“This work will do huge damage to the GM industry worldwide, since it shows that a crop — Monsanto’s maize line NK603 x MON810 — which has been approved as safe by EFSA, and given consent for use in food and feed by the EC, is in fact dangerous to health.  It demonstrates that the approvals process is at best inadequate and at worst corrupt.”

-Dr. Brian John of GM Free Cymru speaking about a new study out of Austria confirming previous study results that indicate GM corn damages the reproductive system of laboratory rats.

Let’s hope that this study will affect the credibility, legality, and profitabilty of the genetically-modified food industry.

Did you catch the recent article about Monsanto’s evil doings in Vanity Fair magazine? News of their nefarious practices is finally reaching mainstream America and opening our eyes to the truth behind GM food.

I loved the part in Michael Pollen’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, where he finishes up an in-depth exploration of the history and cultivation of the potato by hesitantly eating a genetically-modified specimen in an Idaho potato farmer’s kitchen.

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

“Can I put a whole fryer chicken in a Glorious One-Pot Meal?”

My response has always been that I had no idea, never having tried it.

Until now, that is.

The other day I decided to test it out for myself and see if it would work. I had a 3-lb fryer thawed in the fridge and knew it had to be used one way or the other. I may have had thoughts of roasting it when I pulled it out of the freezer several days before, but I didn’t feel like roasting that day. (This is why I have trouble remembering to thaw things: by the time the item is thawed, I’m over wanting it!)

Even though I received the patent in 2005 for inventing the Glorious One-Pot Meal infusion cooking technique, I am constantly experimenting and tweaking the method. This was a good day, I thought, to test out the GOPM method on a whole bird. Since I’ve never made a Glorious One-Pot Meal that was completely inedible, I didn’t have a back-up dinner plan in case it didn’t work. Luckily, I didn’t need one.

I preheated my oven to 450F and pulled out my 5.5-quart oval enamel-coated cast iron Dutch oven. The Organic Coconut Oil beckoned to me in the pantry. I’ve been playing around with this health-giving stuff and enjoying the subtle coconut-flavoring it imparts in GOPMs and when sauteeing. About 3 Tbsps. coated the interior and lid of the pot quite liberally.

Then, I rinsed the chicken, especially the cavity, and put it in the pot. I sprinkled it with sea salt and my favorite Lodo Red Adobo red chile spice mix. Then I tossed around it an onion cut in wedges, strips of acorn squash (seeded but still in the skin), halved mushrooms, handfulls of baby spinach leaves, and the contents of a bag of frozen corn kernels.

Finally, I sent my husband out to collect sage, rosemary, and oregano from the garden to set on top in kind of a pile, so they’d be easier to remove before serving. I covered the pot, put it in the oven, and waited for the aroma of a fully-cooked meal to seek me out.

About 1 hour and 20 minutes later, it smelled delicious. The meat thermometer read over 190F in the breast and thigh of the bird, indicating it was perfectly cooked and safe to eat.

And eat it we did. The chicken meat was unbelievably tender and moist. We discarded the skin, as it came out fairly rubbery. I had to use a slotted spoon to retrieve stray corn kernels from the bottom of the pot where they were luxuriating in a liquid bath of chicken fat. I considered hanging onto the fat to use for something in the future (chopped liver?), but my helpful hubby cleaned the pot before I could get to it.

The kids scarfed it down, too, which was gratifying, and tonight I’ll use the leftover chicken to make chicken enchiladas. I declare the experiment an unqualified success!

While you won’t find this recipe in my new cookbook, you will find other new techniques that have not been published before, loads of new recipes, and even new grains to add to your repetoire. It’s coming out January 6th, but pre-order it now on Amazon for more than 30% off!

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

Weaning my family off of plastic has been harder than I would have thought.

I’m pretty good about bringing my own canvas bags to the grocery stores, and getting better about bringing them to places like Target. I tossed all the sippy cups… well, except for a few with retractable straws that I keep for those times when you just don’t want a spill on the couch. I figure, using glassware most of the time and plastic cups only occassionally, must be keeping us mostly safe from BPAs.

As I said, I’m having a hard time giving up all of my plasticware. Especially plastic food storage containers and zip-top baggies.

The thought of giving up my Tupperware drawer (now mostly Glad and Ziploc) is enough to make me hyperventilate. What are the alternatives? At any given moment, I might have 5 or more plastic storage containers of food in my fridge. And what am I supposed to use when I load my freezer with containers of homemade soups?

I remember when I used to clean out and use jars from pickles, marinara sauce, and salsa for storing and freezing soups. This was in my starving artist days after college when I worked in an art gallery in Santa Fe and waitressed at night. The problem with using glass jars for freezing is that they can shatter if you fill them too full. Which, of course, happened to me more than once. In those days, I would just remove the glass, rinse the frozen cylinder of soup with hot water to remove the outer layer, and heat up whatever was left to eat. As my husband and I remark to each other at times, “You probably won’t find this in the good parenting manual.”

