September 4th, 2010 by sdkq
Cooking with kids can really change the way you look at cooking. It’s such fun to see things through their eyes and to experience it with them, and making delicious chocolate dessert recipes is no exception! My 3 1/2-year-old son and I have been fortunate enough to be the ones to review one of the Handstand Kids Cookbook Kits, and we really had a blast. Learn how to make the delicious Italian tartufo dessert recipe here.The first thing you need to do when cooking with kids, presuming you are using the Handstand Kids Italian Cookbook Kit, is to make sure your child is wearing the chef’s hat. It must be perched jauntily on his head, not obscuring his vision. This is critical, or he will trip going up his step stool to reach the counter.
The next steps are to follow the recipe for tartufo found on page 52 in the Italian cookbook kit. To start with, I tore off a long piece of aluminum foil for my son (that edge is SHARP) and had him mold it onto a jelly roll pan (basically a cookie sheet with edges). The tartufo dessert recipe calls for 10 chocolate cookies. We had Oreos in the house, so we figured that would work. The recipe also called for chopping the cookies with a knife, but since my son is so little, I had him put them in a zip-top bag and pound on them instead. We broke them up together through the bag, then I gave him a rolling pin to continue smushing them into little pieces. Nothing like cooking with kids (or chocolate dessert recipes) to make you appreciate a good rolling pin…or a good seal on a zip-top bag! We transferred the cookie pieces/crumbs to a small bowl to have them ready for the ice cream.
The tartufo dessert recipe suggested making 6 scoops of ice cream, but since my kids are both small (his brother is only 15 months) and nobody wants to deal with that much sugar in a tiny little body (if you have kids, you know just what I mean), I opted to use our cookie batter scoop. The scoops are smaller, and we made a dozen. We dropped each scoop, one at a time, into the cookie pieces/crumbs to coat, and we got those on the cookie sheet and I set it in our deep freeze in the garage to chill for an hour.
What is the most important ingredient in chocolate dessert recipes? Chocolate, of course! The recipe calls for 8 ounces of chocolate, so my little chef turned on our kitchen scale, put the bowl on and zeroed it out, and poured in the chocolate chips until the scale had an 8 on it . Cooking with kids is a great opportunity for your kids to learn measuring, work on their numbers, AND make good food. We had to add 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil to the chocolate chips, so my son held the measuring spoon while I poured from the bottle, then he added it to the chips and mixed it up. We set that aside on the counter to wait for the ice cream balls to finish freezing.
So, the ice cream balls are cookie coated and frozen, time to melt the chocolate. I handled this part by taking the chocolate chip/vegetable oil mixture and putting it in the microwave for the 2 1/2 minutes the recipe called for. I put the bowl on the counter, making sure to let my son know not to touch because it would be HOT, and we stirred the chocolate to complete the melting process. Oh, did I mention that when we were measuring the chocolate chips for the tartufo dessert recipe that he said it would be OK if he had “just 1 or 2 chocolate chips, Mommy. You can have one too, you know.” It was very cute.
Next comes putting the hot, melted chocolate onto the cold, frozen ice cream balls. I brought the cookie sheet in from the deep freeze using a potholder, because metal becomes painful to touch when it reaches about 40 degrees below zero! Probably wouldn’t have needed the potholder if I just stuck it in our kitchen freezer. My son and I carefully spooned out the hot chocolate from the bowl and coated each cookie-coated ice cream ball as much as we could, then I popped the tray back into the freezer until after dinner.
We had a delicious dinner of grilled chicken, prepared by my loving husband, and had our delicious tartufo dessert recipe (or “tarfuffo,” as my son calls it) for dessert. Did I mention that our deep freeze is about 40 below? Had I the foresight to bring the finished tartufo into the house and temper it in the kitchen freezer or on the counter, we would have missed the delightful scene that played out next…
40 below is REALLY cold. So cold, I mean you can’t even use a spoon to cut your ice cream ball (tartufo recipe or otherwise) into a bite-sized piece. No matter, just pick the whole thing up and bite it! That’s exactly what my 3 1/2-year-old son did. It was so funny, but it worked. He couldn’t really bite through the chocolate, but he managed to get it thawed enough between his mouth and his hands that it worked out just fine for him. He was a chocolate mess, but a HAPPY chocolate mess for sure!
