Finally, we waited for summer! After all, summer is not only a time of vacations, rest in the country, trips to nature. Summer is an opportunity to gorge on vitamins “in reserve”, to pamper yourself with fresh vegetables and fruits, fresh from the garden, and – to be honest – to lose a couple of kilograms.
In order to fully meet the beach season, as well as recharge your batteries until the New Year, you just need to follow a few simple rules, which Culinary Eden will tell you about.
• Vegetables and herbs – this is what should reign on your table throughout the summer! All kinds of cold soups, borscht and okroshka, stews, salads … Don’t forget the herbs! Lettuce, sorrel, nettle, parsley … All this abundance contains many vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber and other useful substances. And the less 
if vegetables were cooked, the more “usefulness” your body will receive as a result. Salad in this case is an ideal dish, just season it not with mayonnaise, but with low-fat cream, sour cream, vegetable oils or citrus juice. And less salt – it tends to retain fluid in the body, and this is not good. Okroshka, popular in the heat, can be cooked with kvass (ideally homemade), kefir, ayran, tan, buttermilk. Instead of traditional meat or sausage, you can add smoked cheese or feta cheese to okroshka – try it, it’s delicious!
• Fruits and berries contain a lot of moisture. This is important in the heat. In addition, berries straight from the branch are like little bombs filled with all sorts of usefulness. Fruits and berries that grow in our area are much more useful than those that come to us from afar. Just don’t forget about the sugar content – sweet fruits and berries contain fructose, sucrose and glucose, and these are extra calories. If you follow your figure, then you should not eat high-calorie fruits like bananas, melons, etc. at night.
• Do not give up cereals – sweet (with fruits, dried fruits, honey) and salty (with cheese, nuts), they perfectly balance your diet, since cereals contain almost everything 
substances necessary for the human body: carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, enzymes … You can add bran or dry kelp to the porridge – this will not affect the taste, but it will bring a lot of benefits. Porridge is an ideal breakfast, after which you don’t feel like eating for a long time, which means you don’t want to “nibble” in between breakfast and lunch.
• Recommendations to reduce the consumption of meat and fish in summer are, of course, good, but how can they be applied in life, when trips “to nature” with unchanged barbecue have become almost an obligatory item on the program? Unless it is possible to advise marinating meat not in vinegar, but in more useful marinades (there is relevant information on our website) and eating a kebab with a lot of greens.
The summer diet is, of course, very different from the winter diet. This is also noted by the “science of life” – Ayurveda. According to this teaching, each season has its own taste, that is, if you eat in accordance with Ayurveda, then food can become not only a way to maintain life (“fuel”), but also a medicine. For example, Ayurveda recommends eating as many bitter-tasting foods as possible in the summer. It is necessary to stimulate the circulatory system, heart and small intestine. In addition, long ago 
it is known that it is the bitter and not the sour taste that brings relief and freshness in the heat. Try to quench your thirst with a bitter tonic or add bitter herbs to salad and okroshka – as they say, feel the difference!
The delicate sprouts of wormwood and dandelion have a bitter taste, from which you can make a salad, finely chopped and seasoned with vinegar and vegetable oil. The products of bitter taste also include radish, turnip, rutabaga, radish, onion. Oddly enough, but this group also includes cucumbers, tomatoes, beets, young potatoes and cabbage. Pumpkin crops – squash, zucchini, squash, pumpkin – are also welcome.
According to Eastern dietetics, in summer you can eat lamb, chicken without harm, and heart from offal. Moreover, the meat should be generously flavored with mustard and horseradish. There is a logic in this – how, if not with hot spices, to protect yourself in the heat from all kinds of infection?
It is curious that Ayurveda recommends beer as a summer drink – it has a bitter taste. Moreover, shrimps are suitable as an appetizer, but in no case salted fish, chips or nuts. Doubtful advice, given the effect of beer on the figure and the harm of alcohol to the body as a whole. But, of course, this is real home-brewed beer, not the liquid in glass bottles and cans with which store shelves are littered.
