Lemon
Lemons are a staple of many detox diets, and there is good reason for this. Firstly, lemons are packed with antioxidant vitamin C, which is great for the skin and for fighting disease-forming free-radicals. Furthermore, the citrus fruit has an alkaline effect on the body, meaning that it can help restore the body's pH balance, benefitting the immune system. Try starting your day with hot water and a slice of lemon to help flush out toxins and cleanse your system.
Ginger
If too much fatty food or alcohol has caused problems for your digestive system, it may be worthwhile adding some ginger to your diet. Ginger is not only great for reducing feelings of nausea, but it can help improve digestion, beat bloating and reduce gas. In addition to this, ginger is high in antioxidants and is good for boosting the immune system. To give your digestion a helping hand, try sipping on ginger tea or adding some freshly grated ginger to a fruit or vegetable juice.
Garlic
Garlic has long been known for its heart benefits, however the pungent food is also good at detoxifying the body. Garlic is not only antiviral, antibacterial and antibiotic, but it contains a chemical called allicin which promotes the production of white blood cells and helps fight against toxins. Garlic is best eaten raw, so add some crushed garlic to a salad dressing to boost its flavour and your health at the same time.
Artichoke
If you have recently been overindulging in fatty foods and alcohol, adding some steamed globe artichoke leaves to your meals is a great way to help get your body back on track. Globe artichokes are packed with antioxidants and fibre and can also help the body digest fatty foods. On top of this, globe artichoke is renowned for its ability to stimulate and improve the functions of the liver - the body's main toxin-fighting tool.
Beetroot
For those needing a quick health-boosting shot of nutrients, you can't do much better than beetroot. Packed with magnesium, iron, and vitamin C, the vegetable has recently been hailed as a superfood due to its many reported health benefits. Not only is beetroot great for skin, hair and cholesterol levels, but it can also help support liver detoxification, making it an ultimate detox food. To enjoy its benefits, try adding raw beetroot to salads or sipping on some beetroot juice.
Green tea
While it's not technically a food, no detox plan would be complete without regular consumption of essential liquids. Fluids are essential for keeping our organs healthy and helping to flush toxins from the body, and drinking green tea is a great way of boosting your intake. Green tea is not only a good weight-loss drink, but it is extremely high in antioxidants. Research has also suggested that drinking green tea can protect the liver from diseases including fatty liver disease.
Cabbage
Many celebs have resorted to the cabbage soup diet to help lose weight and get in shape quickly before a big event, however cabbage is not only good for weight loss - it is also an excellent detoxifying food. Like most cruciferous vegetables (including broccoli and sprouts), cabbage contains a chemical called sulforaphane, which helps the body fight against toxins. Cabbage also supplies the body with glutathione; an antioxidant that helps improve the detoxifying function of the liver.
Fresh fruit
Fresh fruits are high in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and fibre= and are also low in calories, making them an important part of a detox diet. If you're after brighter eyes and skin, shinier hair and improved digestion, try boosting your intake of fruit and eating from a wide variety of different kinds. The good news is fruit is easy to add to your diet, so try starting your day with a fresh fruit salad or smoothie and snacking on pieces of fruit throughout the day.
Brown rice
If you want to cleanse your system and boost your health, it is a good idea to cut down on processed foods. Instead, try supplementing your diet with healthier whole grains such as brown rice, which is rich in many key detoxifying nutrients including B vitamins, magnesium, manganese and phosphorous. Brown rice is also high in fibre, which is good for cleansing the colon, and rich in selenium, which can help to protect the liver as well as improving the complexion.
Watercress
Like most green herbs and vegetables, watercress is an excellent health-booster and detox food. Firstly, watercress leaves are packed with many vital detoxifying nutrients, including several B vitamins, zinc, potassium, vitamin E and vitamin C. Secondly, watercress has natural diuretic properties, which can help to flush toxins out the body. To reap the benefits of this nutritious food, try adding a handful of watercress to salads, soups and sandwiches
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Monday, August 1, 2011
Why El Bulli’s Closure Is No Bad Thing for Restaurant World: Richard Vines
By Richard Vines - Aug 1, 2011 7:00 AM GMT+0800
El Bulli, which has won the World’s 50 Best Restaurants title a record five times, closed at the weekend. Is that reason to be sad?
