When You Have A Blender, Who Needs A Stove?

I do not remember the last time that I used the stove. But I have a great excuse. The only thing I know how to heat up is a teabag. The downside? I eat out every day and the quality of the nutrition I put into my body is not nearly as good as I know it ought to be.

This is why Carolyn Hansen's book 100 Healthy Raw Snacks And Treats looks so appealing to me. Now the truth is, even though I know I could benefit from eating these amazingly mouth-watering delights, I probably never will. Why? Because I am lazy, and the idea of having to go to the store to get ingredients, put them in a blender, and then simply pour them out onto a tray seems like a lot of work to me. But you might not be as lazy as I am, and you might be prepared to take a couple of steps to eat healthy snacks rather than the store-bought items that are poisioning me.

Well, posioning might be too strong a word. Still, we all know that the sugar, butter, and other chemical additives that fill traditional snacks are doing none of us any favors. They all contribute in the long run to obsesity and other chronic diseases associated with poor nutrition. This is why when someone comes up with a set of healthy food alternatives we should all take notice, rather than continue to be lazy like I am. I am going to suffer the consequences of my actions, I have no doubt. But that does not mean that you need to do the same.

At least I hope you do not. At the very least, do me a favor and go have a look at the recipe book that Carolyn is offering on her site. If you take a glance at that Strawberry Fields Forever cheesecake alternative, or the Carob Fudge, and you still don't bite (ha ha) then I will know that I did my bit to help your ward off the coronary disease or the hypertension that likely will catch up with you one of these days. Assuming you eat as poorly as I do, that is. You don't, do you?

The bottom line: you will want to go check out 100 Healthy Raw Snacks And Treats if you are less than satisfied with the quality of the snacks that typically end up inside you over the course of a day.

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What Makes These Sugarless Snacks Taste Great?

I have to admit that when I heard about snack recipes which featured no sugar I was a little sceptical about how the end product would taste. After all, sugar makes the world go around, or so you might think after spending most of you life scarfing down an endless supply of snack types made with processed sugar.

But there is an alternative to the use of sugar in snacks. At least, this is what Carolyn Hansen says in her book 100 Healthy Raw Snacks And Treats. Nature has come up with some nifty alternatives that are actually quite healthy for us, and which can be used to impart all the sweetness you might otherwise miss in the absense of a dose of sugar.

Dates turn out to be a good way to naturally sweeten the recipes for snacks and treats that appear in Carolyn's book. Another alternative that most of us are familiar with is honey. Less known is agave nectar, which is also an excellent natural sweetener that appears in many of Carolyn's recipes, including those for tempting cheescake delights that you can eat without the least pang of guilt. Yes, that recipe for a pink Strawberry Fields Forever cheesecake concoction is sure to become one of your favorites.

All done without sugar. Even without flour or butter. After all, who needs high-cholestrol butter in their diet when almond butter and coconut butter can be used instead?

Go check out Carolyn's site now and tell me that those images of the Strawberry Fields Forever cheesecake and the Carob Fudge don't make your mouth water. The great thing about these recipes is that they are not just put together with ingredients that are good for you, but they are easy to make AND they do not require any cooking on your part. If you know how to use a blender, Carolyn says, you can easily follow her directions and churn out a plate full of yum yums in no time.

If this whole idea sounds like a treat to you (hee hee) then here's where you can go to find out more about how to add 100 Healthy Raw Snacks And Treats  to your diet. Trust me, if you like to eat, this is something that is worth your time - especially if you would not mind losing a few pounds by eating stuff that tastes like it was designed to put on the pounds, not take them off!

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Eat These The Next Time You Get The Munchies

I defy anyone who gets a case of the munchies to tell me that their willpower alone will be enough to ensure that they don't reach for the cookie jar or the potato chips when no one else is looking. And if you live alone? Come on. If there is no one else around to see your transgressions then you are going to binge on whatever you can get your hands on. That's just what we are - creatures of comfort food.

Maybe like me you avoid buying the things you love to eat. If I have something tasty and within reach, it is going to get eaten. I might be able to stave off for a day or two the desire to slice open a bag of cookies, but I give in eventually, as I am sure you do. So what are we supposed to do, if this kind of behavior is continually contributing to the number of inches around our waist?

One solution is to replace the "bad" snacks, which is practically every piece of junk food that is sold at your local convenience store, with healthy snack alternatives. But what to those look like? More importantly, what do they TASTE like? I have not-so-fond memories of "healthy" cookies that my mother used to make when the sugar and butter supplies in our household ran low. Thankfully broccoli cookies never appeared on the menu, but nor did anything healthy that also passed as a tasty snack.

