Whenever we are having guests, the first thing they notice about our house is how nice the smell is, that’s thanks to choosing some natural herbs and dried flowers for decorating the interior, and the second thing they are going to notice is how good out kitchen looks.
It’s very easy to notice such a thing, when you come into our house, you will first past near the kitchen, it’s then that most people are going to notice how nice our kitchen looks and they will even compliment my wife for it.
I’ll give you the nitty gritty details that made our kitchen look so good while not spending a lot on it, in fact, we’ve spent less than a hundred dollars to decorate it.
The first thing that will make your kitchen stand out and look nice is how it’s lighted.
I remember that in the past, we just moved in our house we used to light our kitchen using some old styled chandelier that didn’t even look good, the light was dark yellow and the colors were affected by this light and when you enter the kitchen, you would get a “vomiting” sensation.
We learned later on that this was due to the darkness of the color and that it didn’t give us enough courage to stay longer in the kitchen.
My advice is to look for bright colors that are going to match your paint.
Here is a little trick you can do, look at your draws from some clothes that matches your kitchen’s paint color, then when you find such cloths, try to match them with a bright color, this should be your reference to getting a nice light.
The next thing about light is to try to change the lights position.
Center was good in the past, nowadays, the best position to light your interior is in the corners.
Four corners, four lights.
This will make the place look so bright and inviting without spending a lot of light bulbs.
The third thing to lighting your kitchen effectively is to choose always bright colors.
For example, we chose a neon light that really made our kitchen look like those kitchens of famous chefs on TV, it didn’t cost much and it also made the kitchen look a thousand times better.
The second thing to decorating your kitchen is choosing good wallpapers.
I don’t know about you, but for my family and most people I know, wallpaper was synonym of cheap work and ugly walls.
However, there are some amazing wallpapers now that you can get really at a very cheap price, if you decide to decorate your kitchen modernly, then you must chose wallpaper, just look at the kitchens in France, most of them have wallpapers that are both appetizing and very trendy.
We have got nice wallpaper with flowers and mountains in it, when you start looking at it, you feel good about yourself and you start missing a holiday in the mountain.
When you are ready to cook and to begin learning how to make great recipes, the first kind of foods you need to be dealing with and making are soups.
Because they are so much easy to make and will prove to be great lessons for any cook.
I see that a lot of people are going to start with the most difficult things first in the kitchen.
For example, they are going to start with roasting a chicken or making a desert!
I think that these are the most difficult dishes and recipes to make and they are terribly time consuming and error margin is huge, this means that if you make only a small, mistake, you will need to throw everything away and start from scratch.
This isn’t the case with soups.
When learning to cook, the best things to train on are soups because they are less demanding of attention and you can only make them better!
Here is what you definitely need to have in your kitchen: a blender!
Don’t think of making soups without ever having a blender in your kitchen, in fact, it’s the most important appliance after a soup pot!
Let’s start with the first instructions on making soups.
You need to be sure of what you want to accomplish in your kitchen!
That’s the most important step to making great soups.
You don’t need a recipe and you don’t need a big hat to make nice soups, all what you need to do is to have the finished product in mind.
Here is a way to make it easy for you:
Think of the ingredients you would like to have and write them down, and then think of the tastes you would like your soups to have and write it down, and finally think of the time you want to make your soup.
This is the same way I’ve followed to get a very delicious soup lately and out of nowhere!
I took a pen and paper and I wrote down what I need to lake my soup, cabbage, zucchini, carrots, broccoli, spinach, potato.
These were the ingredients I had in my fridge.
Then I wrote down the tastes I wanted to have: sour, salty and consistent.
This made me choose spices like black pepper, half a lemon, cumin seeds, some herbs and chili powder (just a tiny bit).
This is w a cool way to make your soup in your mind first.
Let me tell you that my soup not only tasted good, but it was ready in about an hour.
All I did was clean my veggies, cut them into pieces and then boil them for half an hour, from them on, I just blended them and I putted them again in a hot pan to lose some of the liquids and to become consistent.
It’s the best way to make soup in my opinion if you are still a beginner, just remember that whatever you do, your soup will taste good, so just try new combinations of foods and vegies.
