The Healthy Zone

Archive for September, 2011

Talking about health sometimes I feel like I don’t give my family a healthy food everyday especially right now my baby girl is been not feeling well for several days.  Being a wife and a mom  I should be the one who watch my families health by serving them a healthy diet.

I miss this fruit and vegetables, I got them from Atlanta, they have big supermarket there that you can find some of your favorite fruits and vegetables from your own country. I believe eating more fruits and vegetables are healthier than eating meat alone. I tried to cook vegetables in my kitchen all the time. Good thing my husband loves fruit and vegetables too.

Eat your dinner out is great, I always love to eat out, but I always hear that eating at the restaurant all the time is expensive and ruining your diet. I love food, since I arrived here in US I started to love eat out. Every weekend went to our favorite restaurant. One thing I like now is we only eat out once a week. This schedule saves us money.

My baby girl did not sleep well for several nights already she even doesn’t like to eat, every time she does that I know she is not feeling good.  Yesterday afternoon I saw a clear liquid dripping out from her nose.  Now I know she got allergies maybe from the weather. I usually gave her a garlic. Mommies garlic is the best herbal medicine not only for babies but adult too.

We went to my doctors appointment last week-end. They let me drink a Glucola for my glucose test.  I was happy with the result, they said I pass the test but my iron is very low.  They gave me a list of foods that source of iron but most of the food on the list is not on my appetite,  I even don’t like eat to those.  Anyone knows food that is source of iron.

My homemade atsara or papaya relish. This year I have been craving for a papaya relish, we call it in my country as atsara. I have been looking for this for months in any Asian stores but I cannot fined it anywhere. So what I did is I bought one big green papaya, it is totally green not even close to be ripe. I peeled it and grit it, when it’s done I soaked it with salt for 30 minutes. I sliced some green, red, yellow and orange peppers to have colors on my relish, I sliced ginger and put some raisins on my relish too.
After 30 minutes of soaking with salt, I drained all the water and squeeze it good. Then make a I mixed the water and the vinegar with sugar and salt on it together on the pan, and bring it to boil. Mixed the gritted papaya with the peppers, ginger, and the resins. Put them in a clean jar.
When the water, and the vinegar is boiled enough put it right away inside the jar and close it.

This is the kind of bread I always love to buy in the grocery store. It is sweet and taste good, I love this one for my breakfast and for snacks, My little girl love this one too. Talking about healthy, I am not really sure if this food is healthy for you or not, all I know is this one is really taste delicious in your mouth.

Today I just want to share the food that I love to eat some times. Since I arrived here in US I been craving all of these. When I was pregnant with my first baby I feel like crying everytime I crave those food because I do not have any place to buy. Jully 2011 we went to Florida and stopby in atlanta. Atlanta have a big asain store or they call it market and it is really big. Inside the building they have different isles for different country, that why I got all my phippine stuff. In side the store I found the banana, sweet potato leaves, and some jackfruit.
The picture above is unripe banana, and sweet potato leaves with bagoong and lemon one it.

In our house everybody love to eat vegetables, we are not vegetarian but we believed that vegetables are more healthy to eat in our diet. Eating more vegetable will help you more active and not feeling sickly all the time. Sometimes I always cook meat for my family meals but I am not comfortable feeding them with plain meat in one meal. I am concern about their health. It is the mother’s responsibility to see what kind of diet you want to prepare for your family.

Too busy today preparing and cleaning some vegetables to canned. I do not realized that canning vegetables takes too much effort and time to spend. Last week work on the tomatoes and we are not even than harvesting yet, some are still in the garden. Today I work on the green beans that we got from our friends garden. The green beans are too laborious to canned, you need to string them one by one first, after that cut them in one inch, wash them good, then cook it in the big pot with full of water. Make sure all the canning jars are wash well and after that boil each jar to sterilize them including each lead on it. After five minutes of boiling the green beans put them in the canning jar. When all canning jars are full with green beans then put them in the canning pot and boil them for another 45 minutes. When the 45 minutes is done let it cool for another 30 minutes, and then continue put another canning jars with boiled green beans in it.

Right now we are halfway done. Canning your own food is more healthy, because you know how you process it and you know what you put on it.