【推荐1】At a local supermarket, two women push half-filled grocery cart. The ladies are good friends, but they couldn’t be more different. One is a stay-at-home housewife who loves to create culinary masterpieces from scratch.     1     Household chores particularly those in the kitchen, are not her idea of fun. The two ladies stop for a moment in the frozen foods section. “I’m so tired,” sighs the professional woman. “I don’t know what to do about supper. Her friend suggests, ”What about a microwave dinner? “The weary professional sighs，I don’t feel like cooking tonight. ”   

If you think American cooking means opening a package and tossing the contents into the microwave, think again. On the one hand, it’s true that Americans rely on cold cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and instant dinners.     2     On the other hand, many Americans recognize the value of cooking skills. Parents -especially molders -see the importance of training their children -especially daughters- to cook in the family kitchen. Most Americans will admit that there’s nothing better than a good home-cooked meal. But with cooking, as with any other skill, good results don’t happen by accident.

For those who need guidance in their working,or for those who have just run out of ideas, recipes are lifesavers. Recipes list all the ingredients for a dish (generally in the order used), the amount of each to use, and a description of how to put them together.     3     Most good cooks have a shelf full of cookbooks ranging from locally published recipe collections to national bestsellers like the Betty Croeker cookbook. Magazines devoted to home management, such as Good Housekeeping and Family Circle, are chock-full of scrumptious selections. Friends often augment their recipe collection by passing around their favorites written on cards.

For experienced cooks, true artists that they are, recipes are merely reference points. They often make adjustments as they go along, depending on the quantity of people they need to serve,the ingredients they have available and their personal taste. Some cooks use recipes very little, preferring instead to depend on their experience as they add a pinch of this and a dash of that to cereal just the right flavors.

Of course, wherever you go in the world, people love to eat. As a result, every culture and nationality has its own share of mouth-watering delicacies. And America, as a “land of immigrants,” has imported practically all varieties of cooking. Most good cooks in America are “fluent” in sever cooking “dialects”: Mexican, Italian, Chinese and old good American style, just to name a few.     4    

【推荐3】Drinking tea at least three times a week could reduce the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease(心管疾病) and is linked with a longer and healthier life, at least in China, a new study suggests. Chinese researchers found the health benefits associated with tea were more obvious for drinkers of green, rather than black tea, and for those who had been drinking tea regularly over a longer period of time. The benefits were also clearer among men, the study indicated.

Researchers looked at data from 100 902 Chinese people with no history of heart attack or cancer and divided them into two groups: habitual drinkers who drank tea three or more times a week,those who never drank tea, and those who drank it less regularly. They followed up with them after a seven-year period.

Their analysis found that regular tea drinkers had a 20%lower risk of having heart disease and stroke,and a 22%lower risk of dying from heart disease and stroke. Specifically, they found that regular tea drinkers could expect to live 1.26 years longer at age 50 than those who did not regularly enjoy a cup of tea.

“We found that the protective effects of habitual tea consumption were very obvious and robust across different outcomes for men, but only mild for women,”Dr.Dongfeng Gu from China’s National Center for Cardiovascular Disease.

“One reason might be that the proportion of habitual tea consumers among men was approximately two and a half times as high as that among women,” Gu said. Some 48%of the men in the study were regular tea drinkers, compared with 20%of women.