Bread is a staple food in most countries in this world, however, in our country; it’s much less eaten and has got a very minor role in our nutrition.
However, if you think about all the benefits it can add to your health and the pleasure eating it will provide to you, you are definitely going to make it a habit in your home to always have some fresh bread all the time.
Here are some of its benefits, you will be surprised: great source of a variety of vitamins, great source of fibers, makes you lose weight!
I’m sure that the first two ones seemed like normal and expected, but the last one seemed like a lie or misinformation.
Let me tell you this little fact about bread: when you buy bread from the super market what you are going to get is purely sugar, that’s the reason why you are going to gain weight if you eat it a lot, however, when you make your own whole bread, you are going to get carbs, vitamins and lot of fibers.
The thing most people don’t know about fibers is that we can’t absorb them, thus we can’t get fat from eating them!
Following me?
Good, when you eat a big amount of fiber, like when you eat whole wheat bread, your body is going to require a lot of energy to deal with these fibers and this is the reason why you are going to lose a little bit of weight.
The first barrier to making healthy and delicious bread is not having the right equipment.
When you want to make bread, the first thing you need to think about is buying a bread making Lachine for your kitchen.
If you don’t have one, then let me tell you to go buy one urgently.
They don’t cost a lot and they are very energy efficient and won’t ask for a lot of maintenance.
The thing I love the most about bread machines is that they are going to be very money saving on the long run because you are going to be making your own bread at home.
Let’s take the example of the bread you are going to buy from the super market, first of all, its load with preservatives and industrial products, and the second thing is that a small amount of bread will cost more than a dollar!
That’s a lot for something you could be making at home and very cheaply.
All you will need to do is buy some whole wheat flour, some dry yeast and some bread spices.
Put in your bread machine and you are almost done.
The second barrier making delicious bread is not putting spices in it.
Why not try black cumin seeds, sesame seeds, flax seeds.. .
If you add these to your bread, I promise you that it’s going to taste amazingly delicious every single time and everyone would be eating it, including the little ones.
When my wife had just given birth to our son, I remember being afraid of going in the kitchen and helping her.
It wasn’t a terrible feeling, but I was having an awkward feeling inside of me whenever I stepped in our kitchen.
I had to do something about it because my wife was having troubles with some back pain and she couldn’t take care of our child while still slaving in the kitchen all day long.
When I started looking at the reasons why I had such a feeling about the kitchen, I remembered when I was a kid that my mother got severely burned when she was making soup one day.
The pressure cooker crashed in her hand and she was left with a burned belly for more than two months!
So, I made a decision to look for ways to protect myself and more importantly my family from fire in the kitchen.
And this is what I’ve learned through my readings and practices:
The first ways to protect yourself and to survive fire in your kitchen is to always have towels near you.
This can sound like a very limited advice, but it can save your life.
Let’s imagine that your pan took fire, what would you do?
Throw some water at it?
That’s what most people are going to do.
Guess what would happen?
The hot oil mixed with the females are going to jump to the sealing and then they would start falling all over the place, burn you and anyone near you.
Needless to tell you that your kitchen will look like a mess.
That’s why you need some big towels always handy in your kitchen.
Whenever you’ve got a fire situation, just water them a little and then throw them at the fire.
This way, you are going to deprive the fire form its most important ingredient, oxygen!
It’s the best way to survive fire in your kitchen.
The second way is to always have a fire extinguisher handy in your kitchen.
They don’t coast a lot these days, we bought ours for less than sixty bucks and to this day, we didn’t have to use it.
The problem with such devices is that they are going to require that you fill them every two years; this depends on the brand and the product they are using to stop the fire.
That’s its biggest problem.
However, if you feel that you don’t need one, just stick with your towels and your water.
It’s much more economical.
The best thing about a fire extinguisher is that when there is fire in your kitchen, you don’t really need to look for the towel, soak it with water and then handle it near the fire, you just take your fire extinguisher and you use it on the fire, quick and easy.
The third way is a precaution: avoid using oil a lot in your kitchen.
These are the three horrible mistakes you will fall into when you listen to other people when taking a decision about buying a new kitchen appliance
I’ve been very fortunate to be a stubborn person!
