About bread

In making bread, as in any other culinary endeavor, it is wise to be certain that the proper ingredients are gathered.

There are several basic ingredients to bread, but one is common to all. Yeast is required. It is a living organism that is added to the dough to raise the bread. There are many types of yeast available. We recommend the packaged yeast that can be bought in any grocery store. You will likely also need flour (made from wheat - because wheat glutten is a vital element), sugar, salt, butter (or oil) and milk (or water). Recipes call for varying amounts of each ingredient. As you explore bread-making you will find a whole host of other additives.

In making bread by hand there is a definite technique which must be followed to ensure a good product. Even the process of mixing the ingredients requires a degree of care. For once the ingredients are brought together at an appropriate temperature the resulting dough must be kneaded.

Kneading is a technique of folding over the dough and pushing it down over and over. This is necessary because the glutten in the flour, when rubbed together becomes elastic and helps the bread both rise and set. The dough should be kneaded on a floured surface. If the dough is soft or sticky , add more flour and knead until it shines and has an elastic feel. Be careful not to OVER-knead the dough.

After kneading the bread is placed in a large oiled or buttered bowl. Oil the dough ball. Cover with a towel or plastic sheet and place in a warm draft-free place. Generally, you will want to let the dough rise (the action of the yeast allowed by the glutten) until it doubles in size. This usually takes about an hour.

At this point the dough should be "punched down" and perhaps kneaded a few more times. Place it back into the bowl to rise again or shape your bread into loaves or buns and put it into greased pans - depending on the recipe. The dough should rise for another half an hour or so.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to the appropriate temperature. When the bread has risen place it in the oven to bake until it reaches the desired color. When done, loaves should feel hollow when you tap them with your finger.

The bread can be eaten hot or put on a rack to cool. If it is wrapped too early, it will get soggy. Bread lasts 4 days to a week in the bread box. It may also be frozen, but should be eaten quickly after it has thawed.

Making bread is a fair amount of work, but done properly it can reward the baker in treasures far surpassing the time, effort and materials expended. Try making a batch today! Or if you want to take an easier road to delicious wealth try using a bread machine.

This article taken from the following link, click on the title.

Sushi Mushi!

All about shushi.....
Interesting info.....
Click on the title!

Muesli

Im reading a huge amazing book named "Organic & Wholefoods" Naturally delicious cuisine by Culinaria KONEMANN. I highly recommend it! I was reading about one of the pioneers of organic farmers and muesli suject took my attention so I want to share it with you (this part taken from wikipedia though):

Muesli originally (Bircher) müesli in Swiss German, Müsli in German is a popular breakfast dish (breakfast cereal) based on uncooked rolled oats and fruit. In Switzerland, it is also eaten as a light evening dish; there Birchermüesli complet is muesli with butterbrot and milk coffee.

There are two main variants of muesli, fresh and dry. The first type of muesli is a loose mixture of mainly rolled oats and often also wheat flakes, together with various pieces of dried fruit, nuts, and seeds. Today, dry muesli is widely available in the form of pre-packaged mixes. Many people also enjoy mixing their own. There are many varieties, some of which also contain honey powder, spices, or chocolate. Dry muesli can be stored conveniently for many months. It is served quickly after mixing it with milk, yoghurt, or fruit juice and (if available) pieces of fresh fruit. Fresh muesli, made using rolled oats, orange juice, blended apple and banana, redcurrants, raisins, cottage cheese, topped with raspberries.

The second type of muesli is a freshly prepared mixture that includes rolled oats that have been soaked in water or fruit juice, as well as finely grated or blended apple. Other popular ingredients include additional grated or chopped fresh fruit (e.g., bananas, berries, grapes, mango), dried fruit, milk products (e.g., yogurt, cream, condensed milk, fromage frais, quark, cottage cheese), lemon juice, ground nuts, seeds, spices (especially cinnamon), honey, and muesli mix. People who use an electric blender to prepare apples for fresh muesli find that adding a piece of banana eases the process. Fresh muesli is not suitable to be mixed with fresh milk, which easily coagulates when in the presence of the acids in apple or lemon juice.

