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This is one volume in a series of reports that presents dietary reference values for the intake of nutrients by Americans and Canadians. This report provides Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) for water, potassium, sodium, chloride, and sulfate.

• 1 cup Water
• 2 tablespoons Cornstarch
• ½ cup Sweetened Condensed Milk
• 1½ cups Evaporated Milk
• ¼ teaspoon Salt
• ½ cup Sugar
• ½ cup Guinness Stout

In a heavy saucepan whisk together the water and the cornstarch and simmer the mixture over moderate heat, whisking, for 2 minutes. Add the milks, the salt, and the sugar, heat the mixture over moderately low heat, whisking, for 1 to 2 minutes, or until the sugar is dissolved, and remove the pan from the heat. Let the mixture cool completely, stir in the Guinness, and freeze the mixture in an ice-cream freezer according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Makes about 1 quart

Need to put your site on a diet? Just enter the full http url into the form and let it rip with the submit.

• 3 cups Basil Leaves, cleaned very well, spun dry
• 3 cloves Garlic, peeled, crushed
• 3 tablespoons Pine Nuts
• ½ cup grated Parmagiano Reggiano Cheese
• ¼ cup grated Romano Cheese
• ½ cup Olive Oil
• Kosher Salt

Start by combining the garlic and salt. Mash with mortar and work the salt in to the garlic. Add the pinenuts. Mash and press in a circular motion with the pestle until the garlic, salt, and nuts are all well incorporated.

Add the basil leaves a bunch at a time. You can shred the leaves ahead of time to be more thorough, but I took them whole. Continue working the basil into the mix until you have a mostly uniform paste with no big leaves left. At this point, add the cheeses and mix throughly. I had to transfer the mix to a bowl to do this becasue my mortar had no room. Use a fork to mix the cheeses into the paste. Finally, add the olive oil and mash into the paste with the fork.

Taste for salt. It probably won’t need any since the cheeses are pretty salty.

Serve on pasta or spread on crostini and broil. Heck, eat it by the spoonful if you want. It’s much better than those store bought pestos and you made it yourself.

Sheep milking is an ancient practice and more sheep are milked than cows worldwide. Sheep’s milk is packed with more nutrients than both cow and goat milk due to it’s density and is also higher in protein, minerals and vitamins… Anyone interested in learning more about sheep milk products in Ontario can look here.

What’s the difference, he asks, between someone who has lost control over alcohol or other drugs and over good food? “When you look at their brains and brain responses, the differences are not very significant,” he said.

“Really great food acts in the brain like a drug,” he said.

“Problem?” Mr. Fix-It asked, pencil poised to jot notes on the tag he’d tied to the cord.

“It’s like a Stephen King version of a toaster oven,” I said. “It’s possessed. It won’t turn off and is trying to burn down the house.”

He wrote, “No Off/knob broken?” and said that sometimes buying a new one was cheaper than fixing an old one. He said he would phone as soon as he had a diagnosis.

Mr. Fix-It has not called.

When I drove over the other day to check on the situation, I learned that the toaster oven repair specialist has been on vacation. I suspect I might be eating cold cereal for the rest of the summer.

I like toast. So I decided to go online to find a toaster. I wasn’t in the market for yet another complicated but poorly designed appliance that promised to behave like a convection oven or a microwave or a coffee maker. I didn’t need electronic controls or special features to turn it into a broiler or a vacuum or a carport. I just wanted to brown bread.

• 6 Big Bell Peppers (red or yellow or a mix of both)
• 1 tablespoon of Fresh Rosemary Leaves
• 10 Chives, chopped
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1. Oil the barbecue’s grill, then pre-heat it at a mid-low setting for 10 minutes;
2. Cut the bell peppers in halves, take off the seeds and dispose them, skin side down, on the grill;
3. Close the lid and let grill for 30 minutes, turning a few times to make sure the skin is cooked evenly;
4. To ease the peeling of the skin, put the peppers to cool in the fridge for about 30 minutes;
5. Peel the peppers (the skin should now come off very easily, espescially the blackened parts!) and then slice them;
6. In a large glass jar, pour some olive oil, dispose a few pepper slices, chives, rosemary leaves, some more pepper slices and so on, until you have a jar full of delicious grilled peppers in olive oil.

Grilled peppers will enhance many recipes (pasta or pizza, for example), but they’re so good by themselves that please, eat some “as is,” without any other distracting taste…

It’s hard to deny baking parchment is a great help for the baker. For the last few years my baking parchment consumption has been quite above average. Whenever lining a cake pan or a cookie sheet, I’d turn to my parchment roll (and a drop of oil). It certainly was an improvement from the constant buttering and flouring I used to do before. Up to a few weeks ago, at least. up to the day I bought a Silpat silicon baking mat from Demarle… This is by far the most useful kitchen gadget I’ve bought recently. I’ve baked rolls, cookies and even a few meringues (which for some reason sometimes stick even to parchment) on it and it works like a charm. Absolutely stick proof, no fat needed and very easy to clean, just a wipe with a moist cloth and it’s ready for a new use.

You’ll probably recognize heirloom tomatoes first by their imperfections. They are plainly and outspokenly old-fashioned. They tend to have unusual shapes and odd colors. They wear their wrinkles and blemishes as signs of character. Amid the perfect uniformity of the modern produce section, they stick out like the Queen Mum at a fashion shoot.

Sometimes I really worry about being obsessed about food. And then there are times when I dive into my craziness with the the force of an Acapulco Cliff Diver.

I offer into evidence: It was a hot humid day in Seattle, 85 degrees and high humidity. So did I head to the air-conditioned theater? Did I walk down to “Bite of Seattle” which was in town? Or did I spend 4 hours over a stove trying to figure out the most efficient way of makign a high quality omelette?