Do you know the truth about your bottled water? Your cosmetics? Your infant formula? Your canned food?

The Environmental Working Group researches, exposes and informs you about toxic chemicals and hidden contaminants in everything from your shampoo to your kitchen cupboard. Then we offer “pollution solutions” to help you make healthier choices every day.

Take their fight against bisphenol A (BPA). EWG helped expose the risks of BPA - a potent hormone disrupter that’s been leaching toxic chemicals into countless everyday items. BPA is found in baby bottles, water bottles, infant formula and even our canned foods. They’ve been fighting non-stop to make sure BPA is banned from consumer products.

As consumers, it’s hard to know how to avoid BPA. That’s why they filled our 2008 Pollution Solutions Holiday Gift Bag with BPA-free goodies to keep you healthy and also reduce waste.

When you make your first-time donation to EWG of $135 or more, your contribution will be matched dollar for dollar by generous donors and they’ll send you a Pollution Solutions Holiday Gift Bag.

As a special incentive, the first 500 donors who order the gift bag will also receive a complimentary copy of the book Green Goes With Everything by Sloan Barnett.

Curious about what’s in the bag? Check out these great items:

- A 27 oz. Klean Kanteen stainless steel bottle — the perfect solution to using less plastic and avoiding contaminated bottled water
- Jumbo Enviro-Tote made from 100% recycled plastic, printed with EWG’s pollution solutions
- 6-piece Pyrex glass container set (no more Tupperware!)
- Crummy Brothers organic chocolate chip cookies
- $25 in free product coupons plus EWG’s most popular tools for healthy living

Donating to EWG is a great investment. They pride ourselves on staying lean and stretching your donations to the limit — so your money goes toward groundbreaking research and sweeping environmental change. And with a more environmentally friendly Congress and Presidential administration on the way in, EWG will have even more opportunities in 2009 to push for the kind of change we need to protect our health and our environment.

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

I just sent out a newsletter (my first one in months!) and included a quick description of how I’ve been using lasagna noodles in Glorious One-Pot Meals. Yep, they work great. A satisfying lasagna that doesn’t take me a day to make, or even an hour.

Lasagna in 40 minutes

Here’s the basic recipe:

- Preheat oven to 450F.

- Spray a cast iron Dutch oven and lid with olive oil.

- Open a 14.5oz can of diced tomatoes and mix with 1 tablespoon each of basil and oregano. Season with sea salt and pepper and spread a thin layer along the base of the pot.

- Arrange the dry lasagna noodles on the sauce, breaking them into halves if it helps them to fit together better. It’s ok if they overlap.

- Spread a thick layer of chopped greens like Swiss chard, kale, or spinach over the noodles. Sprinkle with cheese (I used cheddar in this photo just because that was what I had. We didn’t get the stringiness of mozzarella, but it was different and delicious.) Top with veggies like sliced mushrooms, cauliflower, bell peppers, or eggplant, and half of the remaining tomato mixture.

- Set another layer of lasagna noodles down. Spread the rest of the tomato mixture and top with some more cheese. Cover and bake for 40 to 45 minutes or until three minutes after the aroma of a full-bodied meal escapes the oven.

Those of you familiar with Glorious One-Pot Meals will recognize the layering concept as it’s tweaked here. Although this lasagna recipe is not in the new cookbook, there are other new tweaks to the GOPM concept in there that will make it new and exciting for even hard-core fans of the first book. The new book is coming out January 6th. Very soon!

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

My favorite part was hanging out with my good buddy Keith Jones, Host Chef extraordinaire and culinary ambassador to the world. Thanks for snapping these photos, Keith!

Elizabeth cooks at Colorado Cookin'.

This marks the official kick off of my return to touring for Glorious One-Pot Meals after taking most of the summer and fall off. While it was a gift to cut back on my public appearances for a while, I’m fired up and ready to go out and promote my newest cookbook, Glorious One-Pot Meals: A Revolutionary New Quick and Healthy Approach to Dutch Oven Cooking.

The book will be released January 6th, but pre-order yours now and get a HUGE discount. Really huge. About 1/3 off the cover price.

I’d love to come to your city and give you and your friends a private cooking demonstration party! Suggest to your company, favorite non-profit, or healthcare organization that they bring me in to speak. If they do, I’ll come to your house and offer a free private cooking class for you and your friends.

Be sure to keep up to date on my upcoming events through my newsletter (it hasn’t gone out in a while, but it will resume shortly).