History

Muesli was invented in 1900 by Swiss doctor Maximilian Bircher-Benner for patients in his hospital. The term is a diminutive of the Swiss German noun "Mues" (German: "Mus"), a cooking term for a semi-liquid made from raw or cooked fruit that lacks an exact English equivalent, but that is related to mush, paste, compote or the French purée.


Original Bircher-Benner muesli recipe

The original Bircher-Benner recipe is still a prototype for most fresh muesli today (serves 1):

1 tablespoon rolled oats, soaked in 2–3 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon sweet cream (condensed milk may be substituted)
200 grams apple (about one large, preferably a sour variety), finely grated and mixed with the above directly before serving
optionally top with 1 tablespoon ground hazelnuts or almonds


Health benefits

All the main ingredients of muesli are considered important elements of a healthy diet:

A diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of cancer and other age-related diseases, and fresh muesli is a tasty way to start the day with one or two portions of fresh fruit.

Oat products have been shown to help lower high blood cholesterol concentration (hypercholesterolemia) and thereby reduce the risk of arteriosclerosis.

Products made from whole oat and wheat grains are rich in fibre and essential trace elements.

Some types of nuts (especially walnuts) are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which are associated with many health benefits, including the development of the nervous system.

Milk products, often served with muesli, are a rich source of calcium and protein.

This formula it quickly became popular everywhere. Soon companies began to manufacture and market it in a dried version. It is very interesting! You see is healthy so start to eat muesli!!!:-)

ViVa Spanish SaNgRiA!!!

My dad prepares sangria adding brandy, Seco Herrerano or Carta Vieja (white rum from Panama), also you can add soda and so on. Use a simple but good wine. Today you can even find sangria with white wine! but is not the same:-)

Ingredients: (my recipe)
1 Litre of red wine
2 oranges (juice - "naranjas de zumo")
5 tablespoon full of sugar (depending on taste but need to be sort of sweet)
2 pieces of lemon
mix of fruits (example:red grapes, 2 red apples, 2 peaches, 2 oranges)
soda (water)

Preparation:

Sangria is a refreshing drink so you can use simple red wine. Use table wine! Put the wine into a jug, add the sugar, and stir until it is properly dissolved.

Squeeze the two oranges, and add the juice to the jug. Wash the other fruits, peel them and cut them in cubes (1 oranges, 1 apples, 1 peach, grapes, etc) and reserve the other fruits without peeling apart. Put peeled fruits to the wine and juice, any alcohol you wish, sugar and soda and marinate them for few hours or overnight in the fridge. Then take them out few hours later or the next day. If it is not Summer, you can use any other in-season fruit.

Sangría should always be served chilled. If you want to reduce the alchohol concentration, add icecubes and slices of lemon. If you want to increase the alcohol concentration, add a small amount of cognac or rum. Before you serve, take out the "old fruits" and add the new ones that you put apart before. They need to be ready in cubes little bit before serving so you can add them to the jug and they are fresh. Serve in nice glass wine (you can put the glass in the fridge too, is nice cold!) and can add a slice of lemon or orange in the border of the glass or half slice in the middle of the drink or whatever your creativity gives you...for decoration. Enjoy!

(This part taken from www.euroresidentes.com):

Use quality ingredients:

Use wines from Jumilla, Alicante or Valencia. They are usually quite cheap, and are the best choice because of their colour, alcohol content and bouquet.

Tips/Secrets: Make it nice and fruity. Apples, pears, peach, kiwis, bananas, tropical fruits. You can experiment byadding more or less drinks such as cognac, rum, gin and vodka, or you can dilute the alcohol content by adding more orange juice and ice cubes. Some sangria fans like to add drinks such as a can of 7-up, or fizzy orange or lemon. And finally: if you do experiment and find the result irresistable, make sure you have a bed handy, have a nice siesta, and don't drive, even if you feel up to it.

