One of the things my hubby got during out last trip was two packs of Nori – one plain and one wasabi flavored. If you don’t know what nori is, it’s the rather fishy-smelling papery ingredient they use as sushi wrap. Nori, which by the way is dried edible seaweed, is actually used in Japanese cuisine not just as sushi wrap, but topping and condiment for noodles and various dishes.

Feeling rather adventurous with the kid’s palate, who by the way are still toddlers, my husband gave each a strip of nori (not the wasabi flavored of course!). We were expecting to see scrunched up faces and little tongues sticking out as they spit out the nori in disgust. Surprise! Both kids finished of their little strips in minutes and promptly held out their hands for more.

So what’s my point? The point is simply that it’s never too early to start training your kid’s palate so that they will be able to appreciate all kinds of food better as they grow. Not only will you be helping them in case they do end up as aspiring chefs when they grow up, but you’ll also have an easier time feeding them as they grow up because chances are they won’t be such picky eaters.

Oh, and here are links to some recipes that use nori as ingredient from celebrity chefs Dale Talde (Nori Seared Tuna Steak) and Janella Prucell (Brown Rice Tempeh Nori Rolls).

Image via RemixYourHealth

If you’re craving for Pad Thai though, you don’t even have to go to fly to Thailand for an authentic tasting dish. I’ve found one of the best Pad Thai recipes that you can try at home. If you do it right, you’ll end up with a dish that tastes just like the best that Thai chefs make. Just make sure you always prepare the sauce first, because that’s how any self-respecting Thai chef does it!

Ingredients for Pad Thai Sauce (makes four large servings)

• 1/4 cup palm sugar
• 1/4 cup fish sauce
• 1 tablespoon tamarind concentrate
• 1/4 cup Sriracha sauce

Directions for Pad Thai Sauce

• Put tamarind concentrate into a measuring cup, and add enough water to make 1/4 cup, stir, this is your tamarind juice.
• In a small sauce pan, put palm sugar, fish sauce, tamarind juice, and sriracha sauce. Cook on low heat until the palm sugar dissolves, then increase heat. Let it start to boil, then quickly remove from heat, and set aside. You can make this Pad Thai sauce ahead and put in a jar in the fridge up to a week.

Ingredients for Pad Thai (makes 2 servings)

• 1 egg lightly beaten
• 3/4 cup (or more) fresh shrimp, uncooked
• 1 tablespoon sliced shallot
• 1 tablespoon chopped salted radish
• 1/4 cup diced firm tofu
• 1 handful rice stick noodle
• 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons water
• 1 cup fresh bean sprouts
• 1/4 cup fresh chives, cut into one inch long pieces
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons chopped roasted peanut
• vegetable oil for frying

Directions

• Rinse the radish several times under cold water, gently squeezing off the water. Chop it and add a little bit of sugar to sweeten, mix well.
• Soak the rice stick noodle in warm water for about 15 minutes, leave in water until you are ready to use.
• Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a wok at medium-high heat. Add egg and cook it quickly, scrambling into small pieces (see video below). Remove, set aside.
• Add 2 tablespoons of oil in the same wok. Add shrimps and cook until done. Transfer to a bowl, set aside.
• Add 1 tablespoon of oil to the wok. Add shallot, radish and tofu fry until aromatic. Increase the heat of your wok. Add a handful of soaked noodles followed with water. Stir-fry this mixture for about 5-6 minutes. The noodles will start to get soft. Add 1/4 cup of Pad Thai Sauce and mix well. Add sugar, cooked egg, bean sprout, chive and cooked shrimps. Stir well for another 1-2 minutes until everything blends together. Turn off heat, transfer to serving plate with sliced fresh lime, roasted peanuts, and more bean sprout on the side.

If you’re looking for some posh, but simple cocktails to serve during your party, why not give these three cocktails that chefs’ themselves swear by:

The Red Hook (Blake Royer)

Ingredients:

Key ingredient of the first two cocktails

• 2 ounces rye whiskey
• 1/2 ounce Punt e Mes or other sweet vermouth combined with Campari
• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur

Directions:

Pour ingredients into a shaker with a generous handful of ice. Stir briskly until well chilled. Strain into a cocktail glass and serve.

