I think I've heard of mangosteens before, at least I've heard the name. Apparently, though, the tropical fruit is all the rage in Japan.
According to this post from InventorSpot, mangosteens, or juice drinks made from them, are very popular in Japan right now because they're supposed to be high in antioxidants and ward off cancer in mice (though that hasn't been tested in humans).
Mangosteens are originally from Thailand, but they're difficult to export from the region because they are...
Food Video Finds: Show Me the Curry and Aloo Matar
I've been in an Indian state of mind all day, having picked up some tasty-looking tandoori naan at the store today, and trying to figure out what I want to make with it. Unfortunately, I haven't made too many Indian dishes from scratch, save butter chicken long ago and some recent tasty pakora. Luckily, there's a cooking show that details all sorts of Indian dishes -- Show Me the Curry.
In this episode, Anuja and Hetal make Aloo Matar, a simple dish of spices, potatoes, and peas. This is a recipe that they consider to be one of the easiest...
While grocery shopping the other day, I scoured the gourmet dip section. After grumbling about the mass amount of fat and calories in dips like artichoke and asiago or spinach, my eyes rested upon something new: low-fat raita. Unlike the other options, which would weigh you down with hundred of calories per 2 tbsp, this one has 20. Yes, just 20 calories per two tablespoons. I picked it up, all giddy and hoping that it would taste good, and be worthy of my beloved carrot sticks.
Oh, yes. Raita is basically a spicy tzatziki. (Slashfood last mentioned it...
You thought today was going to filled with yummy, delicate posts about sweet treats and flowers, didn't you?
Think again.
Trifter.com has oh-so helpfully provided us with eight of the "most disgusting delicacies" - although we prefer to think of them not as disgusting, per se, but as ...daring. Different. Deconstructed.
Some of the more colorful examples? In Morocco, you can indulge in oil made from goat excrement. The goats climb the trees in search of food, and the resulting oil is though to have medicinal purposes. Or you could hop over to...
Thai Kitchen/Simply Asia are giving away a very cool trip
I have always had a fascination with Asian cooking. When I was younger, I would beg my parents for meals from our local Vietnamese and Thai restaurants and as I got older, any time I had the opportunity to eat out, my preference would be sushi or Pho. Several years ago, I started playing around with learning to cook food that tasted mildly similar to my restaurant favorites (I had particular success with baby bok choy).
If you have a similar culinary obsession to mine, there's a contest going on now that you might want...
It's pretty much a given these days that you don't get much in the way of food on airplanes, especially when you fly in the continental United States. I was shocked to discover on my last flight out to Portland that I was actually served a meal (a microwaved mini pizza, an iceberg lettuce salad, a bag of potato chips and a package brownie). However, when you fly internationally, food is still part of the travel experience, and can range from terrible to excellent.
Last week I mentioned that Pho (Vietnamese beef noodle soup) is one of my favorite cold weather foods. I love the warm, anise-scented broth next to the cool crunch of the fresh bean sprouts and herbs. However, it's one of those dishes that I think of as restaurant-only. I've never attempted to make it, mostly because I know the broth is fairly labor-intensive.
The level of work that it required didn't scare away Brys from Cookthink (it appears that he rarely shies away from complex cooking projects, a...
Back in February I blogged about Anandita Dutta Tamuly, a 25-year-old Indian woman with an uncanny ability to chow down on massive amounts of the world's hottest pepper. She's been known to gobble 60 bhut Jolokia, or ghost peppers, in two minutes, and even plans a bid to smash the Guinness Record for pepper eating.
But what happens when a mild-mannered journalist goes toe to toe with the spicy behemoth? Not by eating 60, but rather by attempting to consume a single ghost chili in one sitting at the behest of his editor. Said journalist was not me; it...
I was looking at the Aug./Sept. 2007 issue of Saveur magazine and reading a great article about Hmong farmers in California by Andrea Nguyen, one of my new favorite writers. (If you want to subscribe or buy and download the issue click here.) The Hmong are a semi-nomadic people who have lived in parts of China and Southeast Asia for centuries. Always on the move, recently a large portion ended up leaving Asia and immigrating to the US,...