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Will Clean Coal Technology Save the Tuna Fish?

Psst! Wanna see what clean-coal technology really looks like? A brand new Reality ad campaign is ready to debunk the myth of “clean coal” from the coal industry.

Environmental experts agree that coal is the dirtiest fuel America uses to produce electricity. The Reality Coalition, a joint project of the Sierra Club, Alliance for Climate Protection, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, and National Wildlife Federation, is challenging the coal industry to come clean in its advertising and in its operations.

607-lb. blue fin tuna

Coal burning plants not only cause visible air pollution in our urban areas, but the toxic particulates fall to earth in the form of acid rain, polluting our crops and waterways, not to mention the oceans. You’ve heard about rising mercury levels in tuna fish? Near the top of the food chain as predator fish, tuna ingest lots of little fish that have eaten tainted plants and smaller sea organisms. The mercury is bio-accumulative and builds up through the long lifetime of the tuna (up to 30 years or longer).

Almost 35% of the mercury consumed in the U.S. comes from tuna.

What kills me is that our response to the rising mercury levels has been to issue voluntary guidelines as to how frequently we eat tuna fish. These warnings are especially stringent for pregnant women and children, where the developing brains are at the most risk for permanent damage from mercury exposure.

Personally, I would rather see more efforts focused on reducing the toxification of our oceans by industrial pollutants instead of idly watching the mercury levels rise in fish and the oceanic dead zones where nothing can live, grow. Would someone please remind the remaining schools of tuna of the reasons behind snubbing the Kyoto Treaty?

Have we been hoodwinked by the coal industry into believing this fossil fuel can ever be a clean energy solution for our future? Does clean coal technology really exist, or is it an oxymoron?

Here’s the Reality Coalition’s clean coal technology message.

Why organic chicken?

Reader question: Just wanted to ask with regard to the “Frozen Dinner in a Flash” recipe if it is necessary to have cleaned the frozen chicken breasts first? Would also love to know which brand of chicken you prefer?

If I purchase the chicken raw, then I clean it and trim it before freezing individually. The chicken we get already frozen has already been trimmed, etc, before being vacuum sealed. Those pieces I usually just toss in after unwrapping.

At our house, we try to only eat organic chicken for several reasons — antibiotics, non-vegetarian feed, and inhumane conditions among them. Ideally, we’d only eat chickens raised as described in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: on a grass-rotation farm where the hens play a role in the rejuvenation of the soil and eat their natural diet of grubs and worms. Since we don’t live near that kind of farm, we belong to a wonderful frozen food co-op that loads our freezer full of natural meats and poultry every six months or so.

When I must purchase chicken, my first choice is from Whole Foods or another natural grocery store. If it must be from the regular grocery store, I look for Redbird brand as Consumer Reports found the lowest levels of salmonella contamination in Redbird poultry products.

Friday Turkey Soup

What do you do with that turkey carcass after the big feast? If you’re like me, you wrap it in a clean garbage bag and freeze it until you’re inspired to make Friday Turkey Soup.

This is what I did with my turkey carcass a few days ago.

12-qt stockpot
12-qt stockpot

I love having a 12-qt stockpot for times like these, when you need to fit a turkey carcas into a pot and cover it with water. Actually, I had my hubby break it in two pieces, but it would have fit intact, had I wanted it to. Really.

I added a peeled and quartered onion, a bag of baby carrots, a bay leaf, about 1/2 tsp. of peppercorns, sea salt, and a handful of parsley and thyme dug out from underneath the snow. I brought it to a boil and then simmered it for about 5 hours, until the stock was thicker and rich smelling, and the scraps of meat were falling off the bones.

At this point, I removed the big pieces to a bowl and strained the stock about 6 times into progressively finer strainers so that it was pretty clear, and then separated it into 3 smaller pots to cool and let the fat rise. Using a spoon, I strained off the fat and discarded it. Now I had stock.

I filled 3 ziptop freezer bags with 6 cups each of stock and lay them flat to freeze. This is a great freezing method for liquids because not only can you stack the bags easily in the freezer to save space, but the thin sheets thaw more quickly than solid blocks. I’ve already used one of them in my cabbage soup this week — recipe to come soon.