The Aviation (Blake Royer)

Ingredients:

• 2 ounces gin
• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur
• 1/2 ounce lemon juice

Directions:

Pour ingredients into a shaker with a generous handful of ice. Shake well until your fingertips ache. Strain into a martini glass and serve.

Grand Champagne Cocktail

Grand Champagne Cocktail (Chef Bobby Flay)

Ingredients:

• 4 shots orange-flavored liqueur (recommended: Grand Marnier)
• 4 teaspoons honey
• 4 fresh strawberries, tops trimmed
• 1 bottle Champagne, well chilled
• Special equipment: 4 chilled Champagne flutes

Directions:

Add the orange-flavored liqueur, honey and strawberries to a food processor and process until smooth. Fill the chilled glasses halfway with the strawberry mixture and then fill the rest of the glass with Champagne.

Each of the cocktails above offer a very different taste so you can choose whichever will suit your palate best. The Red Hook is “dark, seductive, brown, and just a little bitter”, while the Aviation is “bright, gin-y, and tart with lemon juice.” The Grand Champagne Cocktail, on the other hand, is pretty sweet and probably has a more universal appeal.

Recipes and images via ThePauperedChef and FoodNetwork

Boiling eggs are really tricky, especially if you’re cooking for a group of people who like their eggs in varying stages of “hardness”. Add to the fact that the rate at which eggs cook depend not just on the amount of time it takes to cook them, but also the temperature at which they were stored, and also the size of the eggs. With so many factors to consider, it is no wonder that sleepy cooks end up with “wrongly” cooked eggs.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a chef to be consistent in turning out perfectly boiled eggs that will suit everyone’s tastes. All you need is to get yourself a BeepEgg, and you can relax, maybe even sing with it as you make breakfast.

The BeepEgg is an egg timer that you put in the pan with your eggs as you boil them and will tell you whether the eggs are already cooked. Fish out the eggs for the people who like their soft boiled when you hear the egg sing “Killing Me Softly” and leave the rest until you hear it start to sing “I Wish I Was a Hen”, at which point you can fish out the eggs for those who like it medium. You’ll know that the remaining eggs are already hard boiled when you the classical tune from Carmina Burana coming out of the plastic egg.

How to use the BeepEgg

While it all sounds really silly, the BeepEgg works perfectly so that you don’t even have to worry about getting your eggs to room temperature before your boil them. Just make sure that you also store the BeepEgg along with the real eggs because it works by calculating the inner temperature of the eggs based on the temperature it was stored and the boiling water.

Oh, and if you’re getting irritated with all that singing, just dunk the Beep Egg in cold water.

Image via Firebox

Noemi, of Recipe Finder, compiled some of the best and simple turkey dishes on her post “7 Ways to Prepare Turkey”. None of the preparation ideas she gives will mean a traditional Thanksgiving turkey, but at least they are much faster and easier to prepare than a whole turkey roast. So if you don’t mind having turkey burgers, fajitas, or casserole on Thanksgiving, then head on to the Recipe Finder blog for some great turkey ideas.

However, if you already have a whole thawed turkey right before you that you don’t want to go to waste, then you can try Chef Gordon Ramsay’s Roast Turkey and Stuffing in a Pan. The recipe is good for 10-12 persons which means you’ll have plenty of leftovers if you won’t being having guests over for dinner. Prep time is also just 2 hours, with cooking time about the same. And while 4 hours seems like a lot of time, anyone who’s had any experience roasting turkey will tell you that this is one of the fastest recipes you’ll ever find. So if you want to get your roast turkey in time for dinner, better get started or you’ll end up with one undercooked bird on your dinner table!

Image credits:
Turkey burger courtesy of Recipe Finder
Gordon Ramsay with turkey courtesy of The Independent

If you have a food blog, it definitely takes more than just pictures of your last gastronomy high for people to enjoy your blog. You have to provide descriptions of the pictures, mix your usual food photos with other food-related content like chef biographies, recipes, and restaurant features. In short, you can’t keep on serving just one dish, no matter how good that dish may be.

You also need to think about your food blog’s design. After all, no matter how delicious something is, if it looks like something straight from the sewers, then almost no one would want to touch it. The same is true with a cluttered and tacky looking blog. If you want people to take a second glance at your food blog, then you’d better spend some time on your “plating”.

