| You Taste Like a Burger
While growing up in Saudi Arabia, I would watch our cook as he prepared complex, gourmet meals. It was not only a distraction in a place without neighborhood parks or television, but also a cultural adventure into his native Filipino culture, as well as romps to Italy, France and home to the U.S. I'd watch, fascinated, as he would remove the meat and bones from a whole chicken's skin, mixing the meat with vegetables and seasoning, and then somehow get it all back into the skin before stitching the floppy bird back together and roasting it. I have never understood how a person could not know how to cook. Friends ask me to teach them a recipe or two, so before dinner parties, I call them into the kitchen. They are inevitably more concerned about what we are drinking, and are often back in the living room within five minutes.
Accor Celebrates Earth Day With The Kids
Accor employees throughout New Zealand used international Earth Day yesterday to put the spotlight on more than just the environment, with a series of picnics for children affected by life threatening illness and their families. Called Earth Guest Day at Accor, the day is a culmination of campaigns pursued by employees throughout the year and highlights the Earth Guest program introduced by the Group in 2006 to join together its social and environmental responsibility initiatives. The idea behind 'Earth Guest Day' is that we are all guests of the earth and should take time out to give back to the planet. .
Self-guided tour is great way to enjoy beautiful french countryside
After 25 years of marriage and with a newly empty nest, my husband and I decided it was time for the best vacation ever. Our wish list included elements that don't usually share a travel itinerary: hiking through beautiful foreign terrain, taking in historical sights, eating gourmet food and sleeping in comfortable beds. We managed to find the cushy, civilized hiking trip of our dreams on a self-guided walking tour in the Dordogne region of France last October, just after sending our youngest child off to college. .
The Three C's of Freebies
As my body and wallet will testify, I love to dine out. I have certain restaurants that I frequent near my home where I am given the royal treatment I desire. That treatment really means three things: good food, good service, and a free glass of Frangelico after dinner to go with my coffee. Frangelico is a delicious hazelnut liqueur from Mt. Olympus itself and is my preferred dessert. That free glass of Frangelico has cemented my loyalty to these local establishments and I go to them often. In fact, my wife the beautiful A.P. and I go out to dinner just about every other night -- so the restaurateurs are quite happy to give me that heavenly glass. Yes, that glass of Frangelico is the gift that keeps on giving. It gives me what I want; a sense of being a preferred customer, and it gives the owners of the restaurants what they want, my patronage -- meaning my money.
No need to panic over Passover preparations
Colette Perfit prepared Moroccan chicken with olives, a Sephardic dish, and a roast with dried fruits, a nod to Ashkenazic tradition, for tonight's seder dinner for 13 at her Olivebridge home. "I'm a little stressed right now about it," Perfit said Thursday. "But it's worth it." The busy mother of a 5-year-old decided to enlist some help in the kitchen this year in the form of gourmet take-out. Perfit has purchased a layered roasted vegetable and matzoh terrine and an organic walnut apple haroset from New World Home Cooking in Saugerties, which made seder sides to go in the kosher style. The take-out menu, which included an Alaskan salmon gelfite fish and pans of potato kugel, advertised, "You make the brisket, we'll make the rest!" Perfit also asked her seder guests, many of whom are close family, to cook some Jewish specialties.
Making the matzo
On the face of it, matzo brei is a humble dish -- so easy to make that a recipe is hardly needed: Matzo, the dry flatbread of Passover, is broken into pieces and meets briefly with water so it's damp, before being mixed with beaten eggs and poured into a hot frying pan sizzling with butter. Brei, which rhymes with fry, is from the Yiddish word briehn, or soak. And yet, no less august a food authority than Ruth Reichl, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, has called matzo brei "one of life's perfect foods." Reichl came to her post at Gourmet after many years as a restaurant critic, including several at the New York Times. The woman knows food.
Gallery: Passover celebrations
Find a Passover seder worldwide
For aficionados, matzo brei is part-pancake and a kind of cousin to French toast.
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