Archive for the Health Category
Filed under: Chocolate, South Africa, Northern Africa, New Products, America, Holidays, Food News
Los Angeles gourmet chocolatier Compartes has created the perfect combination of style, charity, and deliciousness.
Chocolates for a Cause (5 piece box for $20, 10 piece box for $30) brings you five explosive chocolate flavors decorated with little colored Africas in a box with a Relief Beads bracelet, all to benefit Darfur.
Funds raised from this collaboration [with RELIEF INTERNATIONAL] go directly to funding the only women’s center in Darfur!
The five flavors are made with the finest African ingredients - some of them hard to find, like carmelized plantains and grains of paradise.
You can order the packages here (in plenty of time for the holidays!) or click here for more info on the Relief Beads bracelets.
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Filed under: On the Blogs
Back at the end of August, my cousin and his wife had their second child. In the face of this happy news, I did what any loving relative would do. I pulled down a casserole pan and started cooking. I put together a baked pasta dish with browned organic sausage, lots of wilted spinach, ricotta cheese, homemade marinara sauce and whole wheat elbows.
However, when I turned up with it at their door, instead of looking relieved to have a meal ready to pop in the oven, my aunt (who was there taking care of the two-year-old) looked harried. I wasn’t the first to bring a dish by that day, nor was I the even the third. Their refrigerator was bursting at the seams with deli containers of pasta salad, roasted chickens from the local gourmet market and a pot of turkey chili. If only MealBaby had been around just a few short months ago, we could have avoided that traffic jam of food.
MealBaby, you ask? It’s a new (free) online service that allows you to organize and schedule meals for new parents, people recovering from illness or surgery and anyone else who just needs a few homecooked meals. Once you have an account (and signing up is easy), you just set up a meal calendar for a friend, family member or yourself. You can invite as many people as you’d like to participate, and once they sign up for mealtime slot, the system blocks out the date and sends them a reminder email a day in advance. People can even participate from far away, as there’s also an option to buy a gift certificate to a grocery store or restaurant built into the system.
It’s a brilliant way to coordinate meals and ensure that your lasagna is greeted with an appreciative smile instead of an overwhelmed grimace.
[via The Kitchn]
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Filed under: Wine, South America, Fall, Wine of the Week
 While grape growers in the northern hemisphere are just winding down harvest, the southern hemisphere is six months ahead of us. It seems we should still be drinking our 2005’s, 06’s, and 07,s, but I’ve just opened a bottle of the 2008 Veramonte Sauvignon Blanc Reserva, a gorgeously fresh and lively wine from Chile’s Casablanca Valley.
Ordinarily I think of Sauvignon Blanc as a summer wine because its bone-dry acidity and grapefruit flavors zing through your palate and refresh a thirsty mouth like no other wine can. But dry, unoaked varietal Sauv Blancs are mostly meant to be drunk young in order to stay fresh–so the younger, the better, and when the southern hemisphere 2008s roll out in the fall, it’s best to catch them while you can.
Many producers in New Zealand and Chile use a new harvesting method of picking grapes over a longer period of time at different levels of ripeness, which gives the wine a heady combination of raciness and curves. Pick too soon, and Sauvignon Blanc, already a vegetal varietal, is too green, too grassy. Pick to late, and the wine is flabby and flat instead of full and round. The combination picking results in a multi-dimensional wine that has the best of both worlds: flinty minerality and ripe body.
Continue reading Wine of the Week: Sauvignon Blanc
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Filed under: Frugal Food, Restaurants, Business, The Best … in All of New York, America, Comfort Food, Fast Food, Local Eating
.jpg) Long before Manhattan eateries started lowering prices to bring in depressed (and recessed) customers, Gray’s Papaya was famous for its amazing “Recession Special.” Debuting in the 1990’s, the special originally cost $1.95, but rose to its current price of $3.50 in the early 2000’s. Consisting of a medium tropical beverage and two hot dogs, the combination of two perfectly prepared hot dogs and a medium fruit drink has become a New York institution and one of the city’s best bargains.
Unfortunately, the arrival of a real recession has forced the hot dog retailer to raise the price on its special. In February, seeing the writing on the wall, Gray’s founder Nicholas Gray began warning customers that a price increase was on the way. This week, it finally came to pass: the special has now gone up to $4.45.
Even with the increase of $0.95, the special is still a great deal, and a great way to weather economic hard times. Let’s just hope that things get better before Gray’s has to break $5!
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Filed under: Chocolate, America, Artisan Foods
Know who takes chocolate seriously? Me. Oh, and Amano Artisan Chocolate.
I was fortunate enough to taste the Madagascar, Ocumare, and Cuyagua varieties. In fact, I shared them with a bunch of actors, who all made the classic “mmm, delicious chocolate” faces. It was great.