Carolyn Hansen, the author of 100 Healthy Raw Snacks And Treats, is quite aware of this problem. But she was determined to find snack recipes that did away with the usual cast of bad characters: sugar, flour, butter, and replace these with healthy substitutes that she could live with as a bodybuilder looking to maintain a healthy diet during her preparations for physique contests. That was some years ago now, and today she is making the recipes she came up with during that period available to anyone who could benefit from being able to grab low-calorie snacks on the run that also taste great.

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If you could see some of the photographs of the snacks and treats that she has come up with you would not hesitate to volunteer to be a guinea pig in her kitchen. Would you believe that you can make cheescake alternatives that use no dairy, but look and taste delicious nonetheless? Apparently you can, and this is just one of the recipe types that litter her book.

For more information on this mouth-watering topic I recommend you get yourself across to her site at 100 Healthy Raw Snacks And Treats, grab yourself a copy of the recipe book and put your blender to work. The nice thing about Carolyn's recipes? You don't even need a stove to prepare them - these are all no cook recipes made from natural ingredients that can go straight to your mouth!

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Can Delicious Snacks Actually Be Good For You?

Remember sneaking into the kitchen when you were young to steal a snack when mom was not looking? 

Well, those days might be over if ex-bodybuilding champion Carolyn Hansen gets her way. She has come up with a set of 100 snack recipes that will have mothers everywhere positively encouraging their children to dig in.

The reason? 

The ingredients. No sugar, flour, or butter to be found in these recipes - just raw healthy foods that Hansen likes to call living. 

No cooking either, which makes preparation a snap. All a mom need be proficient with in the kitchen to keep her kids satisfied is a blender. That's the conclusion Carolyn Hansen reaches in her book

100 Healthy Raw Snacks And Treats.

At first glance you might be tempted to think that snacks prepared without sugar and butter might taste like the experimental designs that mom came up with in your youth when she ran low on those items and could not get to the store. If you share the same memories of those bold snack alternatives that I do you might be quick to dismiss the idea of a tasty snack that foregoes the ingredients that we know contribute to chronic disease in later life. Too much sugar and butter in the diet are prime causes of obsesity, diabetes, and coronary disease.

Carolyn Hansen knew this when she went into her kitchen years ago to find alternatives to the snacks she found so difficult to remove from her diet. As a competiting bodybuilder she was determined to find a way to keep herself from ruining her progress in the gym by binging on unhealthy snacks when her willpower wore down.

At first the going was difficult. It turns out that there are a lot of things to take into account when you begin throwing out the staple ingredients of recipes thousands of years old. There were a lot of missteps along the way. But Carolyn perservered, and in the end she came up with snacks that she could share with her bodybuilder friends. Snacks that you can share with your family and friends and know that you are contributing to the maintenance of their health, not only today but for years to come.

So, if you want to get your hands on recipes for snacks and treats that you will not need to feel guilty about eating the next time you have a craving for something delicious, be sure to check out Carolyn Hansen's book 100 Healthy Raw Snacks And Treats, where she shows you how to take control of your blender and churn out mouth-watering snacks that will have the kids in your neighborhood lined up around the block for a sample.

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How to Make Wine ?

So - you have decided that you want to try your hand at making some wine. This article will describe the basic steps and some of the pitfalls to avoid to make sure your first batch turns out good enough to drink.

First things first - how much do you want to make?

I recommend at least 5 gallons. Why? Because beginning home wine makers just cannot wait to taste what they have made. In addition, 5 gallons is only 25 bottles. So you'll get the batch finished, and then you will try a bottle or 2 or 3. Then you'll wait a week and try a few more bottles. Sooner than later, it will all be gone before it has a chance to age and get really good.

If you just want to do something quick and simple, you could do a gallon in a plastic milk jug. The drawback is, once you have tasted it a few times - it's all gone and you'll have to start over.

With 5 gallons - you just might be tempted to let a few of the remaining bottles age. Believe it or not, the biggest mistake beginning winemakers make is not letting their wine age in the bottle. The difference in taste is, to put it mildly, AMAZING.

The next step is to decide which type of juice you want to ferment. Grape juice, cranberry juice, muscadine, and cherry are all good starter choices. The first 3 should produce a rather normal tasting wine while cherries usually will give you a sweeter wine. Of course, you can always add sugar to sweeten your wine after it is stabilized and has stopped fermenting.

