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What to Feed Your Foodie Pet: Cats and Dogs Don't Eat Corn

12/2/2012

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Foodies should feed their pets right, too.
I had a cat growing up, a super-friendly Siamese cat named "Mai Tai." She ate all kinds of weird things, from tomatoes to spiders to cantaloupe. She even preferred to drink water straight out of the tap at full blast. There would be a fresh bowl of water on the floor and she'd walk right past it. Then she'd jump up on the counter in the bathroom and howl at you until you stopped what you were doing and came in there to turn the faucet on for her. Then she'd lap the water straight out of the tap. What a great cat.

While some cats have weird eating habits, most are creatures of habit who stick to their food dish at feeding time. More importantly, cats are carnivores. Sure,  they'll chew on grass and, yes, even eat the occasional chunk of cantaloupe...  but by and large, cats eat meat. Now, to see how your cat is doing on the food front, I want you to go to your cat's bag of food and read the first ingredient on the list, then come back and continue reading.


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When to Use Dried Herbs Over Fresh Herbs

12/2/2012

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Dried herbs have their place when cooking.
Generally, fresh anything is better than non-fresh anything, but there must be some use for dried herbs, otherwise there wouldn't be a mile-long rack of them at the grocery store. What gives? As we all know, fresh herbs deliver a taste that is unparallelled by their dried counterparts, but there are times when fresh herbs just won't do the trick, at least not as well as you'd like. For instance, when making pasta sauces, soups or other dishes that can take a while to cook, your fresh, green herbs turn black pretty quickly.

While you may get the desired flavor out of fresh herbs, your presentation will suffer. No one wants to eat black, limp oregano, basil, rosemary or other herbs.


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Cook Seafood Simply (At Least the First Time)

12/2/2012

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A common mistake with cooking seafood is that, since some people are afraid of that "fishy" taste, they season the hell out of it to try to mask it. On top of that, they often feel the need to deep-fry it. I'm as big a fan as anyone when it comes to great seasonings, and ESPECIALLY deep-frying fish (or anything else,  for that matter), but I just think more of us should get to know the flavors of  our seafood before we decide to falsely flavor it with seasonings.

Here are your ingredients for your next seafood dish: fish fillet of your choice,  salt and pepper... AND NOTHING ELSE. Trust me.

Once you've cooked seafood with just salt and pepper, you'll learn the true flavor of the fish and then you'll be able to pair it with other seasonings, side dishes, sauces, wines, etc. For instance, when I first ran across Basa Fillet  (also called Swai Fillet), I decided to give it a shot. It's a white fish. I've cooked halibut, snapper, cod, catfish, tilapia... how different could it be?


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Poor Man's, Easy Gourmet Pasta Sauce

12/2/2012

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Making pasta sauce from scratch is fine and dandy, but it is time consuming. It can take all day - literally - to get the down-home, straight-outta-Italy flavor you want. But buying a jar of marinara or pasta sauce at the grocery store just seems so... so... non-Foodie. A lot of us just can't bring ourselves to do it. That is, unless, we buy the pricey stuff, but then we always think to ourselves, "Man, ten bucks for pasta sauce? I could have made it myself for way less." But then we're taken back full-circle to the beginning of our dilemma of not having the time to do it the way we want..

Here's a way to compromise in every direction. We're talking low cost, high flavor, no extra time, and probably even better tasting than some of the run-of-the-mill Italian restaurants in your area:


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Cooking with Cast Iron

12/2/2012

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Cooking with cast iron adds awesome flavor.
Non-stick this, teflon that... whatever. Cast iron is the way to go for almost everything I cook. There are very few things that I don't cook with my trusty, perfectly-seasoned, black-as-night cast iron frying pan. Steak, fried chicken, seafood, quiche, bananas foster - you  name it, I've cooked it in that bad boy and I'll never need a new pan.

I remember when I put "cast iron frying pan" on our wedding registry. My wife (then fiancee) thought I was nuts, as did everyone else who saw the list. But my sister was there for me. She saw the light (being somewhat of a Foodie herself). She remembered me talking about cast iron some time before that, so she knew I was serious when she saw it on the list, and voila! My new wife and I were on our way to culinary bliss.

While I'm not blessed with a cast iron skillet that was handed down from generation to generation in our family, I am blessed  nonetheless. When I bust that old clanker out in front of guests, they ask me what I'm gonna do with it. My typical answer is, "There ain't nothin''  you can't cook in one of these! Now STAND BACK!" For the sake of blogging, I'll specify:


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Beer Pairings are on the Rise with Foodies

12/2/2012

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Pizza and beer used to be so easy.
Like almost everyone else, beer was an acquired taste for me. I started at about 20 years old - I mean 21 - and I started with the typical, big-brand, American, yellow, standard-issue, macro-brewed boring beers. They all tasted the same, they were all easy to drink, and they all did the trick. But then one day, I tried a "microbrew." I can't remember which one it was I had first, but all 12 of them must've been good, right? All I can say is that I saw the light... and then I saw beers that I couldn't see the light through... and then I saw beers that made the light look brown, amber, cloudy. You get the point. I quickly became a beer snob.

So, by the time I was 23, I set a standard in my life that there is no time for bad beer. I'd rather buy a 6-pack of great-tasting beer over a 12-pack of "piss beer" with no flavor. From then on, I set out on a quest to find more and more great beer. I even had a job where my supervisor and I would have a "Beer Meeting" every Friday at the end of  the work week. During the meeting, we would talk about what transpired throughout the week and we would come up with our gameplan for the following week. And the catch with the "Beer Meeting" was that we each had to go out and try to find a beer that the other guy had never had before. For those of you keeping score at home, I won most weeks... but you know what? In a game like that, everyone wins.

Anyway, back to beer pairings. When you drink certain beers, you notice different subtleties: one Stout will taste like coffee; another slightly sour; another like vanilla cream. You catch the differences between Pale Ales: one has an excess of carbonation while another is wetter with a hint of green apples. One wheat beer tastes like a meal unto itself while another remains light and citrusy.

A lot of these descriptions sound a lot like, well, like wine pairings. That's right: beer has just about caught up to wine in food pairings. And why wouldn't it? We pair wine with food, so why not beer?


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