While everyone loved the rich bean flavor of the limited edition Cuyagua and the almost-medicinal complexity of the Ocumare, the overwhelming favorite was the Madagascar Premium Dark Chocolate. The chocolate was so moist, and even at 70% cacao minimum was so sweet it tasted almost infused with blueberries. Delish.
Art Pollard began Amano in 1996 when he wanted to manfacture chocolate on par with that in other parts of the world here in America. He studied chocolate-making in Europe and Mexico, and for years only shared his work with selected chefs.
Since 2006, Amano Artisan Chocolate has been made available for all. Get some here, and check out some great photos of its preparation (and founder Art Pollard) below!
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Filed under: Diary of a Distiller
Last Friday we took the day off from installing the steam pipes for our new brewery boiler, to bottle our first hard cider. This is the first new product to be released since I joined the team, and I had a lot of input towards its design. I have had some experience in the past creating hard ciders, both as a home brewer and wine maker, as well as commercially. Right after Mike and I shook hands to form our partnership late last November, I set off to Cornell University’s Agricultural Experimental Station in Geneva, NY to take a week of workshops, primarily on advanced hard cider development and production techniques. The new information I picked up helped fine tune this cider into a great product over the past year.
We started with several different batches of sweet apple cider, fresh pressed from locally grown apples. Each batch had a different blend of apples and was fermented at cool temperatures using different yeasts. After the primary fermentation, the cider was taken off the lees (old, spent, dead and dormant yeast that settles to the bottom of the fermenting tank.) Then put into new tanks to age slowly for months and months, all at cool temperatures in our wine cellar. The cool temperature and slow, slow, slow, fermentation ensure that there will be lots of fresh apple flavor in the finished cider; as well as the tones and notes from the fermentation. Since each batch was made from different apples, and different yeasts; they had a completely different character from each other.
One of the craft secrets to creating a great hard cider is long and slow aging; and this we had done. The other is blending the cider. If you just make one, huge, batch of hard cider using all your apples, it tends to taste flat and one dimensional after fermentation. But if you make several smaller batches, with different apples in each, and later blend them carefully together; you get a final cider that is greater than the sum of its parts. Really great ciders save back some of the final blend to age even longer, and this is added to the blend the following year/s to bring in even greater complexity.
Continue reading Diary of a Distiller: Chapter 22 - An apple (cider) a day, keeps the Doctor away
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Filed under: Beer, Our Bloggers
 When new bloggers join the Slashfood team, we like to make sure they get a proper introduction to our readers. You’ve met Annie Scott, Monika Bartyzel, Stefani Pollack and Alanna Kaufman. Now meet the latest addition to our team, Mike Pomranz.
Do you have a personal blog?
A friend once told me: “You need to post a website or something. How the hell am I supposed to know what you’re up to?” She was kidding. I have serious problems.
For the election season, you can read my Election ‘08 comedy blog, Slander ‘08. Coming soon, I’m launching Wiijuvenated to deal with my Wii addiction. You can also often find me blogging on behalf of my rock band here or my musical comedy duo here. And if you’re a fan of blogs that haven’t been updated in years, feel free to look here, here, here and, uh, even here. (Please note, many of these blogs are not safe for work or for society in general.) Maybe one day I’ll stick with a blog for more than two months at a time.
What is your day job, or rather, what do you do when you’re not food blogging?
As a writer, comedian and musician, I spend a lot of time on the couch.
Continue reading 20 Questions with a Slashfoodie: Mike Pomranz
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Filed under: Food Oddities, Newspapers, Vegetarian/Vegan
Tofurky, Bac-Os, Cool Whip, movie popcorn “topping” - the list of fake foods goes on and on. But why do people feel the need to create substitutes for widely available foodstuffs? There are a number of reasons, says the Chicago Tribune, in an article on the history of fake food. Money is one reason - hydrogenated soybean oil is cheaper than butter as a popcorn topping. Shelf life is another: Cool Whip and Cremora stay good a lot longer than fresh cream. Tofurky, soy dogs and Fakin’ bacon serve the vegetarian market. Ritz Cracker mock apple pie and fake oysters made from corn were American frontier settlers answers to the lack of apples and oysters along the road.
But what accounts for “mock cox comb” or a faux standing roast made from Canadian sausages? The answers may be lost to history.
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Filed under: Stores & Shopping
 There are all sorts of things out there to keep your drinks cold that go well beyond simple cubes of ice. Over the years, we’ve seen naughty ice trays, slick water-free globes, and even, believe it or not, rocks. But what about the clear chill of ice bullets?
UberReview has shared a new way to make ice — the AK Ice Tray, which molds water into AK-47 ice ammo. It’s not a new way to slay your opponents, but it would make a mixed drink look pretty sleek. Just imagine — a ring of bullets with some tasty liquor poured over it, a bucket full of bullets for a gangster shindig, or the perfect gift for a gun toter. Not bad for under $15.
Bite the bullet, baby!
[via Serious Eats]
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