Snack Foods Association

Month: June 2017

The Lean, Not so Mean, Green Juice

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Green juices are the new trend in the eat healthy, detox your body frenzy.

Raw juices made mostly from kale are in high demand to the point where in cities like Hong Kong, imported kale is at a shortage.

Organic shops have been forced into keeping waiting lists, for when the product hits the store.

One of the most influential advocates of the green juice diet is Gwyneth Paltrow, who describes her strict diet consisting in lots of raw juices in her book “Its All Good, published early last year.

Gwyneth follows a vegetarian diet that excludes anything from animal origin, except for fish. She claims tomatoes and strawberries produce allergies and all caffeine, chocolate based foods are poison! I personally cant imagine giving up my morning coffee, cupcakes with friends, pizza as a treat! Er yeap, not happening for me.

That doesnt mean I wont be drinking some green juices every now and then, which apparently have the same energizing effect as a cup of coffee, without all its nocive effects.

Curious about this new trend and excited about all the potential benefits, I decided to go ahead and make myself Gwyneth Paltrows Best Green Juice. Its actually nicer than it looks.
The recipe is as follows:

Ingredients:
5 large leaves of kale, ribs discarded, leaves roughly chopped
1 lemon, zest and pith removed
1 large apple or pineapple,
A 2.5cm piece of fresh ginger
1 sprig of fresh mint

Directions:
1.) Wash all ingredients well.
2.) Cut all produce to fit through juicer, juice and enjoy!

Substitutions:

Spinach watercress, dandelion leaves, kale, lettuce
Apple Pineapple , pear, cantaloupe (rockmelon), honeydew
Lemon lime, grapefruit
If youre wanting to ease into the dark leafy green juices, this is a lovely place to start. This sweet green juice has heaps of benefits:

– Its high in vitamin C
– The lemon helps to improve the absorption of the non-heme iron in spinach
– There are 7.1mg of iron
– The bromelain from the pineapple may ease arthritis, atherosclerosis and it may also help to prevent and treat cardiovascular diseases due to its ability to inhibit Fibrinogen, the chemical that can cause the abnormal blood clotting that underlies most cardiovascular diseases.

Foods Eaten in Nigeria and how to make fried rice.

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There are lots of foods eaten in Nigeria and I want to list the few popular ones and then a detailed guide on how to make fried rice – one of my favorites.

Are you married to a Nigerian man and finds yourself in a tight corner when it comes to making foods for him or worried about his appetite or yearning for home made foods, do you find it confusing that Nigerians in Diaspora often feel excited when they find Nigeria foods? The reason is simple; we used to say that – there is no place like home or home made food.

Most foods eaten in Nigerian are easy and often straight forward to make. The most popular food in Nigeria is Eba popularly called (garri). Eba goes with any of the many Nigerian soups and could be substituted with fufu, semo, amarla or wheat meal.

Eba and fufu are by-products of cassava, while fufu is made by fermenting cassava for 3 to 4 day and sieving out the chaff, eba is often simpler in making. Eba which is also called (garri) is made by peeling off the back of cassava, then grounding and frying on a dry hot pot.

There are lots of soups eaten in Nigerian that can go with eba, fufu, or semo. The most popular Nigerian soup is the egusi soup (melon) it is often very easy to prepare or at least very easy for me to prepare. Egusi soup can also be eaten with white rice.

That’s just about few of the Nigerian popular foods I just want to focus specifically on how to cook fried rice – The most popular Nigerian recipe. Fried rice takes about one to two hour to prepare and the real work is the preparation of things used in making fried rice instead of the actual cooking.

Ingredients include:

3 cups of rice
1 to 2 table spoon-full of curry powder
2 ball of onions
Medium sized cabbage
2 to 3 medium sized carrot
11/2 cups of chopped green beans
About 1/5 kg of liver
Meat of choice (beef, turkey, chicken) most people prefer chicken in Nigeria
2 to 3 cubes of maggi
green peas (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste.

