It’s the time of year when we should be enjoying the sun and with the sun comes one of my favourites – the smoothie. Today I want to share with you one I’ve been trying over the past month or so; it’s a carrot, apple, ginger and green smoothie.

This is a great smoothie if you are looking for a slightly spicy smoothie with powerful health benefits, try this carrot-ginger smoothie with greens and sweetened with apple! This immune-boosting green smoothie will help warm you up on a chilly summer evening!

Apples are full of fibre and will help you feel fuller longer! This smoothie contains 30% of your daily recommended value or fibre and if you are watching your weight there is less that 160 calories in it.

Nutrients in carrots have been shown to reduce the risk of heart attacks and may help regulate blood sugar levels. Carrots are famous for protecting vision, especially night vision.

Carrot Apple Ginger Green Smoothie Recipe

• 2 medium carrots, chopped
• 1 medium apple, cored
• 2 large handfuls of raw baby spinach
• 1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger root
• 4 to 6 ounces of filtered water

Add all the ingredients except for the greens to your blender and hit the “pulse” button a few times. Next, add the greens and blend on high for 30 seconds or until the smoothie is creamy.

Enjoy

This recipe will make two 500g loaves

• 17g sachet fast-action dried yeast
• 275ml tepid water
• 225g wholemeal flour
• 225g strong white flour, plus extra to dust
• 1  tsp  salt
• 5 g mixed seeds (about 2tsp each of poppy, sesame, pumpkin, linseed and sunflower.
• 3 tbsp honey
• 2 tbsp milk, to glaze

What I’m inclined to do is put everything into my bread mixture in the order specified by the instructions and let it mix for about 5-10 minutes, just until it gathers all the ingredients together. I take it out of the mixer and then knead by hand. I figure kneading by hand gives a better result and is much quicker.

If you are doing it all by hand put the flours and salt into a large mixing bowl add the seeds and stir to mix. (If you are using fact action dried yeast, stir this into the flour mixture.) Make a well in the centre and add the olive oil, honey, yeast mixture and remaining water (all of it if using dried yeast.) Stir with a wooden spoon to combine adding more flour if the dough seems too wet. It should be soft, but not sticky

Press the dough into a ball then knead on a lightly floured surface for about 5-10 minutes until smooth. Place in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with lightly oiled cling film and leave the dough to rise in a warm part of the kitchen for an hour or two until doubled in size.

Punch the dough down on a lightly floured surface and knead it lightly. Divide into two pieces and shape each one into a round loaf. Place each on a lightly oiled large baking sheet and cover with lightly oiled cling film. Leave to prove in a warm spot until almost doubled in size. I like to use two 7 inch cake tins as they give a better appearance to the bread.  Normally I use non-stick bakeware simply as an extra aid, never relying on it exclusively. In practice I lightly spray the inside of the tin with oil. I just find this more reliable.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees Gas 6. Remove the cling film and brush a thin layer of milk over the leaves. Bake for about 20-25 minutes until light golden in colour. The loaves should sound hallow when tapped underside. Leave to cool on a wire rack. Best served slightly warm.

If you are only baking for one why not try removing one of the loaves from the oven about 15 minutes into the baking process, let it cool completely, double wrap in and place it in the freezer.

When you want to use it preheat your oven to 200 degrees Gas 6 pop it back into the over for about 10 minutes, that’s not an exact time just watch for the top going a golden brown and listen for the hallow sound when you tap the underside. I find par-baking quite useful

Well, we know being a vegetarian isn’t for everyone, but quite a few celebs have made their lifestyle meat free and veggie delighted. Russell Brand and Kristen Wiig have been crowned the Sexiest Vegetarian Celebrities of 2011 in the PETA’s annual contest.

Who do you think is the world’s sexiest vegetarian. Well according to PETA Russell Brand and Kristen Wiig have won the crowns. Guess I’ll have to wait another year

The comedian, Russell Brant is 37 an has been a vegetarian since the age of 14. His philosophy seems simple enough he says we shouldn’t eat animals; it’s mean to them! Well it is.

Kristen Wiig, 37 and star of the hit film “Bridesmaids,” told Women’s Health this year that she maintains her lifestyle by running, doing yoga and “eating lots of tofu and soy.”

Kristen keeps a strict diet, although she allows herself one day a week to indulge and loves to eat Dark Chocolate Peanut M&Ms, lemon cupcakes and “hot, melted cheesy sandwiches.” Stop it. Stop it, I’ve a post to write.

Read more: http://globalgrind.com/news-politics/peta-crowns-sexiest-veggie-eaters-2011-photos#ixzz1QaCLVed1

Dear Healthy Professor: What exactly is a plant-based diet and why is it so popular?

