Monthly Archives November 2013

Cranberry Pastrami Sandwich

In the previous post we made an awesome, kick-butt cranberry sauce. Although delicious and amazing, chances are you still have some left over sauce. The leftover once we adjust the viscosity a bit with some water are an amazing versatile syrup and condiment. It is sweet and tangy able to mingle with many different flavors. The Sugar can help reduce the spiciness of the various dishes, the acidity can pair well with meats as it changes the pH making our taste buds more sensitive and more receptive to the other elements of the dish... In other words making dish tasting meatier. Although you can always use it in a turkey left over sandwich, I think it is a pity to use this just in a sandwich with the reminiscent of thanksgiving. Here I expand the application to other sandwiches. Cranberries is a gift not only for thanksgiving, but something that we should cherish and use all year around.

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Thanksgiving Cosmo

Thanksgiving food is definitely good. But do you know what else is good? Thanksgiving drinks. And probably the most popular thanksgiving drinks are beer and wine. Beer is often associated with the football games, one of the main events during that day and the wine with formality of the dinner. There is however another drink, that we seem to drink year around, based on cranberries, which for some reason we tend to ignore that day. I am talking of none other than the Cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan is a very popular drink, very refreshing, if it is made right way, and most importantly it is a simple drink. Due to the bright pinkish color it seems to be a very popular drink among the female population, and for the same reason it seems to be not as popular to the male population.

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Happy Thanksgiving – Cranberry Sauce

Thanksgiving is right around the corner. The highlight of the thanksgiving holiday is of course the thanksgiving dinner. It is a staple all across the United States, and although the turkey is the star of the table, there is plethora of side dishes that complete the feast and are equally important. Potatoes, stuffing and the cranberry sauce. The last two actually, are almost exclusively consumed during only that dinner. Stuffing and cranberry sauce. The stuffing is a very complex and diverse dish, ranging from the cornbread, that seems to be the most common, to rice stuffing, that I make and is the best. But cranberry sauce is as simple as it gets. It is also vegetarian, dairy free, gluten-free and all-alergens free, making it safe for everyone. It is tangy enough to add and extra dimension to every meat, even the bland and boring turkey. The acid wakes up the taste buds, changes the pH and enhances the flavor. Although important, it is the one item that almost always comes out of a can. And it is a shame. Cranberry sauce is easy to make and since it is part of the Thanksgiving celebration we should take the time to make it at home.

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Reviewing Tips and Tricks for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is coming and the web is flooding from the side to side with tricks and tips on how to make thanksgiving dinner easier, better, less stressful, cheaper and everything else that will make your life easier. Among them I stumble upon the Buzzfeed post that describes 17 tricks to make Thanksgiving better. Everything from just making the mashed potatoes fluffier to cost saving tips. However, many of these tricks are not really justified and they might not even work well. I will go over these tricks and evaluate them. I will give you my verdict and you can judge if you want to follow them or not.

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Cornmeal Muffins from the past

Food is influenced by the times we live in. Certain times we need to change our habits due to food supply restrictions. Nowadays this happens in the winter when the watermelon supply gets short and the prices go up. And we are bumped. Awwww :-( . Did I mention that it is not even seedless? I know! Total agony. We turn to forget some other times back in the turn of the last century when war was a reality to every part of the world; from Europe to Americas and from Asia to Africa. Back then food supply was already short and the war made it even worst. Lucky people had to improvise and adjust their habits; most would just suffer.

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Baba Ganoush: An inevitable plate

This is an inevitable post. Inevitable since just in the previous I presented the sibling dish of this one, the hummus. This one is all about eggplant. The one plant that has become a stable food around Mediterranean and primarily in the middle-eastern countries. Most of these countries rely heavily on vegetables as power source. Eggplant is not one of them. It is a plant, but not a power source. With a mere 25 kcal per 100 g of the fruit, eggplant is food with low energy value. It does have some other minerals and vitamins, but again they are not even enough to make eggplant a "super-food". Then why do we eat it? Why is it so valuable in Middle East, India etc?

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One more major update

The blog over the years has evolved and changed many times. Different hosts, platforms and focus. Now as we finish 2013 I finally completely one of the most daunting task: migrating the site to brand new host running on brand new platform. I decided to do that to get away from software binding publishing platforms. I started playing around with WordPress around this time and in July the transition was finally over. After that the optimization of the site with widgets and plugins took a few for months. This came complete with social media integration and fan pages. Some recipes were published also in the meantime and I moved. Fourth house since I start blogging. The first recipe will also come soon!

 

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