If you think of apple pie as having two crusts and a filling of apples combined with sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, some of the regional variations may surprise you. Apple cobbler, apple pandowdy, apple puff, apple crisp, apple brown betty are all variations of apple pie in different regions. The prevailing apple recipes for any region may be affected by the variety of apple that’s hardiest and most popular in that area, as well as the style of cuisine that’s prevalent.

In New England, for instance, most apple recipes call for Pippins, Granny Smith’s or other firm fleshed, sweet varieties of apple that cook up well and lose little moisture when being baked. In Maine, it’s not uncommon to find blueberries in your apple pie. In Massachusetts, cranberry apple pie is a favorite. In Vermont, the apples may be sweetened with honey or maple syrup. And in many restaurants on Cape Cod, rather than vanilla ice cream, your piping hot slice of heaven will be served topped with a slice of melting cheese.

In the Southern states, with their predilection for creamy, lightly spiced foods, the most common apple pie recipes include Apple Cream Pie (made with sour cream) and Apple Bourbon Pie, with raisins soaked in bourbon. Raisins soaked in rum are another popular addition to ‘apple pie’ in the South, especially in New Orleans. Other additions include rhubarb, diced peaches and walnuts.

Midwestern Apple Pie is the classic apple pie – two flaky crusts packed with thick, sweet, juicy apple slices mounded high and vented to let the fragrant steam escape. In Kansas or Missouri, your apple pie will satisfy any purist – served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream that melts into the syrupy filling and adds the perfect touch of creaminess to the mix.

In the South and Southwest you’ll find deep-fried apple pie, a variation that matches melt-in-your-mouth flaky fried crust with sweet, diced apples in a syrupy sauce. And in Pennsylvania, the home of the Pennsylvania Dutch, Apple Crumb Pie and Apple Pandowdy take the place of Apple Pie a la Mode on most restaurant menus.

As American as Apple Pie … from coast to coast, Americans have done what they do best – taken a classic and adapted it to suit the ingredients and tastes that surround them. Whether you top it with a sprinkle of cinnamon, a dollop of whipped cream or a slice of sharp cheddar, there’s no other food that comes close to being the All-American dessert.

About the author:
This article provided courtesy of http://www.health-food-shopper.com

I knew they were the world’s best pickles the moment I tasted one. That first taste took place around 1950, and I’ve tasted a lot of pickles since, am a pickle hound in fact, but I’ve never come across anything else as good.

They came to us by way of my Uncle Ronald Smith, who was an electrician in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana where I grew up. One day he was doing electrical work for a Bulgarian family, and they rewarded him with a sample pickle. He liked it so much he got the recipe and gave it to his wife Gladys, who gave it to Grandma Glidewell, who made it and gave some to me, and I thought I’d died and gone to pickle heaven.

And thus, although they became an old Glidewell family recipe, they are really an old Bulgarian family recipe. The Bulgarian family, whose name I do not know, told Uncle Ronald that in Bulgaria, when the first heavy frost kills the tomato vines, they put all their end-of-garden vegetables –- including those green tomatoes — into a barrel, fill the barrel with pickling brine, and eat the best pickles in the world all winter.

It turns out, though, that the pickles’ travel from Bulgaria to the U.S. was only one leg of a more ancient journey. Because I mentioned them to an Iranian woman, and she said, “My family has always made pickles like that! Exactly like that, except we add tarragon.”

Iran being the new name for the ancient kingdom of Persia, who knows how many centuries these pickles go back?

There’s more: I later lost the recipe’s brine proportions. Gave some thought to its travels between Persia and Bulgaria, looked in an Armenian-American cookbook (Treasured Armenian Recipes, published in 1949 by the Armenian General Benevolent Union) and there they were, under “Mixed Pickles No. 2.” Turns out the world’s best Armenian pickles are just like the world’s best Bulgarian and Persian and American pickles, except they include dill, and sometimes green beans and coriander seed.

So this is an old, old recipe belonging to the whole human family.

END-OF-GARDEN PICKLES

Vegetables:

Green tomatoes*, cut in half or quartered if large
Carrots, peeled and cut into strips
Cauliflower, separated into small florets
Baby onions, peeled, or larger onions halved or quartered
Green peppers, cut into broad lengthwise slices
Garlic, two peeled cloves per quart jar
Medium-hot peppers, two small whole peppers per quart

You can also add unpeeled and unwaxed small cucumbers, zucchini, or lightly cooked green beans, though we never did. The hot peppers add adventure and zest, but if you prefer to save your tears for really sad occasions, why not?