A: A plant-based diet emphasizes plant foods. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is, and it’s increasing in popularity due to mounting evidence of the benefits associated with following a vegetarian lifestyle.

It wasn’t too long ago Americans thought a meal without meat wasn’t a real meal. I remember when I was a kid; a plate of spaghetti looked naked without meatballs. Today, I serve vegetables with that spaghetti and call it pasta primavera.

Times are changing and more meatless meals are being served at home and in restaurants, and that’s good news. An article entitled “The Power of Plants in Your Diet” in the July 2011 edition of Environmental Nutrition says that a diet rich in whole grains, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, vegetables with less meat and dairy has been shown to reduce obesity, cardiovascular disease, blood pressure, LDL levels and even cancer rates. One of the reasons is because switching to occasional meatless meals can have significant effects in reducing saturated fat and cholesterol from your diet. Besides benefiting your health, a plant-based diet is kinder to the planet, because these foods have less of a negative impact on the environment. Now isn’t that worth a few less hamburgers?

I think the most important thing to remember about a plant-based diet is that it can be what you want it to be. Your menus can range from strict vegan, where you avoid all animal products all the time, to vegetarian, which may include dairy and fish. Whichever way you choose to eat a plant-based diet, for some meat-lovers out there, it’s still a scary prospect. Fortunately, there is a gradual acceptance of plant-based diets even among die-hard meat eaters. That’s because it doesn’t have to be “all or nothing.” Even just one or two vegetarian-style meals a week are a start, and there’s no better time to start than now.

It’s easy to focus more on a plant-based diet in the summer by making a weekly trip to the farmer’s market. There’s nothing better than coming home with a bag of vegetables and preparing them at their peak of freshness.

If you really want to get adventurous, take a break from typical summer grilling by turning your backyard BBQ into a veggie-Q. Prepare almost any vegetable on the grill and you’ll be surprised at how good it tastes. I even grill romaine lettuce; it’s delicious.

Have some fun changing the way you eat. Start a tradition of “Meatless Mondays” (or any other day for that matter) and get your kids involved in creating new meatless dishes. Meat substitutes, like using soy crumbles for tacos, are good choices for creating some of your favorite dishes. Search the Internet and bookstores for plant-based cookbooks such as ”A Life in Balance: Delicious Plant-based Recipes for Optimal Health” by Meg Wolff.

Plant-based diets are not a fad, but rather the trend towards healthy eating and it isn’t complicated. Just remember the words of ”Food Rules” author Michael Pollan, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

For a daily dose of the Healthy Professor, go to http:/blog.timesunion.com/healthyprofessor/.

Besides being polite and cordial when it comes to playing a good host, you also need to know a few ground rules when it comes to hosting a party or a formal sit down dinner. After speaking to a few experts, we have compiled a list of things you must keep in mind to play the perfect host.

Serve a mixed food platter
Food is one of the most important aspects that need to be paid attention to. Right from the starters to the dessert, make sure that you have a mixed platter of the dishes. If you do not know your guests preferences in terms of vegetarian or non vegetarian, prepare both. You don’t want to be left with no food for that odd vegetarian guest. Unless it is a formal sit down dinner, prepare easy to make, quick finger foods. They are a big hit with kids as well.

Have a well stocked bar
If it is a party and unless it is a BYOB (bring your own booze) do, stock up on alcohol. Make sure you have a well stocked bar. If you can afford, get a bartender or request a friend who is good with it to help you out. Very important – have a lot of ice handy. Limit yourself to one or two drinks because you don’t want to be passing out at your own party.
Don’t mix and match your friends
You could be popular and have a lot of friends, but when you throw a party, make sure you don’t invite every social acquaintance. It is not a great idea to have a mish mash of friends over, where nobody knows either of them. Stick to a group of friends, either your office folks, your school friends or your family. While it could be a good way to interact with people, your guests should not be left getting bored.

Have a kiddie’s zone
If you are going to have kids at the party, then it is a good idea to have a special zone dedicated to them. Kids are hyperactive and get bored easily so you will have to keep them entertained. You could probably have a room in your house and stock it up with books, crayon pencils, stencils and colouring books. For slightly older kids you could try board games like Pictionary, Taboo, Scrabble etc.

Interact with your guests
If it is your party, you have to make sure you do not stick to one or two people. Take turns to talk to people and interact with everyone, lest anyone fees left out. In case someone is a relatively new entrant to the gang, introduce him/her to all your friends. Strike up interesting conversations and let your guests take it further from there.

Keep it simple
If you are throwing a party at home, don’t go all the way to make the set up extremely elaborate. You don’t have to buy new cushions, curtains, bed sheets each time you have a party, but make sure everything in the house is spic and span. Vacuum clean your house, open the windows, throw in a few cushions, have good music and you are all set.