The preparation:
Parboil the meat with meat ingredients (curry/thyme powder, 1 maggi cube, 1 ball of onions and salt) for about 10 to 15 minutes. It is often necessary to parboil this meat with these ingredients just to end up with a tasteful meat.

Add more water to the meat and cook until it is soft for consumption. then pick out from the water and deep-fry in groundnut/vegetable oil (leaving out the meat water on the pot)

Chop the carrot, cabbage, green beans, green pepper, and liver then set aside on different bowls.

Then parboil the 3 cups of rice and cook white till it is about 75% done.

How To Make Fried Rice:

Like I stated initially that the cooking of fried rice in Nigeria is quite simple, the most tedious aspect is the preparation of things used in cooking it.

Set your cooking pot on fire, allow drying before adding groundnut/vegetable oil (the one used in frying the meat would do) use about 15 to 20 cl of oil, allow to heat then add the chopped carrot and green beans.

Fry for two to three minutes and add the peas (optional), add the curry powder to get a very yellowish mixture. (the curry powder actually give Nigerian fried rice its yellowish color.

Add the chopped cabbage, stir and add the liver and green pepper. Pour in the left over water from the parboiled meat, add maggi/salt and pepper to taste, make them a bit in excess because the rice will absorb most of the ingredients.

At this point you are almost done. Add the white rice, stir/turn very well, cover your pot and cook for another 5 to 10 minutes. Serve with the fried meat and soft drink of choice.
This is how to make Nigerian fried rice; I told you it is easy.

Heavy Equipment Simulators for College and Vo-Tech Programs

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Learn How Stanly Community College Created A Model Program With Heavy Equipment Training Simulators

Stanly Community College is nestled in south central North Carolina and boasts the states leading heavy equipment operations program at the community college level. The two semester education and training program provides entry level trade knowledge and technical skills focused on construction and industry safety, construction tools use, equipment controls and techniques, construction math, site materials knowledge, basic computer skills and civil engineering basics. As part of the overall training program, state-of-the-art heavy equipment simulators are included for training students before they hit the outdoor lab to train on actual machines.

