For the vegan: Not Me: Some of My Friends

Vegan Substitutes: Not Me, But Some of My Friends

Great Article from Ecosalon.com

Easy substitutions for a plant-based lifestyle.
One of the nasty pitfalls of becoming vegan or pursuing a more plant-based, healthy lifestyle is the allure of vegan or low-calorie products. These packaged goods mock the “real” thing with often not so forgiving preservatives, colorants, and other additives. That’s why one of the biggest challenges is finding simple, within-hands-reach ways to replace the most common ingredients with their vegan or healthy (and just-as-real) counterparts.
Brighten your kitchen, nourish your heart, and spread the love with these animal-friendly and nutritional kitchen substitutions.

Eggs
If you aren’t eating an egg-centric dish, chances are that a recipe calling for eggs is looking for either a binding or leavening agent. Eggs are viscous and hold ingredients tightly together, which is why they appear in most baked goods, burgers, and creams. They also help to leaven, or “rise” baked dishes. Depending on what you’re making, the replacement will change accordingly.
To replace one egg in a baked recipe, alternatives that have worked for me in include:

• 1 tablespoon a of ground flaxseed mixed in 3 tablespoons of water and allowed to sit until the mixture thickens
• 2 tablespoons of cornstarch or potato starch
• 1/2 large banana, mashed, but only for sweet recipes
• 1/4 cup applesauce, but only for sweet recipes

Keep in mind that the replacement should adjust according to the recipe. The flaxseed mixture wouldn’t work in a smooth batter, so opt for another alternative. If the recipe calls for more than two eggs, add some baking powder – 1/2 teaspoon per additional egg – as it will help with the rising effect.
For the pure purpose of binding ingredients in a mixture, the options are wide and varied. Instead of one egg, you could use 1/2 avocado, 2 tablespoons tahini, 2 tablespoons nut butter, 2 tablespoons bread crumbs, or 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast. Anything viscous and thick enough to hold things together without changing the taste will work. The dry replacements work best in mixtures with a liquid element.

Milk
This is probably the easiest of the bunch, because there is a hot market for dairy-free “milk” these days. Peruse the health section aisles at your grocery store and choose from the array of rice, almond, hemp, coconut, and soy milks. Avoid brands with too many additives – sugars, flavoring or preservatives.
Whenever I have the ingredients on hand, I like to make my own almond milk. All you need is 1 cup raw almonds, enough water to soak them in overnight, 1/2 teaspoon sea salt, and 3 cups water. Soak the almonds in the salt and water overnight. The next day, rinse them and toss into a blender. Blend them with 3 cups of water until thin. Separate the almond milk from its fibers with a cheese cloth. Drink immediately and store in the refrigerator.

Cheese
Dairy cheese can be replaced by any store-bought soy or rice-based cheese, but these often include strange ingredients that are necessary to achieve the same texture, taste, and look of cheese. They are also not much more forgiving in terms of calories and fat.
Luckily, these vegan alternatives make things a bit more interesting and are easy enough to make on the regular:

• white cheese dip
• sweet potato cheese
• basil cashew cheese

Keep in mind that when it comes to cheese, nutritional yeast is your most trusted accomplice. It has a cheesy flavor that, when paired with a creamy base, can mock cheese to the T (or C).

Gelatin
Ever wonder where gelatin comes from? It’s a protein obtained by boiling animal bones, tendons, ligaments, hooves, and skin. Not necessarily the kinds of things you associate with jellied candies, toaster pastries, cereals, and Jell-O.
Alternatives include carrageenan, agar-agar, fruit pectin, and locust bean gum.

Butter
In sweet recipes, you can replace up to 3/4 cup butter with applesauce. Replace the rest with a vegan butter substitution, such as Earth Balance. In cooking, where butter is scant, use a vegan substitution.

Oil
Oil has little benefit when it is cooked, literally, to death. Oil biochemically changes when it is heated, and it loses many of its nutritional benefits. Opt to enjoy oils in their raw, extra-virgin states. The healthiest raw oils include olive oil, grapeseed oil, avocado oil, walnut oil, sesame oil, flaxseed oil, fish oil, and peanut oil. When cooking, use coconut oil – it has a high burning temperature and can withstand heat.

Buttermilk
To replace buttermilk, simply combine 1 tablespoon of white vinegar with 1 cup of vegan milk, such as almond, soy, coconut or rice milk.

Sugar
In baked goods, marinades, and sauces, maple syrup is a great replacement for sugar. In fact, I find that it gives the dish a deeper, more complex flavor, making it more unique and enjoyable to eat. You can replace every 1 cup of sugar with 3/4 cup of maple syrup. This requires that you reduce the dominant liquid in the recipe by 2-4 tablespoons, for consistency’s sake. Pick and choose with the liquids – you don’t want to sacrifice an important taste, so don’t reduce the oil or vinegar measurements when you have 2 or 3 cups of milk to take from. To offset maple syrup’s slight acidity, you may choose to add 1/4-1/2 teaspoons of baking soda. If the recipe calls for sour cream, buttermilk, or sour milk, skip the baking soda.
In tea and coffee, there is no need to reach for sugar anymore. Stevia is the only sweetener out there that has a zero-glycemic level and zero calories – to say nothing of its a-little-goes-a-long-way poster child status. Stevia is 300 times sweeter than sugar and if you find a brand that fits your tastes – I am a NuNaturals fan – you won’t be able to leave the house without it! I prefer liquid stevia, because it’s seamless to use and easy to carry around in my purse. A few drops later, and my beverages taste like liquid gold. One 2-ounce bottle tends to last me 3-4 months.
Some manufacturers have come out with powdered versions that can replace sugar in recipes. There are also sugar and powdered stevia mixes that aim to reduce sugar, but not completely nix it.
Aylin Erman currently resides in Istanbul and is creator of plant-based recipe website GlowKitchen.