Have fun
Just because you are the host, does not mean you can’t have fun at your own party. If a glass or two breaks, don’t be stressed about it. Relax and take it easy. You have put in a lot of efforts to put this together, so don’t let minor slip-ups upset you. You guests will help themselves to food and drinks so chill out and have a good time.

Dress up
Your friends may see you million times a week, but when you invite them over for a party, make sure to dress up. Just because it is your home, don’t dress up shabbily, certainly not in a pair of pyjamas. Agreed it is home, but you should we well put together, especially when you are going to have your friends over. Don’t go overboard and dress up like a Christmas tree. Most importantly, be yourself and don’t forget to smile!

Yotam Ottolenghi isn’t a vegetarian, but recently, his name has become known for the preparation of vegetables — both in the London shops that bear his name and in his column, “The New Vegetarian,” that has run for the last five years in the British newspaper The Guardian.

Those columns were collected last year in a cookbook called Plenty: Vibrant Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi. An American edition was released earlier this year, and if you’re looking for fresh preparations of vegetables for summer salads, this could be your book, as NPR’s Susan Stamberg discovered during a recent lunch at which a friend prepared two recipes from Plenty. There was burnt eggplant with tahini studded with pomegranate seeds, smoky and bursting with flavor, and green bean salad — fresh as a minute — with mustard seeds and tarragon.

“That’s a fantastic lunch,” Ottolenghi told Stamberg after sitting down in a studio in London. “These are some of my favorite recipes in my book and I think it was a good choice.”

The secret to the eggplant dish, he says, is fire.

“It is something quite magical, because it carries the smoke in it like nothing else does,” he says. “You’ve got your stovetop and you spread foil around [the eggplant] and then you literally leave it over the fire for a good 15 minutes. And every now and then you come with some metal tongs and turn it over. So it really does burn in an actual flame. And what that does is the skin starts burning and producing smoke, and that’s what gives the flesh the flavor.”

Then, after the eggplant cools, Ottolenghi says, “[You] just spoon out all the flesh and avoid the skin because at this point the skin is very, very smoky.”

From there, it’s just a matter of mixing the smoky flesh with tahini, lemon juice, garlic, vegetables and herbs, plus a old-school trick that he says is becoming more popular: pomegranate molasses.

“All around the Middle East it’s been used for a long time,” Ottolenghi says. “It’s very simple. It’s just pomegranate juice that has been reduced by heating up for a while and then it is extremely sweet and sour. It’s a little bit like balsamic vinegar.”

Pomegranate seeds are “the jewels in the crown,” according to the chef.

“I’ll tell you what it is about them. There’s something — talking about the [cookbook's] title, Plenty — there’s something very plentiful about them. They’re really symbols of abundance because there’s so much of them in every pomegranate, and they obviously have beautiful color and they have this sharpness that is a little bit sweet,” he says. “So you can add them in so many contexts and they always sort of add a little extra something which is a little hard to explain but it’s very visual. It’s completely beautiful.”

Also beautiful: that bean salad, barely cooked and popping with various shades of green.

“You know what it is,” Ottolenghi says, “basically all these are very simple ingredients that everybody knows, but I think sometimes they don’t know how to put them together properly. There is a long tradition of overcooking green beans of all sorts, even in Italian cooking, which does wonders with vegetables. Whenever I go to an antipasti place, the beans are limp and completely lacking in texture. And what I try to do in so many of my salads — or any dish really — is to just try to keep as much of the original wonderful, crunchy texture, so you remember it’s a french bean, you remember it’s a snow pea. It’s not something that could be anything else. And that’s the wonder of it.”

Just as in the eggplant dish, seeds add intensity.

“You need to cook them and they flavor the oil, but they also add little bits of flavor inside the salad itself, so you have the crunchy beans and also little crunchy bits of seeds.”

Ottolenghi was born in Israel to German and Italian parents, and now lives in London, where he oversees four prepared-food shops and a new restaurant. His food carries some of the same multi-cultural pedigree as his background.

“I would say it is pretty dominantly Middle Eastern and Mediterranean in the flavors and the colors and in the ingredients. Occasionally I do go and venture out to Asian, but really it is very Mediterranean in spirit,” he says. “Everything that fits that palate I can add in. You know, in Italy, for instance, they don’t use cilantro, but all around the Middle East they do. So what I do is try to bring all these things together, not in fusion, but in inclusion.”

Much of his food is casual, so what does he do to dress it up for special occasions?

