March 14th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
Put a pot of hot water on the stove and turn on heat. Drop 100 grams of Eden Selected Bifun (wheat free pasta from Japan). Cook to al dente (only maybe a couple minutes).
Meanwhile, drop the contents of a Kitchens of India Mashed Vegetable Curry packet into a pan. Drible a bunch of olive oil on it and heat to eating temperature.
Dice up a very large handful of fresh cilantro.
Drain the noodles. Put noodles on plate. Curry on top and cilantro on top of that. Eat.
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March 14th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
Cooking time: 10 minutes
Cooks for: 3
Ingredients:
200 grams of Kuzu Noodles (I used 2 packs of Mitaku Macrobiotic brand)
80 ounces of Baked Tofu, Thai Style (I used White Wave brand)
10 ounces of Tomato Sauce (I suggest Four Cheeses by Di Parma Classica brand)
Fresh chives
Lots of fresh cilantro
Chunks of Reggiano Cheese
salt, pepper and olive oil
Instructions:
Put a pot of hot water on the stove and heat. Put the noodles in right away - no need to wait for it to boil.
The noodles should take only a couple minutes to become al dente. Don't overcook! They keep cooking even on the plate so better to under cook.
When the noodles are done take them off the stove and drain.
While the noodles are cooking cut the tofu into bite sized cubes, put in a pot with the tomato sauce, three tablespoons of olive oil and heat.
Chop the chives and cilantro, and cut the cheese into chunks.
Once the tomato sauce is bubbling turn off the heat and mix them together with the noodles for two seconds.
Serve with handfuls of cilantro and chunks of cheese on top. Put a drizzle of olive oil and a dash of salt on top just for fun.
Notice you did absolutely no cooking here. You just heated the stuff up! I love cooking! The key to good cooking is organic fresh products. The rest is easy.
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March 14th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
Cooking time: 15 minutes
Cooks for: 3
Ingredients:
1 and 1/2 pound cabbage
onion
sour cream
handful of raisins
handful of raw walnuts
rock salt
pepper
olive oil
cumin
turmeric
coriander
Instructions:
Cut onion and put into pan with 5 tablespoons of olive oil. Put one eighth teaspoon of cumin. I used a mixture of powder cumin and fennel seed (which is cumin). I like the little crunches of fennel seed.
Also add one eighth teaspoon of coriander, one eighth teaspoon of turmeric and a healthy grating of rock salt and pepper.
Cook until before onion are light brown - about two minutes.
Add cabbage that has been chopped into postage stamp size. Stir and add a handful of raisins. Cook and stir for 5 minutes.
Add half a cup of water, cover and cook on medium heat for about 7 minutes. Stir once or twice to make sure it isn't burning on the bottom. You want the cabbage to cook until it is cooked all the way through but still is crunchy in the middle.
Turn off heat. Stir in a handful of raw walnuts.
Serve on plates with a large dollop of sour cream on top. Enjoy.
I love this dish because it costs about two dollars to make and is as gourmet as any dish you'd find in a fancy Indian restaurant.
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March 13th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
This is a great variation on Arroz Con Leche, which is rice with milk. I have stopped eating sugar (including honey, maple sirup or any other concentrated sugar) so I am constantly looking for creative ways to sweeten.
One of my favorite meails is cooked brown rice that has been warmed up with milk and then you add a spoonful of maple syrup and maybe some butter. But without the syrup it is not the same.
So today I woke up in Hawaii. I woke up early because of a cold I caught on the plane and jetlag. I was hungry. Whenever I cook brown rice in the evening I always make extra so I can eat it in the morning.
So I took the brown rice from the fridge, mixed it with a can of coconut milk, a handful of chopped dates, apricots, raisings, pistachios, cashews and any other nuts I had laying around.
I cooked it long enough to heat it up and simmer for a minute or two. You don't want to cook it too long because the dates will desintegrate and the nuts will get all soggy. Keep it short and sweet, no pun intended.
All of it should be organic, the nuts should not be roasted since that turns the nut oils into cancerous oils, and the dried fruits should be unsulphured and free of preservatives.
List:
three cups of brown rice cooked in water and a dash of salt.
a couple big handfulls of chopped:
dates
apricots
raisins
pistachios
cashews
a can of coconut milk
makes three hearty bowls, one for the daddy bear (me), one for mommy bear (Loretta) and one for the teeny weeny baby bear (my darling 3 year old Saomi).
don't be shy about the nuts and dried fruits. pile them on. International Harvest distributes a great group of products called Himalayan Harvest. They are all sorts of cool things that have been harvested and dried in the Himalayans. It is all natural and traditional. One of the products is called Himalayan Delight, which has all the nuts and fruits I list above. So I just dump a packet of it into the coconut rice dish.
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March 13th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
Since the foco diet is based on balance and lacks the normal binge mentality that a diet lacking in nutrition brings on, desserts and breakfast dishes are pretty much the same.
Neither contains refined or extracted sugars that send the body reeling upwards and then quickly downwards. They tend to have ingredients that are soothing and good for rounding out a meal or breaking a fast (breakfast).