This will surprise more than one person when they are going to read it, but it’s the truth.
I’m a very stubborn person and when I have an idea in mind, I’ll work with it and make it concrete without ever having to ask other people for approving it for me!
It’s important that you think this way too especially when you are about to buy a new appliance for your kitchen.
Here is why you need to be thinking this way:
The first reason is that most people will not judge your idea based on its valid points, but the amount of emotions it does give them.
This is a very true thing about human beings; they are illogical by nature and will never acknowledge this to you or other people.
For example, if you are to ask a person about a buying decision you need to make, the first thing he is going to think about is whether he will like you to buy it or not!
The second thing he will do is think that idea using his brain and more importantly, his experiences.
This is the worst thing a person can do because he will not be very emotionally stable and he will try to convince you of his ideas no matter how logic or illogic they are.
The second thing why you should never ask other people for advices when taking a decision to buy a new thing because most people are hateful!
Let’s be honest about this one for a minute!
When you go a person and ask him on his opinions for a thing you need to buy, he will rarely think of your good and most of the time, he will simply think that he should be better than you and if you bought it, then he will lose.
I’m sorry to tell you this, but most people relay think this way, they are not logical and they will just think of the things that satisfy them the most and give them most pleasure.
Don’t ask people for advices on things you’d like to buy, just take the decision and do it.
These are the reasons why asking people for advices on your buying decisions is a bad thing, now, what can you do about it?
The best thing you can do is to simply go to the internet and look for reviews.
What people are saying and what they are thinking of a new appliance.
It’s the most reliable way I’ve found so far and it’s the only thing that will guarantee you to make a great decision.
I’m sure that the sales man will never tell you about these little secrets!
The first secret you need to know is that your sales man is eagerly interested to make you buy it no matter what the quality is or what you are waiting for and expecting from that fridge!
It’s because we all know it that sales men are paid on commission and they are paid with the amount of things they sell to people.
So watch for the sweet talk he is going to serve to you.
This is absolutely the worst thing when buying a new fridge for your kitchen because you are not sure about what’s true and what’s not!
That’s the reason why I’m going to give you this advice I’ve received from a sales man himself: do your own research.
It can sound like a terrible thing to say if you are a sales man, but this guy is no ordinary sales man, he is my boss and he has always told me that the best sales people will always try to push your button to buy quickly and without thinking, they are not interested in what kinds of decisions you are going to make, they are only interested in the amount of the commission they will receive when they sell you the item.
That’s why you need to do this: let him or her speak, take notes and then go do your own research.
When you are done, you can ask him for more details about something you are not sure about.
This is the way I’ve followed to by our new fridge and it has helped me a lot so far.
The second a sales man will never tell you is that his products have got some defects.
Yes, no sales man is going to tell you about this little detail!
And it’s true, every product have got some minor or major defects, even if you are dealing with a high end product.
One thing I like to ask sales people is to ask them to give me the defects of a product.
If they confirm to me that it’s great and it has none, then I start doubting them and disbelieving them.
However, if they tell me about a little minor defect that’s true, I know that this guy is true and knows what he is talking about.
The third thing a sales man will never tell you is that what’s written on the ticket isn’t totally true.
For example, you may have read in an appliance the label: “energy star”?
The truth is that this label isn’t guaranteed by a higher authority on energy and consumer goods; it’s garneted by the manufacturers themselves!
This is unbelievable, but it’s true.
Do your own research, it’s the best investment you can do, look for reviews and collect them, then make sure you buy only appliance that have a solid warranty.
After a long time searching and reading about many different non-stick pots, me and my wife made the decision to not buy an all clad pot because it was pricy!!!!
What a foolish mistake!!
It’s like taking my money and throwing it from the window!
Whenever I think about this, I’d become a little sad about not choosing an all clad pot from the very beginning.
Here are the reasons that pushed me and my wife to throw out our old pot and to buy an all clad pot:
The first reason for me to review an All-Clad Saute pot isn’t because I like the look or the color!
It’s because all All-Clad pots are made in the USA!
