Fall is a time that evokes memories of delicious food…at least for me it is. The nippy temperature drop always evokes memories of certain special foods that haven’t been eaten in what seems like years. What&#[...]
Health Benefits of Honey
How many products in nature are there that can give you as many health benefits as honey does? Certainly there are some, but not that many. Honey is one of these food products that different people have had various opinions on because it is full of glucose and fructose, the so-called simple sugars. Being a sugar, honey has been in the awkward position of being labelled a food product with "dubious health benefits." Sugars, flour and salt are, after all, considered man's worst enemies or so the saying goes. Chemically speaking and under a microscope, honey does not look different from ...
Fall Is Chili Time
Fall is a time that evokes memories of delicious food...at least for me it is. The nippy temperature drop always evokes memories of certain special foods that haven't been eaten in what seems like years. What's even worse is that I usually don't realize how much they have been missed. One of my favorite fall foods is undoubtedly a glorious bowl of homemade chili. No two bowls are ever the same and no two batches ever come out the same. Slightly different ingredients and cooking factors will produce a completely different tasting chili. Ahh, the complexity balanced with simplicty. The ...
How To Build A Better Bacon Explosion
A step by step guide to cooking a better bacon explosion. When I first heard about the Bacon Explosion after reading about it on The BBQ Addicts site I knew it was a stroke of genius. Meat sushi...how brilliant! At the time, I never thought I'd ever make one. But life is full of unexpected surprises. Before long, I found myself thinking about it constantly. On a daily basis actually. I thought about how relatively boring the BBQ Addicts made theirs. They were the originators so I have to hand them that but I couldn't help but feel the Bacon Explosion ...
Mincemeat Cake Recipe
In the Beginning Was the Recipe… I was looking for my mother’s recipe for Mincemeat Cake. It was not in the yellow binder where I keep the family recipes copied out by my sister in her meticulous art school handwriting and decorated with whimsical drawings. The recipe wasn’t in the manila folder where I keep the loose recipe cards and the torn magazine pages and the newspaper clippings and the scribbled instructions on the backs of envelopes, school notebook paper and old invoice forms from my grandfather’s general store. (There’s even a recipe copied out on a soft paper napkin worn to ...
My Most Memorable Meal – Jenna Petersen, Romance Novelist
Jenna Petersen started writing full-time in 1999 when her husband said, “You’re only happy when you’re writing, why don’t you do that?” In 2004, her dream came true when her literary agent called to say she’d just sold to Avon. Since then, she’s been a Waldenbooks Mass Market bestseller, a Bookscan bestseller and won the Bookbuyers Best Award for Best Historical Romance. She also helped launch the Avon Red line under her Jess Michaels name. In addition, she has run The Passionate Pen since 1999. This popular site for aspiring authors gets nearly 200,000 hits per month and contains information on ...
Mini Cake Sampler – Black Hound New York
THE SECRET OF LIFE IS ... CAKE A slice of cake when it's your birthday is a treat, but a slice of cake for no particular reason is a delightful surprise that turns an ordinary day into a celebration. Life just goes better with cake. Black Hound, a New York-based supplier of sophisticated sweets since 1988, understands this simple fact of life. They offer 26 different cakes for pick up in their retail stores or by mail order. (Shipped frozen and packed in dry ice, the cakes travel UPS overnight. Order the day before and you can eat cake for dessert at ...
Spicing It Up
I don’t have a lot of pots and pans.If I had to, I could put dinner on the table with just one pot and a paring knife.And I’d have no problem eating with mismatched utensils if necessary.But take away my spices and it’s a whole other story. I grew up in a household with a spice rack, but my mother’s culinary palette was much too broad and diverse to be contained, even in the deluxe, three-shelf version.This was in the 60s, way before the foodie revolution when pretty much the only way to get an authentic herbes de Provence blend was ...
