Cheddar Melt Chili
from Betty Crocker Recipe of the Day
This ground beef dish gets its heat from three different sources-salsa, beans and chili powder. Hamburger Helper® dinner mix makes it easy.

New Food & Wine Matcher from Natalie MacLean
from Gourmet Food - Cooking, Recipes, Reviews, Entertaining & Travel
With thousands of wines on the market, picking the best wine to go with dinner can be tricky business, even for the experts. Award winning wine-writer Natalie MacLean has...

Menu for Hope III: 3 days left!
from Purple Liquid: a wine and food diary by Catherine Granger
Hunger and malnutrition are still the number one risks to health worldwide. 852 million is the total number of undernourished people worldwide: 815 in developing countries, 28 million in countries in transition and nine million in industrialised countries. Today, one in nearly seven people do not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life, making hunger and malnutrition the number one risk to health worldwide — greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. The Menu for Hope campaign will be running for three more days so if you're thinking about participating and help UN World Food Programme , there is still a little bit of time but do it soon! So far, we have more than doubled last year's record of $17,000, and have raised over $35,000! Thanks to all of you!

Technorati tags: wine food & drink

Restaurants: Tastes of Russia, but One Without Borders
from Dining by FRANK BRUNI
After a four-year hibernation, the Russian Tea Room stirred to renewed life in early November with a seriously gifted chef, Gary Robins, in charge of the kitchen.

