Category Archives: Cooking and Recipes

Learn Tips About Lobster Bakes


Posted by healthyways

If you don?t already know how, you should really learn how to cook lobster. Choose from lobster tails, clambakes, appetizers, surf and turf, lobster pasta, lobster roll, or a good old fashioned boiled lobster. Whatever you choose no chef’s knowledge is complete without knowing how to prepare Lobster Rolls. A variety of websites provide information on how to cook a simple lobster or construct a classic lobster bake including steamers, clams, corn, potatoes, and sometimes a sausage or chorizo.

Lobster bakes (also known as clam bakes) are a New England tradition that has spread through the world wherever lobster lovers gather. It involves a process of digging a hole in the beach sand, building a fire in the hole then placing wet seaweed over the fire. The lobster, clams, steamers, and accoutrements are placed on the wet seaweed and covered with more seaweed. This event takes all day, which if you?ve ever spent time at the sea is not a problem.

When the seaweed is removed a beautiful and fragrant feast is revealed that suits the casual nature of beach dining perfectly. Simply grab a plate, load it with lobster, clams, steamers, potatoes and maybe a sausage and dig in. Another alternative is to order the ?traditional clambake? from an online reseller. These usually arrive overnight delivery and include large cooking pot for cooking and all the accoutrements you may need. This is a great option for that lobster fix in the middle of off-season, or if you live in a landlocked state, but as with so many things, there is no substitute for the real deal on the beach with the smell of the ocean as an appetizer.

Additional lobster dishes can be as simple as a boiled or steamed lobster on a plate or as elaborate as the lobster thermador dish. This elegant and uniquely flavored dish was originally prepared for Napoleon Bonipart and also holds the dubious honor of being the last dish served on the notoriously doomed ocean liner Titanic. This dish requires removing the lobster meat and saut


How To Enjoy Your Italian Cooking School Tour To The Max.


Posted by healthyways

You’re off to Italy on a cooking school tour you’ve been dreaming of for years, perhaps in the magnificent Barolo wine country in Piedmont or on the east coast in Sicily with views of the Mediterranean and snow capped Mount Etna.

You want to enjoy your sensual experiences in Italy to the maximum: the beauty, the countryside, food, cooking lessons, wine tastings, sightseeing excursions and visits with local people.

Here are four detailed tips on getting all the joy possible out of your Italian cooking school tour, gleaned from my 12 years of experience creating and leading cooking tours in Italy.

1. Many cooking school tour members tell me, “I’ve eaten too much! There’s too much food. I’m a food lover so how can I discipline myself when everything is SO delicious.”

Find out what is on your lunch or dinner menu so you can pace yourself. That way you avoid eating a lot of one course only to find three more courses are coming and you don’t have room for all the wonderful food.

Most Italian meals for special occasions (all cooking school tour meals are special occasions) have five courses: one to five appetizers, pasta or rice, meat or fish, vegetable side dish and dessert, so pacing yourself makes a big difference in your enjoyment of your meal.

A good cooking school tour guide will list all the dishes on the menu to the group before a meal. If she doesn’t, ask her to do so.

Sample a little bit of everything so you experience as many flavours and dishes as possible. That’s one reason you go on a cooking school tour, isn’t it?

Trying a bit of everything will also avoid offending your hospitable cooking teachers or chefs. Then you can smile and say, “It was absolutely wonderful, but I just don’t have the space.” I’m on the petite side, so this line makes perfect sense to my Italian hosts.

2. Some cooking school tour participants say, “The cooking classes were hands-on but I didn’t get enough time to cook hands-on during the lesson. The chef did too much of the cooking in the class.”

If you want to participate more hands-on in the class, get beside the chef and jump right in. If you hang back, waiting to get asked to do something, you may wait awhile and go away feeling disappointed you didn’t get a real hands-on class.

Some tour guides and chefs notice who is shy and hanging back in the kitchen and encourage them to “step up to the plate”, but others don’t. You have to be assertive and volunteer.

3. Some cooking school students wonder, “Will I gain weight during my cooking tour with the vast quantities of irresistible food?”

One woman told me she lost 10 pounds during her cooking lesson trip in Italy. No fried chicken or hamburgers, just healthy, natural, less fatty foods. Italians eat less junk food and more fresh, local foods than many North Americans. She drank water and no pop. She did much more walking than she ever does at home.

If you can find time on your cooking school tour to go for walks or hikes, you’ll go home weighing the same or less, and feel much more energetic while on your cooking tour.