I don’t say this because patriotic reasons, although I’m a very patriotic person, but I say this because the “made in the USA” products have proven themselves over and over to me and if you buy “made in the US” you will know what I’m talking about.
The All-Clad pot is well made, when you hold one in your hand, you can feel that the metal is of great quality and even in the touch you know for sure that it is very robust and will last for many generations!
I’ve made the mistake in the past of buying cheap Chinese nonstick pots.
I’ve tried many brands like Tramontina & Caphalon, but I’ve only met deception and waste of money.
This is why I highly recommend The All-Clad pot; it’s the best money you can spend on a pot.
The second reason for recommending and writing a review of the All-Clad pot is because it’s nonstick.
I know that you will find in almost every pot in the market nowadays the words “non-stick” but I know for sure now that most manufacturers will use this word as a catchy slogan to lure undeceive buyers.
My wife is a great cook, she passes most of her time busy in the kitchen making food for our new born baby and cooking our daily meals.
The first nonstick pot I bought her was a Teflon one.
I thought back then that I’ve made a great decision and that she would be very proud of me and that I’d help her a little bit in her daily struggles in the kitchen.
I made a huge mistake.
The first week of use, it was great and it cleaned very fast, but after about a month, the food started sticking and my wife would pass a very long time cleaning it and eye bowling me for buying such a cheap pot.
The problem with Teflon is that it’s very expensive and when a manufacturer will use it in its pots, it will just apply a very tiny layer on the surface of the pot, this means that with the use, the pot is going to lose this tin Teflon layer and become useless and sticky.
This isn’t the case with All-Clad pots, they don’t use Teflon at all, but their surface uses a special technology developed by all-clad called d5.
That’s the secret of all-clad pots; their surface is designed to not stick even after many years of use because the metal they use in the surface is very robust and heavy duty.
I’m sure that if you take the pot, reverse it and cook on it, it won’t stick because the metal is built to nonstick!
It’s not just a question of putting a small tiny layer of Teflon, the whole pot is nonstick!
The third thing I like about our All-Clad pot is that it’s big, very big.
When you buy a standard pot, you can be pretty sure that you are going to need another one because sooner or later, you will need to deep fry something big in it or when anting to make a big pasta dish.
This is not the case with this pot, it’s big and it can hold any imaginable food you can think of.
We had some guests last month; they all wanted to taste my wife’s famous soup.
This demanded that my wife prepare a large quantity for everyone, including a neighbor.
This can sound like mission impossible for an ordinary pot, but not the all-clad.
It did this very easily and soon, my wife was able to serve everyone in the family and enjoy time with us because it saved her so much time.
Just about anything can be cooked or fried in an All-Clad pot.
The next thing I appreciated about all-clad’s pot is that it safe to use.
This was one of the main reasons for me to choose an all-cald pot.
One time, my wife was trying to fry some potato chips with some garlic in our Teflon pot, when she added the just-cut potato chips, spatters of very hot oil started flying to her direction, thank god she didn’t get injured.
The all-clad pot has tall sides and can seem very disproportionate when you see them at first, but this isn’t done to make it look ugly or pretty to some, it’s been done by the manufacturer to make sure that people would not get hurt by hot spatters when they use it.
Other brands don’t think about this at all and they’d prefer that their pots look nice and “trendy” rather than safe.
But not the all clad pot, it’s made to last you for a long time and to make you last too for a long time!
This ingenious design will also make your stove stay clean and will not demand a lot of work to maintain.
The fourth advantage for buying an all-clad pot is that it will save you money.
If you think about it a little, you can see how it can save you a lot of money.
It’s because you won’t need many pots in the kitchen.
After buying our all-clad pot, our old pots were left dusty in the kitchen, then they got moved to the garage and soon, they were given to people we know.
Now, the only pot my wife is going to use in the kitchen is our all-clad pot and when we think about buying some kitchen appliances, the pot will never be on our list because the one we have is very useful in all situations, it serves a multitude of purposes every single day.
The fifth reason for using all-clad’s pot is that it’s cheap.
I’m sure that you are going to read this and think that I must be out of my mind!
A pot that costs about 160$ doesn’t seem that cheap to people, but in reality it is.