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

swollen tonsils

She was sent home from school about 10 days ago with a fever. I put her to bed, pumped her with fluids and natural remedies (echinicea, gelsenium in case it was the flu, aconite for viral infections), and watched her carefully for the telltale strep rash, yellow bumps on the back of her tongue, or pustules on her tonsils. Her fever broke the next day, so I figured it must have been a passing viral infection.

Guess not.

Her throat was still bothering her a week or so later, so I brought her into the pediatrician’s office. Sure enough, the strep bacteria showed up immediately on the in-office culture. Dang.

Did you know that they have strep tests that return results in 3 minutes now? When I was a kid, my sister and I were strep “carriers” and had it 5-8 times/year. Since my father was a doctor, he would bring the culture swabs home from the hospital and swab our tonsils himself, then drop the thing off directly at the lab — bypassing the pediatrician altogether. The worst part was that he wasn’t a good shot and swabbing would take multiple attempts. It sucks gagging when your throat already hurts, let me tell you.

The thing with strep is that if you leave it alone your body might fight if off by itself, or it might become a chronic infection, or it might migrate to your heart in the form of rheumatic heart fever, scarlet fever, or kidney problems. Some of these can leave you with a permanently weakened heart.

I remember when I was in 4th grade and one of the other student’s mothers was our playground aide. She died suddenly that year, at age 36, because of a weakened heart from a childhood bout with strep that turned into rheumatic heart fever. She left two young sons. Very sad.

So my baby girl is on heavy duty antibiotics. She loves the taste, but they are ripping her insides up and giving her diarreah, poor child. As soon as we finish the course I’ll pump her full of probiotics to help repair the carnage that’s going on.

My infectious disease specialist cousin-in-law suggests that we treat the whole family with antibiotics. The thought is so distasteful to me that I’m going to wait and see if anyone else turns up with any symptoms first. I’ve disinfected the bathrooms, faucets, lightswitches, and doorknobs, and washed all the linens in hot water. Maybe we can avoid this fate. I suspect that being on so many antibiotics during my lifetime helped me end up with multiple sclerosis. That’s one of my theories, anyway.

The incubation period for strep is about 3 days, and sickies are most contagious when the symptoms are most acute, which was about two weeks ago now, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that we came through it ok.

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

I actually did well in science in high school. Me and my late friend Melanie jockeyed for position at the top of the class in theoretical chemistry with a friendly competition over who could get the higher test scores. I could really nail those theorems and apply all the right formulas to solve the calculations. You’d think I’d be able to get baking.

But I don’t.

See, the way I cook is with inspiration (based on a recipe I might have seen, or a restaurant meal I’ve eaten, or simply what I have in the fridge) and desire (what do I feel like eating/cooking?) along with a dose of time constraints (is it 5 o’clock already? I’d better start thinking about what to make for dinner!) and a skew towards healthier foods and cooking methods.

When I apply the same qualities I use when I cook (inspiration, desire, time, healthy) to a baking project, I’m often disappointed with the results.

Duh: baking is a formula, not a creative endeavor! I should know better.

For me, cooking is often an artistic expression, a creative outlet. The problems come when I try to be creative with my baking, too… sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I can’t seem to get it through my head that I must follow the formula/recipe exactly as written to get good baked goods. My stubborn nature gets in the way. I just can’t help myself. Tell me I can’t do something and my first question is usually, “Why not?”

Yet, I still try to bake sometimes. Usually because I see a recipe for a baked good and I get inspired. This should probably be my first clue to set it down and step away from the recipe. But no. I blunder on heedlessly, blithely thinking that I can mold the recipe to my liking and end up with something delicious. As I did last month when I saw a recipe for savory breakfast muffins in the newspaper.

Ham and Cheese Buttermilk Breakfast Muffins, in fact.

Savory Breakfast Muffins

These would be great, I thought, to make as mini-muffins and keep in the freezer. Just pop one in the toaster oven for a quick and substantial breakfast. Like a one-pot meal for breakfast. What a great idea! They’re sugar-free, so maybe they’d even be acceptable to my sugar-phobic husband.

Except, well, the ham part kinda disgusts me, so no ham.

And I don’t have buttermilk, so I’m just going to use the same amount of whole milk.

The recipe calls for finely diced red pepper, but I’m going to use finely diced zucchini as well. I’m sure it won’t make a difference.

Oh yes, and to make it a little healthier, I’m going to substitute 1 cup of the all-purpose flour for whole wheat flour. Just because I’ll feel better about serving them if they have whole grains in them.

Let’s not forget that I’m at altitude, but I have no idea what to do to adjust for this, so I don’t. I like to use it as an excuse, though.

So, instead of following the formula for Ham and Cheese Buttermilk Breakfast Muffins like Emeril says you must when baking, I used the recipe more like it was a guide with suggestions. I’m the kind of person that chafes when told I have to follow the rules. Baking has rules. This should have been clue #2.

