Green tea for two – A Valentine treat!

My 100th post! A toast to Valentine’s day

 Happy Valentine’s day!

Forget red. Paint your Valentine’s Day green this year!  Host a green tea party and do your heart a favor. A beautiful smile, fresh breath and glowing skin are only some of the ways  the green brew can improve your love life. Even better is the boost it gives your memory, as well as your metabolic rate.

A better memory can only mean better grades at school,  better performance at work, and a better chance you’ll remember to do something special for your sweetie on the 14th February. And if you don’t already know, a faster metabolic rate means a sleeker look. You’ll be hotter…  burning more fat all the time – even while you’re in couch-potato mode. All that should earn you some brownie points with your heart’s desire!

You’ll also hit a home run with Dr. Mike Morano. My favorite diet guru recognizes just how good green tea is for you as you work to keep your weight in check. He advises drinking green tea three times a day on his 17-day diet. Make it a habit, he says. It’s good for you, even once you’ve reached your goal. Anything that keeps your metabolism revving in high gear is great for maintaining a healthy weight.

All kinds of tea are good for you, though. For instance, if you want to pig out on some greasy chips and hamburgers one night, drink oolong tea and double the amount of fat that passes right through you, unabsorbed.

Speaking of what passes through, consider the strange Panda dung tea.  At over $200 a cup, it’s the world’s most expensive tea.

An entrepreneur in China grows the tea using panda poo from nearby breeding centres. Pandas eat only wild bamboo. According to Sky News, more than 70% of the nutrients are passed in their excrement. What a great way to recycle!

And how about the weirdest tea in the world… a tea made from caterpillar poo. Known as Pu-erh Tuocha  (Camel Breath), ounce-for-ounce it costs about the same as gold. Master Gao-Que, a third generation Taiwanese tea master, says it’s one of the most labor-intensive teas in the world. To prepare it people have to go through a pile of tea leaves with a magnifying glass and pick out the little poo pellets with tweezers.

As tea leaves are the only thing the caterpillars ever eat, tea is the only thing that passes through their digestive tracts. No meats, no pesticides, nothing dirty at all, the master says. And the taste? According to several personal accounts on the Internet, it’s thickly mellow, elemental, earthy, gamey or meaty — smooth.

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Matcha (powdered green tea): herbal, grassy

After reading about these exotic tea drinks, I bet you’re just in the mood now to settle for green tea. And you won’t go far wrong. Green tea offers great taste while delivering many valuable health benefits, says a Harvard health study.

But from personal experience, be sure to follow the directions on the label. If it says “Steep for 3 minutes,” for heaven’s sake take out the tea leaves after 3 minutes. Otherwise, ARGGGG! My overly long steeped senchu green tea hit the back of my throat with a pitchfork… soooooo bitter. The only way I got it down was by drowning it in milk.

Brewed properly… only one meager teaspoonful per cup of water heated to 74F and steeped for three minutes and not a second more…. green tea tastes LOVERLY.

Everybody loves tea

Tea is one adult drink kids can enjoy too. For the shorter set, I suggest a caffeine-free herbal sort, like mint or roibus (African red bush tea). Notch up the taste into the kid-o-sphere with honey or maple syrup.

While you are all enjoying your tea party, why not sing along to the Tea Tea Tea Tea Tea Tea Song! It’s especially happy!

Make Valentine’s Day extra lovin’ this year with green tea for two!

xxoo

Related links

• The 17-day diet, starring Dr. Mike Morano – Intro to this great meal plan
• Why did the Roman chicken cross the road? – Cycle 1: Lean protein and cleansing fruits and veggies
• Grocery List for 17-day diet - Let’s go shopping! The foods for the three cycles are color coded. Pay attention. It’s easier if you focus only on cycle 1 foods (red) while you’re still in the 17-day accelerate phase. On day 18, take a look at cycle 2 And so on. Less confusing!
• Hummus… Pretty in Pink! – A basic slo-carb food for cycle 2 of the 17-day diet

Go sweet on Valentine’s Day with these deliciously nutritious pancakes

Luv U… B mine?

I was surfing the net one night when I came across what may be the perfect answer to  chocolate overdosing on Valentine’s day.  Emmy in Seattle, another WordPress chef, had posted a recipe for  sweet potato pancakes. I thought: what a terrific treat for the family on a day that celebrates all things close to the heart! The only changes I made to Emmy’s recipe were to make a smaller quantity using buttermilk (which is low in fat in spite of its name), leaving out the sugar in the mix and throwing in a little oat bran to increase the fiber.

To feed four hungry people as a side dish, I took one small sweet potato  (250 grams or 2 ounces) and peeled, diced, and boiled it in just enough water to cover the pieces. When they were soft to the fork I drained the water and mashed them with an old-fashioned potato masher. Yams work equally well, although surprisingly, they are not a potato at all. They are of the lily family.

In a large bowl, I mixed 1/2 cup all-purpose flour, 1/4 c. whole wheat flour, and 1/4 cup wheat bran (which I always keep on hand), 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and a pinch of salt.

In a separate bowl, I whisked 1 omega-3 egg with 1 cup buttermilk and 2 teaspoons of canola oil.  Of course you can use any kind of eggs, milk or oil…. but on a day we are celebrating love, I think we should be as kind to our hearts as we can be with these healthy ingredients low in saturated fat.

I whisked the sweet potato puree into my liquid ingredients,  thinking how  my sweetie whisks me away pretty good, too … She’s great! Then I dumped the whole thing into my dry ingredients and stirred just until they were blended.

If you want to follow through with hearts on Valentine’s Day, Emmy had some good ideas. But I took the lazy guy’s way out. I sprayed my largest cast iron frying pan with oil and added a dab of butter for flavor. Then I filled it with small scoops of batter, just a little larger than my heart-shaped cookie cutter. I waited for bubbles to rise to the surface. Then I checked the underside by lifting it with a spatula. Once it was golden brown, I flipped the whole works over, again using my handy dandy spatula. After a minute or three, once the second side was golden as well, I took the pancakes off the heat and flipped them out onto a wooden cutting board.  Here’s the fun part. Using cookie cutters, I turned each pancake into a heart for my sweetie.  I presented them to her with a splash of maple syrup on top and some berries on the side. “You are berry cute,” I said to her. “I think we’re cut out for each other!”

Sweet potato is a wonder food

Here’s what I found out out about sweet potatoes. They’re super good for you! The Centre for Science in the Public Interest  ranked the sweet potato number one in nutrition of all vegetables. It beat out the next highest vegetable, which was potatoes,  by more than 100 points! Points were given for content of dietary fiber, naturally occurring sugars and complex carbohydrates, protein, vitamins A and C, iron and calcium. Points were deducted for fat content (especially saturated fat), sodium, cholesterol, added refined sugars and caffeine. The higher the score, the more nutritious the food. Sweet potato ranked highest with a score of 184. Potato came next at 83.

Cook Up A Story. See main menu for more about the book. Click pic to order.

Hey, sweet patootie, I yam keen on you! B mine?

Vinny says: Be my valentine

Hot dippity do

Cook Up A Story is in love with chocolate, and Vinny tells you why. If you’d like to see Vinny’s tiny friend get ready for Valentine’s day, click on Jacquie Lawson’s chocolate shop. It’s beauti-licious! Photo courtesy of Hezoos.