When you compare the quality and the worth of the all-clad pot, you can see very easily that it’s a bargain for such a price and it will easily pay for itself in a matter of years.
I’m sure that me and my wife will use it for the rest of our lives and then we will give it to our children who are going to use it too and then pass it on to their children too.
It’s very durable and even if it falls from your hands by accident, you don’t have to worry about it because it won’t break or get damaged.
I’ve been reading my pans brochure for quite sometimes now and I think I’ve done some huge mistakes when maintaining mine.
For example, I’ve used common cleaning liquid when it fact, I have a cast iron pan that will become weak with my acidic washing liquid!
This is just a small mistake I was doing.
I’ve found many other ones that will make your pans at great risk of either rusting or losing their non-sticky properties.
I’ll give you some mistakes I was doing with my wife when cleaning our pans what to do ti correct these mistakes.
The first one is not reading the brochure.
We tend to think of these brochures as not essential and an addition to avoid wasting our times with.
But the reality is that these brochures are made by the manufacturer who really knows what’s inside his products and what they need to work great.
One thing I used to believe is that a brochure is good only for gas appliances or electric devices!
But a pan!!! What brochure and why!!
It doesn’t make sense, but the truth is that when you read the brochure, you will know a lot about the things to use to clean your appliances and the things to avoid using.
The second mistake most people are going to make is not cleaning their pans when they are hot or warm.
Let’s say that it’s the night and you’ve just finished coking a very greasy meal.
Who can adventure inside the kitchen to clean the pans!!
No one would do it!
And this is the worst thing you can do to them, especially if you’ve got some expensive pans like the all clads.
When you don’t clean them immediately, the dirt will start reacting with the coating and this later will lose its non-sticking abilities very quickly.
The best and most effective thing you can do is to take your pan while still hot, and pour over it some water and cleaning liquid, when you do this, you can be pretty sure that next time ,you are going to find it very easy to clean and the water would have penetrated the dirt and took it from the coating.
The third thing you can do to relay damage your pans is to use some aggressive cleaning product on them.
Of course, I’m only talking here about high end pans that cost a lot of money.
When you use aggressive and acidic cleaning products on them, they are going to attack the coating and render it useless very quickly.
The best thing you can do is to use ordinary soap!
None scented and the one that contains no chemical products in it.
That’s the most skin and coating friendly soap.
And the good thing about it is that it won’t cost you a lot, just some pennies a month to clean your high end pans.
I loved this post a lot, since it's been thanks to this guy that I've started trying Allimac, what a great thing to take :) The Garlic Blog!: Allimax review
You don’t like the smell in your kitchen, I’m sure of it.
Neither do i!
I hate it when I go to the kitchen, try to prepare a new meal I’ve just learned about or do some other work like helping my wife and then I’d have that terrible smell in my nose.
It’s not a great feeling.
Here is what I’ve found most useful to chase that smell and more importantly, why it’s there in the first place.
Let me first tell you about the reasons why you’d have a terrible smell in your kitchen:
The first reason is that you use too much water to clean the surface.
I was a big fan of using water to clean the surface of my kitchen; I’d add about five gallons and then use my sweat to get rid of dirt and fragments of foods.
This is what I noticed: when you use a great quantity of water, you are going to help the germs in your kitchen’s corners to feed.
In other words, you will be feeding the germs.
This is a terrible thing to do because they are the ones responsible for that rotten and fungous smell in your kitchen.
Avoid using a lot of water, when you want to clean your kitchen, just use a little bit of water with a cleaning product.
It’s the best solution to both have a great looking kitchen and get rid of those germs and funguses that are making your kitchen and house smell so bad.
The second thing to have a clean kitchen is to close the kitchen sink.
This is where most of the bad odors are going to come from.
Unfortunately, you can do nothing about that smell, in other words, you can’t get rid of that smell.
The only thing you can do is to close that kitchen sink with the rubber device that comes with it.
It’s the best thing you can do.
One thing that annoyed me the most about my wife is not closing the kitchen sink after she was done with it.
This made all the house smell bad.
The third way to get rid of the bad smell is to close your trash bin.
