hello I'm Karen ridges from veggie vision TV and today I'm going to be showing you some healthy cooking tips hello I'm going to show you how to cook barley now barley is an amazing cereal grade it contains eight amino acids and it's actually been shown to help lower cholesterol so I think it's it's a product that we really need to make more use of it's really simple and easy to cook as well so first of all we just start with giving it a good wash under the think so this is a 500 gram bag and typically we use half of this for two or three people but maybe we're just a little bit more greedy so simply tip it in the colander and wash it through the best you can so after it's washed tip it back into a nice big saucepan and there is a bit of a trick to barley you need to use cold water in particular and really I would say a third of the saucepan fill up with water now we use filtered water and alkalis water and it really gives a much better flavor to whatever you're cooking so now when you've got enough water we just pop it over to the hob bring to the boil as quickly as you can and leave boiling for maybe 30 seconds or a minute and then we get rid of that water we start again with fresh water and we leave that to cook maybe for an hour keep checking it as the time goes by make sure there's enough water in there if it boils away obviously you're going to get a burnt saucepan and not a very nice tasting barley so the barley has been boiling now for just a couple of minutes we're going to put it in the colander and give it another good wash then we're going to start again with some more fresh water so leave the barley to cook for another hour and then here's one that I cooked earlier for you and it's just been left to cool and then left in the fridge because you can eat barley hot and cold now a really nice way of eating this is to chop up finally raw vegetables and mix it in for a nice barley salad and you can have lightly warmed mushrooms mix again with the barley and top with some soya sauce and another really interesting way to enjoy your barley is to actually cook it in orange juice and then mix it up with some tropical fruit some pineapples and bananas some Kiwis and have a really tasty healthy dessert hope you enjoy your bar leg