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If you’ve ever walked down the spice aisle of the grocery store you’re probably familiar with herbs like parsley and thyme and spices like cinnamon. But what about tumeric or fenugreek? And what exactly do you do with cilantro? Lee Dobbins new book “Healing Herbs and Spices,” tells you not only how to use nearly every popular herb and spice you can imagine but also the health benefits.

Lee has an engaging style that makes you feel comfortable from the get go.  She explains how the herbs and spices heal you in plain English. Each seasoning has sections about the plant itself, health benefits, side effects and culinary uses.

Did you know that basil has the laboratory-proven effect of killing bacteria such as Staphylococcus, Pseudomonas and Enterococcus? If you get bitten by a mosquito crush a basil leaf and rub it on the bite to lessen the irritation.  Of course, as a cook, what I like about basil is its sweet but tangy bite of licorice.  Italian food just wouldn’t taste Italian without basil.

Lee’s basil pesto recipe is traditional with the richness of pine nuts, the smoothness of olive oil, the saltiness of cheese and of course the herbaliciousness of basil.  Try it on hot pasta, mix with an equal part vinegar for a salad dressing.  Add to sour cream for a dip or spread it on slices of potatoes you then roast in a 400 degree oven.

Make Lee’s recipes your own by varying some of the ingredients.  For example, her recipe for lemon garlic chicken with oregano would work just as well with salmon or trout.

Some of the more unusual herbs include cardamom, lemon balm, savory and tamarind.  What is tamarind you’re asking yourself: it’s the pulp of a tree fruit grown in Africa naturally and cultivated in other tropical regions. Healing uses include lowering the bad cholesterol LDL by binding with it so it can’t be absorbed by your body. It makes a tart but refreshing drink when the paste is combined with sugar and water.

We all know that herbs and spices add zing to our cooking but who knew that those same spices could make us feel better and stay healthy. From Anise to vanilla beans, Lee covers 80 herbs and spices.   It isn’t often you find a book you can use in the kitchen and as part of your medicine cabinet arsenal. That’s exactly what you’ll find yourself doing with “Healing Herbs and Spices.”  available as hard copy or kindle format.

When it comes to party food, most boys aren’t hard to please. They are usually more than eager to eat whatever is presented to them. (Keep in mind, though, if your party guests will be younger boys they may be a bit pickier.) They will also eat more than you think as boys often turn eating into a competition.

As a rule, boys love messy party foods. Pizza is always a good choice, for party goers of any age. You can make it yourself, purchase it ready-made or have it delivered for the event. The boys will, no doubt, appreciate the addition of double cheese… it will make things gooier. Turn the pizza into an activity. Set out rounds of pizza with lots of different toppings. The boys, under adult supervision, pile on whatever toppings they like.

Sloppy Joes are a good choice, when it comes to feeding hungry boys. They are fairly inexpensive to make and can be kept warm in a crock pot, until it’s time to eat. A very simple recipe is to brown one pound of ground hamburger with one pound of ground turkey. Add a cup of chopped onions. If you want the “Joes” to be extra healthy add a cup of finely chopped carrots and a cup of finely chopped celery. Saute on medium heat until the veggies are soft. Add a cup of ketchup and two cups of tomato sauce with 1/2 cup of brown sugar. Simmer on low heat for about 15 minutes. Serve them with chili cheese fries, for a meal they will rave about.

Hotdogs will please almost any youthful appetite, especially if they are stuffed with cheese and baked in crescent roll dough.

Provide a variety of dipping sauces such as cheese, barbecue sauce and honey mustard. Use squirt bottles for easy serving but beware the boys will be tempted to squirt each other as well as their hotdogs.

Grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken nuggets are an option. Jazz up the sandwiches with different kinds of cheeses and serve three or four choices of sauce, for the chicken.

One word of caution, many children have food allergies and must stay away from things like nuts, dairy products, strawberries and eggs. Before planning your party menu, it is recommended that you contact the parents, of all potential guests, to make sure there will not be problems. Older kids know what they shouldn’t eat but younger kids don’t.