 

Mystery of the disapperaing bees: solved !

 

 

Mystery of the disappearing bees: solved !      This is a a must article for anyone who questions the harm of GMO.

 

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Mystery of the disappearing bees: Solved!

April 9, 2012 @ 10:37 pm

By Richard Schiffman

If it were a novel, people would criticize the plot for being too far-fetched – thriving colonies disappear overnight without leaving a trace, the bodies of the victims are never found. Only in this case, it’s not fiction: It’s what’s happening to fully a third of commercial beehives, over a million colonies every year. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return. The queen bee and mother of the hive is abandoned to starve and die.
^[1]Thousands of scientific sleuths have been on this case for the last 15 years trying to determine why our honey bees are disappearing in such alarming numbers. “This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,” ^[2] according to Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee and pollination program.
Until recently, the evidence was inconclusive on the cause of the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) that threatens the future of beekeeping worldwide. But three new studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids ^[3].
In the U.S. alone, these pesticides, produced primarily by the German chemical giant Bayer and known as “neonics” for short, coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds. They are also a common ingredient in home gardening products.
Research published last month ^[4] in the prestigious journal Science shows that neonics are absorbed by the plants’ vascular system and contaminate the pollen and nectar that bees encounter on their rounds. They are a nerve poison that disorient their insect victims and appear to damage the homing ability of bees, which may help to account for their mysterious failure to make it back to the hive.
Another study ^[5] published in the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science and Technology journal implicated neonic-containing dust released into the air at planting time with “lethal effects compatible with colony losses phenomena observed by beekeepers.”
Purdue University entomologists observed bees at infected hives exhibiting tremors, uncoordinated movement and convulsions, all signs of acute insecticide poisoning. And yet another study ^[6] conducted by scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health actually re-created colony collapse disorder in several honeybee hives simply by administering small doses of a popular neonic, imidacloprid.
But scientists believe that exposure to toxic pesticides is only one factor that has led to the decline of honey bees in recent years. The destruction and fragmentation of bee habitats, as a result of land development and the spread of monoculture agriculture, deprives pollinators of their diverse natural food supply. This has already led to the extinction of a number of wild bee species. The planting of genetically modified organism (GMO) crops – some of which now contain toxic insecticides within their genetic structure – may also be responsible for poisoning bees and weakening their immune systems ^[7].
Every spring millions of bee colonies are trucked to the Central Valley of California and other agricultural areas to replace the wild pollinators, which have all but disappeared in many parts of the country. These bees are routinely fed high-fructose corn syrup instead of their own nutritious honey. And in an effort to boost productivity, the queens are now artificially inseminated, which has led to a disturbing decline in bee genetic diversity. Bees are also dusted with chemical poisons to control mites and other pathogens that have flourished in the overcrowded commercial colonies.
In 1923, Rudolph Steiner, the German founder of biodynamic agriculture, a precursor of the modern organic movement, predicted that within a hundred years artificial industrial techniques used to breed honey bees would lead to the species’ collapse ^[8]. His prophecy was right on target!
Honey bees have been likened to the canaries in the coal mine. Their vanishing is nature’s way of telling us that conditions have deteriorated in the world around us. Bees won’t survive for long if we don’t change our commercial breeding practices and remove deadly toxins from their environment. A massive pollinator die-off would imperil world food supplies and devastate ecosystems that depend on them. The loss of these creatures might rival climate change in its impact on life on earth.
Still, this is a disaster that does not need to happen. Germany and France have already banned pesticides ^[9] that have been implicated in the deaths of bees. There is still time to save the bees by working with nature rather than against it, according to environmentalist and author Bill McKibben:
“Past a certain point, we can’t make nature conform to our industrial model. The collapse of beehives is a warning – and the cleverness of a few beekeepers in figuring out how to work with bees not as masters but as partners offers a clear-eyed kind of hope for many of our ecological dilemmas.”
PHOTO: A bumblebee sits on a rhododendron bloom on a sunny spring day in Dortmund, Germany, March 28, 2012. REUTERS/Ina Fassbender

[1] Image: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/files/2012/04/RTR3000M_Comp.jpg

[2] “This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,”: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/10/are-bees-the-ne.html

[3] a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/bayer-pesticide-bees-studies

[4] Research published last month: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/recent

[5] Another study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22292570

[6] yet another study: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0405-hance_colonycollapse_pesticides.html

[7] poisoning bees and weakening their immune systems: http://non-gmoreport.com/articles/apr07/gm_crops_killing_bees.php

[8] would lead to the species’ collapse: http://curezone.com/forums/fm.asp?i=1032682

[9] have already banned pesticides: http://www.greenrightnow.com/wabc/2008/06/23/germany-and-france-ban-pesticides-linked-to-bee-deaths-geneticist-urges-us-ban-would-save-the-bees/

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OPEN SESAME: A DOCUMENTARY ON THE ENDANGERMENT OF SEEDS

OPEN SESAME: AN URGENT STORY OF THE ENDANGERMENT OF SEEDS  Check on this link to view a very urgent movie which documents the possible endangerment of seeds.

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Apple Cake Recipe

Apple Cake  Recipe, yummy.

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups white sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 cups apples – peeled, cored and diced
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease and flour a 9 x 13 inch cake pan. In a mixing bowl, beat oil and eggs together until creamy. Add the sugar and vanilla and beat well. Combine the flour salt, baking soda, and ground cinnamon. Slowly add this mixture to the egg mixture and mix until combined. Fold in the apples and spread the batter into the pan. Bake for about 45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. All the cake cool on a wire rack.