Canned soup is an inexpensive meal that is easy to make. All you have to do is open up the can and heat up the contents. Unfortunately, this can get boring fast. What is an amateur cook to do? If you are in a hurry, you are probably not going to be able to cook a full meal from scratch. The good news is that you can improve any can of soup to make things more interesting, without things getting complicated.
The right additions can turn your canned soup from a bland sort of meal to a fabulous one. For instance, a few extra vegetables can make things a lot more fun. Chop up whatever you have around and saute it quickly in a pan, or just cook it a little in the microwave. Add the partially cooked veggies to your soups and improve the flavor right away.
You can use frozen vegetables, as well. They require even less work than using fresh vegetables or many types of leftovers. Just pour them out of the bag and heat. There is a real difference in taste. Try corn or green beans in chowders or cream soups, for instance.
Meat can make an excellent addition to soups, as well, and it is a great way to use up leftovers. For a tasty chicken soup, save bits from a previous chicken meal, warm them briefly in the microwave, and add to your canned meal for a better taste. Any kind of meat, including seafood, can be used. Just make sure you cook it thoroughly before eating, for safety’s sake.
For those who do not usually have much in the way of meaty leftovers, canned meats can come to the rescue. There are great canned chicken, shrimp, crab, and other meat options out there that can really help you add interest to your soups. It is amazing how easy soup recipes can be.
Grains make great soup addition, as well. If you have a half cup of rice, a spoonful of pilaf, or half a serving of pasta left some night, don’t throw it out. Instead, put it in a bag in the fridge, and then add it to your next soup meal.
Check out your spices and condiments. Some of them can make a boring soup much more interesting. A sprinkle of garlic salt, basil, oregano, or red pepper could add that flavor you have been looking for. A splash of sherry or wine, or a little bit of an interesting vinegar (balsamic is great) are also excellent options. You can get creative with your options, too. A little bit of soy sauce adds an interesting depth of flavor.
Cheese and other dairy products work well, too. Grate a little fresh cheese on top of a soup, or add it to cream soups when heating for a delicious cheesy option. How about a spoonful of sour cream? Add it after heating the soup to make your meal a little richer.
Choose your chicken soup recipe with care. You want to use fresh ingredients and make it from scratch for the most incredible flavor. Canned soups are okay, but they tend to be loaded with sodium. Make it yourself and you can add all kinds of delicious herbs and seasonings.
Filed under Dinner, Fat Burning Foods, Lunch, Negative Calorie Foods, Soup by on Mar 12th, 2010. Comment. 
Pasta holds a special place in our memories of childhood. Even if you didn’t grow up Italian, chances are you remember eating long strands of spaghetti and slurping up the sauce as you went. Pasta is made of simple ingredients: flour, eggs, olive oil and water. Don’t let the simplicity of the ingredients fool you into thinking that commercially made pasta is no different from homemade. Homemade pasta is true comfort food and easy to make. In our house, the making of pasta becomes a collaboration. There is something for everyone to do, no matter how young or how old. And the fruits of our labors end up in a wonderful family dinner that we all enjoy together.
The key to making great pasta is to get the dough to the right consistency and then rolling it to an even thickness before cutting it into various shapes. Some cooks prefer to roll the dough out by hand using a rolling pin and a smooth surface, like a wooden cutting board or a marble slab. I recommend the use of a pasta machine to achieve expert results consistently. With so many different types of machines on the market to choose from, the only decision you’ll have to make is manual versus an electric model. Good manual hand cranked machines should be heavy and have a base that clamps to the table or surface you are working on. Atlas, Imperia and CucinaPro are quality names for manual machines. Weston, Lello and Imperia all make electric pasta machines, and Kitchenaid does double duty by offering an attachment to its standard mixer. Although I have the Kitchenaid pasta attachment, I prefer to use my hand crank Atlas pasta machine, because it always seems like more fun to have one person turn the crank while someone else catches the dough.
If you are going to mix the dough by hand, start by placing the flour in a large bowl and make a well in the center. Crack the eggs into a smaller bowl and beat them lightly to break the yolks. Add the oil and water and mix well before pouring the liquids into the well in the center of the flour. Continue to mix with a fork or a wooden spoon until the dry ingredients are moistened and begin to clump together. Now roll up your sleeves and get ready to get your hands on the dough to finish the mixing.
Lightly dust flour onto your hands, to prevent sticking, and grab one part of the clump. Fold that part onto the center of the dough, press down and out toward the rim of the bowl. Continue to fold and press the dough and rotate the bowl as you do so until the dough no longers sticks to the sides and you have one piece of dough. Turn this out onto a lightly floured surface and knead the dough for 2 to 3 minutes longer, turning and folding the dough into intself. This activates the gluten in the flour which gives the dough its elastic properties.
You are done kneading when the dough is soft throughout, you can’t feel any lumps, the surface has a sheen to it and it feels and looks smooth. If the dough seems too sticky add a little flour, a little at a time, while you are kneading. If the dough seems too dry or hard, sprinkle a little water on the dough and continue to knead it until it becomes soft and pliable. When you have finished kneading the dough, give it a rest by letting it sit on the board covered with a clean, soft kitchen towel for about 30 minutes. This will relax and soften the dough so it will be easier to roll out.
