Quick Dinner Recipes

Are you looking for a perfect gift for your wife or mother at mothers day?
Why not give 2 presents:

• a very personal one and
• on top of that chocolates?

Why not make your chocolates as personal as possible by choosing handmade chocolate covered strawberries? Or be as romantic as the French: choose for your "Cheri" chocolate dipped cherries! That’s a 2 pound box saying "darling" in French covered with chocolates.

There is a whole range of hand picked fruits to choose from. All fruits are hand dipped in the finest imported Belgian chocolate, yes: the best of all chocolates.

You can choose to cover:

• hand picked fresh strawberries
• cherries
• Washington apples!
• dried fruits
• nuts

Mothers Day chocolate gifts can even accommodate to you mothers personal taste! The Chocolate Covered Company can personalize any order to your mothers’ favorite fruits or nuts. Their delicious, award winning chocolates are carefully designed and specially packaged to arrive fresh at your doorstep.

Mothers Day chocolate covered strawberries can also be coated with sugar free chocolate on your request!

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Barley is a type of whole grain mainly used to make beer. Beer! Do I have your attention? Well, we are not going to brew beer today, but make barley water. Why?

A diet high in beta-glucan from barley helps lower blood LDL cholesterol (that’s the bad cholesterol that becomes lower!).

Barley water

First go shopping for pearled barley.

I found this pearled barley bag in a big supermarket and I also saw it in the organic shop. Always buy organic food, your health will thank you in the long run! All these pesticides from normal food sooner or later will accumulate in your body and then people wonder: Why do I have cancer?

Take half a cup of pearled barley and add at least 4 cups of water. Bring to a boil and keep boiling on a medium fire with the lid off the pot. Make sure you check regularly and add more water if the barley water becomes too dry or really thick.

Boil the barley water for at least 1 hour and add rock-sugar to taste. Some prefer to drink it hot, myself I like to add some ice in my barley water drink. If you go eating out in Malaysia, you can just ask for "barley" or "barley hot", and some buffet restaurants give a barley drink for free.

Organic lower cholesterol drink: barley water

You can add in some lime, lemon or like we do here in Malaysia, some soy skin.

Barley in cooking

Since we just saw that barley water becomes quite thick, why not use barley next time you are making a soup or a stew?

And add some cold cooked barley into your salads, not too much but every little bit of barley helps lowering your cholesterol!

Technorati Tags: Cholesterol | Health | Fat | Diet | Hot | Malaysia | Barley | Nutrition | Low cholesterol food | Beer | Pearled Barley | Eating out | Supper | Dining out | High Cholesterol

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Mangosteen: the queen of all Malaysian fruits. Did I already tell you that durian (durians are back!) is the king of all Malaysian fruits? Now I did

Mangosteen fruit is seasonal and can be bought at every market or in any fruit-stall next to the road. Ideal to carry in your backpack!

An ideal fruit to put in fruit gift baskets:

• mangosteen lasts long
• mangosteen has a strong husky rind, so it won’t spoil easily when transporting
• mangosteen is delicious

Mangosteen fruit

The mangosteen fruit is a two- to three-inch tropical fruit with white juicy flesh. The taste is sweet sour, somewhere in between peaches and pineapples. A must buy when they are in season (as they are cheap, you can open them easily and they last long).

Mangosteen juice

Be aware opening mangosteen fruit wearing white T-shirts: the mangosteen juice can leave stains that you just cannot wash out. The ripe mangosteen is roughly the same size as a mandarin orange, and the reddish-purple rind is the cause of un-washable stains.

Mangosteen health benefits

Mangosteen is has cooling properties. What does that mean exactly? You need to believe in yin and yang in order to understand that mangosteen falls in the yin category. Cooling and hot has nothing to do with what we westerners think about: fever.

Once I am sick in Malaysia, I don’t feel like getting the theory of yin and yang explained, I just let the Malaysians deal with my health according to their knowledge of cooling and heating. That normally boils down to following a diet that has e.g. only cooling fruit, food and drinks in it.

Does it work? I may say yes, since I feel fine as usual

Xango Mangosteen

For those of you not living in Malaysia but want to have a taste of mango juice, buy some xango mangosteen. It saves you the hassle of breaking each mangosteen open and spilling some mangosteen juice on your clothes

Technorati Tags: Holidays | Vacation | Mangosteen | Fruit | Hot | Malaysia | Mangosteen fruit | Mangosteen juice | Road | Travel | Tourism | Relax | Seasons | Eat | Xango Mangosteen | Picture of mangosteen | Yin | Yang | Cooling

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