The biggest bummer with trying to make baked goods healthier by changing the recipes is that things often go directly to the trash, and I hate wasting food. These were truly inedible. My Ham-Free Ham and Cheese No-Buttermilk Breakfast Mini-Muffins were like little chunks of sandstone. Super dry and crumbly, tasteless except for an overwhelming sensation of cayenne in the back of your mouth.

Next time maybe I’ll try to follow a recipe for baked goods as it is actually written. There’s always hope.

Here’s the original recipe, if you want to give it a try yourself:

Serves 12

3 c all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp baking solda
1/2 tsp. black pepper
1/4 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 large eggs
1 1/3 c buttermilk
2 Tbsp. canola oil
3 Tbsp. butter, melted
1 c thinly sliced scallions (about 1 bunch)
1 cup diced ham (6 oz)
1 cup grated extra-sharp cheddar cheese
1/2 c finely diced red bell pepper (1 small)

Heat oven to 400 degress. Coat a 12-cup muffin pan with cooking spray or line it with muffin cups.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, pepper, salt, and cayenne pepper.

In a medium bowl, whisk togethe the eggs, buttermilk, oil, and butter. Sir in the scallions, ham, cheese and bell pepper.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and use a rubber spatula to mix until just moistened. Scoop the batter into the prepared pan (the cups will be very full).

Bake the muffins until the tops are browned, about 20-25 min. Let the muffins coolin the pan for 15 min, then loosen the edges with a knife and transer the muffins to a cooling rack. Serve warm.

To store, individually wrap the muffins in plastic and refrigerate for as many as 3 days or freeze for as long as a month.

To reheat, remove the plastic wrap, cover the muffin in a paper towl and microwave on high for 30 sec.

cal 248,  fat 11g,   chol 62 mg,  carb 27, pro 10g, fiber 1g, sodium 787 mg

Tell me your results if you try it!

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

*Sorry for the missing pepperoni on the chin - my hubby snatched it before I could snap the photo.  :)  This is just pepperoni with black olives for eyes - so easy!

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

Scientists at the University of Virginia have tested many common surfaces to see if germs could live on them and then be transferred to the next person. The big news? Yes, absolutely.

Germs can survive in many common spots in public places as well as in the home. An earlier study had shown that germs could survive up to 2 days after a guest checks out of a hotel room.

Here are some of the sobering numbers describing common germ hotbeds to think about as we head into cold and flu season. Spots found to harbor the germ:

6 out of 10 doorknobs

8 of 14 refrigerator handles

3 of 13 light switches

6 of 10 remote controls

8 of 10 bathroom faucets

4 of 7 telephones

20% of the toys in the “sick-child” waiting room at the pediatrician’s office

17% of the toys in the “well-child” waiting room

30% of the toys in the sack to choose from after getting a shot

What can you do to avoid picking up these germs?

Besides remembering to wipe down and disinfect doorknobs, light switches, and phones along with the regular cleaning routine in your home, do your best not to touch these things in public places. That’s what I do. In public areas I turn faucets off with the towel I’m using to dry my hands, flip lightswitches with my elbows, and pull my sleeve down over my palm (or grab the bottom of my shirt) when forced to grasp doorhandles. It’s awkward, but worth it to keep my hands clean and germ-free.

I try not to touch escalator handrails, railings, and elevator buttons, preferring to use my elbow when possible. If I must touch something like the pole in a subway car, I try to wash my hands the first chance I get and remember not to touch anywhere near my face or food until then.

As I’ve said before, one of the best ways to be healthy is to not get sick in the first place!

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.

Monster Heads for Ghoulish Eaters

I place boiled Brussels sprouts atop flat ravioli “shoulders” and affix them with some marinara sauce to make them look particularly bloody. We like to cover them with “snow” or “dandruff” (depending on the child!) by sprinkling with grated Parmesan cheese to top it off.

I trim the end and put a shallow “X” in the base of each Brussels sprout before boiling to help the insides soften to be more amenable to little teeth. I find the smaller heads to be more appetizing for smaller children as they tend to be sweeter and easier to chew.

If your kids find Brussels sprouts bitter, try adding a dash or two of sugar into the boiling water. It will infuse the sprouts with a bit more sweetness.

We typically use cheese or chicken-filled ravioli squares that we get as part of the delivery from our frozen food co-op. With Town and Country Foods, we pay about $119/month to keep our freezer stocked with meats, veggies, and convenience foods like gourmet frozen ravioli.

Talk about making dinner easy! Sometimes I even boil the Brussels sprouts in the same water I use to boil the ravioli — only one pot to clean!

Monster Heads are one of my kids favorite meals, and has made them lovers of Brussels sprouts (who would have thought?). And fall is a great season for Brussels sprouts!

©2008 Effortless Eating. All Rights Reserved.