The next step is to completely sterilize all of the containers and equipment you will be using. Some people use extremely hot water, others recommend using a sanitizer. I like the sanitizer because you do not have to scald yourself with the hot water. The sanitizing solution should be poured over everything and should make contact with all surfaces. Then you just rinse everything off with hot water.

Put your juice in your 5 gallon bucket - that's the next step. BUT - it's not time to put your yeast in yet.

We first want to sterilize our "must" or our juice. You can do this with 4 Campden Tablets. These are sulfite tablets that will get rid of any type of bacteria that could be present in the juice. Crush the tablets and then dissolve them in some warm water and then pour them in your juice or "must". Let this sit overnight while the sulfites do their work.

24 hours later, you are ready to sprinkle in or "pitch" your yeast.

The type of yeast you decide to use is really a question that is beyond the scope of this article. However, I'll say that there are hundreds of different yeast strains for literally thousands of different uses. For our first batch, we can just use the bakers yeast that you can easily find at the grocery store. Later, and after some research, you will probably want to use one of the specialized strains.

Now - wait 7 days and watch. you will want to cover your bucket with a cloth towel or even put on a lid with an airlock in place. The wine will be perfectly safe during the fermentation stage because it will give off lots of Carbon Dioxide. The Co2 will protect your wine from the oxygen in the air.

Once the 7 days has passed, siphon off the wine from the bucket into another bucket or into a glass "carboy". These can be found online or at your local wineshop. When you are doing the siphoning, you will want to get as little of the gunk on the bottom of the bucket as possible. This gunk is called "lees" and is made up of dead yeast. Wine that sits on top of the dead yeast sometimes can develop an "off" flavor.

Once your wine has been transferred into what is called your "secondary fermenter", then you will want to put an airlock in place and just let it sit for about a month. There's a song about this part - "The Waiting is the Hardest Part". It's true. Every budding home winemaker just cannot wait to taste the stuff - but - don't do it. It surely won't hurt you but during this month it is still fermenting. The wine isn't finished yet. Be Patient.

After the month is up, you will want to transfer it back to your bucket, again making sure that you leave the gunk on the bottom. The process of transferring the wine from one vessel to another is called "racking". Why? That's something I am going to research for another article.

You are just about there. Theres only one thing left to do and that is to add a "stablizer" to your wine. A stabilizer inhibits yeast reproduction. In essence, it stops yeast from doing it's thing. Part of what happens during yeast growth and reproduction is that it releases Co2 gas. If that is happening after you bottle the wine, you will get popped corks or exploded bottles or both. So - put in the stabilizer, stir the wine well, and then return it to your Secondary Carboy fermentation vessel. Be sure and clean out the secondary and sterilize it before you do.

Now, all you have to do at this point is wait until the wine clears. Gravity is your friend here. Of course, it won't hurt a bit to bottle cloudy wine. But if you wait another month, it should be crystal clear. The clearing process is another subject that you can find a great deal of information on in other guides and books and I suggest you read up on this subject when you get a chance.

Bottling time! All you have to do is make sure your bottles are clean and sanitized and just siphon the wine into the bottles. Corking the bottles can be a little difficult and i highly recommend you get some king of corker. Again, these are available online or at your local wine shop.

Now - BE PATIENT and let the wine sit in the bottle for 6 to 9 months. The longer the wine ages, the better it will taste - I guarantee it. Happy winemaking!

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Homemade Wine : How to Make Wine ?

Homemade wine making is fast becoming very popular across the world. There are several reasons for this.

The biggest one is that the cost to transport that yummy nectar from where they grow, harvest, and ferment it is going up right along with the cost of fuel. There's no two ways around it - we are about to see bottles of wine at the grocery store and wine shops double.

In the last year, there has been a flurry of "How To" guides crop up around the internet. All of the guides are helpful and at least can get a beginner started.

The truth is, you can make high quality wine, award winning wine, at home, in a 5 gallon food bucket.

Some preparation and materials are required. You have to at least have a hydrometer. You need at least the 5 gallon bucket. AND - you need some kind of near air tight secondary fermentation vessel. In the industry we call this a "carbouy".

There are very inexpensive airlocks and some plastic tubing to round out the equipment.

Some chemicals may be required as well. Yeast is an obvious first one (not really a chemical but a dormant microbe). Citric acid, potassium sorbate, metabisulfate, campden tablets, pectin enzyme and a few others are pretty common.