Better still, choose cooking school tours that include some good walks perhaps along paths in the Tuscan or Piedmont wine country or along coasts in Cinque Terre, the Amalfi Coast or Sicily.

4. Communicate in a direct, friendly way with your tour guide about what you want.

Once you’re in Italy in the middle of experiencing your cooking school tour, you may want to change the tour itinerary slightly. For example, you discover many tempting leather shops in a Tuscan hill town and want to spend more time shopping and forego your spa treatments on the itinerary.

Ask your tour guide how you can change activities. Most tour guides try to be as flexible as possible. After all, their job is making sure you enjoy yourself!

If there’s anything you’re not enjoying on your tour, take your tour guide aside, give constructive, friendly feedback and work together to make changes. Don’t be like some people who say nothing about their disappointments until they fill out the tour evaluation form at the end of the tour when it’s too late to help them.

If you’re enjoying an activity tremendously, ask your guide how you can do more of it. “I loved that boat ride! Is there any way we can do more boat rides?” Tour guides love seeing you happy and will do all they can to delight you.

In conclusion, if you pace yourself at the table, try a small amount of everything, assert yourself in the kitchen, enjoy the healthy cuisine, get some exercise and communicate well with your tour guide, your Italian cooking school tour will give you all you dreamed of and more.

Margaret Cowan of Vancouver, BC owns a tour company, Mama Margaret Italian Cooking Holidays at www.italycookingschools.com.

They ran their first Italian cooking, wine and walking tour in 1995. Margaret and her local Italian tour partners offer cooking school tours all over Italy.

You want to learn italian? You can learn this language at the comfort of your own home: visit learn italian. There is no need to join an expensive language class when you can maximize your learning potential with an online Italian course: learn italian.


Here Are Some New Facts About Banana Bread That You Might Be Interested In


Posted by healthyways

Banana bread remains to be one of the most recognized sweet bread recipes ever. There are so lots of unlike modifications which can be made to a banana bread recipe, that is why it is so versatile. Most of us grew up with a preferred family recipe that had been passed on from our great-grandmothers to our grandmothers to our mothers and finally to us. They are banana bread experts just like folks with a personal trainer certification. Of course, everybody wants to spice it up a bit by adding another kind of fruit or nut in addition to the traditional banana bread recipe to individualize it and make it just a bit different. Cooks can always look to recipe books or on the web for a change of pace as well. It’s like collecting Los Angeles travel deals – you receive to the same place, but the experience can vary greatly. Most banana bread recipes are similar, but it is the distinct approach taken by every creative cook that makes the recipes diverse in both taste and texture.

Might you like a few ideas for a new spin on banana bread? There are so loads of distinctive variations of the traditional recipe that it will make your head spin! It’s like how to get rid of debt – there are numerous paths. Okay, here goes it! There is cranberry banana nut bread, blueberry banana nut bread, apple banana cake, banana pineapple bread, low fat and sugar-free recipes, sour cream banana bread, chocolate chip banana muffins, Bisquick banana bread, African banana bread, Weight Watcher?s banana bread, and on and on and on!! There are also recipes for the ?best?, the ?moistest?, and the ?easiest?. There are recipes for bread machines and instructions on how to substitute a cake mix too into any recipe. The variations are endless as you can see, so just take a search and pick the one which appears the most delicious and will satisfy your taste buds!

Banana bread is as American as apple pie. It is legendary at bake sales, church functions, family gatherings, holiday celebrations, or most any other occasion. It makes a great breakfast or nutritional snack for the kids, and it complements most any meal as a side or a desert. It goes great with ice cream, whipped topping, a side of fresh fruit, yogurt, or it can be eaten all by itself. Banana bread is straightforward to put together and makes use of those bananas that have been sitting on your counter too long! Most everybody likes banana bread in all of its distinctive shapes, whether it takes shape in the form of bread, muffins, cake, or whatever, it won?t last long!


14 Tips For Better Barbecue


Posted by healthyways

Below is a list of the 14 most important things to watch when slow smoking BBQ. All of these tips assume you have already purchased and are using the barbeque techniques in ?Competition BBQ Secrets? of course. That?s the best tip out of all my tips, but the advice in this list are things that BBQers seem to have the most problems with. I have learned what these problems are directly from the emails to me asking for advice…

14. Proper ventilation. Make sure your firebox has enough ventilation. This helps to keep your fire burning properly and not smoldering. You want a light blue smoke – not a billowing white smoke. If you can, open the vents on your firebox all the way and try to maintain your cooking chamber heat with the fire alone. Always leave the smokestack vent open all the way. I have noticed lately that some smokers have bad designs where the fire is well below the firebox vents. The air has to come in and then down to the fire and then up into the cooking chamber. This makes it very hard to get proper airflow. The only way to fix this is to get your drill out and drill a few 1 inch holes in the side of your firebox.