Would I recommend making this tartufo dessert recipe with your kids? Absolutely! Would I recommend making it even if you don’t have or know any kids? Definitely!
Nina Hoffman is Editorial Director for Prime Publishing LLC, owner of RecipeLion.com. We have thousands of free recipes, cooking tips, easy quick recipes and food information. If you want to make it, then let RecipeLion show you the recipe. Discover your inner chef at http://www.RecipeLion.com.
Tags: 15 months, aluminum-foil, chocolate cookies, chocolate dessert, cookie batter, cookie pieces, cookie sheet, cooking, cooking with kids, delicious chocolate, dessert, dessert recipe, dessert recipes, handstand, italian cookbook, jelly roll pan, Kids, little pieces, oreos, pound on, recipe, rolling pin, step stool, Tartufo, tartufo dessert
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September 4th, 2010 by jaio
Students lined the stairs and poured out of the double doors of Science Center Hall C yesterday afternoon, as Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics Professor Michael P. Brenner debuted the new course Science of the Physical Universe 27, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter.”
According to School of Engineering and Applied Sciences postdoctoral fellow Otger Campás-Rigau—one of the class’s three other instructors—the student audience numbered around 600, far exceeding the 350-person capacity of the lecture hall.
The course, which will explore the physical and chemical properties of matter through the lens of cooking science, will incorporate cooking and eating into lab sections. Weekly lectures will feature prominent chefs and food experts in the field of “molecular gastronomy”—a discipline that uses science to re-engineer food.
For example, guest lecturer Wylie Dufresne is known for creating noodles made almost entirely of shrimp.
“This is an extraordinary opportunity to teach science,” Brenner said. “We hope that students will be able to understand the science and learn to see it in the things that they cook.”
Brenner said attendance may bloat even further next Tuesday, when world-renowned chefs Ferran Adrià and José Andés will be joined by food critic Harold McGee as guest lecturers.
“We’ve been changing our expectations—we started out thinking 200 or 300, but as we got closer to today, we started thinking somewhere around 600,” said teaching fellow Emily R. Russell, a third-year physics Ph.D. student.
According to Campás-Rigau, the class will be lotteried down to 300 students by next Wednesday, a significantly larger class size than the 190-student cap discussed last spring. Despite the high level of student interest, Campás-Rigau said the class size could not be increased because of constraints on the number of possible sections.
“It is simply that we don’t have any more space in the labs,” he said.
The lottery will not take seniority into account.
Students who shopped the class said they were drawn by the opportunity to learn from celebrity chefs while fulfilling a science requirement for the Core or General Education.
“It will be different for me [to take a lab class], and I’m not looking forward to it,” said Charlotte H. Nicholas ’13, who plans to concentrate in English. “That’s why I’m hoping to do cooking instead.”
Students also said that the class had generated a significant buzz since it was announced last spring.
“It’s one of those classes that everyone has been talking about since the end of last year,” said Tessa M. Kaplan ’13, who also shopped the course. “I think it goes without saying that something about food and something that involves lab sections where you’re cooking and getting to eat your experiments is pretty cool.”
While both Nicholas and Kaplan were able to grab seats, students in the entrance of the hall periodically jumped up to catch a glance at Brenner and cupped their ears to hear him. Those unable to make it into the classroom are not entirely out of luck, as the course was recorded and will be available on the course website.
— Staff writer Evan T.R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.
September 4th, 2010 by memt
Garlic is one of those tricky ingredients that you need to be careful with when cooking. If you don’t use enough, you won’t even know that it is there, and end up missing out on a great treat. Use too much though, and you can easily find your meal is overwhelmed with garlic. Cooking with garlic doesn’t need to be that difficult though, as long as you follow these simple guidelines.
