Nutrients, food and disorganization: not necessarily in that order
Wow. It's hard to grasp that three weeks have gone by since my last post. I'm working on being more consistent with the basic chores in my life with the hopes that the larger things will take care of themselves.
The photo is of a handful of our Buff Orpingtons before Sharon and the girls butchered them. (It's funny. The old meaning of the word "butcher" is to prepare to cook, now the meaning is to be unnecessarily cruel.) People talk about knowing where your food comes from and we've gone a few steps further and grow a lot of our own food. The difference in nutrition between a grass and bug fed heritage chicken out in the sunshine and a hormone/antibiotic fed mutant breed caged in a warehouse is calculable.
That said, I cam across an interesting article about cooking methods and nutrient retention in broccoli. (It wouldn't be too much of a leap to assume that the same goes for other vegetables as well.) The bottom line is that stir frying is perhaps the best method for locking nutrition in the broccoli. With microwaving, you lose nutrients, mostly vitamin C because it leaches out with any water you cook. I assume that steaming and boiling vegetables does the same thing. That's why the water has that green color when you are done! I suppose you could drink that water or put it into soups instead of pouring it down the drain. And one last thing, stir fry with heat resistant oils like extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil or lard. Some of the other oils don't lock in the nutrients as well and the high heat chemically changes most vegetable oils into toxic compounds.
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