Squeaky Zucchini Stew

My daughter sometimes cooks for us around here. Sunday was a HUGE work day, and I couldn’t grill for the helpers. So my daughter stepped in and made a fabulous meal. Everyone absolutely loves it; if we entered a contest, say, for a week at one of those gorgeous Outer Banks homes, I’d bet we’d win! I thought I’d share the recipe here.

Squeaky Zucchini Stew

1 pound ground sausage, cooked and drained of fat
2 small zucchini, sliced
2 small yellow squash, sliced
1 medium white onion, diced
1-2 cans spaghetti sauce (depending on taste)
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Saute the sausage, zucchini, yellow squash, and onion until the vegetables are tender. Add the sauce; warm up. Throw some cheese on the top until melted. Serve as it is, or with some pasta.

It’s so good! The flavors really blend well. The veggies are slightly crunchy, too, so it’s just terrific stuff.

Great Summer Salads

I love eating salad in the summer, when everything is so fresh. Doesn’t this look so good?

Salads are not just a quick weight loss tool– they are SO nutritious because they incorporate so many varieties of raw foods. Cooked food has enzymes in it, which your body sees as toxic. Your body must work hard to digest the cooked food, and break it down into suitable nutrition. And don’t even ASK about the processed food garbage and what it does to the body!

I’ve been eating a lot less meat and much more salad meals. I usually do in the summer, but I’ve been making a concerted effort to do so. I have found that I eat more salads when there is a lot of vegetable “stuff” hanging out in the fridge. Here are some ideas for making salads– and the possibilities are truly endless–

Collard greens
Swiss chard
Red cabbage, shredded
Kale
Tomatoes (Roma are nice because they slice well and aren’t pulpy)
Red pepper
Raw garlic cloves marinated in olive oil
Snow pea pods
Black olives

Here’s a tip: when you are looking for greens to add to the salad, skip the iceberg lettuce. It has virtually no nutrition. Grab the greens like kale and spinach– much better for you.

Also, if you must add meat or cheese to the salad, try some pre-cooked shrimp or leftover chicken. The shrimp is SO EASY to add- run the frozen bag under cool water, and toss the thawed shrimp on the salad. For cheese, try feta, which is SO yummy with the garlic cloves and olives.

Mmmmmmm.

Beets Are SO Good For You

My local news online had this as “big news” today, but it’s actually “old news”: Beets are very, very good for you.

Duh! Haven’t our moms been telling us that for, like, FOREVER?! I chuckle that scientists do all these expensive “studies” to “discover” things when people — especially moms– have known it to be true for centuries. :-p

ANYWAY.

Beets are great for you! They are even better for you than medicine!

Daily Glass Of Beet Juice Can Beat High Blood Pressure, Study Shows

Researchers at Barts and The London School of Medicine have discovered that drinking just 500ml of beetroot juice a day can significantly reduce blood pressure. The study could have major implications for the treatment of cardiovascular disease.

… the research reveals that it is the ingestion of dietary nitrate contained within beetroot juice – and similarly in green, leafy vegetables – which results ultimately in decreased blood pressure. Previously the protective effects of vegetable-rich diets had been attributed to their antioxidant vitamin content.

Professor Ahluwalia and her team found that in healthy volunteers blood pressure was reduced within just 1 hour of ingesting beetroot juice, with a peak drop occurring 3-4 hours after ingestion. Some degree of reduction continued to be observed until up to 24 hours after ingestion. Researchers showed that the decrease in blood pressure was due to the chemical formation of nitrite from the dietary nitrate in the juice.

I hope this news throws Big Pharma into a tizzy. It should.

Eating raw foods is SO GOOD for you. We have been eating pure crap in our society for decades. That processed, refined, pre-packaged, corn-syrup-laden junk that’s been pumped into our bodies for 60, 70 years is causing our demise. We must eat better. It’s obvious that God has provided everything we need to live long, fresh, healthy lives. And it isn’t by eating canned peaches and Doritos!! Raw foods will reduce your waistline, too! Like a wand similar to weightlosswand.com, raw foods will balance your metabolism and your health. Yay!!

Salads are BIG Right Now

I thought I was just going on a salad binge. But it seems like I’m not alone. My Hubs works at a grocery store sometimes, and he says he’s noticed more folks getting wackier greens, like kale. Yum, I love kale. But my receipt printer doesn’t like it so much; it’s WILDLY expensive. I;m growing uit in the garden this year, my first time with it. I’m trying a lot of new stuff, mostly from the cabbage family: cabbage, collards, chard, kale. We like lettuce, but the leafy greens like kale and chard just seem meatier.

I’m really looking forward to making (and eating) more salads this summer. The stuff in the stores is so expensive.. almost criminal! I can’t wait to have things fresh.

Here are some of the things we like in our salads right now. The star next to the vegetable is something we are growing in the garden this year.
Raw garlic cloves*
Leeks*
Cucumbers*
Kale*
Iceberg lettuce
Red peppers
Black olives
Red cabbage*
Green cabbage*
Carrots
Romaine lettuce*
Mixed lettuce*
Spinach*
Tomatoes*

So you can see that I’m going to grow my salads this year. I wish I could grow olives, YUMMM. I love them. I also add feta cheese or bits of salmon, if I have it. Fresh food is SOOO good for you! I’m starting to really dislike cooked food, more and more.

Now THIS Is a Meal

We wanted to treat the kids to a very nice meal this week, as they’d been working hard and needed some special TLC. But one of them was sick, and no one wanted to go to a restaurant. So I made a trip to the grocery store and we splurged on the yummiest food on planet earth: Mediterranean food. YUMMMM.

There’s everything in that salad, can you see?? Well, maybe not loose diamonds or anything! But those marinated garlic cloves and the Calamari olives come pretty close to it! Wow, this was such a great meal. And I served King Crab Legs, too. They were “OK,” a little too salty. I really liked the salad. This is the bets meal, EVER!

What’s your favorite meal?

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