Is storing food in plastic bad for your health?

I consider myself somewhere in the middle when it comes to being green and up to speed on the latest healthy practices. By that I mean, I am way behind folks who seem to have known about certain health risks and green issues for years and are part of a whole subculture who are really up-to-speed on these things. On the other hand, I am ahead of any of many folks I personally know who are surprised when I tell them things like coconut oil is good and canola is bad.

Anyway, my point is that I believe I am jumping on the "plastics are bad" bandwagon now. This is going to be a weird change since I store pretty much all of my food in plastic bags and my boyfriend and I bring our lunches to work every day in plastic and I even microwave in plastic.

I recently read Jillian Michaels' "Master Your Metabolism". I was NOT expecting her to go off on so many every day practices that she and many folks believe are disrupting and hurting our bodies. I was really scared away by many of her suggestions that seem like drastic changes. I really needed time to let it sink in and do some more research. One of these include the use of plastics for food storage and heating.

So, what is wrong with plastic? I am very new to this but I'll give you a teaser. Apparently some types of plastic leach chemicals and other bad things into our food, especially when used to microwave or when storing fats. These things can can have all kinds of effects from disrupting your hormones to causing cancer.

You don't have to eliminate all plastics for food immediately; I personally am going to try to do this gradually. Here are some immediate things we can do:

• Do not microwave any foods in plastic. Use glass or ceramic instead.
• Check the bottom of your plastic containers and look for the recycling code. If it says 3 or 7, stop using them for food.
• Start using glass, stainless steel, and wax paper storage products. If you drink a lot of water on the go, get a stainless steel water bottle.
• Check out the resources below and search for more info. Decide whether you want to take more steps to reduce or eliminate your use of plastics or buy special plastics.

Resources:

• http://www.care2.com/greenliving/kitchen-plastic-easy-greening.html
• http://www.care2.com/greenliving/safe-plastics-for-lunchboxes.html
• http://www.thegreenguide.com/buying-guide/plastic-containers
• http://lifewithoutplastic.com/
• http://preserveproducts.com/index.html
• http://www.pyrexware.com/
• http://www.amazon.com/Master-Your-Metabolism-Naturally-Balancing/dp/0307450732
• http://www.greenfeet.com/itemdesc.asp?kw=Wax-Paper-Bags-Unbleached-60ct&ic=6006-00009-0000&eq=

Delicious Birthday

I had a wonderful birthday. My boyfriend made it truly special and I am very lucky to have him. He not only puts up with me.. he makes life more and more amazing with each passing day, week, and year we are together. : )

The day started out with breakfast in bed, followed by a nap, then a 6 mile hike through the Santa Monica mountains, followed by dinner at Yamashiro. I had never heard of the place but it's this really cute Japanese-inspired Cal-pan-Asian restaurant in the Hollywood hills. It was awesome!

Hanging Rock, Santa Monica Mountains





View from Insiration Point, Backbone Trail, Santa Monica Mountains


Mango martini... so delicious!!


Spicy tuna and snow crab napolean. A refreshing, pimped out version of tuna tartare. The arugula on the side had a delicious dressing.


Asian baby back ribs with five-spice cornbread and mashed sweet potatoes. The meat just fell of the bone. I loved the Asian flavors in the BBQ sauce.

I liked this dish the most. The black cod was cooked to buttery perfection and the wasabi mashed potatoes were amazing.

Ice cream sandwich! Warm chocolate peanut-butter cookies with dulce de leche ice cream, toasted walnuts, and chocolate and caramel sauces. Loved these flavor combos.. especially the nuts with the sauces.

I didn't know they were going to bring this too! Light cake with tasty strawberry sauce.

Sweet lounge over looking a pool. Not sure who swims in it.

Beautiful views of the city.

Beautiful Rose

This is my favorite kind of rose.. Yellow in the middle and then it
fades out to orange and pink. Can't believe how nice this looks even on the iPhone.

Johnny Cupcakes is Here!

I am so excited about the new Johnny Cupcakes store on Melrose. They sell sweet T-shirts (no real cupcakes). Check out the pictures of the store! There are antique oven doors that shoot out steam, a neon-looking stove top, oh, and of course, t-shirts.

Johnny Cupcakes is Coming to LA!

You might think Johnny Cupcakes sells cupcakes.. they don't. But they do sell wicked cool t-shirts. Johnny's a college drop-out from Boston who decided to make a few funny t-shirts as a joke. That was in 2001 and today the t-shirts are a cult following. First opened on Newbury St. (as close as you can get to a Rodeo drive in Boston) they are now opening a store in May on Melrose near Kid Robot and some of the other fun clothing stores. I'm pretty excited about it.

