Beet salad with gorgonzola and walnuts

This salad is tastiest if you have pickled beets on hand. You can also use canned beets, though. And if you want to boil some beets to use, that’s also a possibility. But I like to use the juice from pickled or canned beets to make a beet-juice reduction for the salad dressing – so good!

I made this salad recently for Valentines Day and served it with preboiled lobster for a red-themed dinner – delicious! My salad recipe serves two, but you can easily double it.

Battling Alzheimer’s Disease: Part 1 – Fueling exercise

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  Bananas fuel the body well throughout life

Fend off those “senior moments”

Vinny’s grandparents have told him that living with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia is one of the scarier prospects of growing older. So he has decided to do a series of posts about some lifestyle choices that could make a positive difference to our mental health in later years. He’s all for starting these habits early, for a longer and more active life. Read on for his first installment.

Fat-burning bedtime soother

What if we could lose weight while we sleep…

That idea sounds almost miraculous. But it might just be possible. Here’s the theory.

At night, our body burns the fat we have accumulated during the day. We can speed up that process while we sleep by stimulating the digestive system and increasing our metabolism. Drinking in some of nature’s stronger metabolism boosters can prod our digestion system to be more efficient.

Pump it! Chapter 2 of Vinny’s book “Cook Up A Story”

The outdoors and exercise go hand-in-hand

Vinny’s messages hidden in  Pump It!

In Chapter 2 of the print version of Cook Up A Story,  read Birthday bumps. It’s a hair-raising adventure about boys on the river, frogs, and wishes gone bad. Then make two delicious campfire treats: wings on a stick and birthday cupcakes baked in orange skins. Use a campfire, a barbecue, or your oven. Flip and Tigger introduce the idea of food as fuel. Vinny targets carbohydrates and suggests ways to gear up for active lives. Exercise is the chapter’s theme.

A Few Crunchy Numbers to Munch On… What was hot in 2012?

Low-sugar cookies

“Skinny” Brownies

Vinny goes back to school

Choco-beet cake

Yak’s Sherpa pie

Kale and coconut oil

 

 Click the pics to view the posts   The carrots are cooked! Thanks to the WordPress gurus, we now know our blog, Cook Up A Story, got 11,000 views in 2012. People from all around the world logged on to read Vinny’s 41 stories over the year and to check out the 242 pictures we uploaded. I know there are lots of blogs out there with far bigger readerships, but I’m thrilled with the faithful following we’ve grown over the past year. Thanks so much to our readers who make blogging such a lot of  fun!

The Queen’s Beets – Let Them Eat Cake

“Woe is me!” sighs Marie.

How Queen Marie learns to dance

Marie Antoinette found herself  bored silly. She had everything she wanted. If she clapped once, her servant would come with a tray full of chocolate cake. Twice got her steaming mugs of cocoa and cream. Three times and she went mad over baskets of truffles and éclairs. But she wasn’t happy.

Beetniks: a winning formula

Sonny and Cher’s coded message: Beets help you run faster!

What’s old

People who are into sports could take a winning tip from Sonny and Cher’s top-100 hit of 1967:  The beet goes on. Yeah. They’re saying, like: Eat your beets, man, and you’ll run harder, longer, faster. Crazy but true!

Curioddities… how curious!

An exercise in thinking

Vinny’s got a few new snippets for you about keeping our bodies in tip-top shape, from Ripley’s Curioddities.