Thu
3
Jul '08
Enjoy the Holiday!
Join us tomorrow to enjoy an interesting series of historical 4th of July photos taken across the United States, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Wed
25
Jun '08
Here’s Day 3 of the A Week of Onion Rings series which features Cheese and Chive Onion Rings.
(Yesterday’s featured onion rings were Hawaiian Sesame Coconut Onion Rings.)
This may be the very best use of beer batter ever! The chives are the perfect liaison between the cheddar and onion flavors. The only thing you really need with these is. . . more beer!
Ingredients:
1 cup (4 oz) finely shredded cheddar cheese (I use Tillamook Sharp)
2 Tbsp freeze-dried chives (or 3 Tbsp fresh minced chives)
2 cups Basic Batter (made with beer)…see the ingredients list for this batter to the right.
Oil for frying
1 very large yellow or Vidalia onion, cut and separated into 3/4 inch rings
Preparation:
Mix the cheese and chives into the batter. Heat 1/2 to 3/4 inches oil in a heavy skillet to 375 degrees. Dip an onion ring into the batter, coating thickly. Lay it gently into the oil and cook until golden, turning once. Remove and drain on paper towels. Repeat with remaining rings. You can do 2-3 at a time depending on the size of your skillet, but take care not to crowd the pan or let the temperature drop too much, or the rings will turn out greasy.
Enjoy!
Serving Suggestions:
- To get a crunchy/toasty coating, dredge the battered rings in panko bread crumbs before frying. Finely crushed pretzels might be a winner, too.
- Horseradish cheddar, pepper jack, or swiss can be substituted for the cheddar.
- My best serving suggestion? Three words: Thick. Juicy. Steak.
Join us tomorrow to read Doug’s new recipe for Curly Ramen Crunch Onion Rings as part of his Week of Onion Rings Series which celebrates the official start of Summer.
You Can Read More of Doug’s Recipe Corner Here.
Note: This original Hugging the Coast article also appears on eHow as:
(You can see more Hugging the Coast eHow articles here.)
Wed
28
May '08
Magnolia Plantation by Chance Agrella
Do you have strong opinions on food and travel? Why not take one of our growing collection of anonymous food polls on the site (or find out what others have answered)?
You can find the polls here…enjoy!
Mon
12
May '08
When you go on a fishing trip or go camping in the mountains, do you enjoy celebrating the pleasure of the great outdoors with a gourmet meal cooked on an open fire?
Fans of outdoor cooking at its finest (as well as gourmet food in general), won’t want to miss the four Redwood Creek Campfire Classic events taking place across the country throughout the spring and summer to kickoff the 2008 camping season.
The most recent event will be held on May 17th, 2008 as part of the Food and Wine Festival at National Harbor in Maryland and will feature the semi-final competitions for the contest for already selected competitors from both the North and Southeast (with Hugging the Coast’s own Doug DuCap competing in the Southeastern Division!).
In addition to the Redwood Creek Campfire Classic cookoffs, the Food and Wine Festival at National Harbor will also feature demonstrations by Michel Richard, the critically acclaimed chef of Citronelle and author of Happy in the Kitchen as well as lectures and samples from dozens of culinary experts from around the country.
Two other Campfire Classic semi-finalist cookoffs will be held in Seattle, WA on May 31st as part of the Pike Place Market Street Festival and in Chicago, IL on June 7th as part of the Chicago Botanic Garden Wine Festival which will determine the finalists from the Northwest and Midwest divisions. (The finalists from the Southwestern division were chosen on May 3rd at Mayfest in Fort Worth, TX.)
Winners of the Campfire Classic Semi-Finals will be awarded $1,000, plus an all-expense paid trip to New York City to compete during the first week of summer for a chance to win a $10,000 Grand Prize. The finals will be judged by Redwood Creek winemaker, Cal Dennison, and Bob Blumer, host of the Food Network’s Glutton for Punishment and The Surreal Gourmet.
Like the poster above? You can get it free here. Also, please see the 2007 Campfire Classic Finalists’ Recipes below to help inspire you on your own culinary campfire adventures:
- 2007 Grand Prize Winner: Coal-Roasted Chuckbox Pozole-Stuffed Onions by Leah Lyon of Ada, Oklahoma
- Chincoteague Scallops by Julia DeCastro of University Park, Florida
- Rocky Mountain Pinon Paella by Paul Heitzenrater of Denver, Colorado
- Down East Lobster Scampi a la Campfire by Brian Mulligan of Bath, Maine
- Lost in the Woods Pork Tenderloin by Kim Wittmers of Minneapolis, Minnesota
Wed
23
Apr '08
Just how addicted to coffee are you? Do you ever wish you could be permanently hooked up to a coffee I.V.? (If so, see the cartoon to the right.)
What about using coffee as a homemade beauty treatment to firm and tone the skin? (Supposedly you can.) Do you have Starbucks Finder installed on your handheld PDA so you can get your fix anywhere you go?
Then cooking with coffee is the next step in your addiction cycle.
Beyond tiramisu and other obvious coffee flavored desserts, coffee and/or espresso can be used to make a wide variety of interesting marinades, rubs, and sauces. If you’ve ever known the deep pleasure of eating country ham and red-eye gravy, you’re already well on your way to enjoying coffee as a culinary enhancement.
Here’s a few main meal recipes featuring coffee as an ingredient:
By the way, it is said that French writer Honore de Balzac drank up to 40 strong cups of coffee a day. He went on to write 92 novels and his essay, The Pleasures and Pain of Coffee, gives one a fascinating/horrifying glimpse of his all-too-caffeinated life.
As Balzac goes on to write in the essay…
“For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of (creative) stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.
For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thought he’d been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part, a failure of observation.”
Balzac died at the age of 51. Ironically enough, Ebook Takeaway offers 51 of his books that you can download free of charge here. There’s also some great coffee trivia here as well as Food & Wine’s Obsessive Guide to Coffee.
Tue
11
Mar '08
Looks like I’m going to have to add drinking Postum to the long list of things I’ve always wanted to do (like flying on the Concorde) but never had a chance to. General Foods, the maker of Postum is discontinuing its manufacture after over 100 years of production.
However, if your pockets are deep and your hunger for Postum immense, you can still snag a few jars of it on ebay.
According to Wikipedia’s Postum entry, Postum’s main ingredients were naturally-caffeine-free wheat grain, bran and molasses. Postum was the flagship product for the C.W. Post Company, which became General Foods in 1929. The drink was popular with Seventh Day Adventists and Mormons who avoid caffeine for religious reasons.
There’s a good article about the end of Postum here. You can also hear an NPR Podcast about Postum here.
But all hope is not lost. Cooks.Com has a substitute recipe for Postum that you can try. If you do, please let us know how it measures up (or just share your Postum memories) in the Comments Section below!
Leave a Comment and Join in on the Discussion »