Probably not.
It has been extremely hard for ordinary diners to get a reservation in recent years. The usual estimate of the odds -- two million applications annually for 8,000 places -- would equate to 250-to-1 if there were a level playing field.
There wasn’t. Ferran Adria isn’t just a brilliant chef. He’s also smart at marketing and at building relationships. He sought to fill his restaurants with food writers and journalists who would help to spread the fame of El Bulli, and with chefs, who might be influenced by his creativity. I’ve been twice.
Adria, 49, isn’t hanging up his whites and putting away his knives to go into a lazy retirement near El Bulli, on the coast, north of Barcelona. He’s founding a culinary foundation where he and his longtime collaborators will focus on creativity.
It’s scheduled to open in 2014. Meanwhile, there is building work to be done. New premises are going to be constructed in place of the car park where apprentice chefs spent their first day of each season -- polishing a pile of rocks that decorated the entrance rather than preparing food.
Until now, Adria has spent half the year creating dishes at his workshop in Barcelona and the other half serving them to customers at El Bulli, which is reached by a winding road from the town of Roses. He’s dispensing with the restaurant because he wants to spend more time being creative, like an artist abandoning exhibitions to focus on making art.
Best Restaurant
El Bulli came to worldwide attention when it first won the best restaurant title in 2002, yet it isn’t a new establishment.
It was created by a German physician, Hans Schilling, who bought a piece of land on the coast, near Roses, and on June 7, 1961, gained permission to open a mini-golf course. He and his wife, stateless, Czech-born Marketta, added a beachside bar and in 1964 built a grill room, the Bulli Bar, using a French slang term for Marketta’s pet bulldogs.
When the restaurant first opened, it served traditional French cuisine. Adria got work experience at El Bulli in 1983 while doing military service at Cartagena and joined full time in March 1984. At that time, he and his friends would often go out at night to drink in the bars and discotheques of Roses. Just a few months later, he and his friend Christian Lutaud were jointly placed in charge of the kitchen. Lutaud left in 1987.
Exploding Olives
If you haven’t tried Adria’s dishes, let me say that they can be challenging. He plays with taste, texture and temperature, so you think you are about to eat one thing and it turns out to be another. This can be fun: Your meal may start with what looks to be an olive but is an olive puree trapped within a film of gel, so it explodes in your mouth.
Your cocktails may be a pina colada that comes as cotton candy with freeze-dried pineapple and spheres of rum. It’s fun, yet a meal may run to 48 courses, as mine did in March. And sometimes the surprises may not be to your liking. My 33rd course was introduced as hare blood: a scarlet liquid congealing in a glass. It was beet juice.
While El Bulli was a unique and fabulous restaurant, it was also an experience for the rich to collect. If you want to understand Adria, elements of his cooking are now to be found in restaurants around the world, including Pollen Street Social, where chef-patron Jason Atherton was the first Briton to complete a ‘stage’ (unpaid work experience) at El Bulli. Also in London, Viajante’s Nuno Mendes is a direct disciple of Adria’s.
El Bulli’s closure doesn’t matter because most people would never have got the chance to eat there and we do still have the master, Ferran Adria, who is now able to devote himself full time to the creative process. Adria is El Bulli.
Long live El Bulli.
(Richard Vines is the chief food critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. He is U.K. and Ireland chairman of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. Opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on the story: Richard Vines in London at rvines@bloomberg.net or Richardvines on http://twitter.com/Richardvines.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.
El Bulli, which has won the World’s 50 Best Restaurants title a record five times, closed at the weekend. Is that reason to be sad?
Probably not.
It has been extremely hard for ordinary diners to get a reservation in recent years. The usual estimate of the odds -- two million applications annually for 8,000 places -- would equate to 250-to-1 if there were a level playing field.
There wasn’t. Ferran Adria isn’t just a brilliant chef. He’s also smart at marketing and at building relationships. He sought to fill his restaurants with food writers and journalists who would help to spread the fame of El Bulli, and with chefs, who might be influenced by his creativity. I’ve been twice.