State Leader
Ed Gann, Career and Technical Education
Director with Stanly Community College remembers his first exposure to Cat Simulators. He attended the Southeastern Regions Cat Dealers meeting as a guest of Carolina Cat, a Caterpillar dealership, where the simulators were featured. He attended with four earth moving professionals and several others from the college. The demonstrations were eye opening. “We all came away that afternoon beginning to see the benefits of simulator training,” said Gann.
Stanly Community College was ready to take on the concept of training in the heavy equipment field using simulators. Gann and the others began to develop a program. The first step was to bring in Carolina Cat, whom Gann had a solid working relationship with. Gann researched other equipment programs and could find only an occasional use of simulators. “Our goal is to train people in the field of heavy equipment operations with a well rounded curriculum,” said Gann. In order to do that, several related subjects are covered during the program.
An advisory committee was set up consisting of construction company owners, heavy equipment sales reps, technical support personnel and other local and regional industry leaders. They were asked their opinion of the potential program before final developmentand they were skeptical.
Overall Gann heard the same thing: that there was no way a community college could turn out someone with all of the equipment skill of a veteran heavy equipment operator. Gann called the committee together to explain his vision for the program and by the end of the meeting, everyone was on the same page. Advisory members began to share their vision of what the graduate would look like, describing ideal operator candidates as those who understand and respect all aspects of safety in the heavy equipment industry; those who are familiar with math beyond what they learned in high school; those who know basic machine care and will listen when the machine is “saying” something isnt right. “Teaching operators to catch a $500 repair today can help avoid a $10,000 repair tomorrow,” states Gann. Advisory members also embraced including a drug screening policy in the college program. Gann relates that construction industry personnel managers “dont even want [operators] getting to us if they arent serious.” Gann shaped the program based on this feedback from community leaders and his own personal goal of turning out equipment operators who are “ready to go to work every day.”
A Program Takes Shape
The first heavy equipment operations class began in August 2009, thanks to grant funding for the simulators. The two large wheel loader simulators, three hydraulic excavators and the mobile simulator unit were all funded by the Golden Leaf Foundation (North Carolina). Students study math and safety, learn how to read construction drawings and learn basic computer skills, among other subjects in the curriculum. Students then spend many hours working between the simulators and the outdoor lab running the actual machines. The lab is on a 12-acre site built in partnership with the local Air National Guard. Simulators play a large role in the training curriculum for many reasons, including saving on fuel costs and the obvious safety features. Students can make mistakes while learning on simulators, thereby saving wear-and-tear on the actual machines or hurting themselves or a bystander. Gann additionally states being able to train regardless of the weather, or adversely impact anybodys job while training, as reasons the simulators are a valuable component.
Students can use the simulators in both the classroom and/or the mobile training lab.
Gann says they built the mobile simulator lab as a dual purpose facility. When students move to the outdoor training lab for hands-on machine training, they can rotate between the simulators and actual machines. The mobile unit is also used for marketing purposes to demonstrate the simulator portion of the training program and to promote the heavy equipment program to industry professionals thinking about training their employees.
The last piece of the puzzle is how to gather and analyze all of the metrics from the simulators. Stanly Community Colleges lead instructor, Josh Aldridge, uses SimU Campus records management software to manage student performance records. Expectations are set high for students. For example, in the Controls Familiarization module of the Hydraulic Excavator simulator, students must go through 100 instruction points and must get them 100% correct. Gann paints a vivid picture when he relates, “We feel this way: If you are the excavator operator and have two men in the trench, it only takes one error to crush a guy against the side of the trench box.”
SimU Campus allows the instructor and administrators to track the students progress and see how they improve over time. It gives the instructor and the student immediate feedback. The instructor can identify where students make mistakes and then work with them to correct the errors. Instructors can show students “outside-the-machine” views on the simulator as well as from inside the cab to show and explain how to properly complete tasks. “By this time students are beginning to see that this is way more than a video game,” muses Gann.
Final Destination
A final differentiator for the program is field tripsthat is visits to working job sites such as mines and construction sites. These visits give students the opportunity to get exposure to machines at work and see real-world operator skills in action. Students can also begin to see where they might find future employment and how they could fit into the employers operations. The college is regularly contacted by prospective employers who need qualified employees. They have even added a new position in the jobs placement office to help students find employment after graduation. Local partnerships have helped shape the program. From working with the advisory committee for feedback and curriculum development, to getting the Caterpillar dealership and the Air National Guard involved, Stanly Community College is truly serving its own community by training many of tomorrows heavy equipment operators.

How To Grow Coffee Beans

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Your cup of steaming hot coffee every morning isn’t something as easily prepared as you might think. Creating coffee needs more than just putting hot water and stirring sugar into it. It doesn’t even come in instant granules that we are so used to.

The coffee that we drink actually comes from the coffee plants that are cultivated in various parts of the globe. Brazil is the number one coffee producer in the world with a market share of about 30-35 percent. Most countries that produce coffee are from South and Central America and the Middle East. Some Asian countries like Indonesia and India also have coffee plantations.

Coffee plants are evergreen plants that are grown in specific situations. They need specific amounts of water, air and land in order for the flavor to be achieved. It involves a lot of back-breaking work and is pretty labor-intensive. This is perhaps why it is so hard to grow them.

Plants are sown as seedlings in what coffee-growers call nursery beds. The land needs to be well aerated since it should have a healthy amount of oxygen in the roots in order to grow well. After about 8-12 months, the seedlings are then replanted to the coffee fields where there are wet and fertilized holes.

As mentioned before, specific conditions must be kept true in order to cultivate a good coffee bean. Sunlight shouldn’t shine directly. In fact, diffused light is best. Moisture should also be kept constant with frequent and regular watering. The soil should also be fertilized and kept healthy by removing weeds and protecting them from pests.

When planted, it takes a long time before it can mature. The coffee grower needs to wait for about 5 years before his first crop.