The biggest secret in home wine making is: get the good stuff to start with.

There are actually vineyards that will sell small quantities of grapes or even crushed grapes and juices, fresh from the vineyard. Although these are hard to locate, they do exist. I have found at least one wine making guide that lists these sources.

Aside from the money savings (you can make wine for about 25 cents a bottle), there is the actual enjoyment of making something that you can drink! 

If your batch comes out really good, you will be calling all your neighbors and friends to come and give it a try.

Cheers and happy wine making!

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Crush the Stock Market Without Trading Stocks

Do you look at the stock market and wish you'd bought some Google stock back when it was first offered for $104?  You'd have gained nearly 300% on that investment in the first year - that's roughly 9.2% each month!  That's a Wall Street level of success!

Imagine if I could show you an investment opportunity that could easily give you over 14% monthly?  What if 21.5% per month was within reach?  These yearly returns of anywhere from 500% to 1000% are possible for anyone who has the initiative to go out and get them.  That's 2-4X MORE than GOOGLE, one of the fastest growing stocks IN HISTORY!  We're talking about an investment opportunity where your returns will crush even the top gainers of the stock market.  Are you starting to get curious about how these numbers are attainable?

You can beat the stock game by playing a different game, the Foreign Exchange trading game.  Also referred to as Forex, the Foreign Exchange market is where one country's currency is traded for another's.  You can buy €1100 Euros for $1000 US Dollars while the exchange rate is at 1.1 Euros/Dollar.  Then you can sell the Euros back to dollars for $1100 (and a nice $100 profit) if the exchange rate moves to 1 Euro/Dollar.

$100 may be nice, but that 1% return on the $1000 doesn't sound like the path to your 500% returns, does it?  Here's how that 1% gets its power:  Leverage.  With Forex, if you have $300 in your account, you can control a $10,000 trade.  That makes your money a lot more powerful than the $1-$1 control you get in the stock market!  If you're thinking that you can lose more money this way too, just read on, you'll learn why that won't happen.

Consider this:  The Foreign Exchange market has a DAILY trading volume of around $1.5 trillion dollars.  That's 30 times larger than the combined volume of all U.S. equity markets (that includes the NASDAQ and NYSE).  This is an untapped resource, and you're about to learn five simple steps towards taking your share out of that market and into your pocket.

1. Get Educated!

As with all things, the more you know about trading, the more likely you are to success.  A little effort spent learning up front can save you hundreds and thousands of dollars of mistakes later.

2. Have a Strategy!

A simple repeatable system can turn trading into a low-risk mechanical system.  Know when you should trade, how often you should trade, how much money to spend per trade, when to cut your losses, and when to take your profits.  Push the right buttons at the right times, and you'll make money.

3. Practice Makes Perfect!

Most Forex brokers will allow you to sign up for a practice account, where you can trade imaginary money until you've solidified your winning strategy.  Don't risk your hard-earned cash until you've proven that you'll succeed

4. Scrape Together $300

That's 2 months of brown-bagging lunch instead of buying it; or a few months of cutting down on the daily coffee-shop visits.  If you start now, by the time you've learned a strategy and perfected it on your practice account, you'll be ready with your $300 to start earning real money.  More money is always better, but $300 is the minimum you'll need to get started.

5. Go Out and Succeed!

By the time you get to Step 5, you KNOW you will succeed, and you'll spring out of bed every day ready to make your profit.  Some days you'll lose a little money, but you won't worry.  Your strategy allows you to lose a little money from time to time; you proved that losing money periodically wasn't the end of the world when you practiced; you'll get up tomorrow and make it back by following your proven strategy.

Starting with your $300, if you made "Google Gains", you'd have $862 in a year.  That's not bad.  With Forex gains, though, you could easily turn your $300 into $1500-$3000 in a year!  Who need the stock market?!?

Saving the best for last, here's the shocking truth:  The 500-1000% yearly returns are possible, but with a smarter strategy you could turn your $300 into over $10,000 in less than a year without increasing your risks!  Best of all, you can do all of this over the Internet without leaving home.  That's 3000% while wearing pajamas.  With these kinds of returns, you could realistically quit your job and trade full-time!

If you could use more money if your life (and lets face it, we all can), you owe it to yourself to learn more about Foreign Exchange trading.

Learn more about the Ten Steps To Profitable Trading, the best trading strategy at http://besttradingstrategy.com