More about coffee!

To check about coffee bean types, processing and roasting, preparation and quick coffee, click on the link! If you feel like drinking coffee, a good tip: with a cookie! check about cookies history on the blog. :-)

History about coffee

Coffee is a popular beverage prepared from the roasted seeds (not beans, though they are almost always called coffee beans) of the coffee plant. It is served hot or with ice. Coffee is the second most commonly traded commodity in the world (measured by monetary volume), trailing only crude oil (and its products such as petroleum), as a source of foreign exchange to developing countries. In total, 6.7 million tonnes of coffee were produced annually in 1998-2000, forecast to rise to 7 million tonnes annually by 2010. Coffee is a chief source of caffeine, a stimulant. A typical 7 fluid ounce (ca. 207 mL) cup of coffee contains 80-140 milligrams of caffeine. Coffee, along with tea and water, is one of the most ingested beverages, amounting to about a third that of tap water.

Etymology and history

Coffee has its history back as far as the 9th century AD. It is thought to have originated in the highlands of Ethiopia and spread to the rest of the world via Egypt and Europe. Over the ages, coffee has met both resistance and acceptance by many.

The word coffee is derived from the Arabic word Qah'wa over Ottoman Turkish Kahve, which originally meant wine or other intoxicating liquors. Partly due to the Islamic prohibition on drinking wine, preparing and drinking coffee became an important social ritual. The effects of coffee were such that it became forbidden among orthodox and conservative imams in Mecca at 1511 and at Cairo in 1532 by a theological court. In Egypt coffeehouses and warehouses containing coffee berries were sacked. But the product's popularity, particularly among intellectuals, led to the reversal of this decision in 1524 by an order of Selim I. In 1538, Léonard Rauwolf, a German physician, having come back from a ten year travel in Near East, was the first westerner to describe the brew: « a beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach.

Its consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup that is pass around and from which each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water and the fruit from a bush called bunnu ». These remarks were noted by merchants, to whom the experience from commerce of spices had made them sensitive to this kind of information.

In the 15th century, Muslims introduced coffee in Persia, Egypt, septentrional Africa and Turkey, where the first cafeteria, Kiva Han, opened in 1475 in Constantinople. From the Muslim world, coffee spread to Europe, where it became the rage in the 17th century. English coffeehouses were centers of intellectual and commercial activity. Lloyds of London, the famous insurance firm, was originally a coffeehouse.

Economics of coffee

Coffee is one of the world's most important primary commodities, due to its being one of the world's most popular beverages. It also has the distinction of being the second most-traded commodity in the world, oil being #1. Coffee also has several types of classifications used to determine environmental and labor standards.

Coffee ingestion on average makes up about a third that of tap water in most of North America and Europe. In 2002 in the US, coffee consumption was 22.1 gallons per person.

Health and pharmacology of coffee

Many studies have been performed on the relationship between coffee consumption and many medical conditions, ranging from diabetes and cardiovascular disease to cancer and cirrhosis. Studies are contradictory as to whether coffee has any specific health benefits, and similarly results are conflicting with respect to negative effects of coffee consumption. In addition, it is often unclear whether these risks or benefits are linked to caffeine or whether they are to be attributed to other chemical substances found in coffee (and whether decaffeinated coffee carries the same benefits or risks).

One fairly consistent finding has been the reduction of diabetes mellitus type 2 in coffee consumers, an association which cannot be explained by the caffeine content alone and indeed may be stronger in decaffeinated coffee. Recently coffee was found to reduce the chances of developing cirrhosis of the liver: the consumption of 1 cup a day was found to reduce the chances by 20%, 4 cups a day reduced by 80%. A commonly held belief about coffee is that drinking it at a young age will "stunt your growth".