Then I put all of the turkey meat that came off the carcass back into the pot along with the carrots and onions, and ladled this “soup base” into 6-cup plastic food storage containers to freeze for later in the winter. Some cold and harried night, I’ll be able to toss this soup base into a pot to thaw, bring to a boil, and add noddles, corn, or cooked rice to make it more of a satisfying quick and easy meal. I could add a can of diced tomatoes, cut potatoes, and green chiles to make a turkey stew… The possibilities are endless.

I also froze a couple single-serving containers for a nourishing meal for the next cold or flu sufferer.

I’ve been looking into replacing all of my plastic container storage with Pyrex Storage and trying to figure out how

pyrex storage containers
pyrex storage containers

I’m going to store all the items I’ll need — I like to freeze a lot of soups when I’m in the mood to cook, so that we can still eat well even on the nights when I’m not in the mood to cook. Food storage containers rotate through my kitchen and freezer constantly.

Sigh. I’ve gotten so used to the conveniences offered by plastic that I’m feeling resistant to changing even though I know the dangers of using plastic food storage containers. I wish the plastic manufacturers were concerned enough to make their products so that they didn’t leak BPAs into the foods.


Stopping Stridor with Steam

Not much more frightening then when your 4-year old shows up at your bedside in the middle of the night painfully wheezing for air with a barky cough. Stridor, or difficult, raspy breathing can be a sign of croup, or it may just be an individual occurrence due to breathing dry air. Luckily, you can avoid a trip to the emergency room with a few simple actions.

The problem with stridor and croup is that they gets worse when the child panics, but not being able to breathe is so scary that panic comes with the territory. The cure has to be two-pronged: warm the airway and calm the panic.

I scooped my daughter up and flew into the bathroom where I ran the shower as hot as it would go and let the tub fill. I sat on the edge of the tub with her in my lap and closed the curtain around us to create a steam tent. The warm, humid air relaxed her throat and opened her airway. The lulling sound of the shower calmed her panic and allowed her to settle down and nestle into me. We stayed in the steam about 10 minutes, until the moist air relaxed her throat and she started to snooze.

Just the day before my son had asked me to turn on his humidifier for the winter and I had responded that as soon as I clean it out I’d turn it on. Of course, that hadn’t happened in time to prevent this episode.

As it happened, I had to replace the humidifier in my daughter’s room anyway as the old one was leaking. I really liked the one we had because it allows you to set the steam temp to cold or warm, and uses uv light to purify the water. I felt lucky to have found this Slant Fin GF-211D 2.4 Gallon Germ-Free Warm-Mist Humidifier for less than half what I had paid for the first one 4 years ago

If the steam bath doesn’t work to stop the stridor, the next option is to bundle up and go outside to breathe the cool air. This can help stop the attack, too.

Do Diabetics Need to Limit Carbs?

Reader question: As a type 2 diabetic I look for healthy recipes, & the immune boosting food sounded like a great thing. But when reading the carbs @110 per serving — OMG we are only allowed 60 carbs per meal. This is not at all doable.

I’m sad to learn that you must be operating on outdated dietary information if you limit yourself to so few carbs. Where is your body getting the fuel to run? The American Diabetes Association recommends a “whole foods” diet, not one in which you count carbs.

Limiting carbs is helpful when you’re eating processed foods which lack nutrition anyway. In the natural health world, we’ve seen diabetic patients be able to wean off of insulin by following a “Perfect Whole Foods” diet, as described in the book Recapture Your Health by Dr. Walt Stoll and Jan DeCourtney.

While my recipes are based on whole foods and can be used when following a perfect whole foods diet, some contain items which are fine for normal eaters (like white rice) but stray a bit from the absolutism needed for a diabetic eating regime (substitute for brown rice). My cookbook, Glorious One-Pot Meals: A Revolutionary New Quick and Healthy Approach to Dutch-Oven Cooking, is not directed at diabetics per se; they are just one of the groups of chronic disease sufferers — not mention regular people — that can benefit from eating a whole foods-based diet.