Making Merry Without Mary
My sister Mary loved Christmas. You think it’s rushing the season when the yuletide decorations appear the day after Halloween?She kept little white Christmas tree lights strewn around her apartment year round, surrounding the space with a dotted line of luminosity that defied the darkness that often threatened to engulf her. She started her Christmas wish list in January, appending directions and diagrams for the hopping-impaired, and revising it weekly throughout the year. Christmas was what she called “a candy holiday,” a time she gave herself permission to eat all the wrong things … all the time.Meals were made of eggnog and ...
My Most Memorable Meal: G. Wells Taylor
Halloween.Some would say it’s the perfect holiday.You get to play dress-up, people give you candy and you don’t have to drive three thousand miles to spend the day with your family.But some would say that the day’s events, now mostly celebrated by children, are the remnants of darker times and reminders of darker places—shadow realms where evil lurks patiently to pounce on the living and the dead rise and walk. Places like the World of Change where Canadian author G. Wells Taylor sets his genre-bending horror novels,He’s releasing the second book of his Apocalypse Trilogy, Forsaken,on Halloween and talked to ...
Double Devon Cream Butter – igourmet.com
This was my thought process when I saw this butter on igourmet.com: Double Devon Cream... Yum! Butter... Yum! How could you go wrong with Double Devon Cream Butter? I was, however, a little daunted by the idea of ordering butter online. I couldn't imagine that it would arrive fresh and still firm without being frozen, particularly if delivery was delayed for some reason or other. But my Double Devon Cream Butter arrived in a cooler with a cold gel pack, unharmed and ready to be spread and melted over all of my favorite dishes. I missed picking it up on the day of ...
How To Build A Better Bacon Explosion
A step by step guide to cooking a better bacon explosion. When I first heard about the Bacon Explosion after reading about it on The BBQ Addicts site I knew it was a stroke of genius. Meat sushi…how brilliant! At t[...]
Mincemeat Cake Recipe
In the Beginning Was the Recipe… I was looking for my mother’s recipe for Mincemeat Cake. It was not in the yellow binder where I keep the family recipes copied out by my sister in her meticulous art school handwriti[...]
My Most Memorable Meal – Jenna Petersen, Romance Novelist
Jenna Petersen started writing full-time in 1999 when her husband said, “You’re only happy when you’re writing, why don’t you do that?” In 2004, her dream came true when her literary agent called to say she’d[...]
Mini Cake Sampler – Black Hound New York
THE SECRET OF LIFE IS … CAKE A slice of cake when it’s your birthday is a treat, but a slice of cake for no particular reason is a delightful surprise that turns an ordinary day into a celebration. Life just [...]
Spicing It Up
I don’t have a lot of pots and pans.If I had to, I could put dinner on the table with just one pot and a paring knife.And I’d have no problem eating with mismatched utensils if necessary.But take away my spices and i[...]
Making Merry Without Mary
My sister Mary loved Christmas. You think it’s rushing the season when the yuletide decorations appear the day after Halloween?She kept little white Christmas tree lights strewn around her apartment year round, surroun[...]
My Most Memorable Meal: G. Wells Taylor
Halloween.Some would say it’s the perfect holiday.You get to play dress-up, people give you candy and you don’t have to drive three thousand miles to spend the day with your family.But some would say that the day’s[...]
Double Devon Cream Butter – igourmet.com
This was my thought process when I saw this butter on igourmet.com: Double Devon Cream… Yum! Butter… Yum! How could you go wrong with Double Devon Cream Butter? I was, however, a little daunted by the idea of[...]
The Soul of a Kitchen
Health Benefits of Honey
How many products in nature are there that can give you as many health benefits as honey does? Certainly there are some, but not that many. Honey is one of these food products that different people have had various opinions on because it is full of glucose and fructose, the so-called simple sugars. Being a [...]
Fall Is Chili Time
Fall is a time that evokes memories of delicious food…at least for me it is. The nippy temperature drop always evokes memories of certain special foods that haven’t been eaten in what seems like years. What’s even worse is that I usually don’t realize how much they have been missed. One of my favorite fall [...]
