Oven Roasted Organic Garlic Recipe

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Claudia Beck, Artist and Organic Living Aficionado
Oven Roasted Organic Garlic Recipe

Organic roasted garlic is delicious and nutritious.

From Simple Savory Recipes & Cooking Tips

This basic ingredient recipe is easy to prepare and to cook. You can roast extra garlic to use in your recipes throughout the week. Organic roasted garlic will last for a week in the refrigerator — simply store in a sealed glass jar in the refrigerator and it will be ready for use whenever you need it.

Organic garlic is a tasty and nutritious addition to many dishes. When roasted, it becomes tender and amazingly sweet, thus organic roasted garlic is absolutely scrumptious eaten just as is — straight out of the oven while warm, literally melting in your mouth. Mmmmm… can’t you just taste it already?!?!

Roasted organic garlic makes a very versatile topping or add-in to salads and other sides like rice dishes and potatoes. It is also a flavorful addition to a multitude of main dishes. It is particularly useful as an ingredient in quick cooking recipes, where the cooking time is not always lengthy enough to allow raw organic garlic to cook until soft and infuse flavor into the dish.

Oven Roasted Organic Garlic Recipe

Ingredients you’ll need:

  • 4 or more organic garlic heads, with all very loose skins peeled off
  • organic olive oil

Tools you’ll need:

  • glass baking dish or pie pan
  • cutting board
  • knife
  • preheated oven to 350°

Time you’ll need for prep, baking and securing for storage:

  • 1 ½ hours

Steps:

1.) Slice 1/4″ off of the tops of each head of garlic.

2.) Place garlic heads top side up close together in baking dish and drizzle olive oil all over each head. Be sure that you drench each exposed clove.

3.) Bake in 350° oven 30 – 45 minutes or until soft when pressed. Can also poke small fork into clove to test softness.

4.) Remove from oven when done and let sit until garlic heads are cool to the touch.

Be forewarned, this next step is slightly messy because your fingers will get covered in olive oil. But that’s okay, if you’re the one doing this job you can snitch all the warm, roasted garlic you want And believe me, you’ll want to! 🙂

Once garlic is cool enough, gently peel outer layers of skin away from head. Then use a small fork or tip of a paring knife and a light squeeze with fingers to carefully remove each clove from skin. Use your paring knife to make a vertical slice in skin if needed to help remove cloves. Many cloves will simply slip right on out when gently squeezed from the bottom.

When you are finished with step 4, you will have a lovely, fragrant pile of delicious organic roasted garlic cloves (providing you didn’t eat them all as you were peeling them! 🙂 )

5.) Use in recipes as desired and place the balance in a glass jar to be stored in your refrigerator up to 7 days for later use and consumption.

Curious about where to purchase organic garlic? We’ve got you covered. You can easily order it from our online Farmer’s Market, Garden Fresh Co-op. It will be delivered right to your front door, plus you can choose from all sorts of other fresh organic vegetables, fruits and herbs to be shipped direct to you too!

Just visit our website at: http://gardenfreshco-op.com, create your free account and follow the links for more information.

If you try out this recipe, we would love to read your Comments here about how you used the savory, roasted organic garlic in your fare.

Bon appétit!

Filed under: Organic Health & Nutrition, Organic Living, Organic Recipes and Ingredients, Politically Organic | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Fake Chinese organics try to slip into US market

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Garden Fresh Co-op LLC

(NaturalNews) There seems to be no shortage of fraud coming out of China these days, with a recent report issued by the non-profit Cornucopia Institute (CI) stating that a certain Chinese agricultural supplier has attempted to export fake organic products into the U.S. The report states that the supplier forged fake organic certification documents in an effort to capitalize on the large and growing U.S. market for organic products.

According to the report, the Chinese agricultural marketer attempted to sneak non-organic products into the U.S. using fake certifications that appeared to be issued by the National Organic Program (NOP), the official USDA certification standard for organics. The supplier also forged the name of a French USDA accredited certifying agency in the documents as well.

“Unfortunately, this incident … serves as a stark reminder that imports from China are fraught with peril,” said Mark A. Kastel, co-director of CI. Charlotte Vallaeys, lead author of the report, added that the incident “illustrates why so many responsible processors and marketers in the organic industry shun organic imports.”

The announcement comes at the same time as another recent media report has been issued concerning Chinese companies mass producing and selling fake, plastic rice and this is all on top of numerous other Chinese cases of melamine contamination of food, fake drugs, and toxic farmed fish that have all made headlines in recent years.

Many are urging the USDA to take a more active approach in ensuring that anything coming from China, especially food products that are supposedly organic, be fully inspected and regulated. Some are even calling for an immediate moratorium on all organic imports from China.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031378_organics_China.html#ixzz1FTzPiWPH

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Where Will the Food Come From!