I’ll give you a hint — I made ten variants of a basic 3-egg cheese omelete.

I’ve been making lots of smoothies for breakfast to try to get in some calcium, protein, etc for breakfast, and this one was one of my favorites. Whenever our bananas are starting to get overripe, I peel them, break them in half and put them in the freezer so they’re ready for smoothie-making.

For this one, I blend half a frozen banana to break it up, then I add about ⅓ cup plain yogurt, some milk, a couple tablespoons of almond butter and a couple squirts of honey.

“I’ve always said Americans are the only people I know who drive to the health club eating a doughnut,” said Dennis Lombardi, executive vice president at Technomic Inc., a food industry consulting firm based in Chicago.

The growing interest of consumers in more nutritious fare has been developing in tandem with the growing popularity of exceptionally indulgent treats. Consider that even as the low-carb craze dominates the grocery business, super-premium ice cream chains such as Cold Stone Creamery and MaggieMoo’s are opening new stores, and creating long sweet-tooth lines…

But if some people are eating both ways, the food industry has also discovered that while some customers want to eat light, others don’t, so catering to both can increase sales.

The US military has devised a way to ensure its troops in battle need never go hungry — with dried food that can be rehydrated using dirty water or urine.

The meal comes in a pouch that filters out 99.9% of bacteria and most toxic chemicals, says New Scientist magazine.

The aim is to reduce the amount of water soldiers need to carry.

The smallest, lightest animal with a backbone has been described for the first time, by scientists in the US.

The miniscule fish, called a stout infantfish, is only about 7mm (just under a quarter of an inch) long.

“In some places, people gather around the water cooler and talk about the play they saw the night before, or a new TV show,” notes Ned Colange, the state’s chief medical officer. “In Colorado, the talk is more likely to be somebody’s new personal best for the 5K [run], or the snow conditions at the ski areas.”

This statewide zeal for active outdoor living has its rewards — particularly around the waistline. For years now, federal studies have consistently ranked Colorado as America’s thinnest state. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that about 16.5 percent of Coloradans meet the clinical standard for obesity — the lowest percentage of any state.

For most states, the obesity rate is over 20 percent. For 2002, the latest available period, the District had an obesity rate of 21 percent; Virginia rated a portly 24 percent; and Maryland ranked among the more svelte states, with 19 percent of its residents obese. The stoutest state in the union, according to the study, was West Virginia, with an obesity rate of 28 percent.

Women who get a lot of their dietary protein from vegetables are at reduced risk for having their gallbladder removed, which is usually performed for gallstones and related problems, new research suggests.

“In animals, vegetable protein can inhibit gallstone formation,” Dr. Chung-Jyi Tsai, from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and colleagues note.

A group of U.S. cattle industry producers and companies plans to petition the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the right to test all their cattle for mad cow disease to comply with demands by Asian customers who currently are refusing to buy U.S. beef.

“A lawsuit is definitely an option,” said Bill Bullard, chief executive officer of R-CALF United Stockgrowers of America, one member of the budding coalition challenging the USDA.

Japan, previously the biggest foreign buyer of U.S. beef with $1.4 billion purchased in 2003, halted imports last December when the first U.S. case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly called mad cow disease, showed up in Washington state.

More evidence that fish consumption reduces the chances of having a stroke comes from an analysis of results from several large studies.

In fact, the findings suggest that “the incidence of ischemic stroke might be significantly reduced by consuming fish as seldom as 1 to 3 times per month,” Dr. Ka He, at Northwestern University in Chicago, and associates comment in their report in the medical journal Stroke.

The Dutch, already the tallest people on the planet, are still growing in height while also packing on the pounds.

The market research organization GfK said on Thursday that data collected over the last seven years showed increasing demand for larger clothing sizes in the Netherlands, where the average man is about 6 feet, 1 inch, tall.

“The Dutch are growing,” said GfK spokesman Koen Snoeren.

The Dutch are nearly four inches taller on average than the British and Americans, and almost six inches taller than they were four decades ago.

This famous Provençal vegetable stew is best made in the autumn when the vegetables needed for it are cheap and plentiful. This can be a most attractive dish but not if it ends up mushy. So to avoid this, make sure you don’t cut up the vegetables too small (they must retain their individuality), and also make sure you get rid of the excess moisture in the courgettes and aubergines by salting and draining them at the start.

Italy may not immediately spring to mind when you think of buffalo — more likely you’ll imagine an American prairie, with herds of hump-backed beasties, but those herds aren’t really buffalo, they’re bison. The real buffalo roam the countryside of Campania, producing the pure white milk that makes the best Mozzarella…

Being vegetarian has never been so good! The days of choosing between cheese salad and an omelette are long gone with the huge variety of exciting veggie options now on offer. If you’re looking for inspiration, we have selected some of Delia’s best meat-free main courses here. If you want more, simply use the recipe search facility and click in the box marked vegetarian.

During the early Eighties, I remember passing on a little advice on television: “If you want to improve your cooking, and eating, overnight, never use preserved grated Parmesan cheese — a travesty of the real thing. Buy it in blocks instead and grate it freshly yourself.” Fifteen years later I would have to be even more specific. If you want to eat the very best — and gain the highest acclaim for your cooking — never simply settle for Parmesan cheese, only that which is branded with the magic words Parmigiano Reggiano.

This is the aristocrat of Italian cheeses, or crowned king, they will tell you locally. And with every justification. For the lover of fine cheese, Parmigiano Reggiano should not just be a permanent fixture among their store of ingredients, it deserves to be enjoyed just as it is, as a nibble with apéritifs before a meal or as a cheese course to make a grand finale to the perfect meal.