The best way to enjoy these excellent samosas is to prepare them freshly at home. I have found some great recipes on the Cooking channel available on Comcast Cable. Cooking at home allows you to control the amount of heat in the spices you select.  You can be very creative with the base filling, consisting of the potato mixture.  You will also be the envy of your friends, who will want to be invited over for this Indian delicacy as often as they can persuade you to invite them.  Here is a video by an experienced Indian cook to get your started!

Here, you’ll see several examples of what to do when things aren’t turning out right with your baking.  What happens if your cookies stick, or the oven doesn’t maintain a consistent temperature throughout as you are baking?  How can you counter a bread emergency?  Unfortunately, many people don’t know what to do when the unexpected arises during baking.  Lots of times, they toss out the lopsided loaf of bread or the underdone inside/burnt outside cookies and just give up out of frustration.  But baking well is a worthwhile pursuit, and you don’t have to let those minor setbacks deter you from becoming a great baker.  Check this out for ideas of how to save the day when your baking takes a turn for the worst:

In the video you are about to watch, author Lierre Keith is interviewed, explaining her reasoning behind her point of view not only for human health, but that of the planet and its ecosystems.  Let us know what you think.

No matter the reason a person chooses to be vegetarian, nearly all vegetarians tend towards better overall health as measured by popular markers such as total cholesterol and triglycerides.  There is also less occurrence of diseases of the heart and circulatory systems, probably owing to the lack of animal products that build up cholesterol in the arteries, leading to such complications in many meat eaters.  Vegetarians who eat healthily also report less diabetes than non vegetarians.  In this infographic you can see some of the many benefits of eating a healthy vegetarian diet:

So, enjoy the video below.  This is not my kind of cuisine by any means, but it does illustrate how the other half live, if you know what I mean.

Now, Clinton considers himself a vegan. After dropping about 28 pounds, the former US president says he has more energy and is in better health than he has ever been in his entire life. It didn’t happen overnight, but two heart procedures and nearly twenty years later, Clinton now follows strictly the diet that former first lady Hillary Clinton put into action after consulting with Dr. Dean Ornish, who worked with White House chefs to design meals that would help reverse her husband’s heart disease.

Here is a remarkable video detailing the transformation, and outlining the secrets of Clinton’s success.

Alright, that’s a bit extreme, especially when cooking your own vegetables is actually easy, fun, and rewarding.  There’s no real reason not to dive in and have a go at it, but you really should follow some expert advice if you want to avoid being permanently turned off at the prospect of eating your veggies.

Here is a great video that explains how to properly sautee your vegetables for the greatest consistency and flavor.  Learn a little something here, then take it to your kitchen.

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Drying: Drying tomatoes is incredibly easy and rewarding. All you need is your oven and a little bit of patience to get great dried tomatoes. Plum and Roma tomatoes work most successfully with the oven technique. Slice the tomatoes in halves lengthwise. Place them cut side up on a baking sheet and  bake at 200 degrees for 2 to 3 hours — until they look slightly parched, and shriveled around the edges. These can be used instead of sun dried tomatoes.

Grilling: Firm and large tomatoes, sliced about 1/2 inch thick can be brushed with olive oil. Cook on a heated grill on both sides until the edges turn brown, about 5 to 8 minutes. Try using a mesh-style grill topper, since tomatoes tend to get really soft on the grill. Cherry tomatoes are perfect for grilled kebabs.

Pureeing: Puree large chunks of tomatoes in a blender or food processor. It doesn’t get any simpler than that!

Seeding: To get the seeds out of a tomato when some recipe calls for seeding, just scoop out the seeds with a small spoon.

Skinning: To get the skin or peel off a tomato, you need to plunge it into boiling water for 10 seconds, then let them cool. After the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, the skins slide off easily.

Those are some great tips for keeping tomato season year round.

Aside from convenience, there are a lot of other excellent reasons to make the switch to a plant based vegetarian or even vegan diet.  Here is an infographic I found with some sweet benefits that come with adopting a mostly fruit and vegetable diet that is also low in fat.

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Firstly, while in zoos, the gorillas are fed a diet of processed foods that are high in starch and sugar, and low in real vegetables.  It’s cheaper to feed them those types of foods.  Unfortunately, those foods do not mimic the effects of the natural diet of gorillas in the wild, which does consist of real vegetables and fruits — not the processed “Frankenfoods” American human beings have adopted, similarly, instead of natural options.

When a researcher decided to do something about the gorillas’ health problems, the goal was simple:  restore the gorillas’ natural, real plants based diet.  The gorillas would be given plant based whole foods, rather than those loaded with sugar and starch that more closely resembled the unhealthy diet of American men and women.  The results of this informal study speak for themselves.  After one year on their new high-vegetable, low-processed-food diet, the gorillas are now thin and healthy.  Heart disease has been reversed.  Each one lost and average of 65 pounds after their plant-based switch, while consuming twice the calories they did before.  The behavior incidence and frequency of gorilla behavioral problems was noted to undergo a noteworthy decline as well.

Animal rights activists would like to see more, if not all, gorillas who are kept in zoos placed on this healthy diet.

I, while not an animal rights activist, am a human rights activist.  I think it’s time we humans took some lessons from nature and incorporated the successful strategies for ourselves.  If humans were to switch over to a largely plant based diet, then there is evidence that heart disease will be reversed and eliminated altogether.