Since I discovered truly natural, non-toxic wine, I feel better about enjoying a glass in the evenings to wind down sometimes. There’s a way to make wine taste even better though and up the health benefits. Mulled wine, like mulled cider, is simmered with aromatic spices for a delicious, warming drink.

Curl Up With a Cup

There’s nothing quite like sipping on mulled wine on a cool evening. While it tastes good, the act of taking some time to enjoy sipping a drink is good for health in more ways than one. Taking a moment to engage in a little self-care reduces stress, helps the digestive system, and lowers cortisol levels.

You don’t have to sip mulled wine all alone on your couch though to see mental and physiological benefits. It’s all about having a positive mindset. Mulled wine is also a great drink for when company comes around.

An Inviting Home

Our family likes to make apple cider in the crockpot because it makes the house smell amazing! Mulled cider does much the same thing. Although the cook time is typically shorter for wine than cider, the smell of spices in the air is irresistible. This is a great drink to pull out when company is over since it helps the home smell more warm and inviting.

Best Cook Time

I browsed through various mulled wine recipes for inspiration and they all had one thing in common. They all had different cook times. So how long should you cook mulled wine? The answer is, it depends.

The longer the wine is simmered the more concentrated the flavors will be. However, the longer the wine simmers the less alcohol content will be in the final drink. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Nutrient Data Laboratory, 40% of the alcohol remains after a 15 minute simmer time. If you want a little flavor to your wine, but don’t want to sacrifice too much of the buzz, then 10-15 minutes is a happy medium.

A Lower Alcohol Version

On the flip side, if you’re trying to reduce alcohol content and want a more intense spiced wine flavor, then up the cook time. After an hour the alcohol reduces to 25% and after 2.5 hours only 5% remains. However, after an hour or so there’s not much wine left to drink as it can evaporate pretty quickly. Longer cook times also require stirring or the wine can burn. Personally I wouldn’t go over 30 minutes.

Choosing Your Spices

You can buy premixed mulling spices or make your own. Ground spices are harder to strain out, so it’s best to use whole or crushed spices here, like cinnamon sticks and clove buds. There’s some wiggle room to experiment with what spices you like, but this is the recipe I liked best.

Feel free to play around with the ingredients to get your perfect mulled wine blend.

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Mulled Wine Recipe

You can make up mulling spice bags ahead of time to use as desired for recipes to save time. Or you can get pre-mixed mulling spices. Wine is generally more tart than cider (especially the natural versions) so you can add honey if you prefer a sweeter drink.

Ingredients

• 1 bottle wine
• 1 orange (cut in quarters)
• 1 apple (cut in slices)

Mulling Spices: Use 1 packet of store-bought mulling spices OR the following

Instructions

• In a saucepan combine all the ingredients except the honey and bring to a boil.

• Reduce the wine mixture to a simmer and cook for 10-15 minutes.

• Strain the spices. Whisk in the raw honey to taste if desired.

Notes

The nutrition info and how many servings you end up with depends on how long the wine simmers and how much liquid evaporates in the process.
For this recipe a 750mL bottle of red wine with a 12% alcohol content from Dry Farm Wines was used.

Nutrition

Serving: 5oz | Calories: 129kcal | Carbohydrates: 21g | Protein: 1g | Fat: 1g | Saturated Fat: 1g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 1g | Monounsaturated Fat: 1g | Trans Fat: 1g | Sodium: 10mg | Potassium: 261mg | Fiber: 3g | Sugar: 14g | Vitamin A: 86IU | Vitamin C: 16mg | Calcium: 46mg | Iron: 1mg

Instant Pot Mulled Wine

I love my Instant Pot because it saves me so much time. You can make mulled wine in the Instant Pot, but it isn’t necessarily a time saver for this recipe. And you miss out on your house smelling amazing from the spices. However, if you do want to opt for the Instant Pot method here are two ways to do it.

• Add the ingredients to the pot, seal the vent and cook for 1-3 minutes
• Add all the ingredients and use the slow cooker button for about 2 hours.

Looking for More Warm Drinks to Cozy Up With?

Have you tried mulled wine? What are your other favorite cold weather drinks to cozy up with?

This article was originally published by wellnessmama.com. Read the original article here.

These flavor-packed Chicken Romano Meatballs stuffed with Romano cheese, herbs, and garlic are topped with a lemony white wine pan sauce.