What the trees look like Coffee trees are big and broad with dark green leaves. The flower, which resembles jasmine, is where the coffee granules are gotten. That is why harvest time are timed at the period when these flowers blossom. The fruits are also great sources of the coffee beans. The cherries or the berries will begin to come out about 6-8 months after.

It is a must that these fruits are harvested immediately as they can ripen easily- within 10 – 14 days. Manual harvesting is still preferred even if it takes a longer time. This is because the picker needs to keep the good beans apart from the bad ones.

The long wait is however very profitable for the coffee grower. One tree can produce about two pounds of beans, which is around 2000 coffee beans. After the harvest, the coffee beans are then processed. They are dried and then roasted. These coffee beans are then ready to be sold on the market where they will be grounded before being served.

Italian Pasta Recipes Not Just Spaghetti

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It’s true that some meals with pasta as their underlying component can get very heavy, especially when you add the thick, meat-rich Italian made sauces. You might think of the big favorite, lasagna, with its layers of meat, rich cheeses, long noodles and tomato sauces. Yet there is a lot more than just that to Italian pasta recipes, and it takes the mere seasonal progression from springtime to early summer to demonstrate that. As these seasons get underway, the lighter Italian pasta meals start emerging from their winter hibernation.

Even the name of pasta primavera loosely refers to spring. But some claim it isn’t really Italian, since it was introduced to American society by Le Cirque restaurant in New York. Yet according to Foodreference.com, the chef there received it from the painter and writer of Italian cookbooks, Edward Giobbi. So it may be one of the genuine Italian pasta recipes after all. This spaghetti dish uses the first tomatoes of spring, with fresh basil, parsley and garlic, and extra virgin olive oil, making it a lovely lighter dish for the emerging springtime.

Another of the Italian pasta recipes that will work well in spring is pasta pomodoro. The flavor of this dish resides primarily in the pomodoro sauce itself, which begins with the typically Italian combination of tomatoes, garlic and olive oil. Beyond those basic ingredients, you can add others to your taste, including sauteed onion, mushrooms and peppers, or even some meats. This dish is said to go especially well with poultry, so you might want to add chunks of cooked chicken to the sauce.

Another popular choice is the pasta salad, which can be as light or heavy as you want it to be. Some recipes are as simple as tossing some pasta with fresh tomatoes, feta cheese, olives and basil. There are more complicated versions as well. For example, an Italian sausage pasta salad at Epicurious.com calls for chunks of the sausage to be sauteed, adding broccoli and zucchini, with tomatoes, olives, wine and Parmesan cheese added toward the end. But pasta salads also lend themselves well to vegetarian recipes as the sausage dish could easily be adapted to be meatless.

That’s something that makes Italian pasta recipes so versatile and almost universal. They can please the most voracious meat-eater, and yet vegetarians who continue to eat cheese can make just a few alterations and enjoy their own versions of the same recipes. Many of the recipes, especially the spring salads, are quick and easy to prepare. Yet someone who wants to take the time to make a rich meat sauce can turn their pasta meal into a hearty main course. Italian cuisine and pasta in particular, can serve almost any occasion and please almost any palate.

Tasty Steak Recipes

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Steaks are the easiest to prepare amid all the meats. Tender steaks such as sirloin plus the T-bone are likely to be grilled. The main disparity between the popular steaks recipes is the marinade utilized for flavoring the steaks. A few of the mostly utilized components to marinade the steaks are wine, lemon juice, soy sauce, and tomato juice. You can also utilize a few fruits such as papaya and pineapple for preparing the marinade.

It is highly recommended that you simply marinade the steaks for the minimum of 6 hours to the maximum of 24 hours before positioning on the grill. The time limit of marinating the steals completely relies on the steak dishes. The finest grill is a simple charcoal grill that ought to be used to grill your steak recipes. Based on the gentleness of the steak, they are turned twice or thrice to have the specified level of doneness. Steaks really should not be disturbed if they are grilling, as this does not allow the outer layer to form on their sides. Further, it is also crucial that you don’t poke the steaks with knife or fork as steaks might lose the juice while grilling.

