Cooking World

All parts of pumpkin are edible, including stalks, leaves and soft roots. In Italy roots are added in an omelet or soup. Flowers are used for stuffing, salads and risotto; pumpkin “pulp” may be used for almost everything, seeds for a delicacy. Even the peel is edible! In the south of Italy, namely in Kalberia, all a peel is dried at first, during winter time it is soaked, rolled in a flour and baked in deep fat.
Secrets of cooking

If you want to soften a pumpkin, steam boiling is more preferable to cooking in water.

Pumpkin can be baked in an oven, without adding any liquid. It may be baked whole.

It is fried, if one wants to make pumpkin chips. To get rid of superfluous moisture, it is recommended to cook it as vegetable marrows - to salt pieces of pumpkin and set aside for a couple of hours.

The pumpkin is good also for a grill. For this purpose it is cut sliced or cubed, greased with olive oil and fried on a grill up to softness.

Pumpkin is a widespread vegetable. It came to the European cuisine in the middle of XVI century from Central and South America. To all botanical signs, a pumpkin is a berry (juicy pulp, and many seeds inside). It may reach 25 kg, but the best pumpkins are round ones and of the average sizes, such pumpkins are sweeter.

The pumpkin protects an organism from many illnesses and delay ageing. Chinese believe that the pumpkin helps at depressions, in the Western people consider that pumpkin seeds help to treat inflammations and clear uric system.

The pulp of a pumpkin is rich with sugars, zinc salts and phosphoric acid. From microelements there are potassium, calcium, magnesium. It contains more iron then any other vegetable. And how many vitamins - B1, В2, В6, With, Е, РР, Т and also vitamin Е. Seeds contain valuable oil and albumen. In folk medicine dishes from a pumpkin are in cases of hypertension, adiposity and metabolic disease. Pumpkin juice or pumpkin broths with honey are recommended in case of insomnia.

If you are going to be a vegetarian, look up at the vegetarian cookbook at first. You could find there a wide range of covering recipes for beginners and advanced cooks. Most of such books also give dietary advice.
Do not hurry and start gradually. For the beginning adapt familiar dishes such as lasagne by using vegetable protein. All ingredients are for sure available at health food stores. If you’re going to be the only vegetarian in your family it would be better to adapt a meat dish instead of cooking separately. A casserole, for example, can be cooked with beans and vegetables in one pan. And the meat can be cooked separately and then added to the meat eaters.
Try vegetarian cheese, which uses vegetable-derived rennet. Every supermarket has now at least one kind of vegetarian cheese.
You should learn to read the labels. Having bought a food product that seems vegetarian it may in fact turn out that it contains something such as gelatine or animal fat.
Many products are marked with The Vegetarian Society’s Seedling Symbol, which tells you at a glance that the food is suitable for vegetarians.
Pulses. Use tinned variety of kidney beans, chick peas, etc.
Study health food stores. You will find out that most of them have vegetarian products you haven’t seen before.

The old stereotype that all vegetarians are pale and unhealthy took a long time to die out. As a matter of fact, people who stick to a multifarious and well-balanced vegetarian diet are act in correspondence with the current nutritional recommendations for a low fat. Medical studies have proved that vegetarians are less likely to suffer from such illnesses as heart disease, cancer, diet-related diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure.
There are very few restaurants that don’t have at least one vegetarian dish. Vegetarianism is such a growing movement that restaurateurs just can’t afford to neglect it.
True vegetarian meal doesn’t mean eating only vegetables. You may take advantage of hundreds of different vegetables, grains, fruit, pulses and nuts and seeds that exist. Besides, vegetarian food is cheaper than a meat-based one, so you can afford more expensive delicacies.
Well-balanced vegetarian diet provides all the nutrients you need to have good health. For example, proteins are not only found in meat. They are also present in necessary quantities in dairy products, eggs and nuts, and also pulses and grains. Actually vegetarian diet includes more than enough protein.

Decision to become vegetarian is very individual and reasons for such a choice are as many as vegetarians. Many people said that they avoid eating meat because they did not approve killing animals, or because they objected to the ways in which animals are kept, treated and killed for food.
Many become vegetarians fallowing healthy life style, some people are also becoming vegetarian because it matches the kind of low fat. Another much spoken cause is growing concern about the environment.
A vegetarian is a person who does not eat meat, fish, poultry or any abattoir by-product such as gelatine. Vegetarians stick to a diet of grains, pulses, nuts, seeds, vegetables and fruit, with or without eggs, milk and milk products. Vegetarians who do not eat anything containing dairy products or eggs are called vegans.
Vegetarian food is widely spread and available in shops and restaurants, in markets, supermarkets, corner shops it’s also easy to cook at home. It’s not so difficult to give up meat when there are so many delicious recipes and so many tasty dishes. If you are worried about the environment, you’ll be satisfied to know that you’re eating a healthy diet that doesn’t involve killing of animals.