Posted on February 20, 2011 by Garden Fresh Co-op LLC

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an “unrecognizable” world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday. The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, “with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia,” said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, “we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000,” said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). “By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable” if current trends continue, Clay said. The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.

But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years — tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations — and add more strain to global food supplies. People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.

It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP. “More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet,” Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.

Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations. “For 20 years, there’s been very little investment in family planning, but there’s a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices,” said Bongaarts. “We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning,” said Casterline.

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You Need 10 Servings of Vegetables to Equal Just One Serving from 50 Years Ago!

Posted on February 12, 2011 by mjcash

Several excerpts from a very informative email I just received – by Jeannette Leduc at OrganicsPlus

You Need 10 Servings of Vegetables to Equal Just One Serving from 50 Years Ago!1

  • Just One of the Vital Minerals Lost was Regulating More than 300 Critical Body Functions.
  • The Same Thing Is Happening to Your Fruit.
  • And, It’s Getting Worse…

These days, the produce you buy at your local grocery store just doesn’t have the nutritional power that fruits and vegetables had just a few decades ago. Over farming, soil depletion, commercial fertilizer, hybrid crops and genetic modifications are slashing the nutrients found in your fruits and vegetables.

You’d have to eat 10 servings of spinach to get the same level of minerals from just one serving about 50 years ago.2

Producers create “hybrid” forms of your fruits and vegetables – not for their ability to store nutrients – but for their color, weight and shelve life. Why? So they’ll look nice and pretty when they sit under the fluorescent lights of your supermarket.

You may think they look nutritious, but “under the hood,” they contain little more than indigestible cellulose, sugar and water…..(snip)

Your Food Supply has Changed:
You’re Eating Fruit with No Vitamins… Vegetables with No Minerals…

We first began to know that there was a problem back in 1936. A group of doctors introduced Document No. 264 to the floor of the United States Senate. It was a dire warning that the mineral content of the soil was eroding. Vegetables were losing their power and people were at risk. Unfortunately Congress did nothing.

Today, we’re feeling the effects…

For instance, just look at the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) nutritional values for fruits and vegetables today compared to 1975.3

Take a look at the loss of vitamins and minerals Since 1975:

  • Apples, vitamin A is down 41%
  • Sweet peppers, vitamin C is down 31%
  • Watercress, iron is down 88%
  • Broccoli, Calcium and vitamin A are down 50%
  • Cauliflower, vitamin C is down 45%; vitamin B1 is down 48%; and vitamin B2 is down 47%
  • Collards greens, vitamin A is down 45%; potassium is down 60%; and magnesium is down 85%

According to USDA’s own numbers, the vitamin and mineral content has dramatically plummeted – in just 30 years!

Notice minerals like iron and magnesium have dropped by more than 80 percent. That’s from commercial farming technology and powerful fertilizers that practically sterilize the soil – leaving it with little to no mineral content.

If the soil doesn’t have minerals, there’s no way for vegetables to absorb them.

And that’s bad news for your health… Magnesium regulates over 300 body functions every day and is so critical to heart health and healthy glucose metabolism.*

But the story doesn’t end there. I wasn’t the only one to realize your fruits and vegetables don’t pack the nutritional punch they used to… A report from the University of Texas in Austin, also tracked the decline of nutrients in produce.

They reported findings at a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis. They found significant drops in a wide range of produce across the board, including a  20 percent decline in vitamin C and a 38 percent plunge in vitamin B2.

What’s worse, fruit and vegetable growers create “hybrids” for the sake of making their produce “look better.” They actually create new versions of all your favorites so they have more water, more sugar, more pith (The indigestible support tissue like the white fibrous netting around an orange section) and less of everything else.

Growers call this the “dilution effect.” For them, more water and more pith helps their produce ship well, look good and weigh a lot. But it virtually wipes out their vitamin and mineral content.

The plunge in nutrients in your produce over the last 30 to 50 years is bad enough. But it is rapidly getting much worse. Genetic hybrids are pushing nutrient values even lower.

A popular broccoli hybrid called “Marathon” is an alarming example:

By the USDA’s own admission, levels of calcium and magnesium in the Marathon hybrid are 35 percent lower than other hybrids. The hybrids themselves are 50 percent lower in calcium and magnesium than “normal” broccoli. And the “normal” broccoli has less than half the calcium and magnesium than broccoli did in 1975!

In less than 50 years, the mineral, vitamin and antioxidant value native to fruits and vegetables has been virtually “destroyed” – robbing you of the natural vital nutrients you need every day….(snip)

You Have Over 280 Deadly Chemicals and Toxins Flowing through Your Blood – And they’ve Been there Since the Day You Were Born…

Living in the 21st century affords you many luxuries. High-speed computers… cell phones… air conditioning and plasma TVs… but the chemicals and industrial solvents that make them possible are poisonous. And they’re flowing through your blood as you read this letter.

