Get the entire set here: Minnesota State Fair Bingo Cards

Now that looks like a perfect week! Too bad I am stuck inside most of the day…

Eat real foods

Take care of your digestive tract

Grilled Tandoori Chicken

Ingredients:
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1T lemon juice
1/2 small onion
2-3 garlic cloves
1 inch piece of ginger
2 tsp garam masala
1 T paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (or to taste)
salt to taste
~2 pounds chicken breast, cut into 1 inch pieces

1. Place onion, garlic and ginger in mini food processor. Pulse. Mix with yogurt, lemon juice and spices.
2. Place the chicken in a freezer bag along with the marinade and marinate in the fridge for at least about an hour.
3. Remove the chicken from the fridge and let it come to room temperature.
3. Skewer chicken – adding veggies if you wish.
4. Grill the chicken until cooked, about 3-5 minutes per side.

The chicken has a nice spicy Indian flavor after it is cooked. I like to make it into a chicken salad: I chop up the chicken and roasted vegetables, mix with greek yogurt, lime juice, a bit of sugar, cilantro, chopped celery and hard boiled eggs.

I also did some random cooking to use up a bunch of food that was getting old in the fridge. I had a couple packages of Target brand chicken sausage, a third of a head of cabbage, some tomato sauce, carrots, and spinach. So I made this:

Spinach and Garlic Chicken Sausage with Cabbage

Sweet and Yukon Gold tomatoes ready to roast. Also you see the yogurt I made straining through cheesecloth

Italian Chicken Sausage and Spinach

In order to emulate the popular iPhone apps we decide to use jQtouch (good basic how-to article). It does a good job of wrapping most of the touch events, making a smooth looking site on iPhone and other touch devices. We were able to take advantage of a few HTML5 (the “placeholder” attribute) and CSS3 (border-radius and gradients) features which was fun. I was able to test and debug the site using Safari (developer tools allow you to emulate iPhone) and my Android phone.

Everything was coming together nicely until I had to test on the Blackberry. After overcoming the challenge of installing the Blackberry MDS service and a couple device emulators I was finally able to do some testing of my mobile website on the Blackberry browser. I had 3 devices I was using to test (client is in Canada, these are 3 of the popular Blackberrys offered by Rogers): Bold 9000, Curve 8900, and Curve 8520. I was surprised at the differences in html and css rendering across these devices, despite the fact they are all running 4.6 version of the Blackberry browser.

Here are a few of the things I learned about making a mobile website that can be used on a Blackberry device:

• Give inputs size attributes (both the Bold 9000 and the Curve 8900 required this)
• Buttons – use padding and margin (the Bold would not center align text)
• Images cannot have width: 100%
• Float right = bad. Use absolute positioning instead
• Text areas – sigh, still not sure what will work to make them scale nicely
• Use <meta content=”true” /> – tells the browser you have optimized the site for handheld devices
• If you are using XHTML – ensure that your HTML validates. Or use

 <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Update: This could be handy: CSS3 media queries

Soaking grains/legumes:
Traditional Preparation Methods Improve Grains’ Nutritive Value
by Stephan Guyenet (one of my favorite blogs, although it can get quite deep at time) is one of the most rounded and well-researched articles I have read about why and how we should soak grains and legumes (although the bit about oatmeal has me confused). Since soaking, sprouting and grinding flour for bread is a bit much for me, we mostly eat Ezekiel Bread.

You get what you pay for: Good Food is Not (Only) a Class Issue at Simple, Good and Tasty is a nice write up on how Americans in general feel about food. My favorite quote:

“When it comes to most things, we believe we get what we pay for. Shoes, clothes, cars … but when it comes to food, we don’t believe that. Most of us have a more intimate relationship with our hair cutter than we do with our farmer.” – Joel Salatin

We’ve come to think of cheap food as our right, and the idea of paying more when we could pay less seems silly, almost un-American. We’re saving our money for the things we think are really important, like cable TV and betting on football games.

Not saying we need to get out an become friendly with area farmers (although that probably wouldn’t hurt) but we need to put a higher value on the food we put in our bodies. There are so many good points in the article – go read it now.

Have Seed Oils Caused a Multi-Generational Obesity Epidemic? The title says it all; another great article from Stephan at Whole Health Source.

In 2009, Dr. Ingeborg Hanbauer published a paper showing that when mice are fed a diet with a poor omega-6:3 balance (77:1), after three generations they develop adult obesity (5). Mice fed the same diet with a better omega-6:3 balance (9.5:1) did not develop obesity, and remained smaller overall.

Articles about fat not making us fat have been floating around a lot in the past month or so, but I love how Charlotte at The Great Fitness Experiment sums it up and shares her feelings on the matter. My favorite quote:

“Stampfer’s findings do not merely suggest that saturated fats are not so bad; they indicate that carbohydrates could be worse.” The article goes on to discuss research that shows that eating a diet high in refined, processed carbohydrates is correlated with heart disease.