13. Indirect heat. Make sure you set up your grill or smoker for indirect heat. Some of you are using gas grills or Weber charcoal grills – make sure you set them up properly for indirect heat.

12. Know your smoker. There are hot spots and cold spots on every smoker. After it gets up to temperature, check the temperature at different spots on your grate. Place your meat accordingly. For instance, chicken is better if cooked at a slightly higher temperature.

11. Buy a quality smoker if you can afford it. You get what you pay for when it comes to smokers. You can Barbeque some good ribs on things like a charcoal grill, but it is much easier to do on a well built smoker. Insulation is key to maintaining a consistent temperature and producing quality Barbecue. Look for thick steel on traditional offset smokers. The thick steel will hold in the heat. Insulated vertical smokers like the Stumps and Big Green Egg are nice too.

10. Use a water pan. Using a water pan will help regulate the heat in your smoking chamber and will also maintain a moist environment. Put some beer in the pan for some extra flavor!

9. Let your meat sit out of the ice box for about one hour before cooking. You can really get some strange results if the inside of your meat is cold when you put it on the smoker. Never put frozen meats on a smoker without thawing to room temperature first. Don?t let your meat sit out at room temperature too long though or you?ll run the risk of bacteria contamination.

8. Don?t poke holes in your meat. What happens when you poke a hole in a piece of meat that has been on the smoker a while? You can literally see the juices gushing out! Do your injections before cooking and maybe insert one temperature probe. After that, try not to poke it any more. Don?t use a fork to pick up your meat. Wear gloves and use your hands or tongs. Of course, let your meat rest properly before cutting or pulling. If you don?t, all the juices will pour out and your meat will be dry.

7. Buy quality meat to start with. See the May 2007 newsletter at www.bbqsuccess.com

6. Keep your lid shut. If you?re lookin?, you ain?t cookin?. Consistent temperatures are the key to great Barbecue. Needless to say, opening the lid lets all the heat out. Open only when necessary – not when you are curious or just to take a look.

5. Learn what good Barbecue is. This may be the best tip out of all of them. Most people have no idea what good, quality ribs, brisket, pork, and chicken tastes like. Sure… everybody has tasted good BBQ before, but how are you going to know that there is a whole another level if you have never tried it? The question is… how do you try it? One way is to go to a BBQ contest and get friendly with one of the teams and see if they will throw you a bone or two. Don?t be surprised if they don?t because most teams cook just enough for themselves and the judges. And they are not allowed to sell it without paying a vendors fee. Another thing you can do is participate in the ?people?s choice? competition. You will sample several small portions of BBQ from the teams and pick which one you like the best. But the very best way to learn what real competition BBQ tastes like is to become a certified judge. Check with your local BBQ society and get certified and then volunteer to be a judge in the next contest. All the BBQ Associations are looking for good BBQ judges and you?ll be doing them a favor and yourself too. You will be trained as to what to look for in good BBQ and you will be able to taste a whole lot of great BBQ on competition day.

4. Fixing the rubbery chicken skin problem. Just prepare yourself a hot bed of coals on a standard grill and then grill your smoked chicken over high heat for about 5 minutes per side to crisp the skin.

3. Don?t be afraid to experiment. There are a million different ways to BBQ. Think of all the different combinations of spices, rubs, injections, marinades, smoke flavors, times and temperatures that you can have. If you do try something else, maybe just change one thing at a time. In any kind of testing, you always have a ?control? to measure against. If your new test is better, then it becomes your new control and your old control does not get used anymore. If you change more than one thing at a time, you will not know which of the two things made the improvement. Keep good notes too.

2. Give yourself plenty of time. Finishing early is no problem at all. Not finishing on time is a big problem – ever heard of somebody finishing their barbecue in the oven? If you finish early, just wrap it in foil and place it in a warm ice chest. It will stay hot and actually continue to cook in the ice chest. Some big name BBQ teams do this on purpose… they remove their briskets early and let them finish cooking in the ice chest.

1. Measure temperature AT THE GRATE. So many people use the thermometer in the lid of their smoker. This is a big mistake. Always use a digital remote thermometer with a dual probe and measure your cooking chamber temperatures at the grate right next to your meat.

For more information on “Competition BBQ Secrets” visit BBQ

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