Quotes About Cooking

If you chop the broccoli (or brussels sprouts, kale, collards, cauliflower, or any other cruciferous vegetable) and then wait forty minutes, you can cook it as much as you want. At that point, the sulforaphane has already been made, so the enzyme is no longer needed to achieve maximum benefit. It's already done its job. (You can also buy bags of fresh greens and other crucifers that are prechopped or shredded, which can presumably be cooked immediately.)

Commercially produced frozen broccoli lacks the ability to form sulforaphane because the vegetables are blanched (flash-cooked) before they're frozen for the very purpose of deactivating enzymes.11 This process prolongs shelf life, but when you take the veggies out of your freezer, the enzyme is inert. At that point, it doesn't matter how much you chop or how long you wait—no sulforaphane is going to be made.

If you sprinkled some mustard powder on frozen broccoli that's been cooked, would it start churning out sulforaphane? Yes!

So, if you don't have forty minutes to spare between chopping and cooking, or if you're using frozen greens, just sprinkle the crucifers with some mustard powder before you eat them, and you'll be all set. Daikon radishes, regular radishes, horseradish, and wasabi are all cruciferous vegetables and may have the same effect. All it appears to take is a pinch to revitalize sulforaphane production.

Whenever I'm boiling pasta, for example, I'll add a bunch of fresh greens to the pot a few minutes before I'm ready to drain the pasta. I know I'll be losing some nutrients when I pour off the cooking water, but it's worth it to me for the convenience of throwing everything into one pot and getting my family to eat even more greens.

During my bachelor days, I would regularly order Chinese food for delivery—usually broccoli and garlic sauce (hold the white rice). Then I'd throw brown rice or quinoa along with dried lentils into my rice cooker and steam or microwave a pound of greens. By the time the delivery arrived, everything was ready and I would just mix it all together and have more than enough for leftovers.

The food category that averages the most antioxidants is herbs and spices.

Plant-based meals tend to be rich in antioxidants on their own, but taking a moment to spice up your life may make your meal even healthier.

Draining and rinsing your canned beans can remove about half the added salt, but then you'd also be rinsing away some of the nutrition. I recommend purchasing the no-salt-added varieties and cooking with the bean liquid in whatever dish you're whipping up.

While there is no proven way to halt the progression of Alzheimer's, if you do know anyone suffering from the disease, regularly cooking him or her saffron-spiced paella may help.

Cooking without oil is surprisingly easy. To keep foods from sticking, you can sauté in wine, sherry, broth, vinegar, or just plain water. For baking, I've successfully used green-light ingredients such as mashed bananas or avocado, soaked prunes, and even canned pumpkin to substitute for oil to provide a similar moistness.

This is good news, because it's best not to eat mushrooms raw; there's a toxin in edible mushrooms called agaritine to which you should minimize your exposure.

use a grater to add my daily quarter inch into whatever I may be cooking (or right onto a cooked sweet potato), or I throw a raw slice into a smoothie. You probably won't even taste it. Fresh turmeric has a much more subtle flavor than dried, so it may be an especially good option for those who don't like turmeric's taste.

Groats can then be sliced into two to four pieces

you hate to cook and just want the cheapest, easiest way to make healthy meals, I highly recommend dietitian Jeff Novick's Fast Food DVD series. Using common staples like canned beans, frozen vegetables, quick-cook whole grains, and spice mixes, Jeff shows you how you can feed your family healthfully in no time for about four dollars a day per person. The DVDs also include grocery store walk-

Split red or orange lentils are even easier. They're ready in five minutes, quicker than boiling pasta.2372 Once they've softened, rinse them to cool, then mix with herbs and lemon juice for a basic legume salad. Another favorite of mine is to cook lentils a little longer so they thicken into almost a purée before adding spices like curry, turmeric, cumin, and garam masala for a thick, savory, and healthy Indian-inspired sauce.

Whole-wheat pasta cooks in about ten minutes. Improved production technologies have created a new generation of whole-grain pastas that no longer have the rough and mealy texture of yesteryear. My favorite brand is Bionaturae because of its deliciously nutty taste

Meth is too easy to make, and unfortunately right now all the ingredients need to make this highly addictive drug are legal and readily available to those who want to cook it up and sell it to our children.

The [World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research] scientists cited a natural substance in meat call harm, which they identified as promoting the formation of potentially carcinogenic compounds. They also suggested that cooking meat at high temperatures produced a group of more than one hundred substances--known as heterocyclix amines and polycystic aromatic hydrocarbon--that can cause cancer in people with a genetic predisposition.

Many of the Prego sauces—whether cheesy, chunky, or light—have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar.

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

I believe it's a cook's moral obligation to add more butter given the chance.

I buy onions every time I'm in the grocery store, not because I need them, but because I fear not having an onion when I do need it. Not having an onion in the kitchen is like working with a missing limb.

The social food researcher Harry Balzer noted without prompting that Americans are not cooking more, they're simply eating more meals at home.