Even if it’s clean or empty, germs are going to live there and reproduce and by the same action making a lot more bad smell.
Even better, if you’ve got a balcony, try to put the trash bin in it, it will avoid you a lot of troubles and terrible smell in those hot summer mornings.
In the past, my wife suffered from excess weight, the pregnancy and stress of relocating were for something.
She tried every diet possible and couldn’t get the excess weight from her body.
To tell you the truth, she was the only one complaining about this situation, I liked her excess weight a little and loved to see her fit wear her tight jeans like she used to when we first got married :)
However, she was determined to lose that weight and to become “skinny” again.
I was determined to help her with this.
These are the changes we’ve made to our kitchen and to our eating habits:
The first thing was that we got rid of most processed meats;
The salami, the chicken nuggets, the fish rolls, the beacon. . .
If my wife wanted to make a sandwich, she’d now use olive oil instead of butter and a tomato slice to replace the salami, and no cheese.
The second thing we did in our kitchen is to replace the sugars.
We had maple syrup, normal sugar, brown sugar. . . . we’ve had too many sugars in my opinion.
So, we throw everything and replaced them with date sugar.
It is not as tasty as normal old sugar, but it’s very healthy and soon, my wife was drinking her coffee without added sugar.
The third thing we did in our kitchen was to buy a bread machine.
At first, we bought most of our bread.
This made us choose cheap and unhealthy breads, but with the bread making machine, we were now able to make our own.
We started buying whole wheat flour and making our own bread.
This was a great experience and we not only were able to get rid of my wife’s excess weight, but mine too.
This experience bounded us even more and we could find some things to talk about in the evening beside the usual subject: “what do we have for dinner?”
When you need a new appliance for your kitchen, here are the things you have to be looking for every single time:
The first thing is the manufacturer.
In other words, is it a known brand or an unknown one?
To tell you the truth, I like known brands more because there is something about such a brand that made it very popular.
If you started thinking about it realistically, you will know that most brands will never survive the first ten years of their career because they are going to have either flowed machines or incompetent management.
This is the first reason why you need to always look for known brands.
The second thing to look for is warranty.
Believe it or not, don’t be looking for long warranties, most of the times, it’s a sign that the product has got a defect and the manufacturer is trying to resolve it and not get many negative reviews about it.
The third thing to look for is the energy efficiency.
When you want to buy a new appliance, the amount of energy it’s going to use is very important because it will determine your electricity bill at the end of the month.
Don’t believe the energy star you see on most products, it doesn’t belong to an independent organization, nowadays; it’s the brands that can put that star on their appliances.
The best thing you can do is to go to amazon and check the reviews, it’s where you are going to find out if the appliance is really energy efficient or not, you can even ask people in comments about it and make sure it’s the right one for you.
When my wife was trying to lose her pregnancy weight, what I love to call motherhood weight, we went to see a doctor in a very expensive hospital, he was the head of the nutrition and weight department in that hospital and we were introduced to him by a friend of us.
We thought that he would give us some amazing advices that we didn’t know before about weight issues and losing the excess weight.
Unfortunately, all what he could tell us is something like this: eat less carbs, eat more proteins!!
In other words, eating more meat and eggs!
This is what my wife has been doing for a long time and she was now developing high blood pressure and her heart was working in excess!
I feared for my wife’s health and told the doctor about this, the only thing he did was to take his prescription pad and write down some drugs we could get to lower the pressure and to make the heart beats less violent!
I was annoyed by this; I didn’t want my wife to lose her weight through this.
That’s why I went and did my research and found that my people in third world countries do not have these problems with excess weight.
When I asked some friends who have been to India, they confirmed this and told me that only the rich families who were suffering from excess eight!
I was in for a surprise!
I found a group of very knowledgeable scientists who were advocating this idea: make meat and other animal products a treat, once a month!
I liked the idea, we tried it with my wife and soon, she was losing weight very rapidly.
This is why I need to tell you this: do your own researches, your doctor has more benefits of selling you a drug than making you healthy!
Unfortunately, this is what it came for nowadays with modern health care system; it’s following the model of big vuisness!