Chicken Romano Meatballs

These Chicken Roman Meatballs take all the classic Italian Chicken Romano flavors and stuff them into a meatball. The meatballs are served in a light, lemony pan sauce that is wonderful over pasta. More of my favorite chicken meatball recipes are these Chicken Marsala Meatballs, Harissa Chicken Meatballs, and Buffalo Chicken Meatballs.

I am excited to share this recipe with you from my friend Jessica Merchant’s newest cookbook, Everyday Dinners: Real-Life Recipes to Set Your Family Up for a Week of Success. Jessica is one of my favorite bloggers, and has probably been doing it as long as I have! Her book is stunning and features “plant-based, one pot, and slow cooker recipes” that cook in under 30 minutes. Jessica has recipes for everything from Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Honey Ginger Chickpeas and Tahini to Honey Dijon Pretzel- Crusted Salmon. Plus, these meatballs! I’m glad I got to try them – highly recommend!

What is chicken Romano?

Chicken Romano is an Italian baked chicken dish with a Romano cheese- breadcrumb coating. Often, it is served with a lemon-butter sauce over pasta.

Chicken Romano Meatball Ingredients

Below are the ingredients you’ll need to make these delicious chicken Romano meatballs.

• Meat: Ground chicken
• Binder: Egg, Breadcrumbs
• Flavor: Garlic, Romano cheese
• Herbs: Fresh parsley and dried oregano and basil
• Seasonings: Crushed red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper

The pan sauce adds so much flavor, so definitely don’t skip it. Plus, it only has six ingredients and is super simple to make. For the sauce, you’ll need:

• Shallot
• Garlic
• Salt
• Dry white wine
• Chicken broth
• Lemon

How to Serve Chicken Meatballs

These chicken meatballs would be delicious over your favorite pasta or rice. You could also serve them on a hoagie roll to make a sandwich or with vegetables like roasted asparagus or grilled zucchini. Another idea is to pair the meatballs with a salad and a piece of crusty bread to soak up the sauce.

Variations:

• Use ground turkey instead of ground chicken.
• Sub parmesan for Romano.
• Swap out the dried oregano or basil for rosemary or thyme.
• Omit the crushed red pepper if you prefer mild food.
• If you prefer to cook without wine, replace the wine with more broth.

More Meatball Recipes You’ll Love:

This article was originally published by skinnytaste.com. Read the original article here.

13 Jul A healthy wine with no sugar or hangovers? YES… (keep reading!)

OK , but like you I had more questions. How did this company come about? Why is their wine so good tasting and so good for us?

Before you go… don’t forget to get a bottle of Dry Farms Wine for just ONE CENT!

 Order HERE and with your first shipment of a Dry Farm Wines membership you’ll receive an additional bottle for a penny!

Comments

This article was originally published by nataliejillfitness.com. Read the original article here.

Gerda Endemann, our senior director of science and research, has a BS in nutrition from UC Berkeley, a PhD in nutritional biochemistry from MIT, and a passion for cherry-picking from our wellness shop. She spends a lot of her time interpreting research—established and emerging. You’ll find some of her deep dives into health conditions in our growing library of articles called goop PhD. You can send your own questions for Gerda to [email protected]

Dear goop, When we go out, my friends act as if they’re making a superior choice by drinking wine, when all I want is a cold beer. You know—resveratrol, the French paradox, and all that. I find beer soothing, and I handle it better than wine. Which is better? —Michaela M.

Hi, Michaela. Don’t let anyone intimidate you. Beer is an amazing invention—full of compounds with demonstrated health benefits. Wine is similar, in that both are complex soups of bioactive chemicals, some of which may make you feel good and some of which may not. It’s an individual thing. I attribute my bad reaction to red wine to histamine, which can cause flushing and headache depending on how well your body is able to detoxify it. The tyramine in ale may do the same. Of course, the alcohol in either can give you a hangover.

Personally, I’ve had a rocky relationship with beer. When I was a kid, I would get carsick, and my dad would try to get me to take a sip of beer to calm my stomach. I hated the taste, and this was probably what caused me to avoid beer for much of my adult life. He wasn’t a lush: Dad kept one beer in a cooler in the trunk to have with a picnic lunch on all-day sales trips. The brand he favored was a smooth dark beer called Bavarian. My best guess is that it was from the Bavarian Brewing Company in Kentucky, now defunct.

