Link-o-rama

Kate at Accidental Hedonist has tips for cooking chicken. They are pretty good tips, especially the food safety tips. You should always assume that raw chicken is contaminated with germs that can make you sick, and handle it accordingly--nothing should touch the chicken and also touch food that is ready to serve unless you wash with soap and hot water first.

My favorite way to cook chicken is to butterfly it and grill it with a hot brick. I stole that one from a Bobby Flay show, and it works great. It's quick, too.

The New York Times says that coffee is very, very good for you. It lowers the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cirrhosis of the liver substantially. It has more anti-oxidants than grape juice, raspberries, oranges, or blueberries. Two words: woo-hoo! (Or maybe two and a letter, Kenya double a, which is my favorite coffee.)

Soy is found in 60% of processed foods. Isoflavones in soy are similar to the hormone estrogen, and can impact the human body if you eat enough soy. This isn't a problem in Asian diets because the soy products there (mainly tofu and soy sauce) are fermented for up to 18 months, which makes them more digestible and breaks down the isoflavins. I wonder if I should skip soy for a while like I'm skipping corn? That shoudn't be too hard, because the only processed food I eat more than occasionally is coke zero. I should check out the label on coke zero, but I don't want to, because I like it. How sad that my guilty food pleasure is diet soda.

That's an example of food hypocricy. "Food hypocrisy is where you tell yourself that you are a moral, virtuous and pure creature because you don't eat certain food stuffs." It includes telling yourself something is good for you because it has one good ingredient, and ignore the bad ones (like Caesar salad, loaded with cheese and croutons and dressing); cancelling out, where one good thing cancels out another bad thing; and food substitution, where you eat a lot of a good thing, then eat a bad thing to make up for it.

That's food for thought.