Lemon Verbena Drop Recipe

2 oz. lemon verbena infused vodka (instructions below)

splash of Limoncello

sweeten to taste with superfine sugar or simple syrup (less grainy) - start with 1/4 teaspoon or so, and sweeten from there to taste.

In a shaker filled with ice add the lemon verbena vodka, a splash of Limoncello, and the sugar/simple syrup. When it comes to sweetness, you may want to add more or less sweetener depending on how you like your drinks. Shake well and serve in a martini glass with a sprig of lemon verbena and a curl of lemon peel (you can also sugar the rim if desired).

Lemon Verbena Infused Vodka

Clean and dry the jar you are going to use.

You want to wash the lemon verbena you are going to use really well, or the sediment will end up in your vodka. Wash several leafy sprigs of the lemon verbena and pat them dry with a clean towel.

Add the lemon verbena to the vodka. Depending on how much vodka you will be using adjust how much lemon verbena you add. You can see in the above picture I used quite a bit of the verbena and ended up letting it infuse for about 36 hours. It's not an exact science, just keep sampling it until the strength is to your liking.

Seal the jar and wait at least 24 hours. The lemon verbena imparts its flavor to the vodka quite willingly and you will also start to notice a change of color in the vodka. After the initial 24 hours, if you want a more pronounced verbena flavor, let it go longer and taste every 12 hours or so until you feel the infusion is complete.

Burger, Fries & Coke please

"Can I take your order sir?"...."Sure I'd like a burger, fries and a coke please." Does this sound familiar to you? because it does to me. I can't tell you how many times I've rolled thru a drive thru at my local fast food restaurant and ordered this food, if you want to call it food. But it's really amazing to me how resilient the human body is to be honest. We can really wreck havoc on our entire internal organs for 50, 60 sometimes even 70 years before it starts breaking down. God really is amazing and our bodies truly are like machines. When you take good care of your body (temple) it makes perfect sense that it will serve you for much longer than the normal 60 to 70 years. But when you eat conventional denatured, cooked, chemicalized foods, diseases like cancer, and heart disease become normal. Thank God we are on an entirely different path.

There really is no way to 100% completely eliminate toxins from our entering our bodies. It's in the air, the plastics, mold in our houses the food etc. But what we're trying to do with raw foods is to lessen the toxic load to a more manageable burden.

The link to the study can be found here:
US Food and Drug Administration -
Total Diet StudyMarket Baskets 1991-3 through 2003-4
http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~acrobat/TDS1byps.pdf

Here is what I've found in a conventional hamburger, fries and coke.
Hamburger: 38 pesticides
Fries: 23 pesticides
Coke: 8 pesticides
Total: 69 pesticides

Quarter-pound hamburger on bun, fast-food
1,1,1-trichloroethane 44
1,2,4-trimethylbenzene 44
benzene* 44
BHC, alpha 44
BHC, beta 44
bromodichloromethane 44
butylbenzene, n44
carbon tetrachloride 44
chlordane, cis44
chlorobenzene 44
chloroform 44
chlorpropham 44
chlorpyrifos 44
chlorpyrifos-methyl 44
cumene (isopropyl benzene) 44
DDE, p,p' 44
DDT, p,p' 44
diazinon 44
dichlorobenzene, p44
dieldrin 44
endosulfan I 44
endosulfan II 44
endosulfan sulfate 44
ethyl benzene 44
heptachlor epoxide 44
hexachlorobenzene 44
lindane 44
malathion 44
nonachlor, trans44
octachlor epoxide 44
pirimiphos-methyl 44
propylbenzene, n44
styrene 44
tetrachloroethylene 44
toluene 44
trichloroethylene 44
xylene, m- and/or p44
xylene, o44

Carbonated beverage, cola, low-calorie
benzene*
bromodichloromethane
chloroform
dichlorobenzene,
omethomyl propylbenzene,
n-styrene
toluene
trichloroethylene

French fries, frozen, commercial, heated
1,2,3,5-tetrachlorobenzene
2,3,5,6-tetrachloroaniline
2-chloroethyl linoleate
2-chloroethyl palmitate
benzene*
chlorpropham
chlorpyrifos-methyl
DDE, p,p'
DDT, p,p'
dicloran
dieldrin
diphenyl 2-ethylhexyl phosphate
endosulfan II
endosulfan sulfate
ethylenethiourea
heptachlor epoxide
iprodione
isopropyl(3-chloro-4-methoxyphenyl)carbamate
malathion
pentachloroaniline
pentachlorobenzene
pentachlorophenyl methyl sulfide
TDE, p,p'

For a great documentary on the production of food checkout The Future of Food.