Amounts and proportions depend on what vegetables you have and how many quarts you plan to make. You don’t have to have the green tomatoes, and the other things can be bought in a grocery store. But you do need a variety of vegetables, and you have to have the onions and garlic, or you won’t have the world’s best pickles. You will have the world’s so-so pickles, and that would be a shame.

Armenian-Persian-Bulgarian Brine

To one quart of water add 1/4 cup pickling salt (salt that isn’t iodized), and one cup of white distilled vinegar. Bring the mixture to a boil. This is enough brine to cover two quarts of mixed pickles, with a little left over.

Processing

Follow the canning instructions in a good, standard cookbook. Or, if you plan to eat them right away, pack the vegetables into clean quart jars, pour over them the hot brine, and keep the pickles covered in the refrigerator. Some of the more impressionable vegetables, like zucchini, will be ready to eat in only two or three days.

About the author:
Go STEAMIN’ DOWN THE TRACKS WITH VIOLA HOCKENBERRY, a storytelling cookbook — and find Montana country cooking, nostalgic stories, and gift ideas — at Janette Blackwell’s Food and Fiction, http://foodandfiction.com/Entrance.htmlOr visit her Delightful Food Directory, http://delightfulfood.com/main.html

Finding delicious has just become easier since you found our website. There are many wonderful low fat salmon recipes that will please your palate plus the palates of your dinner guests or family.

This first low fat salmon recipe uses yummy ingredients such as low or non-fat sour cream and low or non-fat mayonnaise to create a delectable creamy salmon recipe that is perfect for any occasion.

For this recipe you will need:

2 pounds of salmon filets,
¾ cup of low or non-fat sour cream,
1/3 cup of low or non-fat mayonnaise,
2 tablespoons of all purpose flour,
2 tablespoons of lemon juice,
8 ounces of low or non-fat cream cheese,
1 minced clove of garlic,
1/3 cup of your favorite white wine,
salt, pepper, and paprika to taste.

Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Wash the salmon and pat it dry with a paper towel.

Use a non-stick spray such as Pam and spray your 9×13 inch baking dish. Place the salmon filets in the baking dish with the skin down in a single layer. In a medium size bowl, blend together the sour cream, mayonnaise, flour, lemon juice, cream cheese, garlic, and wine until smooth and well blended.

Now, with the back of a spoon spread the mixture over the salmon. Sprinkle with the salt, pepper and paprika to your liking. Do not cover and bake for around 20. You can use a meat thermometer to ensure your salmon is done and not overcooked. The internal temperature should be 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The salmon will still cook once you remove it from the heat source. Do not go by color alone.

You can also prepare low fat salmon recipes on your grill or barbeque and create some wonderful low fat sauces to enhance the flavor of your salmon.

A great sauce to serve along side grilled salmon is a low fat lemon dill sauce.

For this sauce you will need:

2 tablespoons of non-fat mayonnaise,
2 tablespoons of lemon juice,
1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard,
¾ teaspoon of dill weed,
salt and pepper to taste.

Blend together all ingredients with a wire whisk and refrigerate until ready to serve.

About the author:
Hans loves seafood and is author of
Seafood
Recipes at Steaks-Guide.com

Sea air, crisp apples, the brisk, spice of fallen leaves – there are few things that say autumn in New England like the scents that seem to buffet the senses from everywhere. Among those marvelous treats for the senses are popular dishes from appetizer to dessert that you just won’t find – or at least won’t find quite the same way – anywhere else in the country. If you doubt it, there’s always an ad that was popular this past autumn – after the Red Sox won the World Series. In it, a man was explaining, “Son, when you live in New England there are three basic truths… clam chowder is white…”

And the other two truths don’t matter. We New Englanders take our clam chowder seriously. Up and down the New England coast throughout the autumn, nearly every town and township has its Chowder Festival. Throughout the six states, restaurants cook up pots of chowder from their best recipes and compete to be named Best Clam Chowder. The granddaddy of all New England Chowder Festivals is held in Newport, Rhode Island, where dozens of area restaurants compete for the title of ‘America’s Best Clam Chowder’.

It’s a simple enough dish, but like chili in Texas and crab cakes in Maryland, every cook has their own special twist on the recipe. There are the basics: clams, potatoes and milk. From there, it’s every chef for himself. Some swear that clam chowder without salt pork is just potage. Others insist that clam chowder can’t be made without onion. Chefs nearly come to blows over whether heavy cream should ever be used and why a butter and flour roux is a better base than clam liquor. Secret recipes abound – and everyone has their favorites.

