Erasing the Line Between Food and Fiction

Guest Blogger:Chris Manganaro What we eat on a regular basis tends to be normal to us based on the simple fact that we are used to it. Just as we might eat a hamburger once a week or so, in other places it may be normal to have eaten larvae or snake. Of course, it is still hard to believe that there is anywhere in the world where blood is consumed regularly, yet there likely is. The word "food" means something different to everyone. What one finds appetizing might come off as unappetizing to someone else based off of any number of things, from taste to culture. Extreme is a word that is used when describing something in the highest degree, something at its peak. In some ways, this is what Jerry Hopkins book titled Extreme Cuisine: The Weird & Wonderful Foods That People Eat is all about. It takes the word food and brings it to the very edge of reason. It is a book which can boggle the mind simply by telling us things we may already know yet in greater detail. Most people have heard about at least some of the foods in this book, yet how much do we actually believe it? People eat dogs and cats. This is a fact, but any pet lover would be too appalled to even think that there is history and reasoning behind this. It is just too extreme a thought. Jerry Hopkins wrote this book to express his passion for food. He has tried many of the foods he has mentioned and even enjoys them. He writes facts as well as personal stories which range from humorous to stomach turning. It is a very humanizing way of presenting somewhat disturbing information. Not everyone is bound to take this book the same way, of course. Hopkins tries to make the book as appealing as possible to all readers by adding his human touch but he does not hold back so as not to take away from the experiences he is trying to convey. He is noticeably biased yet he knows he cannot change his reader's minds. If the descriptions are not enough to make you queasy, there are also recipes and pictures to add that extra little bit of tantalizing terror for the reader. Many readers will find themselves gagging on the words throughout the book, but the recipes and pictures will only make the book itself feel icky. Full color photos bring certain parts of the book to life, for better or worse. Recipes only bring the idea of everything as food to light all the more. It is quite humbling. This book is not for the faint of heart or those just about to eat. Or for that matter, those who have just eaten. Of course, for people like Hopkins, perhaps it might cause some salivating. Needless to say it takes a healthy appetite, whether for food or information, to get through this book. It is an intriguing read for many reasons, as long as you find the right time to read it. For Great Recipes get your copy of the Gourmand World Award Winning Book The Basic Art of Italian Cooking: Holidays & Special Occasions-2nd edition

Leftover Christmas Bulge

Guest Blogger: Renata Toth If you are like me, you gain weight in December, even though you’ve been counting calories, counting carbs, counting fat and counting your steps and the minutes you spend with working out. Now Christmas is over and spring is coming, although slowly – it’s time now to get back to shape and lose that excess we gained during this period. A simple diet plan came to my mind when I was trying to figure how to lose weight effectively. I hate starving and hate depriving myself of the food I like, therefore I chose a few day-long diet that allows for some goodies even though strictly limitedly. You can do it for 3, 4 or 5 days, but do not do less than 3 in order to get the effect, and do not do more than 5 to prevent your body from switching to “emergency mood” and start living off of much less calories than usual. The first day is usually all right. The breakfast is an orange and around 100 grams of sour cream. For lunch, you can have a slice of bread with a small amount of meat and a lot of veggies: lettuce, carrot, tomato, cabbage – but raw, and not cooked! For dinner, eat another orange and another 100 grams of sour cream. If you are very hungry during the day, you may have some reduced fat-content snack: a cereal bar, a biscuit, an apple – but avoid chocolate and fat. And also do not forget to drink 2 litres of water per day! For the other days, the rule is as follows: you may exchange the sour cream with the same amount of unflavored yogurt and the orange with another fruit, preferably apple, mandarin, kiwi, or maybe a smaller pear. For lunch, you would want to diversify the meat you eat: once chicken, once beef, once pork. Always add raw veggies without sauce. Also, you can add 1 or 2 eggs to one of your meals. If you do this for 4 days and eat normally for the other 3, and repeat it twice, you should lose those extra pounds! How to Make Gluten Free Amaretti Cookies (The Basic Art of Italian Cooking)