There are some really good things about Johnny's company: they make everything in the U.S. in small batches and they don't sell to big chain stores. Everything is quality and limited edition. If I had known this before I would have bought the t-shirt I had my eye on .. a cupcake moving through a large intestine, sweet!! For now, we'll have to choose from what they have available.

My new MP3 player

I know this doesn't have to do with food but I just bought a new mp3 player and it is so sweet I had to tell you about it. It's called the Sansa Clip and it's perfect for working out in between eating cupcakes and Chinese food. It's so light and tiny that you can clip it to your t-shirt when running and not feel a thing. You can load music and audiobooks and it even has an FM tuner with 40 programmable pre-sets. Plus it has a voice recorder should you need it. The only downside of this player is it only holds 2 mg, but that's about 500 songs and enough for me.

The best thing about it for me is that it works with Rhapsody to Go. This is a music services that lets you put any music you want onto specific devices (like this one) for a monthly subscription price of $15. If you usually buy one CD a month, then it's totally worth it. You can listen to new music to see if you like it before buying or find old tunes you had forgotten about. They even have Rhapsody channels, a mix of songs you can download based on genres or artists you like.. it's a great way to find new music. If you want to listen to unlimited tunes on your computer, that's just $10 a month. There are even ways to stream it to your stereo with special wireless adapters and other devices. Check it out!

New colour palette

I'm not sure if anyone notices, but I often change the colors on my blog. Since I've recently become addicted to colourlovers.com, I thought, why not use a nice palette from the thousands available there? So, I chose the palette called "Easily Fooled" by the user "museful". Let me know if you like it.

You can check out my latest colors, palettes and patterns right here.

All my little sushi images and such are also missing right now. You see, there was a little incident with my web hosting company and now I am in the process of setting up a new place to keep all my images and stuff. In the mean time, I'll see if I can find some little images that someone wont mind me linking to. (For all you folks who dont understand what I just said, it's not that important.)

And now for something completely different

I guess I could kind of relate this post to the idea that I want to give this blog a new look. It's gonna be funky retro sweet. In the mean time, I need to figure out how to design the graphics I want.

I've been checking out this website for a while: colourlovers.com. It's basically a community for people who love colors, and now they have patterns as well. You can check out color palettes other people have made or make your own.

I made a pattern called shogun, (shown here) and it's based on the early Autumn foliage I saw in Japan. I guess there are so many colors in the spectrum that 3 of the ones I used have not been used on the site before... so they let me name them! That was fun. Anyway, check out my page on there.

I encourage you to make your own. It's fun and easy and no design skills are required.

Cake Mania

I wish I was talking about real cakes right now. Sadly, I am stuck in bed recovering from surgery. So, the only cakes I'll be making are in Cake Mania, the addictive PC game. You can try it out for free.. so give it a shot! The worst that can happen is a little wasted time. But then again fun is never a waste : )

Cake-Mania.com

P.S. If you need tips or have questions about it, feel free to use the comment area here.

A Journey of a Million Miles..

One of my favorite quotes of all time I actually heard in an episode of Roseanne, one of my favorite TV programs of all time. It is: "A Journey of a Million Miles Begins with One Step." It was said by Jacqui, Roseanne's skinny and loveably messed up sister. Not that a blog should seem like a million miles, something insanely daunting and not fun, but somehow it seemed like a good start to things. Basically, this will be my food blog. I know, I know, who needs another food blog? No one does, that's who. But I felt the need to create one because I love food. I also like reading a few blogs. So, maybe this will be fun.

I was going to make a blog about healthy food, but not everything I want to post would technically be "healthy" (whatever that is). So, I thought "happy" would be a better word to use. So, some things are healthy, some are not, but all of them should be yummy and all of them should make you happy, like a rainbow makes you happy* (* If a rainbow doesn't make you happy, then you might have some problems).

Some of the posts and photos will be food from local establishments. I live on LA's west side, and there is a lot of good food here. One can only try to to refrain from taking a picture of her plate with her Hello Kitty pink bling cell phone to the utter dismay of her dining companions. But, it needs to be done. Some of the food will be stuff I make, in which case I will certainly post the recipe IF I can remember what I put in it by the time I am done. I wouldn't want to post some shoddy estimate and have you try it and then post nasty comments in my fresh new blog.

Well, I am off!

Amendment 1: Sometimes I will post about other things just because I feel like it.
Amendment 2: I am fully aware that there are lots of great moderate to expensive priced restaurants in my area. I purposely write about the lower to moderate costing ones. I don't think I am cheap, and I am not poor. I just think you shouldn't have to spend too much to eat great food. We go to fancy restaurants on birthdays, anniversaries, times like that. Plus, don't you think it's more of a challenge finding affordable yummies?