Have you ever wondered how to correctly use garlic? After all, if you use too much then you find your meal either too spicy, or just plain ruined. However, if you use too little then you can find yourself with an extremely bland meal. If only there was some way to learn the proper way for cooking with garlic. Luckily, there is. Here are some simple guidelines that you can use to help you learn the best way of cooking with garlic.
Watch how much you use. When using fresh garlic, the number one thing to watch out for is how much garlic you end up using. Unless you know exactly what the results of your recipe will be, you should always start with the least amount of garlic possible. If you would like a stronger taste, slowly add a little more as time goes by in the cooking process. This is especially true when using freshly cut, sliced, pressed, minced, or otherwise broken cloves of garlic.
Heat carefully. If you are thinking of cooking some fresh garlic, then you need to be especially careful when heating it. This is because you can have some very nasty results if you accidentally burn, or scorch, fresh garlic. Whether the garlic is in whole cloves, or it has been sliced or cut in some other way, when garlic gets burnt it turns extremely bitter.
Using cloves. If you are looking for a sweet, nutty flavor to add to the taste of your meals then you want to use whole cloves. Avoid piercing the skin of the garlic cloves, and then simply heat them up slowly as you cook them. The resulting almost nutty flavor can be an extremely pleasant addition to just about any dish, up to and including ice cream. Simply roast the garlic cloves and then slice them after roasting.
Slicing, dicing, and pressing. Raw garlic is perhaps the single most potent form available. In fact, it could be said that a single raw garlic clove that has been pressed, minced, sliced, or diced is the equivalent in taste to over a dozen whole cloves. The reason for this is pretty simple, when the skin of the garlic becomes pierced a type of oxidation begins which is what produces such a strong odor and flavor.
In conclusion, when cooking with garlic, there is one thing above all that you need to keep in mind. That one thing is caution. Be careful when you use this herb, since it is such a powerful one and can easily have consequences that you didn’t expect.
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September 4th, 2010 by telr
Parenting can be hard. Feeding your baby delicious, nutritious food shouldn’t be. Enter Cooking Light First Foods. The nation’s most trusted healthy living magazine’s first-ever guidebook specifically for parents takes the guesswork out of preparing and choosing foods for your child—from veggies at age four months to snacks for your terrible two-year-old. Insightful, informative and, most importantly, easy, this baby cookbook is a must-read for parents seeking healthy, homemade foods and sound advice. First Foods went on sale August 17 for $19.95.
Tapping the unique professional and personal insight of Carolyn Williams, Registered Dietitian and mom to a growing toddler, First Foods baby steps readers through the first few pivotal years of child development. Taking parents through the stressful transition from mother’s milk to soft foods, and slowly introducing a wider variety of cuisine, First Foods provides more than 100 recipes that are:
-Dietitian approved
-Cooking Light Test Kitchen tested
-Approved by a panel of babies and toddlers
Visually-engaging, with 200+ precious, helpful and guiding photos, First Foods is in an easy-to-use spiral-bound format. Straightforward illustrations simplify important matters such as food allergies and intolerances, as well as food charts for each phase of a baby’s growth.
Key elements include:
-Baby and toddler-approved recipes for all stages, from first foods, such as Blueberry Banana Yogurt and Lentils with Sweet Potatoes, to a toddler’s meal of Cheesy Broccoli and Potatoes or Butternut Squash and Spinach Lasagna to snacks such as Banana Pops
-Hardworking tips and how-to advice, including recipe prep techniques and more
-“At Our House” tales from the front line of parenting
-Special sections “Happy Birthday, Baby” and “Holiday Food for Everyone,” which offer recipes and tips for celebrating milestones without throwing nutrition out the window
My son enjoyed looking at all the toddler’s pictures as they were eating their foods. These recipes can be enjoyed by all, the Mac and Cheese with Roasted Tomatoes, Cheesy Broccoli Potatoes, Fruit Purees (great to add to muffin/pancake batter!), Chicken, Rice, and Tropical Fruit Salad and Risotto Primavera are just some that are tempting my tummy!