A Wild Recipe for Special Occasions

Guest Blogger: Renata Toth Around Christmas, everybody is busy with cooking and baking. I usually spend more time in the kitchen than out, cooking for family. Although we have a few classic meals we like to prepare, from time to time it feels good to bring a little adventure to Holiday cooking and try something new. The wonderful piece of tender deer meat offered recently by a family friend was an exciting choice to change the traditional and well-known line of Christmas meals. Being my first time of preparing venison, I was thankfully wise enough not to chose the most difficult recipe and go for a delicate, exciting, but not very complicated dish, and still make it a powerful pre-Christmas main course. The quick preparation time also adds to the attractiveness of this recipe in the overcharged Christmas period, filled with cooking and shopping and cleaning and cooking again. Ingredients for 4: 4 bigger but thin slices or venison (or 8 small ones) salt and nutmeg (or use spice mix) 1 egg 40 gr flour 50 gr cleaned and sliced natural (not salted) almonds 200 gr sour cherry 30 gr butter 3 cl cognac Preparation: spice the meat mix flour and almonds beat the egg cover the meat in egg, then the flour and almond mix, and fry in hot oil for 5 minutes on both sides. melt the butter and boil the cherries in the butter for around 10 minutes, or until the sauce mostly disappears. add the cognac to the cherry, and light it. It should burn down in a few seconds. Serve hot. as side dish, prepare rice, mashed potatoes, oven-baked potatoes, or croquettes. The combination of deer, cherry and cognac gives a wonderfully warm, wintery and forest-like impression which is the best with potato croquettes that increase this feeling. Accompanied by a beautiful advent wreath as a classy centrepiece on the dining table, especially with cinnamon and orange scented candles and decorated by dried orange slices and nut shells, complete the cozy mood of a pre-Christmas dinner in family. For more great recipes get your copy of the Gourmand World Award Winning Book Series The Basic Art of Italian Cooking: Holidays & Special Occasions=2nd edition

Eating: A Social Event

Guest Blogger: Chris Manganaro Eating is a social event. Some people believe that food even tastes better when eaten in good company. Eating is an experience best shared in one way or another. If you cannot express your enjoyment to others, the experience of food decreases quite a bit. Sharing a compliment with the chef or telling your companion to have a bite add just the right flavor to any meal. If you made it yourself then seeing others enjoy it is what ends up mattering to you all the more than your own enjoyment. Food helps us to understand one another. In Alice, Let's Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Eater by Calvin Trillin, we learn about Alice and Calvin as a couple through their experiences with food. Calvin is a food enthusiast, a foodie, a gourmand. Whatever you want to call him, his love of food is more than obvious and sometimes leans towards ridiculous. Alice is also a lover of food, but not exactly in the same vein as Calvin. Throughout the book one can see the differences between the two yet food still brings them together quite often. The book is simply set up in chapters which often revolve around one topic. Each chapter's topic is in some way related to food, of course. Calvin Trillin would not have it any other way. What makes this interesting is that the way each chapter addresses food is not always direct. Each exploit is rather silly and rarely serious. This makes the book move by at a leisurely pace. It is an easy read that is likely to make you chuckle along with your rumbling stomach. Due to Calvin's eccentricities, you may just be laughing at times because his love of food likely outdoes yours. He will eat most anything. For great recipes and food info and tips join 100,000 worldwides subscribers at http://www.marialiberati.com Get your copy of the Gourmand World Award Winning Book The Basoc Art of Italian Cooking: Holidays & Special Occasions-2nd edition at www.marialiberati.com or on Amazon

Wine Soup? Who Knew

Guest Blogger: Renata Toth What characterizes this cold season? Wild animals, mushrooms, orange, grapes and wine are typical to the fall and winter months. The soup I find interesting is a nice warm wine soup in which the flavours of fall and winter are combined with the bitter sweetness of dry white wine. To make this soup for 4, you'll need: • 1 cup dry white wine • 2/3 cup water • 1 egg yolk • 4 egg whites • a few cloves • orange skin • lemon skin • approx 3 tsps sugar • approx 2 tsps of flour First, pour the wine into a pot and start boiling it. Add a few stripes or orange skin and lemon skin and the cloves (5-6 for this amount), and bring it to boil. Meanwhile, beat the egg whites until you obtain a thick and hard cream. Mix the egg yolk with the sugar with a little water, and the rest of the water with the flour. When the wine is boiling, take it off the fire, and add the egg yolk-sugar mix while mixing continuously, and the water-flour mix, while still mixing it continuously in order to avoid the creation of lumps. Bring it to boil once more. When boiling, add the egg whites and mix with a hand whisk until you obtain a smooth and creamy texture. Serve hot in pretty bowls. This soup is fast and delicious, ready in approximately 30 minutes, so it is best to prepare it freshly before the dinner so that it remains hot. Although it keeps its alcoholic and' winey' taste, it practically won't contain any alcohol after boiling, so it is a safe dish for those who plan to drive after dinner. Enjoy! For more great recipes join 100,000 worldwide subscribers at http://www.marialiberati.com Get your copy of the Gourmand World Award Winning book The Basic Art of Italian Cooking: Holidays & Special Occasions-2nd edition