Adria, 49, isn’t hanging up his whites and putting away his knives to go into a lazy retirement near El Bulli, on the coast, north of Barcelona. He’s founding a culinary foundation where he and his longtime collaborators will focus on creativity.
It’s scheduled to open in 2014. Meanwhile, there is building work to be done. New premises are going to be constructed in place of the car park where apprentice chefs spent their first day of each season -- polishing a pile of rocks that decorated the entrance rather than preparing food.
Until now, Adria has spent half the year creating dishes at his workshop in Barcelona and the other half serving them to customers at El Bulli, which is reached by a winding road from the town of Roses. He’s dispensing with the restaurant because he wants to spend more time being creative, like an artist abandoning exhibitions to focus on making art.
Best Restaurant
El Bulli came to worldwide attention when it first won the best restaurant title in 2002, yet it isn’t a new establishment.
It was created by a German physician, Hans Schilling, who bought a piece of land on the coast, near Roses, and on June 7, 1961, gained permission to open a mini-golf course. He and his wife, stateless, Czech-born Marketta, added a beachside bar and in 1964 built a grill room, the Bulli Bar, using a French slang term for Marketta’s pet bulldogs.
When the restaurant first opened, it served traditional French cuisine. Adria got work experience at El Bulli in 1983 while doing military service at Cartagena and joined full time in March 1984. At that time, he and his friends would often go out at night to drink in the bars and discotheques of Roses. Just a few months later, he and his friend Christian Lutaud were jointly placed in charge of the kitchen. Lutaud left in 1987.
Exploding Olives
If you haven’t tried Adria’s dishes, let me say that they can be challenging. He plays with taste, texture and temperature, so you think you are about to eat one thing and it turns out to be another. This can be fun: Your meal may start with what looks to be an olive but is an olive puree trapped within a film of gel, so it explodes in your mouth.
Your cocktails may be a pina colada that comes as cotton candy with freeze-dried pineapple and spheres of rum. It’s fun, yet a meal may run to 48 courses, as mine did in March. And sometimes the surprises may not be to your liking. My 33rd course was introduced as hare blood: a scarlet liquid congealing in a glass. It was beet juice.
While El Bulli was a unique and fabulous restaurant, it was also an experience for the rich to collect. If you want to understand Adria, elements of his cooking are now to be found in restaurants around the world, including Pollen Street Social, where chef-patron Jason Atherton was the first Briton to complete a ‘stage’ (unpaid work experience) at El Bulli. Also in London, Viajante’s Nuno Mendes is a direct disciple of Adria’s.
El Bulli’s closure doesn’t matter because most people would never have got the chance to eat there and we do still have the master, Ferran Adria, who is now able to devote himself full time to the creative process. Adria is El Bulli.
Long live El Bulli.
(Richard Vines is the chief food critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. He is U.K. and Ireland chairman of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. Opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on the story: Richard Vines in London at rvines@bloomberg.net or Richardvines on http://twitter.com/Richardvines.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
1 Michelin Star Chef Roland Chanliaud
Chocalate Croustilant and Olive Ice Cream
Pineapple Carpacio and Pinot Colada Sorbet
We were given Chef Roland chanliaud's business card in case we wanted to visit his restaurant in Burgundy France. Here is the address for Le Jardin des Remparts:
10, Rue de l'Hotel-Dieu, 21200 Beune . Tel 03 8024 7941
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
1 Michelin Star Chef Roland Chanliaud
Seabass served with Dried Tomatoes and Vinegar
My wife chose this dish and although the fish was fresh, it was not something that she will remember
Saturday, November 22, 2008
1 Michelin Star Chef Roland Chanliaud
Comfit of Pork Belly with Grilled Prawns
It was a fatty piece of pork and I think it represents the area that the chef hails from.I kind of liked it although my parents tought otherwise.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
1 Michelin star Chef Roland Chanliaud
Beetroot with Poached Foie Gras and Smoked Eel
The soup dish was a brilliant red with the rich taste of Beetroot and smoked eel. I kind of liked it but my parents and my wife did not fancy it.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
1 Star Michelin Chef Roland Chanliaud
Scallop Tart Mango and Black Olives
The scallops were fresh and tasted just like Sashimi served in a Japanese restaurant.
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