When you round out a meal it is often to fill in that last corner of your stomach so you feel totally satisfied. This is often done by some form of fat, often in the form of a nut or cheese. Fat is what you are really craving when at the end of a meal you think you crave something sweet.
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March 13th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
If I had to choose one thing to be stranded on a desert island with it would be water. I love clean water. It is like magic.
The attached pdf shows what happens to plants when you water them with Microwaved water. Basically they die. I don't have anything against microwaves except they give me a headache if I stand next to them when they are on. So I don't own one.
But this pdf file makes a pretty strong case against microwaves. Along with photos of dead plants it mentions a nurse in Canada that warmed up blood for a transfusion patient and accidentally killed the patient when the blood went in dead.
Ok, maybe the nurse wasn't the sharpest scalpel on the operating table, but still, if she had warmed the blood in a saucepan it would still be good. We're not talking about bringing the blood to boiling. We're talking just raising it from fridge temperature to body temperature (note to self: don't heat up blood in microwave).
See file below.
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March 13th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
Cooking time: 1 min
Cooks for: 1
Ingredients:
Erivan Acidophilous Yogurt
Jumbo Raisins
Raw Shelled Walnuts
Instructions:
Plop a bowl full of yogurt. Throw a handful of walnuts and raisins on top. enjoy.
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March 13th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
Cooking time: 15 minutes
Ingredients:
200 grams Paneer
bushel of chopped Spinach (frozen or fresh)
handful of chopped tomatoes (fresh or canned)
handful of Corn kernals (frozen, canned. or fresh cut off corn)
ginger
olive oil
garam masala spice
cumin
Instructions:
Paneer is a full cream milk with acetic acid. It becomes like hard tofu with more flavor. Used a lot in India.
Cut Paneer into small cubes. Chop ginger. place into pan with lots of olive oil. Cook for 7 minutes until a little brown. Stir once in a while.
Add spinach, corn and chopped tomatoes. Cook for 7 minutes, stiring once in a while. Salt to taste.
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March 13th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
Cooking time: 4 minutes
Cooks for: 2
Ingredients:
1/2 pund Laraia's Fresh Hand Made Mozzarella ball (or any organic fresh mozzarella ball)
20 leaves of Fresh Basil
1/2 pound of ripe tomatoes
salt, peper and olive oil
Instructions:
Drain the water from the fresh mozzarella if it has any. Then slice the mozzarella into. Do the same with the tomatoes. I usually just cut it all up into rough mouth sized chunks. It all ends up there anyway. Chop the basil leaves into smaller pieces but no need to dice it completely. Ths isn't an exact science. Plop it all together on the place. Grind lots of sea salt over it and some peper if you want. Pour at least 3 or 5 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. Enjoy. This dish is older than the roman empire. I love it.
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March 13th, 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
Got this in a chain mail:
MSG Hides Behind 25+ Names, Such As 'Natural Flavouring'
MSG Is Also In Your Favorite Coffee Shops And Drive-Ups
I wondered if there could be an actual chemical causing the massive obesity epidemic, so did a friend of mine, John Erb. He was a research assistant at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and spent years working for the government.
He made an amazing discovery while going through scientific journals for a book he was writing called “The Slow Poisoning of America”.
In hundreds of studies around the world, scientists were creating obese mice and rats to use in diet or diabetes test studies. No strain of rat or mice is naturally obese, so the scientists have to create them. They make these morbidly obese creatures by injecting them with MSG when they are first born. The MSG triples the amount of insulin the pancreas creates; causing rats (and humans?) to become obese. They even have a title for the fat rodents they create: “MSG-Treated Rats”.
I was shocked too. I went to my kitchen, checking the cupboards and the fridge. MSG was in everything: The Campbell's soups, the Hostess Doritos, the Lays flavoured potato chips, Top Ramen, Betty Crocker Hamburger Helper, Heinz canned gravy, Swanson frozen prepared meals, Kraft salad dressings, especially the 'healthy low fat' ones.
The items that didn't have MSG marked on the product label had something called ''Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein'', which is just another name for Monosodium Glutamate.
It was shocking to see just how many of the foods we feed our children everyday are filled with this stuff. They hide MSG under many different names in order to fool those who carefully read the ingredient list, so they don't catch on. (Other names for MSG: 'Accent' - 'Aginomoto' - 'Natural Meet Tenderizer', etc) But it didn't stop there. When our family went out to eat, we started asking at the restaurants what menu items had MSG.
Many employees, even the managers, swore they didn't use MSG. But when we ask for the ingredient list, which they grudgingly provided, sure enough MSG and Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein were everywhere:
Burger King
McDonalds
Wendy's
Taco Bell
And every restaurant like: TGIF, Chilis', Applebees and Denny's use MSG in abundance.
Kentucky Fried Chicken seemed to be the WORST offender: MSG was in EVERY chicken dish, salad dressing and gravy. No wonder I loved to eat that coating on the skin, their secret spice was MSG.
So, why is MSG in so may of the foods we eat?
