What is Quinoa? Nutrition Facts and Recipes For Quinoa

Quinoa? What is that?, I asked. Pronounced “Keen-wah”, not Kee-no-wah, quinoa is something I had never heard of until very recently and wanted to find out more. Friends were discussing a website called “Cooking Quinoa“, which has recipes for cooking with quinoa with lots of delicious looking pictures of foods made with it.

Based on everything I’ve read so far about quinoa, its numerous health benefits and the nutritional facts shown on bulk packages I found, adding quinoa to our diet is a smart choice. We’re not vegetarian or vegan by any means, we do enjoy eating lean meats for sure, but we have been reducing our consumption of fatty meats over the last few months.
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Home Canning For Beginners – Canning Books, Equipment and Supplies

Home canning and preserving have been around forever, but I’ve only known a couple of people in my lifetime so far who know how to can. Learning how to can fruits and vegetables grown in our organic garden is a relatively new interest of mine, and it only makes sense to learn as much as possible about the basics of canning in order to can correctly the first time around, hopefully.

Being an avid reader with a thirst for knowledge on many different topics, acquiring books on home canning that explain exactly how home canning is done, the needed canning jars and supplies, and of course a variety of tasty recipes for the canned goods is a must-do for canning beginners like me. Fortunately, technology advances have improved the options available for people wanting to begin canning for the first time, where the “old fashioned” way of canning isn’t the only way anymore.
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Recycling Coffee – 25 Ways to Recycle Coffee Grounds

There are many new and commonly known ways of recycling coffee grounds. Recycled coffee grounds is an effective way to become more eco-friendly by reducing landfill waste and lavish garden plants and vegetables with natural, nutrient-filled compost for gardens. It doesn’t matter what coffee brands you use, and I’ve even heard that using decaffeinated coffee grounds is okay for composting too.

Coffee drinkers who brew their own grounds know that a week’s worth of used grounds add up fast, and there is no better way to dispose of old coffee grounds than to recycle the grounds instead of simply throwing brewed grounds in the trash. We usually brew two pots of coffee each day, which adds up to a lot of used grounds in a weeks time, creating lots of waste.
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Kids In The Kitchen Gooseberry Patch Cookbook Recipes

The Gooseberry Patch cookbook for kids called Kids in the Kitchen includes recipes that kids of all ages, including preschoolers, toddlers and older kids can enjoy the fun of cooking in the kitchen with mom or dad, or even Grandma and Grandpa.

Kids need to be in the kitchen rather than being shooed away, so children can learn the basics of nutrition, healthy food choices, correct portion sizes and much more. Gooseberry Patch cookbooks are not just for adults, and as a Grandma who raised 6 kids and now has two grandchildren, I love the great ideas found in these cookbooks for kids.

Cooking with kids in the kitchen is a fun activity that should be encouraged rather than discouraged. The Kids in the Kitchen: Recipes for Fun cookbook was designed exclusively with little kids in mind, and the list of recipes found in this cookbook will help little chefs want to learn how to cook lots of good food!
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Children’s Books New Releases of Hot New Children’s Books

What are the best brand new children’s books and hot new releases of children’s books for kids? Time will tell if the children’s books listed below will make it on the list of top children’s books of all time or not, but kids love books regardless of whether they are new books or “old” classic books.

USABookNews.com, the premiere online magazine and review website for mainstream and independent publishing houses, announced the winners and finalists of THE NATIONAL “BEST BOOKS 2009″ AWARDS (NBBA) on October 20, 2009. Over 500 winners and finalists were announced in 130 categories covering print and audio books. Awards were presented for titles published in 2009 and late 2008.

Below are the winners and finalists of some of the best new releases of children’s books that are expected to be amongst the most popular children’s books in 2010.
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Top 10 Children’s Books of 2009

One of the best activities grandparents can do with their grandchildren is to read children’s books to them. Of course, as children get older and are able to read books on their own, Grandma and Grandpa can still help teach the importance of reading by having some of the best children’s books of all time available for kids to read.

The New York Times has released a list of what it believes to be the top ten children’s books of 2009, and there are a couple kids books listed here that even I had never heard of, but will definitely take a close look at adding some of these children’s books to our library.

Here is the top 10 children’s books list from the NY Times:
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Getting Out Of Debt On Your Own – Personal Finance Blogs to Help Get Out of Debt

Getting Out Of DebtGrandpa and I have been working hard on getting out of debt, or more specifically, getting out of credit card debt, on our own. Like many other Americans who are dealing with debt from credit cards and/or loans etc, working hard to reduce or eliminate debt from credit cards became our New Year’s Resolution after Christmas last year.

Of course, there is such a thing as good debt, such as paying for a mortgage that creates home equity – which after a period of time allows homeowners to sell their house at a nice profit if the housing market is right for homeowners to sell their home. Right now, the housing market sucks due to the economy, so there’s no way we’d be able to sell our house even if we wanted to, at least not for the kind of money we’d want and need to get for it.

Anyway, in order to help us meet our goals of getting out of debt completely, we made the tough decision to really tighten our financial “belt” so to speak and focus our time and energies on paying off all credit cards and loans as quickly as possible. One debt-inducing expense each year has been the amount of money that is often spent buying Christmas presents for everyone on our xmas list. We are generous gift givers, to a fault.
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Great American Smokeout – November 19, 2009 – Too late, I Quit Smoking Already

Quit SmokingThe Great American Smokeout was held yesterday, November 19, 2009, wherein smokers join together to quit smoking or using tobacco products of any kind at least for the one day. Funny thing is, I already quit smoking and didn’t even know about the “smokeout” until this morning when I heard about it online.

I’ve lost track of how many times I have tried to quit smoking, but nothing seemed to stick. The various stop smoking aids like Chantix pills scare the beejeebers out of me, and the nicotine patch was never something I wanted to try either. Why? Because trying to quit smoking with the “help” of products that have nicotine in them doesn’t make any sense to me. Nicotine addiction is what keeps smokers smoking, so it makes no sense to me to attempt to quit smoking and rid myself of nicodine addiction by continuing to take nicotine into my body.
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