Tom Yum Inspired Soup
(serves 4)

TOPPINGS

• 1/4 cup shallot, thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup straw mushrooms, sliced
• 3 tablespoons green chili peppers, chopped, about 3 Thai or 1 serrano pepper
• 1/4 cup lime juice
• 1 Tablespoon Soy Sauce
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

SOUP BASE

• 2 cups coconut meat
• 1 teaspoon garlic
• 5 medium Kaffir lime leaves
• 1/3 cup coconut oil
• 2 Tablespoons lemon grass, chopped, lower stalks only
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• 3 to 4 cups filtered water, as needed

GARNISH

• 2 tablespoons cilantro leaves, chopped

Marinate toppings by placing all ingredients into a bowl. Set aside for 10 minutes or more.

Into your blender, place soup base ingredients with 1 cup water. Blend smooth. Add remaining water,  blend to mix well.

To serve, scoop soup base into 4 bowls. Top with marinated vegetables,  and garnish with cilantro leaves.

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Cleaning houses is one of the most common household activities that we cannot do without. No matter where you live, the chances of getting dust and dirt is a common thing. Although most people have been doing this since childhood, very few actually enjoy the dirty work associated with cleaning houses. Some people even resort to paying other people just to get house cleaning jobs over with. Hence, here are some tips and ideas to help keep the ordeal of cleaning houses a bit bearable.

Do it little by little

Most people end up hating cleaning because they stall on it and postpone it until the time that the house is horrifyingly dirty. A lot of people avoid house cleaning because they associate it with longs hours wasted and a staggering amount of activity. Sometimes, doing your cleaning tasks seems to be futile as you see hours trickle by and your cleaning tasks are still so long. Do simple cleaning like sweeping and dusting every day. Do simple cleaning little by little each day so that your workload in cleaning does not pile up. This would lead to a surprisingly small amount of formal cleaning job for you. 

Do not wait for your house cleaning genie

No matter how much you want it, those house cleaning tasks will not sort themselves out. There is no magic pill that could make your house cleaning tasks magically disappear. People with a limited income simply cannot afford to hire somebody else for cleaning. The solution lies in stopping your fantasies and get down to start with the tasks.

Make it your exercise

Treat cleaning houses as a unique way to exercise. Look forward to house cleaning by seeing it as an alternative to your gym sessions. Despite an aircon room, you will certainly find yourself working up a sweat after cleaning houses. Make the torture of cleaning a bit lighter as you see that it can somehow burn off those extra calories.

Treat your house like a person

Another tip is to think that your house is a living and feeling thing too. Imagine him having feelings or sometimes allergies to dust. See an income generating opportunity

There are quite a huge number of people who literally hate cleaning houses. Some people do not appreciate the importance of regular house cleaning. They would pay any amount just to have somebody else do the job. Who said cleaning houses have to be tiresome and unfulfilling? A lot of house cleaning businesses, agencies and workers earn a lot from people who do not want to do the cleaning tasks.

There loads of people that are looking to live a greener life but the Amish have been doing this for many years now. You may be surprised to understand this but the Amish people have decided to resist all the advancements in technology and that’s why their lives are so green. You’re probably already aware of this additionally, but all of the problems that we are having with our planet right now are due to the advancements in technology. In the following paragraphs we’re going to be looking at a number of the things that the Amish individuals do which helps them to leave the smallest carbon footprint possible.

Growing their own food is among the first things the Amish people do, and this is also how they end up reducing pollution that could otherwise be developed. And by growing their own food you ought to also recognize that they are reducing pollution the first way by not needing to drive a vehicle to the store to get their food. Yet another thing I should mention about than growing their own food is that this food is actually going to be far more nutritious and is also not going to be filled with dangerous chemicals. At this point you ought to realize that growing your own food is not only going to be something which can help the planet but the food will also be filled with more nutrition for your family.

If you’ve ever seen the Amish men and women you almost certainly also already understand that they do not have any sort of motorized vehicles for transportation. There are actually two benefits of not buying vehicles, the first being that the big businesses that end up manufacturing these vehicles won’t need to create as many reducing pollution, and there’s significantly less pollution from the exhaust. You’re going to find that when it comes to transportation many of these men and women will simply use a bicycle, but you are going to also discover that they use horses and wagons. This is a very important lesson we can learn from the Amish as many folks could also end up using bicycles in order to get to where they have to go.

The Amish men and women are incredibly self sufficient in the fact that they actually end up making everything that they need instead of purchasing these items. I comprehend that many of you do not have any idea how to do things that a blacksmith would do in order to make metal items, but there is no reason you could not stitch your own clothes. If you start making your own items you are going to help reduce the amount of things that the major businesses need to manufacture every year.

If more folks would start living like the Amish we are able to have great benefits on our planet and possibly have the ability to reverse the damage we have done. One thing you should realize is that there’s a lot of other things that you could learn from the Amish people in order to help the planet although we only discussed a couple of them here.

If you fail more than 10% of the time with solar lights, then a little something is definitely up. The real issue is if you do not have a problem with falling short of your goals. village green solar lights is just one impressive piece of information that is crystal clear and uncomplicated.

by shizzi under CC BY-ND  with wpseopix.com

eating organic food find out the benefits

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Organic food is food that has been grown without the use of toxic chemicals, pesticides or fertilizers. The food is as natural as can be, safer for the environment and usually tastes better too. Most importantly though, eating this food is healthier for you and may provide many health benefits, which is what this article is all about.

Even though further research needs to be done to gain a better understanding of the benefits of organic food, there is still much valuable information to share with you.

Before we discuss the actual health benefits of eating whole food, lets take a look at the advantages it has over non-organic food.

