Healthy Tip – Holiday Food Safety

Growing Hyacinths

This is one of the many books in my collection but the only one to focus on growing big, bigger and biggest vegetables. If you want to grow giant vegetable for exhibition or to get large crops then there are many pointers in ‘How to Grow Giant Vegetables’ by Bernard Lavery and below.

The original post on 5th April 2008′ was entitled welcome to the Compost Heap.’

Our transatlantic cousins still benefit from the Pilgrim fathers gardening knowledge taken to their shores centuries ago. The potato famine of 1845-50 caused Irish farmers to discover the Idaho potato. Now these and other horticultural favours can be returned by this book of organic homespun tips.

A meal kit delivery service sends a box of food ingredients to your home that contains everything you need to prepare a complete meal, including the recipe and instructions for preparing. There are dozens of companies offering meal preparation kits, and they provide a convenient and delicious way to make dinner with no grocery store runs, little planning, and minimal prep. You simply go to the company’s website, pick the meals you want to make, choose the number of meals you want to purchase for a week, and select the number of people who will be eating. Most companies offer a variety of menus, and many include options for dietary restrictions and child-friendly diets. Meal delivery is truly a simple and convenient way to deliver delicious meals with little effort.

I recently had a call from a South Carolina resident who lost power for more than 24 hours and wanted to know whether the foods in her freezer would be safe to eat. This is a very common problem in South Carolina winters and could easily affect you in the coming months.

Yes, you read that right – snowman hands. When I started teaching food safety practices to children I wondered how to teach them about proper hand washing. We all know how important it is to thoroughly wash our hands before preparing food, after touching raw meat and poultry or any other potentially contaminated surface. We can easily explain to children (and adults!) that singing happy birthday twice, while scrubbing hands, equals the prescribed 10 to 15 seconds that we should do while washing. However, how do you explain how much soap to use to create a good lather?? The answer: snowman hands! Use enough soap that your hands look like a snowman’s hands after rubbing them together! I have found great success with this tip while teaching children (and now my own children) to wash their hands properly. And guess what – it takes a good 10 to 15 seconds of scrubbing soapy hands together to create those snowman hands! Bonus to the singing of happy birthday while washing hands! So next time you are washing your hands, use enough soap to create snowman hands. This will help prevent the spread of food-borne illness (and those nasty cold and flu bugs too!).

The cucumber is originally from South Asia, but now grows on most continents. It is high in beneficial nutrients, plant compounds, and antioxidants beneficial to health. Cucumbers are low in calories, contain water and soluble fiber. Cucumbers are ideal for promoting hydration and aiding in weight loss.

Squash is native to the Americas; remains have been found in Central America and Mexico dating back as far as 7000 BC.

The tomato is a fruit from the nightshade family native to South America. The Spanish first introduced tomatoes to Europe, where they became used in Spanish and Italian food.

Silver Queen Corn is a favorite; the 8-inch tapered ears fill to the tip with 14-16 rows of tender, sweet white kernels with excellent flavor. Kernels contain moderate degrees of sugar and convert to starch rapidly after harvest; taste best when fresh.

The sweet potato is a starchy, sweet-tasting root vegetable. They have a thin, brown skin on the outside with colored flesh inside, typically orange in color, but other varieties are white, purple or yellow. You can eat sweet potatoes whole or peeled; the leaves of the plant are also edible. While called ‘potatoes’, sweet and white potatoes are not actually related. Botanically, the sweet potato belongs to the bindweed or morning glory family, whereas the white potato is part of the nightshade family.