My own personal favorite is the thick, creamy, eat-it-with-a-fork variety of clam chowder served at Legal Seafood and Au Bon Pain in Boston. Rich and laden with chunks of potato, meaty bits of clam, onions, garlic and salt pork, it’s a meal rather than an opener for one. Served with a slab of homemade bread slathered with butter, it’s guaranteed to raise your cholesterol level and please your taste buds for hours.

While many chefs cry sacrilege, others believe that fresh corn adds the perfect touch of crisp sweetness to the rich broth and pungent bits of clam meat. Corn isn’t the only bone of contention when it comes to this regional specialty. Purists insist that the only real ingredients in clam chowder are clams, water, milk, onions, potatoes and butter. They argue whether chowder should be made with mussels or littlenecks (if you’re in Maine, it’s littlenecks – in Connecticut, mussels. Anywhere else – it varies), whether to add the clam bellies or just the necks, even whether clams should be steamed ‘virgin’ or with garlic, wine or beer.

Whether you like your chowder thick or thin, with or without corn, flavored with salt pork or bacon or something else entirely, there is one thing on which all New Englanders agree – clam chowder is white. We’re not sure what it is that they serve in Manhattan – but it’s not clam chowder.

Traditionally, in my mother’s household, we fry foods in a thick black wok, but you need a specific stove ring to hold up the wok firmly from tipping over and spilling boiling hot oil.  Nowadays with the modern stoves that cater to flat-bottomed pots, that even the woks have to sport a flat base, I decided to get an electric deep fryer.

On top of what I have just mentioned above, I have one more reason to do so. My stove top does not accommodate 2 big pots cooking at the same time, let alone adding a wok frying away at the same time.  I tend to do 2 dishes at the same time, or prep an ingredient in one pot in order to add to the other.

In my search for an electric deep fryer, I looked onto the one my sister bought for her family use.  I love the fact that hers is basically a simple non-stick flat-base pot with a heating element practically soldered underneath.

The electrical cord which the thermostat is attached to, towards the pot’s end, can be taken off whenever we need to clean the pot.  The pot is propped up by 4 plastic wedges so that the heat from the deep fryer would not come into contact with your kitchen surface.

So, based on what I have seen so far, here’s a summary of what I would look for in an electric deep fryer:

a) Size of the pot: You may want a bigger one, if you tend to fry whole turkeys or chicken.

b) Easily washed : A detachable cord and washing-friendly frying pot is quite high on my list.

c) I care not for the wire basket to suspend food while frying, it will make me use more oil, so all the fancy ones with LEDs and multi-settings would not do for me.

I urge you to find what fits your needs before purchasing one. The simple list above basically fits mine, and I most probably settle for the same brand my sister uses.

I mean, whenever I visit friends and family, if offered coffee, I would take it, no problems.

But at home, it is not automatic for me to have coffee in any drinking liquid form on a daily basis. I prefer hot chocolate, juice, plain water and on occasion, tea.

So, with some trepidation, I stealthily inquired my best friend, Stella on what makes her coffee tick. Yes, tick or tickle her pink, whichever applicable. And through our casual chat over the phone, I managed a small list without giving any of the upcoming surprise away. I was sincerely hoping so, of course.

Next, I had to combine that list of criteria with the environment and life she is living.

By that, I was thinking of
a) the size of her kitchen and counter top, where she would most likely place the espresso machine,
b) the number of coffee drinkers in her household, so that the number of cups the machine provides on a single run is enough to cope with the daily demands of the household,
c) how frequent she throws a get-together for friends and family, even how often I came to her house and notice her taking a cuppa.

I also know, based on my observations, that she seems to prefer specialty pods on our outside meets, she’s not a coffee purist (purists would most probably have their very own system of grinding coffee to unleash the UTMOST best from a coffee bean, and have an exact system of extraction, beating the current scientific method), her coffee machine is aging at home, and now that her sons are going of to college, the tendency is to just have a cup on her own leisure.

Well, I am finally glad to say after all the research of my target “market”, I was happy with the purchase I made, and Stella was extremely ecstatic and practically over the moon with the one-cup espresso machine I had gotten based on the many feedbacks from Amazon. Hurray!

After all, what is so hard about going to the store, skimming over the one you need ie. the simple one that is, a reasonably good brand and off to the checkout line?

Thinking that it could be a simple buy, must have been my downfall.
Per my previous post, I cook rice many ways and instead of finding a simple rice cooker and went home, I was a little overwhelmed by the variety of settings or features available in the line of electric rice

cookers nowadays.

When the time has come for you to buy an electric rice cooker, consider these things in mind…

The size: would an 8 cup be good for you and the family or a 5 cup would be enough for one sitting or the whole day? Bear in mind the measurement cup is small and should be viewed properly before purchase.