Medicinal cuisine is traditionally classified under four categories: health-protection cuisine, prevention cuisine, healing cuisine and therapeutic one.
Health-protection cuisine helps to reinforce the required nutritional food to support the organic health. Such dishes as a soup of pumpkin and almond can help to lose weight; soup of angelica and carp helps to maintain beauty; and ginseng congee gives more strength.
Prevention cuisine helps to build resistance to potential sickness. The excellent means to avoid heat stroke in summer is a bean soup. Lotus seeds, lily, yam, chestnuts, and pears can help to prevent dryness in autumn and will strengthen resistance to cold during the winter.
Healing cuisine is intended for rehabilitation after severe disease. Broiled sheep’s heart with rose or braised mutton with angelica will help to restore a healthy constitution.
Therapeutic cuisine is focused at the specific pathology. Fried potatoes with vinegar can adjust the organ and suppress hypertension and carp soup with Tuckahoe may enrich the strength of blood plasma albumen to help reduce swelling.
Everyone should once try this and he will enjoy the delicacy while benefiting from the nourishment. And it will be really amazing experience.

Scientists of German institute of dietology have dispelled a myth about the fat people - gourmets, presumably capable to estimate better taste qualities of food. It was considered that fat people easily can distinguish degree of product’s sweetness or bitterness. As a result of research, which 120 men and women have taken part in, it was determined, that fat people has lower sense of smell and ability to distinguish taste, than people with normal weight. Researched have been divided into three groups: “average”, “well-fad” and “stout”. Tests have shown that “stout” people are more often mistaken in determination of a degree of sweet, salty, sour or bitter products, than respondents from group of average weight. Moreover, thick people are capable to distinguish bitterness only in rather big concentration. Even sugar contents in solution they determine hardly.

Lack of iron in person’s organism can lead to such serious disease, as anemia, while this microelement is irreplaceable in hematosis processes and an endocellular exchange. And there are a lot of it in meat. But it does not mean at all, that for iron resupply in an organism it is necessary to eat meat. First of all, the iron in meat is hard to digest. And second, it is possible not to eat meat and satisfy a need iron due to the other products.
Most reach in iron are dried mushrooms, liver and kidneys, peaches, apricots, rye, greens of a parsley, potato, onions, pumpkin, beet, apples, quince, pears, pomegranates, buckwheat, string bean, lentil, peas, oatmeal, chicken eggs, spinach, green vegetables, turnip, mustard, watercress, dandelion leaves and dried fruits. And to assimilate this iron better, vitamins C and Ð’12 are needed.

The main cause of depot fat on hips, stomach and buttocks - sweet drinks! To such conclusion came scientists - dieticians from East Lafayette University (USA).
They have carried out the following experiment: twenty persons within a month daily received 450 calories over recommended norm in sweet drinks. By the end all probationers have put on the weight - from one up to one and a half kg.
After that volunteers have been given enough time to bounce back (for the purity of an experiment), and then they again got on a strengthened diet, but this time additional calories were given with cakes and sweets. What an amazement of scientists was, when after a month they had not fixed any appreciable (more than 150 grammes) increase in weight!
These results lie not in any special profit of cakes. All participants of an experiment ate less during the dinner as cakes created satiety sensation. Danger of liquid calories is in that that drinking does not give satiation and person does not receive from an organism a signal to stop. Besides, the human organism almost does not spend energy for sweet drinks assimilation.

Dutch researchers bring forward new evidence that drinking moderate amounts of wine every day can prolong the person’s life. Presenting their discovery at the American Heart Association’s 47th annual conference researches proved that half a glass of wine a day was linked to a 48 per cent lower risk of heart disease.
Their research proved and made broader the existing statements that moderate red wine drinking and to some extent, alcohol in general, is useful for health.
Wine gave the most protection if to compare with other alcoholic drinks, adding an extra two years to the drinker’s life on average. And, person who drank small amounts of wine from time to time could live nearly four years longer than those who drank no alcohol at all.
Some earlier researches had linked moderate consumption of red wine with lower heart disease risk and even longer life. More recently, these apparent benefits have been connected with polyphenols in the wine, which are believed to provide strong protection for human blood vessels. One type of polyphenol in wine, procyanidins, are supposed to be the most active.