“For me, every food can be special,” Ottolenghi says. “I always think you can add beauty and luxury to a dish by adding lots of herbs to it. I think a huge platter always looks better than a small plate, so to make my guests welcome and feel special I put many beautiful platters with food, as I do in my shops, so it’s quite a lot around, a lot to choose from. Once you’ve done that, you can make the simplest things in the world, and still everyone thinks you’ve gone to the longest of efforts, but actually it’s as simple as that.”

Has Morrissey changed his views? Followers of the former Smiths frontman will know that he has waged war on the meat industry throughout this 28 year career. But now he has surprised many by supporting Gaga’s decision to wear a meat dress at a recent awards show.

In and interview with leading UK newspaper – The Daly Telegraph – Morrissey said, “The meat dress was first done by (British artist) Linder Sterling… in 1982, and she did it as a protest at men seeing female flesh as meat. I don’t know whether that came across with Lady Gaga.

“I think people didn’t question it too deeply – they simply saw it as ‘today’s loony idea’. But I like to assume that Gaga had the same notion. If it’s a social and political statement, it’s acceptable. If it isn’t a social and political statement, I don’t really see the point.”

So maybe he is not back-tracking. As a matter of interest the dress in question has been donated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

It is summer time here in Ireland, or at least what passes for summer! Anyway summer means tomatoes and tomatoes mean greenfly and the annual question of how to control them. One of the weapons in my armoury is Basil.

The gardening programs will tell you that basil is great for deterring these little creatures. So every summer I plant basil under my tomatoes and with the feed the tomatoes gets the basil really takes off. It is really great to have fresh basil and really great to be able to freeze and dry some for the winter days, but let’s be honest there is only so much basil you can use or freeze so I’m always looking for new ways to enjoy this delicious herb and I found one Banana and Basil Smoothie.

What? I hear you ask. Well to be honest when I first came across the recipe I was a little bit cautious of it myself but decided to give it a whirl and to be honest it tastes quite nice, especially when I come in from doing a hard days weeding. Dam weeds!

In this recipe the basil turns this smoothie from just being another banana smoothie and transforms it into a more complex, slightly more sophisticated summer drink. A good tip when you are using bananas in smoothies is to peel and slice the bananas and then pop then into the freezer for at least an hour, or over night if you think about it, it really freshens the drink up.

Give it a try, here’s the recipe.

Banana Basil Smoothie
Source: GoneRaw.com

INGREDIENTS:

2 ripe bananas, peeled, chopped
10 fresh basil leaves
1/4 cup filtered water
2 tablespoons agave (or raw honey)

METHOD:

1. Blend the ingredients in a blender until liquefied and smooth.
2. Serve immediately or chill the smoothie in the refrigerator for an hour or until ready to serve.

OK they may be sexy but isShania Twain and Leona Lewis the Sexiest Vegetarian Celebrity of 2011?  That’s what People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) want you to decide.

Shania and Leona are among a long list of male and female celebrity vegetarians currently up for the title.  You can vote for your favorite at PETA.org, either by tweet or registering your vote on the website. Other veggies who are up for the title this year include Paul McCartney, Prince, Joan Jett, Tom Higgenson of Plain White Ts, Colbie Caillat, many of the female stars of Glee, including Lea Michele, and The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde.

The voting for the first round ends Friday, June 17th, at 5 p.m., and then next round runs from June 20th through June 24th.  Winners will be announced June 28th.

Image: Oprah Winfrey Network

For the Chinese, a diet heavy in vegetables has been the historical norm. Changes have come on the wings of a growing middle class economy and the modern Chinese consumer, who makes more money, eats more meat and has more health problems with cancer and heart disease. Specifically, the consumption of meat in China has quadrupled over the last forty years.

Although meat consumption is still lower when compared to the western world, it is rising rapidly and getting worse, as indicated by the fact that factory farming of meat has already begun in China

Actress, Gao Yuanyuan together with animal rights group, PETA, was part of a recent promotion targeted to encourage consumers to go vegetarian. In honor of the occasion, she sported a dress made of lettuce leaves that looked good enough to eat.

The form-hugging lettuce leaves were only part of her vegetarian ensemble. Around her neck, she wore a necklace made of shiny chili peppers.

“After going vegetarian, I feel so much lighter… When I first started the vegetarian diet, I was not used to it and so I ate starchy foods in big amounts, and gained a little bit of weight. Still, I felt much more energetic,” Gao told the press.

Many meat eaters are not so willing to change and are skeptical of the new findings, claiming that a balanced diet screams for meat and vegetables and not just veggies alone.

Time will tell on the meat and vegetable debate but in the meantime, once can only wonder:

Will Gao eat her dress in a healthy salad of lettuce and endive, or will it remain to rot somewhere on a rack?