Anyway, all this is to explain why deep down, I associate beer with healing properties, especially for digestion. And a few years ago, when my fiancé taught me how to watch baseball and drink beer, I finally discovered its pleasures. I don’t handle alcohol very well, but a moderate amount of a smooth dark beer seems to agree with me. These days, when I say I’ll have “a health beer,” it’s understood that I’m referring to Modelo Negra.

Wine has gotten more press, but whether it’s beer or wine, up to one drink a day for women and up to two per day for men is associated with lower risks of heart disease and diabetes. It’s probably a combination of alcohol, phytochemicals (plant chemicals), and fermentation products that is responsible for the benefits. Drinking spirits is associated with similar but less significant benefits.

Note: This is not a prescription. You do not need to drink alcohol for good health, and it’s of course wise to avoid it if you don’t handle it well. Some researchers argue that for any amount of alcohol, the cons outweigh the pros. Alcohol consumption is linked to increased mortality from many causes, and even the lowest level of alcohol intake is associated with an increased risk of cancer, including breast cancer and oral cancers.

I will assume you know all about the cons, though. And here I’ll share what I’ve learned about beer’s unique properties, beginning with its hops content. Hops are flowers from the hop vine, and they have been used medicinally for thousands of years to support sleep, digestion, and gynecological health. Before hops harvesting and processing was mechanized, it was noted that people became pretty sleepy while doing this work. Maybe my dad thought beer would calm my stomach because of the sedative effects that hops have. Components of hops have even been demonstrated to increase calming parasympathetic nerve activity.

Hops contain numerous bioactive compounds, including unique acids, essential oils, and polyphenols. The hops acids (humulones and lupulones) are important for beer’s characteristic bitter taste. All beer contains hops, although amounts vary. I wish I liked the strong, bitter taste of a hoppy IPA that has more of these compounds. Hops acids and polyphenols—such as catechins, epicatechins, proanthocyanidins, and quercetin—have potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activities.

During fermentation, yeast metabolizes phytochemicals, making the mixture more complex. And after drinking beer, our gut microbes can carry out further transformations. For example, hops—like many plants—contain compounds with weak estrogen-like activity. Metabolism by gut bacteria can greatly increase this estrogenic activity. This may be desirable or not. Female hops harvesters complained of menstrual irregularities. On the other hand, there’s preliminary evidence that the estrogenic compounds might help prevent postmenopausal loss of bone.

Clinical studies have shed light on ways that beer might be promoting cardiovascular health. I bet it’s easy to recruit participants when drinking beer is required. In some particularly revealing research, men were asked to drink beer, gin, or alcohol-free beer—equivalent to about two drinks—daily for four weeks. Those drinking alcohol had improvements in blood chemistry, mainly in their blood fats. But in the alcohol-free beer drinkers, there were different effects, such as decreases in inflammation.

In this research, beer, but not gin, had another interesting effect. The body can repair damaged arteries using stem cells from the blood. These stem cells can repopulate and repair the lining of arteries. Researchers found that the number of stem cells in the blood increased after subjects drank beer or alcohol-free beer but not after they drank gin. The researchers’ conclusion was that beer may have benefits for heart health that spirits don’t. (Before getting too excited, remember that this stem cell research needs to be repeated by others to see if it holds up.)

To get back to digestion, although it doesn’t explain why beer might calm a queasy stomach, research has shed light on how beer can support a healthy gut. One reason hops are added to beer is because they act as preservatives, helping to prevent the growth of undesirable microbes. So it makes sense that hops might affect our gut microbiota, and beer has been reported to promote desirable gut bacteria. In return, gut bacteria help break down polyphenols to make them more bioavailable for us. From animal research, there are indications that hops can improve gut health by promoting healthy barrier function and reducing inflammation and that hops can improve metabolism and blood sugar regulation.

If you want more happy news, beer is also a source of vitamins and minerals. It provides niacin, folate, choline, B vitamins, and a little bit of magnesium and potassium. Some beers contain significant amounts of chromium, a trace mineral needed for insulin function.

And of course, beer is a perfect accompaniment to many foods. It doesn’t get much better than pizza and beer. My fiancé was ecstatic when I took him out to Mentone for his birthday. It’s fancy for pizza but still a cheap date. Here are a few suggestions to help set the mood for your next beer and pizza night in.

Gerda’s Beer-Night Picks

This article is for informational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice. To the extent that this article features the advice of physicians or medical practitioners, the views expressed are the views of the cited expert and do not necessarily represent the views of goop.

This article was originally published by goop.com. Read the original article here.