You can’t cook well and make great meals if you do not have these ingredients at home; they are very cheap and can make your dishes taste amazingly well.
Here is a list of the ingredients I’m going to always have in the kitchen:
Spices.
Spices are nature’s wonders in terms of nutrition and taste.
I can’t imagine spending one single hour in y kitchen preparing food if I don’t have cinnamon, nutmeg, cumin seeds, black and weight pepper, ginger and cloves.
These are the most essential spices.
Always, when going out to buy food, think of checking your spices, if you see that the reserve of cinnamon are dwindling, buy it as soon as possible.
The problem people have with spices is that they do not use them.
In the past, I used to have a huge amount of spices in my kitchen; however, I didn’t use them at all.
All the food we bought was frozen ones and the spices at home served as a decoration for the kitchen.
Don’t make my mistake and get the habit of always throwing a little bit in your foods.
The second ingredient to always have in your kitchen is greens.
Dark green leafy vegetables are very essential to our bodies, just a quick example, one leaf of collard green can contain up to half the amount of the vitamin A you are going to require for the whole day.
Imagine this, just one leaf of collard greens.
When I speak about dark green leafy vegetables, I’m not advising you to buy lettuce!
Lettuce is very poor and contains in my opinion no nutrition at all.
When shopping for dark green leafy vegetables, always buy these: broccoli, spinach and collard greens, they are the most important ones.
The third ingredient to always have is iodized salt.
Don’t buy sea salt, it contains a tiny amount of iodine and it’s not good for your health.
In the past, we used to get all of our iodine from the foods we ate, but iodine is not very available nowadays and you need to supplement it.
Use iodized salt, just one tea spoon a day will be enough for nearly your whole family in term of iodine.
The fourth ingredient to always have in your kitchen is green tea.
You can use green tea for a lot of uses, but the most unusual one is using green tea for your drinks.
Here is what I’ll be doing personally when making my smoothies: I’ll throw in about a tea spoon of great tea.
This will make my smoothies taste great and have a lot of antioxidants too.
Good cooks and terrible cooks are only differentiated with a few things in my opinion, here are they:
When you are entering your kitchen, you need to be aware if you are a good cook or a terrible cook.
This is very important because you can’t have the self confidence and the audacity to try new things and make new recipes if you do not know what kind of cook you are.
Here is what distinguishes the bad cook from the terrible cook:
The first thing is how much trouble you make in your kitchen.
If you use many tools and you make a mess in your kitchen, then you are a terrible cook, however, if you just use the necessary tools and you leave the kitchen very new=at, then you are a great cook.
This can seem like something totally unusual to judge a cook, but when you look at it in closely, you are going to notice that the person who uses a lot of resource will usually get the meal to taste bad or undercooked, but the person who uses his mind first and then get to work on his ideas will always have great results.
The second thing and the most important one that makes all the difference between a good cook and a bad one is having a vision in his mind.
When you enter you kitchen, you need to be able to see the result of the work you are going to do, the final result should already be in your mind.
Only great cooks have this in them, most other people will just work hard and never know what to expect from their work.
There is one thing I like about our kitchen the most, it’s our fridge.
When I was just starting in life, this means no good money and a very small room up in a dirty building, I always dreamed and thought about the day I’d have a wife, a big apartment and a nice kitchen with a great looking fridge.
This happened to me some three years ago, but the thing that was lacking me was a nice fridge.
I made up my mind to look for a great one and to be ready to spend about two thousand dollars to get one.
Yes, that’s the amount of money I was ready to spend.
I finally, after a long time of saving and taking some loans from friends and wife’s parents, I bought a Philips!
It’s not very known in the US, but it’s one of the best fridges you can get in the market right now.
I did a lot of research and read a lot of reviews and then decided on this Philips fridge.
It coasted us more than two thousand bucks, but for this amount of money, we got more than we have dreamed of.
Anyway, here I was with this great fridge and I’ve filled it with great food, but after some few moments, it stunk like a dirty raccoon!
It was terrible.
Here is what I’ve managed to do with my wife to get rid of that smell:
Place a little bit of salt near the eggs.
This is a great trick, just fill a little container with ground rock salt and it will absorb the excess humidity in your fridge.