Cake decorating is more of an art than a science. Behind the glitz, glamor and great-tasting goodness of the best cakes lie the right tools. While you could frost that three-tiered wedding cake with improvised equipment there’s no substitute for cake decorating tools Every baker who prides herself on her technique and skills has a basic arsenal of cake decorating tools.

Spatula
A spatula is a long, flat, elongated tool used for icing cakes. It comes in several sizes; bigger and longer ones are excellent for spreading icing or frosting more quickly while shorter ones can be used for working on narrow or delicate areas.

Flat spatulas are very useful for most icing jobs but for more detailed and tidier work, an offset spatula is a good choice.

Set of tips
Tips are indispensable cake decorating tools. These are usually made of stainless steel and come with a coupler and/or pastry bag. Tips are used for creating shapes with icing and frosting. With these tools, it is possible to create lines, scallops, scrolls, shells, lattices, weaves, dots, etc. These are also used for creating and decorating sugar flowers and figures. Tips often come in sets, although it is possible to purchase individual tips if necessary.

Cake turner
A cake turner or turntable is used to turn the cake during decorating. It works particularly well in ensuring that the icing layer is smooth and even on every side. It comes in different sizes to accommodate different cakes.

Cake smoother
A cake smoother is a rectangular-shaped tool with a handle on top. It comes in handy particularly for working on fondant icing. A smoother helps remove air bubbles between the cake and the fondant layer and corrects any uneven surface. It works well for both round and rectangular cake shapes, although it is also useful for uneven-shaped cakes.

Now that you’ve got your tool kit stocked with the necessary tools you can decorate cakes to your heart’s content.

You spend hours clipping coupons, comparison shopping and stretching a dollar until George Washington’s face is no longer recognizable.  You want to make your family healthy dinner recipes without blowing your grocery budget. Don’t let that effort go to waste by wasting your leftover food. We’ve all had that odd baked potato left over, 1/2 cup of mashed potatoes, or a couple of tablespoons of breakfast hash browns. It’s not enough to save — but you don’t feel comfortable throwing it away.   So don’t. Turn the power of potatoes into soups, dumplings for stews or put the potatoes to the rescue in recipes.

Baked Potato Soup

You can do this with actual baked potatoes or mashed potatoes.  It also works with hash browns, but you’ll have crispy bits in the soup. Chop the baked potato into 1/2 inch cubes, skins and all.  Set aside.  Roughly chop one small onion and sauté in a tablespoon of cooking oil until the onions are translucent.  Add the potatoes. Mash down the cubes or the hash browns. Add 1 cup of chicken broth, or 1 cube of bullion and 1 cup of water, for every cup of potatoes.  Let simmer for 10 minutes. Whisk together 1/2 cup of mil, or cream, with 1 teaspoon of flour.  Add to the potato mixture. And here comes the fun part.  Set out toppings of bacon bits, chopped chives, grated cheese and sour cream, just what you’d put on a baked potato.  Add crunchy bread and a green salad and you’ve made a hearty lunch or satisfying supper from leftovers.

Potato Dumplings

Save mashed potatoes until you have 2 cups.  Normally potatoes don’t freeze well, but in this case go ahead and tuck the leftovers in the freezer until you have enough. Thoroughly defrost before using.  Add 1 beaten egg, salt and pepper to taste, 1/2 cup bread crumbs (optional) and 1 cup of flour to the potatoes combine well.  Roll into balls half the size of a golf ball.  Top a simmering stew with the dumplings. Press gently into the liquid with the back of a spoon. Cover and cook for 30 minutes. Slice a dumpling in half to make sure it’s cooked through. Dumplings may be cooked in soups or salted water as well as in stews.  Serve with melted butter and sprinkle with parsley.

Recipe Rescues

Cooked potatoes come to the rescue of dishes that are too salty, too spicy, or too thin.  Drop in chunks of cooked potatoes into a dish that’s over salted.  Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring every so often.  Remove the potatoes and some of the salty taste will be removed as well. Potatoes have the same capacity for taking out spice from an over-seasoned dish.  Thicken up spaghetti sauce, chili or soups, by adding in mashed potatoes a tablespoon at a time.  Stir well and cook a few minutes. The potatoes won’t add any odd flavor.

