**Excerpt from Organic Bytes:

Quick Facts of the Week
E.Coli, Food Safety and Your Food Source

• 80 percent of non-organic beef in the U.S. is slaughtered by four companies.
• 75 percent of non-organic pre-cut salad mixes are processed by two companies.
• 30 percent of non-organic milk is processed by one company.
• Depending on the time of year, up to 70 percent of the produce sold in the U.S. comes from other countries.

The solution to this problem can be found in the “WEBSITE OF THE WEEK” below…

Website and Tip of the Week
New Year’s Resolutions and Local Harvest

Local Harvest lists almost 10,000 farmers’ markets, cooperative grocery stores, restaurants and retailers that provide locally-grown, organic produce to consumers. It’s one of the best tools online for helping you find these important resources near you. Buying your food locally or regionally cuts down on the amount of energy consumed to transport your food, supports your local economy, and can provide you and your family with safer, fresher foods. Make a New Year’s resolution for 2007 to put a special effort towards buying local.

Learn more here: http://www.localharvest.org/

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Anyone who knows me very well knows that I LOVE spicy foods. I’m also an adventurous eater, and enjoy tasting dishes from different cultures. While Mexican cuisine is good, my favorite will always be Indian food from the state of Tamil Nadu.

In one of my last places of employment I became good friends with a Tamil man named Karthikeyan Ramadoss. Eventually Karthik & I became roommates and I was soon introduced to Tamil food and culture. I was instantly interested in educating my palette in the rich, spicy ways of this great new fare.

Karthik and I lived together for a year and then I moved in with my new bride. Before I moved out, I had him go through a step by step instructional (because it was all in Karthik’s head) on how to make Tamil Chicken Curry, my favorite.

It has since been a few years, and Karthik and I still remain good friends. I have now “mastered” the art of chicken curry and am excited to learn how to create new Tamil dishes. In my search I stumbled across a great instructional website. Indian-Tamil-Recipe.com is a great resource for many traditional Indian Tamil dishes.

I hope my readers enjoy the fare as much as I do, and expand their culinary expertise to include this great historical cuisine and culture! And remember…you’ve gotta eat it with your hands (and banana leaves if you have any)!!
Thanks Karthik!

Here is a quick recipe for Chicken Pepper Fry, another one of my favorites!

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again…brrrrrrrrr!!

One of the most important things you can do for you & yours this winter is make sure you’re all properly prepared for winter driving. There are a lot of sites out there that give you winter driving tips…I have sorted through them to save you time & have found a great site.

CarTalk.com is an awesome site & they also have the best winter driving checklist I’ve found to date.

Click here to visit CarTalk: Winter Driving Tips

For those of you who are still using Internet Explorer to surf the web, this post is for you.

I’ll avoid getting into the heavy geek stuff here…however, I will list reasons and guides to help you switch to a better internet browser! The first thing you’re going to want to do is read why you should switch. Here is a great link that lists very credible press opinions, including the New York Times and USA Today.
BrowseHappy.com is a great place to start. BrowseHappy lists reasons why Internet Explorer is unsafe, people who have switched, and gives an unbiased list of alternative browsers. eJabs.com personally recommends Firefox.

Switch2Firefox.com is another great reference. They have the top 10 reasons to switch to Firefox, along with a guide to switching.

Here is one last link that provides more positive press coverage about Firefox versus IE.

Recently you may have noticed the frequency of my posts declining.  This is because I recently contracted bronchitis.  I posted when I could, but mostly used the time to rest & recoup.   I would like to write a post relative to this topic…

Although modern medicine always gives us chemical treatment as our first, & seemingly, only option; I always question those practices & urge you to do the same.  My recent stint with bronchitis sent me searching for a traditional way to help my body overcome the intruder.  Please note that the use of antibiotics as an aid in recovery, weakens your body’s natural ability to heal itself with antibodies.  This occurs because the antibodies are no longer needed in the presence of the antibiotics.

Secondly, the virus or bacterial strain will grow more & more resistant to the antibiotics creating “ever-stronger” stains of the infectious bacteria.  Even the FDA is aware of this.

My way to personally combat this is to trust my body to fight off common ailments including, colds, flu, bronchitis, etc. using my God given antibodies.  Also, to research and use any natural means available to help strengthen my body’s Immune System.

For example…with bronchitis, I learned that the honeysuckle & forsythia herbs are commonly used in Eastern medicine as a means for quicker recovery.  When I went to my health food store, I could not find this combination, so instead settled on Traditional Medicinals Breathe Easy.  Visit the company’s homepage here.

Now, I’m not saying this is a cure, but it definitely helps!  Normally if I contract bronchitis, I will be struggling with the sickness for at least 5 days, usually a week or two.  I came down with the bugger on Tuesday, purchased & drank the tea on Wednesday, & by Thursday morning I felt good enough to return to work!

Also, in doing all this, I have helped my body to increase its ability to stave off this same type of infection & haven’t added to the antibiotic resistance of the day!

Put that in your pipe & smoke it!