Your pasta machine will come with basic instructions on how to process the dough. The basic steps are to roll pieces of dough through the rollers at thinner and thinner settings until you get nice, elongated, resilient pieces of dough. From there you cut the dough into whatever shapes you want. Dough may be cut and formed by hand, like simple papardelle, which are strips about 1 1/2 inches wide. All the pasta maker machines come with some attachments for cutting the dough. Tagliatelle and tagliolini are common pasta shapes that most of the manual machines produce. Electric pasta machines frequently have attachments that can extrude the dough into shapes like spaghetti and capellini.
After you have cut and shaped your pasta, the pasta needs to dry out a bit before it is cooked. Dry the pasta at room temperature on a lightly floured board or baking sheet. The flour helps keep the pieces of pasta from sticking to each other and helps seal the noodle. If you have made more pasta than you need for the meal you can freeze it on a baking sheet and then put the frozen pasta into freezer bags or containers for future use. If you just had a ravioli making party, you will be able to enjoy homemade raviolis any time. Pasta also dries well, although you will still want to cook it us within a couple of days because your dough does not have preservatives in it. Long pasta shapes can be dried in little nests or you can use a pasta drying rack, which allows you to dry the pasta as long threads.
Once your family has had a hand in making fresh pasta at home and eating the results, you won’t want to go back to commercially processed pasta again. Homemade pasta has a delicate, rich flavor and a smoother texture than store bought pastas. Making pasta at home is a fun family project that everyone can do together and it will become one of the warm and comforting memories you share in the future. So start a family tradition of fun and laughter and good food. Make pasta-making a regular event in your kitchen.
Making fresh homemade pasta has been a Lauder family event for years. Family, friends and neighbors all take a hand in making the dough and sitting at the table to feast on the results. Watch a video on rolling dough through a pasta machine on Geri’s website, browse great cookbooks and pick out a pasta machine for your next family pasta party.
Filed under Negative Calorie Foods by on Feb 4th, 2010. Comment.
Mexican cuisine makes most of us think of assertive spices; mostly chilies and cumin. This combination of spices is one, which is a perfect representative of the country’s culinary history; an ingredient, which came from the old world with the Spanish and one, which has been a central part of Mexican food for thousands of years.
Chilies are the Mexican spices with the longest history, having been used by the Aztecs for many centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Like tomatoes and potatoes, peppers are new world natives and remain one of the most important ingredients in Mexican recipes just as they always have been.
A familiar type of pepper to Americans is the jalapeno; these small to medium sized hot peppers are a common ingredient in salsas, where they lend their characteristic kick to these sauces. They are also commonly pickled on their own or as part of an escabeche (which is somewhat similar to a Mexican take on Italian giardinera). The Serrano pepper, a smaller and usually slightly hotter pepper is also seen fairly often in US markets. It is hard to imagine Mexican cuisine or Mexican food without the presence of these peppers, as well as others, which are often dried, and ground, as are anchos and pasilla peppers. You will also find peppers smoked to provide a milder, smoky heat as with the smoked jalapenos known as chipotle peppers.
Some of the Mexican culinary herbs, which are native to the country, include epazote, culantro, and Mexican oregano, all of which are very important to various Mexican recipes. Used very often in Mexican and Caribbean cooking, culantro is largely unknown in the US and hard to find other than in Mexican groceries. Its flavor, however, is similar enough to cilantro that this herb may be substituted if you cannot find the real thing in your area.
Despite its name, Mexican oregano is not even a relative of the old world herb of the same name. While their flavors are similar enough that Greek oregano can be substituted if needed, this herb is actually related to lemon verbena, not oregano. Its flavor is slightly stronger than that of the oregano used in Greek and Italian cooking and can be found dried in Mexican groceries and specialty spice markets.
Epazote, on the other hand, is an herb for which there is no real substitute. This herb is used to flavor beans in traditional Mexican recipes. While its flavor is something like that of tarragon, it is not recommended to substitute this or any other herb in a Mexican recipe, which calls for epazote. It has a flavor which is all its own.
Cumin is one of the spices, which we think of the most in connection to Mexican food. This spice is also a staple of Turkish and other Mediterranean cuisines; introduced to Mexico by the Spanish (who themselves were introduced to it by Arabs during the Moorish period in Spain), this ingredient was adopted by Mexican cooks with enthusiasm. This newcomer quickly became an important ingredient in a great many Mexican dishes.
You might say that Mexican food is among the world’s first fusion cuisines, with its blending of old world and new world flavors. Using ingredients from both Europe and the Americas, Mexican cooks created something unique, new and distinctively Mexican. It is a cuisine which has a flavor all its own and thanks in part to Mexican spices, it has become popular in nearly every part of the world.
Mexican food has quite a history and many delicious dishes to experiment with. Visit MexicanFoodRecipes.org for resources, tasty recipes like Mexican rice recipe and handy tips for trying your hand at this delicious cuisine.
Filed under Negative Calorie Foods by on Dec 12th, 2009. Comment.