For my recipe review, I chose to make the Banana Mango frozen yogurt. It was such an easy recipe, and I added in some small diced mangoes for texture. Boy was this good!! I loved how the banana flavor came through with the vanilla extract, and the little pieces of mango. Everyone (even my Father-in-law) enjoyed this, not just my 3 yr old little guy. =)
Banana-Mango Frozen Yogurt
1 cup sliced ripe banana
3/4 cup chopped peeled mango
1/3 cup orange juice
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1-1/2 cups 2% low-fat milk
3/4 cup sugar
1 (16-ounce) carton vanilla low-fat yogurt
1. Combine first 4 ingredients in a blender; process until smooth. Combine
banana mixture and remaining ingredients in a large bowl; stir well with a
whisk.
2. Pour mixture into the freezer can of an ice-cream freezer; freeze according
to manufacturer’s instructions. Spoon into a freezer-safe container; cover
and freeze (ripen) at least 1 hour. Yield: 6 cups (serving size: 1/2 cup).
NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION:
CALORIES 118 (8% from fat); FAT 1.1g (sat 0.7g, mono 0.3g, poly 0.1g); PROTEIN
3.1g; CARB 24.9g; FIBER 0.5g; CHOL 4mg; IRON 0.1mg; SODIUM 41mg; CALC 105mg
Source
I wrote this review for “Mommy? I’m Hungry!” about Cooking Light’s First Foods. I received free product to keep for this review. All opinions for this review are that of myself & family. Product info & stock images provided by PR or Co.
September 3rd, 2010 by telr
p>Cooking Tips – 7 Useful Cooking Tips And Hints For Amatuers
It’s your first day in the kitchen and you have no idea where to start. A haphazard way of doing things will only delay meals and see that you are stuck in the kitchen for a long time! To ensure that you produce quicker and easy-to-prepare meals, as well as please your family’s taste buds, a few cooking tips and hints are in order—
(1) First of all, there has to be a place from where you can pick up cooking tips and hints. There are many classes set up for beginners by various local institutions and organizations. In addition, they are not expensive. Since most of the students are beginners, you feel comfortable in sharing your own experiences and learning from others.
(2) Once you cross the beginner’s level and develop a taste for cooking, further instructions at an advanced level for specifics such as dessert-making, barbecuing, baking and so on, can be obtained. If you do not wish to continue as a student after learning the basics, you could turn your attention to magazines devoted to cooking. Many of them display articles related to specific cooking methodology.
(3) If you are the type of person who can get easily overwhelmed, you can just go for one favorite item and learn the related skills. Once that is mastered, you can move ahead from there.
(4) Another way of getting cooking tips and hints is to browse the Internet. This does require some time and patience, but you will be well rewarded with a number of websites offering answers to all your questions.
(5) Many cooking tips and hints are centered round recipes. Even the preparation of the simplest dish requires following a certain method. Recipes act as guides here. The instructions are presented in a precise and step-by-step format, making them easy to follow. Plenty of cook books are available in the market to help you out. Some of them are good enough to present helpful ideas as well as cooking tips and hints along with the recipes.
(6) Reading a recipe correctly is also an art! The reason is that the measurements related to ingredients presented in each recipe can be quite confusing for a beginner. Some measurements are related to liquids while others are related to solids. Look for cooking tips and hints regarding cooking measurements.
(7) Cookbooks (but not all of them) also talk about utensils required for cooking. All types of utensils are available for purchase, but you need cooking tips and hints to let you know which are more commonly used than others. You can therefore buy what you need immediately before going in for any others.
September 3rd, 2010 by ipxe
p>Dinner this evening: Corn, fresh apples, and “sticky wings” (chicken wings, with an Asian-y hot and sweet sauce that uses, among other ingredients, hoisin sauce)
Contents of refrigerator: Corn, fresh apples, chicken wings, other ingredients.
Relevant contents of pantry (or so I believed): hoisin sauce.
Except the hoisin sauce was oyster sauce.