Interesting Facts

Potatoes are tubers and hold everything needed to grow a whole new plant.  That’s exactly what the “eyes” on a potato are — baby potato sprouts.  A green skin on the potato means it’s about to sprout. Potato plants like tomatoes are a member of the nightshade family.  The tubers are safe to eat but the plants are toxic.

January 24, 2011

Do you think you’re being virtuous by wrapping up all your leftovers and organizing them neatly in the refrigerator, only to find them turning into alien life forms at the end of a few weeks? If that sounds like you, don’t waste that money you saved by couponing.  Prevent leftovers in the first place.

Learn What a Serving Is

Restaurants, especially fast food restaurants, have led us to expect that a hamburger must weight 1/2 pound; a plate of pasta holds two cups and drowns in sauce, or a rack of ribs should overflow the plate.  Portion control cuts down on leftovers and grocery expenses for that matter.  A serving of protein — that hamburger — is about the size of a deck of cards, a regular 52-card deck not the 82-card pinochle deck.  If you can’t picture a deck of cards, use your palm, not including your thumb, as a guide.  Figure on 4 to 5 oz. of meat per serving. Pasta and starches serving are one cup or 8 oz. Vegetables are full cup and fruit servings are a half cup.

Plate in the Kitchen Not Family Style

I know it’s less work to let everyone serve themselves from common dishes in the center of the table.  The problem is that our eyes are bigger than our tummies.  While your teenage son may eat that mountain of mashed potatoes he put on his plate, your grade schooler won’t.  It’s not sanitary to save the food that’s half eaten.  So prevent over-serving in the first place. Put the food on each person’s plate in the kitchen based on normal serving sizes.  If someone wants more, they can serve themselves from the kitchen.

Cook Just What You Need

When transitioning a family from big portions to normal portions, cook just what you need. I know that it’s tempting to cook two chickens so you have dinner for later in the week, but how often has that second chicken been half eaten during the first meal? Cooking just what you need means there aren’t any leftovers to deal with.  If your family fusses, saying their still hungry when dinner is over, cook normal portions of meat and starch and add an extra vegetable.  Or start dinner with a salad or cup of soup.

January 15, 2012

Cooking healthy meals is a good way to start the New Year, especially if you’ve overindulged during the holidays. All those cookies, special drinks and nibbles can pack on the pounds, as well as upset your digestive system. Get back on track to healthy eating with one simple trick.

Use spices and herbs instead of salt.  You might not realize it but most Americans consume double the amount of salt they require.  If you eat one fast food burger you’ve consumed all the salt for the day, half the calories you require and all the fat.  Only 15 percent of the salt most people eat is consumed by salting their food while eating or cooking.

Cut down on the salt by reading labels.  Did you know one serving of a popular canned chili has 30 percent of the salt you’re allowed for the day? And a serving isn’t the entire can it’s one cup.  Make your own chili and freeze it in meal-size portions.  Pick up low sodium cheese and use no-added sodium roast deli beef for sandwiches.

Most people have an acquired taste for salt. Parents actually salt their purchased baby food because the food tastes flat to them.  The baby of course, not being used to eating salt, doesn’t mind the taste. The easiest way to readjust your taste buds is to go cold turkey for three or four days. That means not only not adding salt, but preparing meals from salt-free ingredients.  It will take some extra time but at the end of the time period you’ll recognize just how salty most food is. You might even lose a few pounds because you can’t eat fast food that’s loaded with salt and fat.

Replace the salty flavor with strong tasting herbs such as rosemary, basil, dill or oregano.  Add heat instead of salt by adding in diced fresh jalapenos, cayenne pepper or even hot pepper sauce.  Boost flavor with spices such as fennel seed, cumin or cinnamon.  Try cinnamon in meat dishes such as chili or meatloaf.

Make your own dips using fat-free yogurt instead of sour cream and mayonnaise. A quick and easy dip that can be thinned with apple cider vinegar to use as a salad dressing is to mix one cup of fat-free yogurt with 1 tablespoon of dill seed, 1 teaspoon of dried onion flakes or 1/2 teaspoon of onion powder (not onion salt), 1/4 cup of chopped scallions, 1/4 cup of minced cucumber, throw a tablespoon of fresh chopped dill if you have it.  You won’t miss the salt or the extra calories in purchased onion dill dips with this recipe.