history of low blood pressure so I never really thought about the dangers of too much sodium in my diet. But one thing I have struggled with was my weight and so I began to read all that I could find about weight loss. One of the things that I read over and over is how having too much sodium in your diet can lead to water retention, and here is the thing. Water retention is not true weight as many of you know, but what water retention can do is discourage you when you are trying to loose weight. It has been proven, if by nothing more then my own experiences, that if you try to loose weight, go on a diet, start working out and you get no results after a decent amount of time then you are far more likely to give up. But I started to think, what if it isn’t so much that my efforts are pointless but that I am counter acting the good with bad habits. So I began to read more about the importance of sodium in our diet and tried to understand how to decrease the amount I was taking it. What I learned has changed how I think about food and cooking in more ways then I could have ever imagined.
Again I am no expert I am only taking information that I have learned over the years and compiling it together to help point you in the right direction, it is very important to also ask a doctor or nutritionist what is good for you. But there is one thing that I learned that I think is important I pass along to you, especially for women. Eating foods that have a lot of sodium may decrease your body’s ability to retain calcium. We need calcium to build strong bones, but if you eat too much salt, a lot of your calcium intake is directed straight out of your body via urination. This is something that I think should concern young women because it is the habits you have when you are young that affect you when you get older. A decrease in calcium absorption can lead to a loss of bone density, which as you know leads to Osteoporosis. Now of course I am not a doctor, I am not even trying to say a diet high in sodium causes Osteoporosis, these are just facts that we need to be aware of so that we can make the right decisions.
One last piece of information, for our bodies to function properly they say an adult needs a minimum of 500 mg of sodium a day, it is recommended that our daily intake not exceed 1,500 to 2,300 mg. This really means nothing to people, like me who really don’t understand what a mg of sodium looks like, so here are some examples of some common foods and their sodium levels. Again educating ourselves is the best resource we have to healthy living, though don’t just take my word for it, multiple sources of information is always the best way to get a more accurate picture.
1 can of Green Giant Green beans-serving size on package says ½ cup that means the whole can is approximately 2 cups, which means if you serve the whole can that is 1,600 mg of sodium.
1 box of Rice-a-Roni Chicken- Serving size is for this prepared is 1 cup, the whole box cooked makes about 2 cups. That means that the entire box prepared contains 2120 mg of sodium.
1 can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup- the serving size given on the can is ½ cup. There are about 1¼ cups in the whole can. So if you are like me and can eat the entire can in one sitting then you are taking in a whopping 2,220 mg of sodium!!
And because we often just can’t say no to the convenience of fast food-
BK Whopper with Cheese contains 1,430 mg of sodium
Now onto obsession number two, sodium. I am actually very blessed with a family history of low blood pressure so I never really thought about the dangers of too much sodium in my diet. But one thing I have struggled with was my weight and so I began to read all that I could find about weight loss. One of the things that I read over and over is how having too much sodium in your diet can lead to water retention, and here is the thing. Water retention is not true weight as many of you know, but what water retention can do is discourage you when you are trying to loose weight. It has been proven, if by nothing more then my own experiences, that if you try to loose weight, go on a diet, start working out and you get no results after a decent amount of time then you are far more likely to give up. But I started to think, what if it isn’t so much that my efforts are pointless but that I am counter acting the good with bad habits. So I began to read more about the importance of sodium in our diet and tried to understand how to decrease the amount I was taking it. What I learned has changed how I think about food and cooking in more ways then I could have ever imagined.
Again I am no expert I am only taking information that I have learned over the years and compiling it together to help point you in the right direction, it is very important to also ask a doctor or nutritionist what is good for you. But there is one thing that I learned that I think is important I pass along to you, especially for women. Eating foods that have a lot of sodium may decrease your body’s ability to retain calcium. We need calcium to build strong bones, but if you eat too much salt, a lot of your calcium intake is directed straight out of your body via urination. This is something that I think should concern young women because it is the habits you have when you are young that affect you when you get older. A decrease in calcium absorption can lead to a loss of bone density, which as you know leads to Osteoporosis. Now of course I am not a doctor, I am not even trying to say a diet high in sodium causes Osteoporosis, these are just facts that we need to be aware of so that we can make the right decisions.
One last piece of information, for our bodies to function properly they say an adult needs a minimum of 500 mg of sodium a day, it is recommended that our daily intake not exceed 1,500 to 2,300 mg. This really means nothing to people, like me who really don’t understand what a mg of sodium looks like, so here are some examples of some common foods and their sodium levels. Again educating ourselves is the best resource we have to healthy living, though don’t just take my word for it, multiple sources of information is always the best way to get a more accurate picture.
1 can of Green Giant Green beans-serving size on package says ½ cup that means the whole can is approximately 2 cups, which means if you serve the whole can that is 1,600 mg of sodium.
1 box of Rice-a-Roni Chicken- Serving size is for this prepared is 1 cup, the whole box cooked makes about 2 cups. That means that the entire box prepared contains 2120 mg of sodium.
1 can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup- the serving size given on the can is ½ cup. There are about 1¼ cups in the whole can. So if you are like me and can eat the entire can in one sitting then you are taking in a whopping 2,220 mg of sodium!!
And because we often just can’t say no to the convenience of fast food-
BK Whopper with Cheese contains 1,430 mg of sodium
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