Before the food gets served though, you need people to serve it too. Sure, tasting your own creations can be fun, but not having other people to share it too and ooh and ahh over the great tasting feasts is doing yourself a disservice. Again, the same is true with your blog. You need to have guests come over to enjoy your content, and hopefully rave over your content, maybe even spread the news by word of mouth. However, to get the first guests to come, you of course need to promote your blog.

You can do this by pestering your family and friends to keep on visiting your food blog, or do it the more professional way and pay for services of portals like Blog Search Engine. Blog Search Engine will review your food blog for you, link back to your blog, and make it searchable to their users, all for $14.99. You can also promote your blog even more aggressively with their upgraded packages and so increase your food blog’s visibility, thanks to their blog network.

In the end, if you treat your food blog like you would your food, you can guarantee that you’ll have people coming back for more.

The long and winding road. Being a chef was not Ramsay’s first choice. He was actually a very talented soccer player who was on the Glasgow Raiders team for three years before a knee injury forced him out of the game and into an entire new lifestyle. It would be years later that he would discover his life’s purpose . . . only after going to college to major in hotel management.

Rough upbringing. Ramsay had a rather dysfunctional childhood. His father was an unstable alcoholic, who moved from job to job (taking the family with him) and had a multitude of extramarital affairs. When he was sixteen, Ramsay escaped from his tumultuous family life by moving out of his parents’ home and in with his sister. He has never been short on money or such. There were little talk about someone close to him who tried out payday advance but beyond that he is financially stable and so is his family.

The family. Gordon Ramsay is a family man. He has a wife of over fifteen years (a schoolteacher) and four children (count em) to prove it. Ramsay has expressed his commitment to being a “father figure” and a source of “support and affection” for his children. As previously mentioned, Ramsay’s father was an uncontrollable alcoholic. Unfortunately, addiction plagues Ramsay’s extended family ties in more ways than one; his brother is a heroin addict who is constantly in and out of jail.

Oh, the hypocrisy One of Chef Ramsay’s first experiences as a chef was training under master chef Marco Pierre White. White is known for his temper. Ramsay ultimately left White’s mentorship, claiming he could no longer endure White’s “bullying.”

Financial issues. Just because Ramsay is a big-time television star, it doesn’t mean he hasn’t had his share of financial worries. His New York restaurant recorded losses of about four million dollars a year until he decided to back out – but only after draining his personal accounts of several million dollars.

There is much more to Gordon Ramsay than meets the eyes – or the ears. Outside of the hard-nosed persona most people take to be the “real” Gordon Ramsay, there is a man who has lived a life of adversity, who is committed to his role as husband and father, and who, although not perfect, has a multifaceted personality that is quite endearing (once you get past the potty-mouth).

Batali made his remarks in front of the panel deemed responsible for choosing Time magazine’s Person of the Year award. Various sources quoted Batali as saying “The way the bankers have toppled the way that money is distributed — and taken most of it into their own hands — is as good as Stalin or Hitler”. Batali was forced to make a groveling apology earlier this week, stating that “it was never my intention to equate our banking industry with Hitler and Stalin, two of the most evil, brutal dictators in modern history.”

The incident was especially embarrassing for Batali as many of the patrons of his high class restaurants in Manhattan are bankers and financial workers. Many people in the finance sector have been outraged by his comments and there have been numerous calls to boycott his restaurants and eateries.

Eater.com, the NYC food blog, has reported that an anonymous bank has already cancelled reservations at Batali’s restaurants, while another has reportedly told all employees that it will not reimburse receipts from his establishments. Financial planner Jason Mieras also went on the record as saying “A significant portion of Batali’s ‘better’ (i.e. willing to spend a lot of money) customers will not soon forget these comments and his utter disrespect for the financial industry at large. My wife will be disappointed but I will no longer support him”.

However, despite the boycott, Batali has also had his fair share of people coming to his support. His Tarry Lodge partner Joe Bastianich commented on the story: “I worked on Wall Street for many years. I think that what was said in that room was probably misinterpreted to a certain degree. I’m one of those people, so I get both sides of the story. Of course we want (finance workers) to come to our restaurants.” Similarly, Los Angeles-based event promoter Michael-Patrick Hogue stated “I believe that opinion reflects the majority of Americans these days in how we perceive the banks. I don’t think he should be fried for his opinion.”