It’s a fact that this food is highly nutritious and contains higher levels of vitamins and minerals. Vitamin C and minerals like magnesium, calcium and iron are just some of the nutrients organic food contains higher amounts of.

Whole foods also contain higher amounts of antioxidants, which help reduce the risk of developing cancers.

You may be surprised to know, but the vegetables we eat today are nowhere near as nutritious as they were 50 or even 15 years ago. Farmers tend to take shortcuts when growing food, and the fastest way is generally not the best way to do something. This trend is expected to continue, so if eating highly nutritious food is important to you, looking into organic foods is something worth considering.

If you were wondering why organic food hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm, it’s mainly due to the extra cost associated with organic growing. Demand is greater than supply and as a result, you can expect to pay about 20% extra for this kind of food..

Numerous studies have been conducted to find out the benefits whole foods can provide us humans. Many results are still fairly inconclusive however there have been many reported cases of benefits when animals are fed organic food.

The reason for the vagueness in health benefits is due to many reasons such as: incorrect method of testing and the lengthy time it takes to determine results of this nature. However several studies have shown benefits such as:

Decline in colds and other conditions
Improves dental health
Improves flow of your overall system
Greater chance of sprains and fractures
Reduces chance of injury
Better over health

As mentioned, the subject of organic food vs non organic food is very iffy and many researches believe that this food provides little to no health benefits.

Thinking about it logically, surely food that has been grown as it was intended to and that contains no added toxic chemicals has to be considerably healthier for us.

Whether the extra cost associated with organic food is worth the money is entirely up to the person. There is insufficient evidence to say something like “eating whole foods will reduce the likelihood of getting heart disease”.

by Doug Beckers under CC BY-SA  with wpseopix.com

organic soil does it make a difference?

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by Rebecca Thompson, M.S.

“Pay how much for a pound of organic bananas? Are you crazy?” The sentiment was one I had echoed myself only 8 years before when I took my first trip into a health food store, which happened to be a Whole Foods Market, and saw the prices. “I’m not paying that much for some special bananas!” I heard the woman say from the next aisle. “What difference does it make anyway?”

I thought it was a great question. This was one I had struggled with trying to make ends meet on a teacher’s salary as a stay-at-home mom. What was the difference between conventional and organic? Is it enough of a difference to justify the extra expense? I wanted to do what was best for my family, but wasn’t sure what that was at the time.

A Brief History of Organic

Up until the middle part of the last century, all food was organic. Chemical agriculture was just really catching on then, which changed the way farming was managed in this country. Up until that time, careful management of the soil and smaller crops were the norm, along with crop rotation or growing certain plants together to support the growth of the others. It was also common for each family to have their own garden. When chemical fertilizers made their way onto the scene, farmers could grow much more food with less effort. They could kill the pests that would have devastated their crops in the past. It seemed like a great plan.

But with the addition of the fertilizers, pesticides, and less attention to the quality of the soil, the net result was food that was no longer as nutrient dense, and had the added disadvantage of toxic chemicals. Micronutrients that used to abound in the soil were no longer present, which resulted in food that didn’t taste as good. Ask anyone who is older than about 50 if produce tastes different than they remember it tasting when they were young. Most likely, the answer will be yes. Nutrients taste good. That apple with no taste has very little nutrition.

During the 1980’s, the word organic began popping up in health food stores, but there was no standard for what could be called organic and what couldn’t. During the 1990’s, the first standards for organic foods were set. In 2007, more legislation was passed to more clearly define what was acceptable for organically grown foods and what wasn’t. In the meantime, organic foods have become big business and many companies that were formally conventional have now started organic lines, like Dole. The advantage was that organic foods were now readily available at most grocery stores. As organic became more commercially available, prices started to go down, but the intention behind the movement shifted into making money, rather than doing what was ultimately best for people and the environment. Consumer confidence in the organic label dropped as incidents formally known to only affect conventional crops started happening with the organic crops.

As a side note, some farmers are now producing what is called biodynamic produce. These crops are considered even better than organic and special attention is paid to the soil for optimal health of the plants and high nutrient content. Like organic, it also must be free from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Organic is better than conventional, but biodynamic is even better than organic.

Why is organic better than conventional?

Chemicals used to protect food from pests are harmful to young children. Young children’s bodies have difficulty removing the chemicals ingested through food and children tend to eat more produce per pound of body weight than adults. However, the “safety” criteria often sited is based upon adults, not children. By eating several of the most contaminated produce in a day, your children are exposed to an average of 15 pesticides per day. You can reduce that by around 90% by simply eating more of the least contaminated foods. Organic food, by definition, must be free of synthetic chemicals. More attention must be paid to the soil in order for organic foods to grow, so they also tend to be more nutrient dense.

My favorite story about organics is taken from a zoo. They were feeding the monkeys a mix of organic and conventional bananas. The zookeepers discovered that the monkeys always peeled the conventional bananas, but ate the organic bananas whole, peel and all, which is normal for them. Even the animals know the difference!

Why are pesticides so bad? Don’t they just wash off?

Pesticide ingestion has been found to contribute to the following health problems, according to numerous animal and human studies:

Cancer
Fertility problems
Brain tumors
Childhood leukemia
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma
Hormone or endocrine system problems
Nervous system damage
Read that last one again: Nervous system damage. Most pesticides are designed to attack the nervous systems of pests! I couldn’t understand how anything that attacks the nervous system could ever be considered “safe” for anyone, let alone children.
Keep in mind that pesticides are not just on the outside of fruits and vegetables, as is commonly thought, but are taken up inside the produce through the soil. Even when you wash the outside or peel the skin off, though this will lower the pesticide exposure, it will not remove all pesticides. However, by removing the skin, you are also losing valuable nutrients found in the peels and outside layer of the fruit or vegetable.

organic matters