In 2005, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group published the results of a sobering study. After analyzing the blood of newborn babies from around the country, they discovered 287 chemicals and other toxins.5 One of the pesticides that turned up the most was a by-product of DDT – a pesticide banned in 1972.

They also found:

  • 76 chemicals that damage cells in humans and animals.
  • 94 that are toxic to the brain and nervous system.
  • 79 that are toxic to a developing fetus.

At this point in history, we’re being poisoned before we take our first breath! But this is not limited to newborns. Not too long ago, PBS aired a Bill Moyers special called “Trade Secrets: A Moyers Report.” In it, Bill Moyers volunteered to have his blood and urine tested for chemical and toxic threats.6

The results were not surprising: Eighty-four distinct chemicals, solvents and toxins that are known to be harmful to your health. These chemical residues – termed the “chemical body burden” – are present in every human being on this planet, regardless of where you live or what you do.

Dr. Michael McCally of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who led the research team for the Bill Moyers report made this comment: “Current ‘normal’ body burdens of dioxin and several other [chemicals] in humans are at or near the range at which toxic effects occur in laboratory animals.”

The message is clear: Studies on animals show that the average person is carrying enough toxins to cause serious DNA damage…..(snip)

To Your Good Health,

Jesse Cannone

1 Heinrich, Elmer. The Root of All Disease.
2 Heinrich, Elmer. The Root of All Disease.
3 Vegetables without Vitamins. Life Extension Magazine. March 2001.
4 Better than Vitamins. Newsweek. April 25, 1994.
5 Environmental Working Group. Body Burden – The Pollution in Newborns. July 14, 2005. http://www.ewg.org.
6 http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/bodyburden.html

The facts presented above really explain why you need to grow your own food to control the variety and quality of seeds grown if you can grow a garden. If not, MyOrganicAcres provides a way for you to have a virtual garden grown for you organically from heritage seed varieties for maximum nutrition and flavour with the produce shipped fresh to you in a couple of days. As a free or basic member of MOA you also can purchase produce from a growing network of organic farms through the Farmer’s Market.

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Why Your Grocery Bill Will Double This Year and What You Can Do About It

Posted on February 11, 2011 by mjcash

By Jeannette Leduc of organicsplus.info

The following website http://www.backyardfoodproduction.com/why-your-grocery-bill-will-double
Explains “Why Your Grocery Bill Will Double this Year and What You Can Do About It”

There is a series of videos capturing a 40 minute presentation given to a standing room only crowd at Brave New Books; in Austin, TX.

Marjory Wildcraft presents:
– Real price increases versus CPI fiction
– The vulnerability of the US food supply
– Debunking the US ‘Bread Basket to the World” myth
– The 3 biggest factors pushing up food prices.
– Getting started with backup food supplies.
– How much land do you need to be food self-reliant.
– How much water do you need.
– Getting started right now! Specific directions for everyone.

It explains very well why you want to have your own garden at MyOrganicAcres if you can not grow your own garden or to supplement what you grow.

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Food Costs Are Increasing!

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Garden Fresh Co-op LLC

MANILA/MILAN (Reuters) – World food prices hit a record in January and recent catastrophic weather around the globe could put yet more pressure on the cost of food, an issue that has already helped spark protests across the Middle East.
Up for the seventh month in a row, the closely watched Food and Agriculture Organization Food Price Index on Thursday touched its highest since records began in 1990, and topped the peak of 224.1 in June 2008, during the food crisis of 2007/08.
“The new figures clearly show that the upward pressure on world food prices is not abating. These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come,” FAO economist and grains expert Abdolreza Abbassian said in a statement.
Surging food prices have come back into the spotlight after they helped fuel the discontent that toppled Tunisia’s president in January and have spilled over to Egypt and Jordan, raising expectations other countries in the region would secure grain stocks to reassure their populations.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick urged global leaders to “put food first” and wake up to the need to curb increased price volatility.
“We are going to be facing a broader trend of increasing commodity prices, including food commodity prices,” he told Reuters in an interview.
SUPPLY THE KEY
A series of weather events hitting key crops is likely to keep up the pressure on food prices as a massive cyclone batters Australia, a major winter storm ravages U.S. crop belts and flooding hits key commodity producer Malaysia.
National Australia Bank agribusiness economist Michael Creed said food markets may take a while to regain equilibrium.

“The broadbased nature of what crops have been wiped out over the past year means that it’s going to take a while to actually rebuild and get production back in line with consumption,” he said.
White sugar futures hit a record high and raw sugar futures rose to their highest in more than 30 years on fears of the damage Cyclone Yasi would bring to the Australian cane crop.
The worst winter storm for decades in the United States drove wheat futures to the highest in nearly 2-1/2 years, and Malaysian palm oil prices are at 3-year highs as flooding hit crops.

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