Since we will not drink beer, then how can we quench our thirst, because in the heat a person loses up to one and a half liters of water per hour! Delicious sparkling lemonades are not an option. The artificial sweetener aspartame is used in the production of sugary sodas. Aspartame is 200 times sweeter than sugar and at the same time has almost zero calories. And all would be fine, but it turned out that aspartame contains a small amount of methanol (the same methyl alcohol that blinds and kills victims of “burned” vodka!). When heated, the amount of methanol in soda increases, which is why bottles always bear the inscription “Drink chilled”. But even if you follow the recommendations of the manufacturers and drink ice lemonade, then this drink will not become less harmful: it contains phenylalanine, a permitted food additive that has the ability to change the sensitivity threshold and deplete serotonin reserves, and sodium benzoate is essentially a cough medicine , used as a preservative, and when combined with vitamin C, forms benzene, the strongest carcinogen.
Terrible? And we and our children drink all this … So, maybe we will remember that there are such drinks in the world as compote of fresh and dry fruits or a drink that gives us a scary-looking, but such a useful “tea mushroom”, or infusion “Tibetan rice”? In the end, brew regular green tea and drink it hot, sugar-free, in small sips – after that, wherever the thirst disappears! Or, for example, homemade Russian kvass – real, fragrant, refreshing!
Homemade bread kvass
Ingredients:
1 loaf of rye bread
3 l of water,
1 stack. Sahara,
20 g of compressed yeast,
2 tbsp raisins.
Preparation:
Slice the bread, dry in the oven until golden brown. Fold into a saucepan, pour boiling water over, let cool. Then strain, add sugar, yeast and leave for 10 hours to ferment. Take two one and a half liter bottles, add 1 tablespoon to each. raisins, pour kvass, tighten the corks tightly and refrigerate for 2 days.
Another secret enemy of our figurines is ice cream. Yes, it’s delicious, yes, it’s cold … But ice cream doesn’t quench your thirst. It’s sweet! And the calorie content of this delicacy is rather big. Classic milk ice cream contains about 70 calories per serving, but cream ice cream is much tastier than boring milk ice cream, and if it also contains fillers like caramel, nuts, chocolate … So it turns out that one cone can pull 250 kcal. Low-calorie “fruit ice”, that is, sorbet – a frozen mixture of water, sugar and fruit (chunks, puree or juice) – contains 10 to 25% fruit, 50-70% water, sugar or artificial sweetener, as well as artificial colors, flavors and preservatives. Chemistry again. But a self-made sorbet will be both healthy and safe. After all, it’s up to you to decide how much fruit to put in a treat, which means that you will get a pleasant coolness and vitamins.
Orange sorbet
Ingredients:
300 ml freshly squeezed orange juice,
½ lemon juice,
100 g sugar
1 egg white
100 ml of water.
Preparation:
Boil the syrup from sugar and 100 ml of water, cool, add juice and lemon juice to it. Freeze by pulling it out of the refrigerator several times and stirring (whipping with a mixer). After 30 minutes of freezing, add the whipped protein into the foam. The sorbet is ready in an hour.
Strawberry sorbet
Ingredients:
300 g fresh strawberries
100 g sugar
½ lemon,
50 ml of water.
Preparation:
Boil the sugar and water syrup over low heat until bubbles begin to appear on the surface. Then remove from heat and cool. Pour the strawberries over with lemon juice and beat in a blender until smooth. Combine with syrup, beat, refrigerate. You can take it out of the freezer 2-3 more times and stir the sorbet.
In summer, it is very convenient to spend fasting days. I don’t really want to eat in the heat, and therefore the body tolerates such days quite easily. It is best to carry out fruit or 
vegetable fasting days. The recipe is simple: 1.5 kg of fruits (apples, watermelon) or vegetables per day. Drink clean, still water. It is better to refuse tea and coffee on this day. It is advisable to spend such days once a week. As a result, you will get clean skin, fresh breath and lightness throughout the body. The most “slimming”, by the way, is a watermelon day.
Finally, a few words about food on the street. In summer, a great many cozy cafes open on the streets of cities, which beckon to sit in the shade, drink something refreshing, have a snack … But it is here that the danger lurks. And it’s not even that snacks have a bad habit of settling on the waist in the form of fat rolls. And it’s not that hot dogs, hamburgers and other fast food are not at all healthy, and sometimes harmful. It’s about elementary security. In hot weather, pathogenic bacteria feel great. And you, sitting down to eat shawarma, are sure that the shaur-master washed his hands after visiting the toilet? And even if you carry disinfectant wipes in your pocket, it will not save you from poisoning if some salad has stood in the sun for more than one hour.
All these recommendations can be reduced to one thing – be attentive to what you eat, because it is not for nothing that the ancients said that “a person is what he eats.” Eat right and stay healthy!
Larisa Shuftaykina