A conventional French steak recipe named as Buf au Poivre is certainly one of the most popular recipes all across the world. This is definitely an exotic dish, that uses just the major cuts of the filet mignon.

Beef steaks from the tenderloin (four of them of about 1″ thickness should provide four people) are first sprinkled with salt like kosher. Afterward, cover up the steaks on all sides using a few crushed peppercorns. Afterward, the seasoned steaks are added to the 12″ skillet pan. Plus the pan is placed over a medium flame. They are cooked for 8 to 10 minutes on one side, without disturbing. Preferred doneness is checked which has a meat thermometer or simply by touching if the person is experienced. Then cognac and mustard is included with the skillet and further cooked for roughly 30 seconds.

Normally, every culture has their own authentic and traditional steak recipes. Asian recipes with porterhouse steaks are spicier, using a lot of soy sauce and peppers; prepared in rotisserie style. Asians are known for their numerous delicious kababs recipes. The Irish blend steak and bacon along with raisins to make a spicy-sweet recipe named the Steak and Guinness Pie.

As in largely other dishes, the Swiss use salsa in their steaks and provide it along with mushroom soup. However, the preferred and delicious steak recipe is the one that originates from La France. The French cuisine is called for making a few of the most experimental epicure dishes. Despite there being numerous hundreds of steak recipes all over the world, Americans focus on the standard grilled steak, which is simply as flavorful as any of another high-brow names going around.

Seafood Recipes An Exclusive Range to Make you Feel Wow

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Well, it might be years since you spent a balmy evening with your vibrant gang of buddies nearby a sprawling beach at an embellished seafood eatery. Now, all of a sudden you have decided to recuperate that very moment. Your last evening might have been spent in gorging baked salmon or some exotic lobsters. However, the world of seafood has opened up with an extensive range of recipes in the recent years. This time make sure you order Alaska scallops that can serve perfect for a rocking seafood dinner party. Compared to other seafood recipes, this unusual stuff comes with a promise of taste and flair and assures to make your treat a memorable one.

Relish the Scallops

Scallops are always unique compared to the typical seafood recipes. Once you have a taste of it, you might be compelled to try them at home. Now, if you are truly craving to prepare scallops, you primarily require some garlic and butter along with some other ingredients that can finally make it a classic one. In fact, if you love to spend several hours in the kitchen, you will be thrilled to know that preparing scallops do not require any skill. Moreover, you can always fetch ideas on seafood recipes from several websites and get going.

Preparing Scallops

Are you dying to let your taste buds embrace the classic baked scallops? If it be so, the classic baked Scallops recipe involves a mix of garlic powder, breadcrumbs, paprika along with three cloves of minced rice. Once they are blended, you need to sprinkle the mixture over the scallops and place them in a well-buttered casserole. Then bake for at least 20 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Once you are through with it, you have your meal ready to stun your family. Its one of the most exclusive seafood recipes that ensure to make all seafood lovers crazy.

Italian Seafood Specialty

You must have heard of pasta recipes. Have you ever gorged on the seafood pastas? If its a no, get it either with some shrimps or scallops. These stunning seafood recipes are drawing huge number of seafood buffs from various corners and dominating almost all seafood restaurants. While you order, dont forget to get along a glass of chilled white wine.

Baccala Ala Napoletana is an enthralling Italian delicacy that actually refers to salted cod fish. If you are trying for it, take nearly two pounds of salted cod, chopped green onions, tomato puree, capers, red pepper flakes, olive oil, garlic, oregano and some flour for getting the fish dredged. Its one of those mind-blowing seafood recipes that have captivated a huge number of sea foodies all these years.

Besides, lobsters and crab tails are always popular. In fact, lobster boasts of an extensive range of recipes. Once you visit the lobster related website, you will come across uncountable lobster seafood recipes.

Shrimps are awesome not only in providing you a pure culinary pleasure but cater highly to your health standards. To know more seafood recipes, you can browse the lobster sites and know everything related to seafood.

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