Social aspects of coffee

Coffee plays an important role in today's society. From the coffeehouses of the 16th century, to the modern day cafés, coffee has impacted the lifestyle of people from all walks of life. When it first appeared in Africa and Yemen, it was commonly used as a type of religious intoxicant (it is still used in excorcism ceremonies in Ethiopia today). This usage in religious rites among the Sufi branch of Islam lead to it being put on trial in Mecca for being a "heretic" substance similar to wine. It was briefly repressed at this point, and later was part of a larger ban in Ottoman Turkey under an edict which led to the death of thousands of people. It's early association in Europe with rebellious political activities led to its banning in, among other places, England.

Other uses

Spent coffee grounds are a good fertilizer in gardens because of their high nitrogen content. Starbucks, and some other coffee shops, have a specific policy of giving away their used coffee grounds to gardeners. While they tend to be only slightly acidic, they also tend to improve the acidity of garden soil through the same chemical processes which cause sawdust to do the same thing. Coffee grounds raise soil acidity sooner if they are added fresh, instead of after brewing. Likewise, coffee diluted with four times its volume of water can be used to amend soil acidity, especially useful for tomatoes, chili peppers, blueberries, and other plants which like high soil acidity.

The grounds are also used as bait in "Vegas roach traps".Some use coffee to create art. Latte art involves designs in the foam of espresso-based drinks. Arfé is the use of coffee as a coloring for painting or other visual effects.

Cookies

In the United States and Canada, a cookie is a small, flat baked cake. In most English-speaking countries outside North America, the most common word for this is biscuit; in many regions both terms are used, while in others the two words have different meanings—a cookie is a bun in Scotland or a form of rough-textured biscuit similar to the biscuit pictured here, while in North America a biscuit is a kind of quick bread.

Etymology

Its name derives from the Dutch word koekje which means little cake, and arrived in the English language via the Scots language, rather than directly from the Dutch. In Scottish English the word denotes a small scone-like cake or bun, often filled with cream.

Cookies were first made from little pieces of cake batter that were cooked separately in order to test oven temperature. The ancestor of the cookie is said to have come from Persia (from the Persian kooluchih) in the 7th century according to many sources.


Recipe

Cookies can be baked until crisp or just long enough that they remain soft, depending on the type of cookie. Some cookies are not cooked at all. Cookies are made in a wide variety of styles, using an array of ingredients including sugars, spices, chocolate, butter, peanut butter, nuts or dried fruits.

A general theory of cookies may be formulated this way. Despite their descent from cakes and other sweetened breads, the cookie in almost all its forms has abandoned water as a medium for cohesion. Water in cakes serves to make the base (in the case of cakes called 'Dough') as thin as possible, which allows the bubbles – responsible for a cake's fluffiness – to form better. In the cookie, the agent of cohesion has become some variation of the theme of oil. Oils, be they in the form of butter, egg yolks, vegetable oils or lard are much more viscous than water and evaporate freely at a much higher temperature than water. Thus a cake made with butter or eggs instead of water is far denser after removal from the oven.

Oils in baked cakes do not behave as water in the finished product. Rather than evaporating and thickening the mixture, they remain, saturating the bubbles of escaped gasses from what little water there might have been in the eggs, if added, and the carbon dioxide released by heating the baking powder. This saturation produces the most texturally attractive feature of the cookie, and indeed all fried foods: crispness saturated with a moisture (namely oil) that does not sink into it.

Cookies are broadly classified according to how they are formed, including at least these categories:

Drop cookies are made from a relatively soft dough that is dropped by spoonfuls onto the baking sheet. During baking, the mounds of dough spread and flatten. Chocolate chip cookies are an example of drop cookies.

Refrigerator cookies are made from a stiff dough that is refrigerated to become even stiffer. The dough is typically shaped into cylinders which are sliced into round cookies before baking.

Molded cookies are also made from a stiffer dough that is molded into balls or cookie shapes by hand before baking. Snickerdoodles are an example of molded cookies.