Macarons Maïs Violette
from Chocolate & Zucchini by clotilde

If you are still trying to get your act together about what homemade edible presents to give out this holiday season, I'm here to tell you that you are not alone. I myself have done precisely zilch about it, but that's okay: today is Tuesday, Christmas eve is this Sunday, and that still gives me plenty of time to pick a recipe, buy the ingredients, and get started, right? Right? Thank you.
I would hate to spoil the surprise for the usual recipients of my food gifts, who happen to read this blog every once in a while -- especially just before they see me so they can pretend they read it more faithfully than they probably do --, so I can't tell you exactly what I'll make, but I will gladly point you to a few recipes I'm considering (but haven't tested yet):
~ Jenjen's Maple Brandy Snaps,~ Monica Hayden's Havreflarn, as recommended by Marie,~ Nolwenn's Dried fruit biscotti (in French),~ Pascale's Chocolate caramels (in French),~ Bulle's Guimauves, the French marshmallows (in French).
Add to those twelve gift-worthy favorites from the C&Z archives (a selection you would have received in your mailbox three weeks ago if you were a happy subscriber of my monthly newsletter):
~ Very Ginger Cookies,~ Shortbread, ~ Chocolate and Cacao Nib Cookies,~ Green Tea Cat's Tongues,~ Chocolate-dipped Apricots,~ Dried Pears (which you can chocolate-dip, too),~ Mendiants,~ Florentins,~ Spiced Chocolate Peanut Butter,~ Wine Jelly,~ Almond Lemon Curd,~ Pear and Cacao Nib Jam.
And a bonus recipe, that of the cornmeal macarons* I've come up with a few months ago: I was hoping to create delicate two-bite numbers that would make good teatime companions, preferably with a lightly crunchy crust that would yield into a soft, nubby heart. I tinkered and stirred and trusted my instincts, and I was quite pleased with what I got -- pleased enough to make a few more batches since then (it is such an easy one-bowl, scoop-drop-'n-bake recipe), in different flavor incarnations: violet, citrus zest and pepper, or simply vanilla.
* See here for more on the use of the word "macaron".
~~~
Just as a reminder, you have until Friday to make a donation in our Menu for Hope fundraiser and get a chance to win some of the cool prizes; my sincere thanks to all of you who have already donated with such generosity.

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30 Second Wine Advisor: How long can you keep leftover wine?
from WineLoversPage.com
We run a simple experiment to test the conventional wisdom about keeping wine in an open bottle.

30 Second Wine Advisor: Say "cheese"
from WineLoversPage.com
Playing with my food during a fancy dinner at a NYC culinary temple, I reinforce a theory about matching red and white wines with artisanal cheeses

Wines of The Times: Panned on Screen, Merlot Shrugs and Moves On
from Dining by ERIC ASIMOV
“Sideways” may have done a favor to a wine not much loved.

Top 10 Drinking Chocolates
from Gourmet Food - Cooking, Recipes, Reviews, Entertaining & Travel
Winter always makes me think of hot cocoa. Maybe it's a childhood thing or maybe I'm just searching for an excuse to have more chocolate! As an adult,...

Wines of The Times: What Goes With Turkey Again?
from Dining by ERIC ASIMOV
The Dining section’s wine panel held a blind tasting with a typical Thanksgiving meal and decided which ones went best with the food.

The Talk: Dining Finds in Buenos Aires
from Dining by OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT
Palermo Viejo, the city’s hippest ‘hood, is also the best place to chow down

It Takes Over a Village
from Dining by MAGGIE BARRETT
Every fall, when harvest time rolls around, the entire town of Buonconvento, Italy, picks up a fork and digs in.

Nov 20, 2006 10:39 AM
Early to Market in Bisceglie
from The Food Section: Press Sighting: New York Times by Josh Friedland


The drive from Bari's airport to Bisceglie is deceptive. The landscape is marked by an incredible amount of modern development: big box stores, a giant outlet mall, and huge cranes building new apartments. But, peel back a layer of the Apulian onion, and you'll find along the coast the old whitewashed towns with narrow streets that wind their way up out of the Adriatic.
I got up early on my last day in Bisceglie and walked along the water into the old city center, where there was an incredible market. The fishermen head out early from the town's small harbor, pushing colorful wooden boats against the tide, and return with a jaw-dropping bounty of seafood -- octopus, squid, clams, oysters, and silvery, glassy-eyed fish. Adjoining the fish market was a vegetable market teeming with fresh produce -- bright fall persimmons, puntarella, pears, olive dolci (fresh, uncured olives), and green and purple artichokes with stems as long as your forearm.
Below is a slideshow of photos (click directly on the photo to advance; refresh your browser to return to the beginning):

Featured Recipe: Cheese Blintzes
from For Food and Wine Lovers - Epicurean.com
Blintzes remind me of French crepes, although they're Russian in origin. They can befitted with savory or sweet mixtures. Children have great fun mixing up the filling and stuffing the "pancakes." Serve these hot with sour cream topping, sliced strawberries, or stewed rhubarb (sweeten to taste or combine with canned crushed pineapple), or with applesauce on top of a sour cream dressing for additional garnish.

Changing The Palate Express Hotelier - Mumbai,India... as India becomes a global destination for travel and various ... spirit are being sketched over the food landscape all ... for Indians and a few wine societies have ...

Parmesan Polenta News 14 Carolina - Raleigh,NC,USA... After the polenta's cooked for 10 minutes or so, add about 1 cup of grated parmesan cheese and stir that in until it's well incorporated. ...

Afuega'l Pitu is a very ancient cheese made in the valley formed by the rivers Nalon and Narcea.

Paris's Emerging Neighborhoods
from Gridskipper, the Urban Travel Guide
Just out from the Mairie De Paris is this map of the most deprivedareas of Paris, where they are investing in 211 million euros this year alone. Parisians pay high taxes but at least the money is being invested in the city and it's inhabitants, including the most needy 350,000.
Attached to each area, there is a list of the number of inhabitants, the percentage of those under 20 years old and the percent unemployed (chomage). The 24% foreigners we're not talking about foreign buyers but mostly African and Maghrebin (North African) immigrants.
You could use this as a guide of where to buy that will eventually appreciate rather than hold it's value like the more privileged parts of Paree. If you are on a limited budget and a real estate pioneer. Like other capital cities, at least London (see Brixton and New York (hipster-ville Williamsburg) Paris is gentrified up now and house prices in even places shown on this indicator like Canal St Martin, Belleville and Menilmontant have risen sharply over the years.
You could still choose the even dodgier parts of town that are left (and cheaper), batten down the hatches, bribe your friends to visit you and then sooner or later you'll see a macelleria selling over-priced Italian salami spring up on the corner where the drug addicts used to hang out.
In La Chapelle, Montmartre district, prices have risen by 21% between June 2005 - June 2006. It's here you find the quartier La Goutte d'Or where Zola's Nana was born - you can stil feel its web of Zola-esqe crime and destitution. There are some extremely run-down buildings and social problems amongst the most visible, drug addiction.
So before jumping in as a pioneer and buying your pied-a-terre or booking that funky new hotel in an "emerging" area, make sure you can hack it or will you feel unsafe coming home late at night. You may not be able to hang out in the local Cafe either (some are all-male enclaves with spit on the floor). Of course, when you're more streetwise you'll see all these areas are fabulous in their own way too - check out the fantastic Marché Exotique on the rue Dejean for an authentic Paris/Dakar vibe.
[Text+Photo: Suzanne Hollands]

30 Second Wine Advisor: Can you taste organic?
from WineLoversPage.com
Is the organic wine glass half empty or half full? It depends on who's looking

What to Drink with What you Eat
from Gourmet Food - Cooking, Recipes, Reviews, Entertaining & Travel
Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page have created a masterpiece of culinary work with What to Drink with What you Eat (Bulfinch Press 2006). This book is destined to be the...