Sigh.
Did you know that, according to the Interwebz, one can substitute ketchup and molasses, in equal parts, for hoisin sauce? And according to me, it works, especially in sticky wings sauce, where there are lots of other ingredients…
I won’t even mention how, when I opened the fridge to return leftovers, I found that I *did* have a fresh bottle of hoisin sauce inside…
Mindy, who likes cooking but who gets exasperated with herself sometimes!
Mirrored from Mindy Klasky, Author.
September 3rd, 2010 by sdkq
p>15 Basic Cooking Tips to Make your Life Easier!
There are some basic cooking tips that anyone could learn and use to help out in the kitchen. With today’s busy lifestyles becoming more prevalent, learning and using these basic cooking tips will save you time and headache.
The following fifteen is just a tiny handful of the many basic cooking tips that you could integrate into your everyday life to save time and money.
• Bacon: Reduce shrinkage by running cold water over it before frying.
• Beans: Stop gas attacks by adding a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda in a big pot of beans while they are soaking.
• Boiled Eggs: Add some vinegar or a little salt to the boiling water when boiling eggs. This basic cooking tips will keep the egg in the shell if it cracks.
• Ripening Fruits and Vegetables: Put your unripe fruit and vegetables in a brown paper bag and place the bag in a dark cupboard for few day. Using this basic cooking tips is an excellent way to save money on fruits and vegetables that has to be ripened.
• Salads: Cut your iceberg lettuce into wedges instead of tearing salad greens to save some time making a salad.
• Spaghetti Sauce: Add a small pinch of bicarbonate of soda to your spaghetti sauce to lower the acid taste from the tomatoes.
• Corn: Place the corn directly into boiling water, and do not add salt. Do not boil corn for more than three minutes. Overcooking reduces the taste level.
• Frozen Vegetables: When they are stuck together, simply run boiling water over them.
• Grating Cheese: Freeze for twenty five minutes before grating. It will shred so much easier.
• Pancakes: Use a small amount of sugar in the batter and they will brown more quickly.
• Pie Pastry: Substitute one teaspoon of vinegar for one teaspoon of the cold water called for in the recipe and the pastry will be much flakier.
• Quick Sauces: Use condensed cream soups such as cream of mushroom, cream of chicken, cream of tomato, cream of celery, to make fast and easy sauces.
• Quick Tenderizer: Use vinegar as a meat tenderizer. Add a tablespoon to water when boiling meat or ribs for stews. This basic cooking tips will help tenderizer even the toughest meat.
• Wilted vegetables: Soak wilted veggies in two cups water, one tablespoon vinegar to help bring them back to life.
• Wooden Skewers: Soak all your wooden skewers in cold water for twenty minutes to prevent them from burning.
Inspiration could be considered to be one of the key ingredients to writing. Only if one is inspired, can one get to writing on any subject especially like cooking.
Use some of these basic cooking tips to make your life in the kitchen more enjoyable.
September 3rd, 2010 by ucin
Product Description
Welcome back to Ballymaloe! When it was originally published ten years ago, Myrtle Allen’s Cooking at Ballymaloe House was hailed as an instant classic. Legions of Irish-Americans, tourists familiar with the guest house, and gourmets intrigued by an oft-neglected cuisine clamored for this groundbreaking cookbook devoted to traditional Irish dishes. Easy yet elegant recipes for Irish stew, batter-fried fish filets, mutton pies, colcannon, apple cake, and Ballymaloe’s trademark brown bread did not disappoint. Now, in a completely redesigned edition, Stewart, Tabori & Chang is proud to bring this heirloom collection of recipes into the twenty-first century.
Ballymaloe House evokes a time and place when summer meant freshly squeezed lemonade and sorbet made of plump blackberries picked right from the brambles; when breakfast was a multi-course meal to be savored, from the stone-ground oatmeal to the buttery scones to the robust sausages; when the making of plum pudding, months in advance, signaled the beginning of the Christmas season. This tranquil way of life still exists at County Cork’s legendary countryside inn, where proprietress and master chef Myrtle Allen presides over a kitchen that prepares seasonal dishes from the incomparably fresh local produce.