Rolled cookies are made from a stiffer dough that is rolled out and cut into shapes with a cookie cutter. Gingerbread men are an example.

Pressed cookies are made from a soft dough that is extruded from a cookie press into various decorative shapes before baking. Spritzgebäck are an example of a pressed cookie.

Bar cookies consist of batter or other ingredients that are poured or pressed into a pan (sometimes in multiple layers), and cut into cookie-sized pieces after baking. Brownies are an example of a batter-type bar cookie, while Rice Krispie treats are a bar cookie that doesn't require baking, perhaps similar to a cereal bar. In British English, bar cookies are known as "tray bakes".

Commercially-produced cookies include many varieties of sandwich cookies filled with marshmallow, jam, or icing, as well as cookies covered with chocolate which may more closely resemble a type of confectionery.

Biscuits (cookies) in the United Kingdom

A basic biscuit (cookie) recipe includes flour, shortening (often lard), baking powder or soda, milk (buttermilk or sweet milk) and sugar. Common savoury variations involve substituting sugar with an ingredient such as cheese.

Cuisine Term

A cuisine (from French cuisine, meaning "cooking; culinary art; kitchen"; itself from Latin coquina, meaning the same; itself from the Latin verb coquere, meaning "to cook") is a specific set of cooking traditions and practices, often associated with a place of origin. Religious food laws can also exercise a strong influence on cuisine. A cuisine is primarily influenced by the ingredients that are available locally or through trade. (For example, the "Asian" dish chop suey clearly reflected the adaptation of Chinese immigrant cooking styles to the different ingredients available in North America.)

OVERVIEW

The last century or so has produced enormous improvements in food production, preservation, storage and shipping. Today almost every locale in the world has access to not only its traditional cuisine, but also to many other world cuisines, as well. New cuisines are constantly evolving, as certain aesthetics rise and fall in popularity among professional chefs and their clientele.

In addition to food, a cuisine is also often held to include beverages, including wine, liquor, tea, coffee and other drinks. Increasingly, experts hold that it further includes the raw ingredients and original plants and animals from which they come. The Slow Food movement is a global effort to preserve local plants, animals, and techniques of food preparation. It has 70,000 adherents in 50 countries.

There are also different cultural attitudes to food, for example:
In India, consumption of food is regarded as an offering, a Yajna. Thus the stomach is considered to be a homagunda (holy fire) and all the food consumed is an offering to the holy fire.

In Japan, Tea drinking is a fine-art and there is an elaborate ceremony about it. Not drinking tea in the right way is considered to be an act of barbarism.

There are cuisine from all over the world: Cuisine of the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania and non-regional cuisine...will be reading about them soon or you can click on the title to find out more!

Herbs

Herbs are plants grown for culinary, medicinal, or in some cases even spiritual value. The green, leafy part of the plant is typically used. General usage differs between culinary herbs and medicinal herbs. A medicinal herb may be a shrub or other woody plant, whereas a culinary herb is a non-woody plant. By contrast, spices are the seeds, berries, bark, root, or other parts of the plant, even leaves in some cases; although any of these, as well as any edible fruits or vegetables, may be considered "herbs" in medicinal or spiritual use. Culinary herbs are distinguished from vegetables in that they are used in small amounts and provide flavor (are spices) rather than substance to food.

Botanical definitions

In botany, herbs are plants that does not produce a woody stem, and in temperate climates usually dies, either completely (annual herb) or back to the roots (perennial herb), at the end of the growing season. Examples include bulbs, Peonies, Hosta, grasses and Banana.

The term herbaceous means either having the characteristic of a herb or being leaf-like in color and texture. A related term is forb, which means a non-woody plant that is not a grass and is not grass-like. This means that the term forb excludes sedges (Cyperaceae) and rushes (Juncaceae) along with true grasses (Poaceae). Non-herbaceous plants are woody plants which have stems above ground that remain alive during winter and grow shoots the next year; examples include trees, shrubs, and woody vines.