Is it a preservative or a vitamin?? Not according to my friend John. In the book he wrote, an expose of the food additive industry called “The Slow Poisoning of America” he said that MSG is added to food for the addictive effect it has on the human body. http://www.spofamerica.com
Even the propaganda website sponsored by the food manufacturers lobby group supporting MSG at: http://www.msgfactscom/facts/msgfact12.html explains that the reason they add it to food is to make people EAT MORE OF THEIR PRODUCTS.
A study of the elderly showed that people eat more of the foods it is added to.The Glutamate Association lobby group says eating more benefits the elderly, but what does it do to the rest of us? 'Betcha can't eat just one', takes on a whole new meaning where MSG is concerned! And we wonder why the nation is overweight?
The MSG manufacturers themselves admit that it addicts people to their products. It makes people choose their product over others, and makes people eat more of it than they would if MSG wasn't added.
Not only is MSG scientifically proven to cause obesity, it is an addictive substance! Since its introduction into the American food supply fifty years ago, MSG has been added in larger and larger doses to the pre-packaged meals, soups, snacks and fast foods we are tempted to eat everyday.The FDA has set no limits on how much of it can be added to food. They claim it's safe to eat in any amount. How can they claim it safe when there are hundreds of scientific studies with titles like these? :-
'The monosodium glutamate (MSG) obese rat as a model for the study of exercise in obesity'. GobattoCA, Mello MA, Souza CT, Ribeiro IA.Res Commun Mol Pathol Pharmacol. 2002.
'Adrenalectomy abolishes the food-induced hypothalamic serotonin release in both normal and monosodium glutamate-obese rats'. Guimaraes RB, Telles MM, Coelho VB, Mori C, Nascimento CM, Ribeiro Brain Res Bull. 2002 Aug.
'Obesity induced by neonatal monosodium glutamate treatment in spontaneously hypertensive rats: an animal model of multiple risk factors'. Iwase M, Yamamoto M, Iino K, IchikawaK, Shinohara N, Yoshinari Fujishima Hypertens Res. 1998 Mar.
'Hypothalamic lesion induced by injection of monosodium glutamate in suckling period and subsequent development of obesity'. Tanaka K, Shimada M, Nakao K, Kusunoki Exp Neurol. 1978 Oct.
Yes, that last study was not a typo, it WAS written in 1978. Both the “medical research community” and “food manufacturers” have known about MSG's side effects for decades! Many more studies mentioned in John Erb's book link MSG to Diabetes, Migraines and headaches, Autism, ADHD and even Alzheimer's. But what can we do to stop the food manufactures from dumping fattening and addictive MSG into our food supply and causing the obesity epidemic we now see?
Even as you read this, G. W. Bush and his corporate supporters are pushing a Bill through Congress called the “Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act” also known as the “Cheeseburger Bill”, this sweeping law bans anyone from suing food manufacturers, sellers and distributors. Even if it comes out that they purposely added an addictive chemical to their foods. Read about it for yourself at: http://www.yahoo.com . The Bill has already been rushed through the House of Representatives, and is due for the same rubber stamp at Senate level. It is important that Bush and his corporate supporters get it through before the media lets everyone know about 'MSG, the intentional Nicotine for food'.
Several months ago, John Erb took his book and his concerns to one of the highest government health officials in Canada. While sitting in the Government office, the official told him “Sure, I know how bad MSG is, I wouldn't touch the stuff.” But this top level government official refused to tell the public what he knew.
The big media doesn't want to tell the public either, fearing legal issues with their advertisers. It seems that the fallout on fast food industry may hurt their profit margin. The food producers and restaurants have been addicting us to their products for years, and now we are paying the price for it. Our children should not be cursed with obesity caused by an addictive food additive. But what can I do about it?… I'm just one voice.
What can I do to stop the poisoning of our children, while our governments are insuring financial protection for the industry that is poisoning us.
This e-mail is going out to everyone I know in an attempt to tell you the truth that the corporate owned politicians and media won't tell you. The best way you can help to save yourself and your children from this drug-induced epidemic, is to forward this email to everyone. With any luck, it will circle the globe before politicians can pass the legislation protecting those who are poisoning us. The food industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry. Imagine if big tobacco had a bill like this in place before someone blew the whistle on Nicotine?
If you are one of the few who can still believe that MSG is good for us, and you don't believe what John Erb has to say, see for yourself. Go to the National Library of Medicine, at http://www.pubmed.com Type in the words “MSG Obese” and read a few of the 115 medical studies that appear.
We the public, do not want to be rats in one giant experiment and we do not approve of food that makes us into a nation of obese, lethargic, addicted sheep, feeding the food industry's bottom line, while waiting for the heart transplant, diabetic induced amputation, blindness or other obesity induced, life threatening disorders. With your help we can put an end to this poison. Do your part in sending this message out by word of mouth, e-mail or by distribution of this print-out to all your friends all over the world and stop this 'Slow Poisoning of Mankind' by the packaged food industry.
Blowing the whistle on MSG is our responsibility, get the word out.
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