In chapters ranging from soups and starters to desserts and drinks, the 100 recipes in Myrtle Allen’s Cooking at Ballymaloe House have been specially selected and adapted for the American home. Mrs. Allen introduces each one in her own charming prose, and her witty descriptions bring Ballymaloe to life.Amazon.com Review
Myrtle Allen’s Cooking at Balymaloe House, first published in 1990 and now reissued, is a modern classic. Written by the proprietor and chef of Ireland’s most famous guesthouse, the book presents a farm-fresh cuisine miles removed from the common notion of Irish cooking as savorless or indelicate. Most especially, it offers the voice, recollections, and culinary wisdom of a woman who has seen and understood much since she and her husband bought Balymaloe House in 1947. Cooks of all kinds will delight in Allen’s observations (of her refusal to put carrots in a traditional Irish stew: “As this is a folk dish, I feel that the common practice carries its own authority”) and hasten to try such recipes as Lettuce and Mint Soup, Baked Rainbow Trout in Spinach Sauce, and Beef with Stout.
Chapters explore soups and starters through breads, desserts, and drinks, and offer 100 or so accessible recipes for everyday and special-occasion dining. Present are traditional Irish favorites, including Dingle pies (a spiced mutton dish), Colcannon (potatoes mashed with cabbage), and brown soda bread, as well as the likes of Danish Liver Paté, Mussels with Mayonnaise, and Turnedos with Mushrooms. Readers with a sweet tooth will want to try Allen’s Almond Meringue Gâteau with Chocolate and Rum Cream and Blackberry Sorbet, and an exemplary trifle featuring almonds, cherries, and angelica. Illustrated with color photos throughout, the book is a cook’s treasure with delightful, sometimes provocative thought. –Arthur Boehm
Myrtle Allen’s Cooking at Ballymaloe House: Featuring 100 Recipes from Ireland’s Most Famous Guest House
September 3rd, 2010 by memt
Not a lot of time for words, but congratulations to Cristine Dryden who took first place today in the annual crab cooking contest held at the First Baptist Church in Crisfield. Read coverage in the Sept. 8, edition of the Crisfield-Somerset County Times. I will post more photos later next week.
That’s Dryden on the left as they announced her name.
Preparation…
The winning dish heads to the judging room.
Looks like someone is peeking…
One of the judges…
Dryden poses with the our newly crowned royalty.
A lesson in cooking from one of the contestants.
A little prayer while the food is cooking.
A few dishes to make you hungry.
There’s nothing like real Maryland crab!
Thanks to all the volunteers!
Oh, standing offer to all the contestants: you can come to my house for dinner anything. I’ll buy the Maryland crab, you cook.
September 3rd, 2010 by ucin
iPhone Application Description:
✵ 40% off! ✵
A tasty and satisfying time management entrée. -iPhone Game of the Day
*It’s clear this version of Cooking Dash has been specially tailored for the platform. – News Shopper
**If you like Cooking Dash, you’ll love Wedding Dash! Try it for FREE! bit.ly/WeddingDashLite **
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With over a million downloads to date, Cooking Dash offers fast-paced action and innovative gameplay in quick bursts of on-the-go entertainment. Help Flo and Grandma keep five DinerTown restaurants up and running… if you can stand the heat!
FEATURES:
★ 50 LEVELS OF GAMEPLAY
The happier your customers, the higher your score!
★ FIVE UNIQUE RESTAURANTS
Master the art of perfectly prepared meals in each uniquely themed kitchen.
★ LISTEN TO YOUR iPod MUSIC (iOS 3.0 and higher)
Enjoy your favorite songs as you play.
★ EXCITING UPGRADES
Purchase unique upgrades for each restaurant!
Watch the Video Trailer at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDeEfCXaZhA
**This version is ONLY for iOS 3.0 (or above) users.
Please update your firmware to iOS 3.0 or above before you download the game or it will not work properly.**
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