Remember this is only pesticides it doesn't factor in herbicides, fungicides, and other chemicals. Eating this food is more like eating chemical soup! Thank you very much but I'll make better choices. So hopefully this list can serve as motivation the next time you may get tempted to eat fast food. It's just one more tool to keep in the back of your mind that will allow us to make better food choices. How often do you eat fast food?

Beggar's Chicken

Ingredients:

• 1 fresh chicken, 3 to 3 1/2 pounds, cleaned
• Marinade:
• 2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
• 1 teaspoon ginger juice
• 2 teaspoons salt
• Stuffing:
• 6 shiitake mushrooms, fresh or dried
• 4 ounces lean pork
• 2 ounces Chinese pickled cabbage, or preserved mustard greens
• 2 green onions
• 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
• 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
• 1/4 teaspoon five-spice powder (optional)
• Other:
• 2 tablespoons oil for stir-frying
• 2 large sheets aluminum foil for wrapping chicken

Preparation:

To make the ginger juce, grate the ginger and squeeze out the juice until you have 1 teaspoon. In a small bowl, combine the marinade ingredients. Rub the marinade ingredients over the inside and outside of the chicken and let marinate for 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

While the chicken is marinating, prepare the vegetables and pork. If using dried shiitake mushrooms, reconstitute by soaking in warm water until softened. Squeeze dry and cut into thin slices. For fresh, wipe with a damp cloth and slice. Cut the pork into thin matchstick pieces. Finely chop the remaining vegetables.

In a wok or heavy frying pan, heat 2 tablespoons of oil over medium-high to high heat. Add the green onion and the pork. Stir-fry until the pork is crisp and nearly cooked through, then add the mushrooms and preserved greens. Stir in the soy sauce, rice wine or dry sherry, sugar, sesame oil and five-spice powder if using. Remove from the pan.

Stuff the chicken loosely with the stuffing and close with skewers or strong toothpicks. Wrap the chicken tightly in the aluminum foil. Place the wrapped chicken in a roasting pan.

Bake the chicken for 75 minutes. Bake for another 15 minutes or until the juices run clear and the temperature of the chicken in the thickest part of the thigh is 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove the stuffing and serve with the chopped up chicken.

Source : http://chinesefood.about.com

Raw Food Affiliate Program

We recently launched a raw food affiliate program for our new raw food store called ShopRawFoods.com. I've seen many blogs out there that have affiliate banners on their sites promoting various online raw food stores. This is a great thing because it benefits everybody.

If you really believe in a store or the vision of a company why not earn some extra money by putting one of their banners on your blog? The way an affiliate program works is that most of them are free to sign up.

Signing up is pretty easy, you just need to fill out a quick form. Then you can typically select from a number of text or graphic banners to put on your site. Don't worry you don't need to know any html or coding language. The affiliate program gives you this code and all you have to do is copy and paste it into your site or blog.

When somebody clicks on your new raw food affiliate banner that you just placed on your site and makes a purchase, then you receive a commission, just for the referral. How amazing is that?

What happens if the person who clicks on that new banner simply looks around and then doesn't buy? Well you wouldn't make any money off that. But most all affiliate programs have what's called a "cookie" length. That simply means that when the reader of your blog clicks on your banner and doesn't buy; they still have been "cookied." That means that even if that person goes directly to the merchants site X amount of days later (w/o going to your site and clicking on that banner first) and makes a purchase, you still get credit for that sale. Why you ask? Well the reason why is because you're being rewarded days later for "introducing" your blog reader to the merchant who sells products.

The trick is to look for raw food affiliate programs that have long cookie lengths. Typically most affiliate programs offer a 30 or 60 day cookie program. Ours has been set to 150 days. That's 5 months! You could refer somebody over to our site and they can wait almost 5 months to buy something and you still get credit for that order!

Another thing about raw food affiliate programs is that you have to accrue a certain amount of money in your affiliate account in order to get a check. Most of the time affiliate programs make you have to accrue at least $100 dollars before you can get a check. I've seen some as low as $75, we really want to reward our affiliates so we set ours currently to $50. All you have to do is earn $50 and you get paid!

Last but not least, you want to look for an affiliate program that has a high commission rate. Typically commission rates hover around 5%. I think even Amazon.com starts their affiliates off at around 4.5% Our commission rate right now is set to 8%. Our average order size is $120 so that means a commission check for each order just shy of $10.00! Imagine making an easy $10 for every order you refer and making some money for doing something you love like blogging about the raw food lifestyle?

I know that having an affiliate program on your raw food blog or website is not for everybody. If it is and you resonate with what we're doing, we'd love to have you on board.