Initially working as a dishwasher in New York, Batali climbed his way up the ranks before opening his debut restaurant Po in 1993. Since then, he has opened numerous restaurants across the world and has appeared in a number of TV cooking shows on channels such as PBS. He has also collaborated with a number of celebrities in his cooking exploits, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Spanish actress Claudia Bassols.

Planning and organization. Ask any celebrity chef what the single most important holiday cooking tip is and you will no doubt hear something related to preparation. At the recent LA Food and Wine Festival, a number of celebrity chefs turned out to offer some sage advice when it comes to cooking for such a big occasion as the holidays, and most of that advice had to do with planning to cook, rather than cooking itself. Chef Giada advised people to “plan in advance,” Wolfgang Puck echoed that sentiment, saying, “you have to plan ahead . . . . have everything ready so when you’re ready to cook, you know it’s there,” and Chef Daniel Boulud further reinforced the need for proper preparation, saying, “my top cooking tip is, first, be organized.”

Brining. Celebrity chef Don Bowie stresses the importance of brining fowl for an entire 24 hours before cooking it. Fowl is a popular holiday offering (Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas Cornish hens, anyone?), and the process of brining it (soaking it in a salt water mixture) overnight makes for a tender and succulent bird. You can find a variety of brine recipes to suit a variety of tastes and fowl recipes online.

Avoiding the double-dip. One of the most enjoyable parts of the holiday season (besides the food) is the parties. Chef Claire Robinson warns of the need to protect holiday party guests’ health (the holiday season is also flu season, remember?) by serving finger foods and hors d’oeuvres in bite-sized pieces to prevent the germ-sharing practice of double-dipping. It’s also helpful to use toothpicks.

Pumpkin pie alternatives. If you don’t want to make a sweet desert like pie, but would still like to include the traditional pumpkin in your holiday feast, celebrity chef Ming Tsai has a suggestion: scrape the seeds out of small sugar pumpkins, then cook the pumpkin meat inside of the pumpkins – adding butter and either salt or brown sugar – to create either a sweet or a savory pumpkin side dish.

Cooking for the holidays doesn’t have to be a scary prospect if you do your research and plan, plan, plan. Take these holiday cooking tips and run with them . . . to the nearest grocery store.

Titles such as the upcoming Jamie’s Great Britain from internationally acclaimed star Jamie Oliver are being sold on Amazon for £10, rather than the RRP of £30. Heston Blumenthal is another heavyweight name whose titles are being heavily discounted, with his latest Heston Blumenthal at Home being sold in places for less than half the recommended price of £30.

This heavy discounting is causing problems for many smaller independent book retailers, who simply cannot compete with the lower priced offerings of major sellers like Amazon.

Rosamund de la Hey was the former children’s marketing director at book publisher Bloomsbury, although she now owns and operates the Main Street Trading Company bookstore in Scotland. She commented on the state of the market: “It has got to a point now where it is becoming ridiculous. It puts us on the back foot because it makes us look like we are ripping people off – that’s the most frustrating thing.”

It is not simply large online retailers like Amazon that are adding to the difficult situation – mainstream supermarkets are also heavily discounting major cooking titles in order to attract custom. Supermarkets like Tesco and Sainsbury’s all sell major new releases for a fraction of the recommended price.

It is thought that cooking titles are particularly susceptible to the discounting because of their immense popularity. Major retailers are well aware that the titles will sell and so drop their prices in order to entice consumers into their own shops.

Even larger book retailers are beginning to feel the pinch from the supermarkets and online retailers. Foyles’ senior buyer Jasper Sutcliffe stated that “it is indeed a shame to see publishers increasing RRP in the middle of a recession, particularly as we’re simply not able to match the heavy discounts they encourage. Furthermore, this level of discounting draws consumer focus to a relatively small number of new titles.”

So what do the publishers have to say about all this? At this stage, very little. A spokesperson for Penguin underlined the fact that “we obviously can’t disclose the commercial terms with individual retailers, but publishers can’t control the price at which a retailer chooses to sell a book.”
It is thought that the discounting war will add extra pressure to an already troubled market. Traditional book publishing has recently come under fire from new inventions such as the Kindle and other e-reader devices, and the effect these drops in retail prices will have on the industry remains to be seen.