Humidity is the primary cause of the smell; the germs are going to like it in there if they are provided with a humid environments.
The second thing you can do is to cut a lemon in half and put it in your fridge too.
This is a fantastic way because the lemon is going to absorb the excess smell and humidity too.
Here are the best appliances I use every single day to cook my vegetables and to do most of the family cooking.
The first thing you need to have got in your kitchen is a rice machine!
You simply can’t survive without it!
You can’t have that tender and chewy rice without having a good rice machine.
There are many brands in the market, but the best ones are made in the USA, they are a bit expensive, but from my experience, the price tend to be the least thing to worry about, because if you add even two hundred dollars and you got a great working and durable machine, you are the one who will have less troubles and headaches with it later on.
Think of it as an investment.
The second appliance you really need to have is a pressure cooker.
You need to get a pressure cooker, it’s a must.
How can you cook those beans and legumes if you do not have a good pressure cooker, it’s the first appliance we thought about when we moved to our new apartment.
The third kitchen appliance you definitely need is a bread machine.
If you care a tiny little bit about your health, you should be making whole wheat bread your own.
Bread machines are very common in department stores, but they tend to be a little expensive, however, if you think of it as an investment, you are going to see that the more bread you eat and the more the bread machine is going to seem like a bargain.
The fourth appliance to have in the kitchen is a steamer.
That’s not a must have, but I prefer to have it in my kitchen.
When you are making your vegies and good salads, you need to steam vegetables.
Unfortunately, if you do it using the traditional method, the vegetables are going to lose a lot of their nutrients and you will end up with a fad tasting vegies!
We have a small child at home and we want him to grow knowing of the importance of eating vegetables every single day.
The best way to make him eat his carrots and broccoli is to make them taste great.
A steamer then will become a necessity for a family with small children.
I’ve read that if your kids grew up thin and healthy, they will stay that way for their whole lives!
When I was looking for a new fridge, the first thing I thought about was to look for an energy efficient one.
I’ve read a lot of reviews about this and I’ve found that the most energy efficient brands were X and Z and Y!!
I was very happy about these results and was ready to make my purchase!
However, I’ve read one thing that annoyed me a lot; it was this: it was the manufacturers who attributed the energy star to their products!
What!!!!????
This means that when a manufacturer is going to make a new product, he’s going to either say to himself: “should I give this an energy star or no” or “I’m going to be honest with my clients” ?
I don’t think that most manufacturers are going to think throw the second way of thinking, most manufactures have got salaries to pay and margins to make, they are going to think of the best and most catchy argument to sell you their products!
That’s why, when you want to buy an energy efficient product, the first thing you need to be doing is looking at forums and amazon reviews for the most honest reviews.
Here is the thing you need to know: some merchants websites are going to write positive reviews themselves for you to buy the product from them.
The best reviews can be found at amazon, it’s what I trust the most.
I know, this will sound like a boring thing for you, but I’m going to tell it anyway.
When I was single and living alone, I was a very lazy person, I couldn’t go to the kitchen and make a sandwich, all what I thought of when I was hungry is to go out and get some chips or a doughnut.
But when I find the love of my life, my wife, and we settled down, the first thing I start to worry about is my health.
I was very over weight and I couldn’t walk a few meters without having to breathe loudly and look like a mess.
My wife’s love pushed me to start looking very realistically at the way I was eating and the foods I had the habit to like.
When I think about it now, I start wondering how I stayed alive all these years.
I was doing terrible things for my health and I didn’t have the least idea of the consequences of my action.
I was driving myself to a near death.
My wife took me one day by the hand, and she showed me my pants, it was huge.
I hated her for this, but at the same time, I liked her honesty and I decided to take my health in hand and to be a great husband to her.
I started with taking some cooking lessons, they were very informative but I didn’t have the self-confidence to go inside the kitchen and apply what I’ve learned.
Soon, I made the decision to buy some good cooking appliances and to embark in this adventure.
I thought to myself that buying expensive equipment and not using them is a crime.
It was this that pushed me to work more on my cooking abilities and helped me become more self-confident.
Just take the first step and you are going to have great results and feelings about your self.