Durability: Pick the brand you trust and make sure the warranty covers a certain important things such as LED batteries and availability of spare parts. We sure wouldn’t want to be buying one every 2 years.

Your requirement for settings such as timer and keep warm function, cooking brown rice or sticky rice. Mine have all of them and more.

I love doing rice for meals.

No matter whether it’s going to be porridge or congee, fried rice, coconut rice, packed rice cut into cubes or any shape you like, a side dish, as filler in soups or just simply steamed to perfection, rice would be staple for me and the family.

Now, I know that some people think it’s unhealthy due to all the carb.  I’d say, its the volume that makes the difference.  I have had rice almost all my life and I am a normal 5′3″ and 125lbs.  Furthermore, rice is considered an organic food compared to other processed carbs.

Back to the many ways one can enjoy rice dishes, with the advent of new technology, there are a few appliances that could be used to cook rice as you wish.

For porridge/congee, the slow cooker or crock pot is a  good choice, where one could even add pieces of chicken to simmer to perfection while you tend to other things.

For packed rice, the way I do it is to cook manually and ensure it’s cooked further than you would eat as your main meal with other condiments, drain the excess water and press the rice into containers and let it chill before cutting into cubes or into cookie cutter shapes.

For normal cooked rice and even coconut rice, the best almost hands-free way to do so would be using the electric rice cooker.

For fried rice, the best cooked rice to do this would be normal cooked rice leftovers from the meals the day or night before and chilled in the fridge overnight.  And just before I add the chilled rice into the wok for frying, I would gently break the clumps without mashing them up, so that the flavor or seasoning of the fried rice would be evenly distributed.

Good thing is that now, I can do rice in many ways by using my electric rice cooker, the one with multi-settings, of course.

Risotto – which we should not over stir or be stirring too often seems a breeze to make, and rice puddings turns out well too.

In the next post, I will indulge more on what features are available on the new-age electric rice cookers. Till then…

Here’s my list to quickly recap what I have discussed last week and the remaining criterias I set for the appliance.

a) Size of loaf and machine: Usually a toss between 1lb or 2lb loaf maker.  You need to choose one that would fit your household consumption requirement, or simply to ensure your tiny kitchen could fit the machine on the kitchen counter or both.

b) Elements that would make your life easier ie. Timer and Keep Warm function: Choose them if you view bread-making as more of a necessity than just a hobby.

c) Features that would produce a good loaf like heavy-set non-stick baking pan, even heating element.  We would not want the loaf to be brown at the bottom and almost doughy at the top.

d) Other settings of interest.  Mine has a cake setting, for whenever I want to bake a small cake without cranking up the oven.  So I use the function to make banana bread.  I have read of others’ success with baking Blueberry bread with a muffin recipe using this setting too.

e) Ease of cleanup.  This is also important not only to avoid la cucaracha to invade the kitchen, but to ensure your future loaves are evenly and well baked.

With that I hope you would be able to decide what you look for in a bread maker.

Now, bear in mind that my bread maker has all those functions.  Surprised? I was, when I first started to research for one that would have most of the functions that fit my requirements.

A piece of advice: Don’t let the price be your first criteria, or where it’s made.  It just does not work to our advantage.

Why? Because for the first reason, I found that a good bread maker would cost us more than what we perhaps have in mind for a budget, not to mention, in the long run, would more than pay off for itself with the savings from making our own bread.

The second reason stemmed from the fact that some of us are a bit wary with items made in China.  As I write, more and more brands of electrical goods will commission their appliances in Chinese factories according to strict specifications stated by the brand company, not the manufacturer.  Besides, sub-quality products can be made by other western world manufacturers, so let’s not start overanalysing here.

Back to my criteria for a good bread maker.  First one is size.  I chosed to have one that is big enough to consume for a day or two so I won’t have to bake everyday, yet require a small machine which would fit into a small space on my kitchen counter or in the pantry where I keep the other appliances such as the toaster, blender, rice cooker.  Don’t mind me, I hate clutter on my kitchen top, so I fit them all in the pantry.  Usually bread makers make 2lb loaves, which is pretty huge, but nowadays, you get the ones making 1lb loaves too.  Also a small one means if you muck up the dough, your wastage is minimized.  So I bought the 1lb version.

On my list of requirements are also for the bread maker to have a timer, and a warmer function, so that I could pop the ingredients into the machine the night before and have fresh made loaf in the morning.  And the cleaning must be quite easy.

The following week I will divulge and discuss the rest of my bread maker criteria with you all.  Stay tune!