Easy Lemon Jam

Guest Blogger: Renata Toth If you have read my previous post on the chocolate-lemon jam muffin, this one will come in handy, as for the jam itself. Its wonderfully lemony flavour is not only for cakes, though. You can use it as a jam on a slice of buttered bread, on biscuits, on in a pancake as filling. This is a totally home-made receipe as done by my mother and nowadays by myself as well. It does not need a lot of thinking or preparation, and it is a really low-budget treat to prepare. The ingredients for a dose are: • 1 kg white squash (not to be mistaken with the sport), grated • 3 bigger whole lemons, grated (all included) • Powdered sugar You just take the grated squash and cook it on a medium-high fire in its own juice until tender and the sauce evaporates a little. Then, add the grated lemons and cook together. When ready, distribute it into smaller or bigger bottles. You may want to wash the bottles with cold water before you do it, and only add a small amount of the hot jam, otherwise the bottle may crack or even break because of the sudden temperature increase. When the bottles are filled, put a good amount of powdered sugar ont he top to preserve the jam, put the top on tightly, and place them in a basket upside down. Cover them until they cool to avoid a quick cooling that wouldn’t do good to the jam itself. Without opening the bottle, you can keep the jam for years; if the bottle is open, then you need to keep it in the fridge and finish it relatively soon! A great breakfast idea would be to eat some jam with a home-made croissant and either a big mug of coffee or a nice fresh orange juice! Enjoy! For recipes, cooking how to's. join 100,000 worldwide subscribers at The Basic Art of Italian Cooking by Maria Liberati tm BLOG at www.marialiberati.com Or get the new booklet The Basic Art of Christmas Dinner at www.marialiberati.com

Dreaming Up Deliciously Dimunitive Dessserts

Guest Blogger: Chris Manganaro We often find ourselves fixated with the size of many things in our lives. From our cars and homes to who got the larger piece of cake, everyone always wants to have the bigger piece of the pie in life. What we do not often consider is the idea that good things come in small packages. Due to the fact that people often dismiss this perspective, we sometimes miss out on what really matters. It all comes down to greed. This applies just as easily to dessert, which is something that some people cannot get enough of. They want to have their cake and eat it too. Well, with a recipe like Piecaken from Christy Beaver and Morgan Greenseth's book, Petite Treats, you can do just that. Greenseth and Beaver both show an understanding of the might behind miniature things. Their cookbook, as well as the business which sparked it, were formed on the basis of this thought. The desserts in this book may be small, but they pack a powerful punch both in flavor and presentation. By presenting so much to the senses in such a compact way, the book and desserts speak volumes in their own tiny voice. The book itself is small in comparison to other cookbooks, but not so small as to be impractical. The words are still easy to read and the pictures included are good quality. Another bright side to its smaller size is the fact that there is less white space on the pages, making the book feel full. The use of pictures which relate to the recipe at hand also help to fill the white void without overwhelming the reader. This is all done to compliment the size and enhance the readers experience. Speaking of enhancing the experience, there are side bars on most of the recipes which are labeled as "sweet tips" and are there to assist the readers baking needs. In some cases these tips are rather necessary while other times they are partially silly, pushing the reader not to waste anything. Due to the brevity and wit of the boxed words, they come off merely as gentle prodding and clarification. They are but another part of the books charm. One should have no trouble navigating their way through the recipes in this cookbook. It is split into simply defined sections with an easy to navigate table of contents. The little blurb between sections shows off the writing style and mood of the authors quite well. This is a book written for everyone from hobby bakers to vegans, who will find many recipes that can be altered for them. You do not need to be a seasoned veteran of the kitchen to use this book. Everything is laid out concisely, but also with enough detail that anyone should be able to prepare these desserts. The only downside would be the fact that the book does not have an equipment guide, but this is easily remedied as long as you read through a recipe first as the necessary equipment is mentioned within them. Not everyone's kitchen contains mini scone and whoopie pie pans after all. In the end,there are no small cooks, just petite treats! For more great recipes and culinary travel join 100,000 worldwide subscribers at http://www.marialiberati.com Get your copy of the Gourmand World Award Winning book The Basic Art of Italian Cooking:Holidays &Special Occasions-2nd edition How to Make Gluten Free Amaretti Cookies (The Basic Art of Italian Cooking)

Moroccan Tajines

Guest Blogger: Renata Toth To continue with another typical Moroccan dish, I’d suggest choosing a delicious tajine. Tajines are those pyramid-shaped cooking pots Moroccans use for cooking. The specialty of this is that all the ingredients are added one another, allowing for the different cooking times, and then basically cooked together, which gives an extraordinary mixture of all the flavours, the outcome of which will be a full and tasteful meal. In case you do not have this tajine, you can just as well cook it in a pot. A meat and fruit tajine would just do nicely after this thick soup. You’ll need the following: 1 middle-sized onion approx 4 cl oil 1 kg meat, mostly beef is used 2 cinnamon sticks, or ground cinnamon ½ tsp ginger salt and pepper 1 litre of water a little bit of powdered cinnamon, if you have been using sticks above 4 sp honey 200 gr dried peaches 250 gr pineapple, cut in small dices 250 gr pears cut in small dices 100 gr butter 5 sp sugar 2 bananas 100 gr breadcrumbs First, in a pot, put together the onion cut into thin pieces, the oil, meat, 1 cinnamon stick (or a little powdered cinnamon), salt and pepper, ginger and the powdered cinnamon (in case you used sticks above). Mix it well until the meat is browned, then add water, cover and cook for 35 minutes approximately. Afterwards, add the honey and let it cook for a little while, but keep some sauce. While the meat is cooking, wash and peel the peaches, and cook for 10 minutes. Then, drain them and mix in the mixer. Put the pineapple cubes and pear pieces in a pan with a small amount of butter, add the sugar and the other cinnamon stick, and let it cook until the juice evaporates completely and the fruits are slightly caramelised. Peel the bananas, cut them in circles. Melt butter in a pan. Cover every pieces of banana with breadcrumbs and fry them on both sides in the butter. Serve the meat on a plate and surround it with the fruits and the peach sauce, and sprinkle with sesame seeds. To accompany this dish, prepare a nice fruit juice! For example, take half a kilo of strawberries, sugar according to your taste, ice cubes and half a litre of orange juice, mix them together in the blender and serve in long glasses! To be stylish, you can dip the glasses into sugar as well and maybe add a little umbrella as decoration! For more recipes visit http://www.marialiberati.com Get your copy of The Basic Art of Italian Cooking: Holidays & Special Occasions-2nd edition

A Taste of Harira..

By Guest Blogger: Renata Toth Ramadan night dishes are usually heavier than an everyday lunch, given that the whole day’s calorie consumption has to be covered with one meal. Yet, this one meal includes several dishes from the dense soup to the nuts, sweets and fruits coming for dessert. Probably the Moroccan harira and couscous are the most widely known dishes preferred during Ramadan, given their richness that fills the stomach easily. Harira itself is most often associated with Ramadan. To make this soup, you will need the following ingredients: 100 gr chickpeas 100 gr lentils 200 gr soft meat cut in small pieces 100 gr onion cut in small pieces 4 sp oil 100 gr chopped celery 500 gr chopped tomatoes salt black pepper 1 tsp powdered ginger a little bit of saffron 1 cinnamon stick or a small amount of ground cinnamon 2 litres of water 1,5 sp tomato puree around 100 gr ground coriander and parsley First you’ll have to soften the lentils and the chickpeas in water for a whole night -so begin the night before. In a pot, put together the chickpeas, lentil, the oil,the onion and the celery, and cook on medium fire until the meat gets a nice golden color. Then, add the chopped tomatoes and the salt, pepper, ginger, saffron and the cinnamon. Pour water over the mix and boil until the meat and the chickpeas are well cooked. Using a pressure-cooker would significantly diminish the cooking time of this dish. Then when the meat is ready, take out he cinnamon stick if you used one. Add the tomato puree, coriander and parsley, and cook on medium fire for another 15 minutes. Serve hot.. for more recipes and foodie info visit http://www.marialiberati.com and get your

copy of The Basic Art of Italian Cooking: Holidays & Special Occasions-2nd edition