THE NIBBLE Gourmet News & Views
Trends, Products & Items Of Note In The World Of Specialty Foods
Read all of our content on TheNibble.com, the online magazine about specialty food.
Archive for Holidays & Occasions
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June 24, 2008 at 4:48 pm
· Filed under Cocktails & Spirits, July 4th
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Tart cherry juice is a flavor-rich ingredient for cocktails. Photo by Liv Friis-Larsen | IST. |
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One of the healthiest juices you can drink is tart cherry juice. Sometimes called a superfruit,* tart cherries (also called sour cherries and Morello cherries) have among the highest levels of disease-fighting antioxidants, as compared to other fruits. They also contain other important nutrients such as beta carotene (19 times more than blueberries or strawberries), fiber, folate, iron, magnesium, potassium and vitamins C and E. A growing body of scientific research links cherries to health benefits, from helping to ease the pain of arthritis and gout, to reducing risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers. Cherries also have been found to help regulate the body’s circadian rhythm, prevent memory loss and delay the aging process. You can read more about the fruit at the website of the Cherry Marketing Institute, ChooseCherries.com.
*A superfruit is one that has a high antioxidant level as well as nutritional density. Others include açaí, blueberry, cranberry, grape, guarana, mangosteen, noni and pomegranate.
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| Most of us are acquainted with the fun side of cherries: cherry pie, ice cream, yogurt and other delights. Now consider the cherry cocktail. These bright red cocktails are also perfect for red-themed holidays like Independence Day, Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Find recipes for a Cherry Red Eye Mojito and Red Alert Cherry-Coconut Fusion on TheNibble.com. |
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April 11, 2008 at 1:33 pm
· Filed under Chocolate, Top Pick Of The Week, Entertaining, Mother's Day
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Looking like the Marilyn Monroe pinup of white chocolate, Pierre Marcolini’s white chocolate bar truly is eye candy. |
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If you don’t already love white chocolate, our review of the best white chocolate bars in the world will make a believer out of you. You’ll also learn why you may not have enjoyed the white chocolate you’ve had in the past, and how to select the best bars. With Mother’s Day fast approaching, if you’re stuck for a gift or an activity, order one of each bar and have a white chocolate tasting party (read our instructions). Read the full review, and check out the Chocolate Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine for many more of the world’s best chocolates. |
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March 13, 2008 at 11:20 am
· Filed under Cookies/Cake/Pastry, Recipes, Tip Of The Day, St. Patrick's Day
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Make a white chocolate frosting with Irish cream liqueur. Photo courtesy of Equinox Maple Flakes. |
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Celebrate the 17th with Irish Cream Icing. You can bake or buy brownies or a loaf cake and add this tasty homemade topping. Take 1/3 cup Irish cream liqueur (such as Bailey’s) and 8 ounces of top-quality white chocolate. Buy a good chocolate bar instead of baking chips, which can be vegetable oil instead of real chocolate. You can buy Green & Black’s, one of our favorites (it’s organic, too), readily available at Whole Foods Markets and elsewhere. In a small pan, bring the liqueur to a slow boil; then remove from the heat and whisk in the chopped white chocolate until it’s completely melted and the icing is smooth. Refrigerate until it becomes thick enough to spread, stirring occasionally. Spread the icing over the brownies or cake. Keep refrigerated until 30 minutes before serving.
- Make Irish Coffee to go with your dessert.
- Find more cake recipes in the Gourmet Cakes Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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March 11, 2008 at 8:41 am
· Filed under Recipes, Pasta, St. Patrick's Day
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| You don’t have to hunt for green bagels for St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. Start your day with a nutritious green breakfast by adding pesto sauce to the eggs beaten for scrambled eggs, omelets, a frittata or quiche. Mix in one teaspoon per egg. Decorate the plate with fresh basil or spinach leaves, and you’ll start the day in a holiday mood. You’d think pesto would be a pretty simple proposition: basil (or other green, like spinach or arugula), oil (usually olive, sometimes walnut or other oil), Parmesan and nuts (usually pine, nuts, but walnut pestos and other recipes are pretty fine). Yet, we tasted more than 100 pesto sauces from around the world and found only six brands to recommend to you, two of which were from recent Top Pick Of The Week sauce maker, Sauces ‘n Love. Read about our favorite pestos, the history of pesto and a recipe for making great pesto at home. When you realize how easy it is, you’ll become a pesto-making maverick. |
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Use pesto sauce to make green eggs on St. Patrick’s Day. Ham is optional with your green eggs, but you can enter our Gourmet Giveaway to win a great one this week. Photo by Val Lyashov | SXC. |
| Read about more of our favorite sauces in the Pasta & Sauces Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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March 10, 2008 at 7:20 am
· Filed under Meat & Poultry, Contest, Easter
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| Take our Ham Trivia Quiz #2 in THE NIBBLE’s Gourmet Giveaway this week, and you may win a prize of an Easter ham. This is not just any ham, but our favorite ham from the ham artisans at Ham I Am, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week (read the review). It’s 12 to 14 pounds and feeds up to 24 people (or provides ham sandwiches for the family for a week after Easter.) Just answer four fun trivia questions about ham—you don’t even have to answer them correctly. Everyone who enters has an equal chance of winning. Take the quiz, from March 10th through March 16th for the prize, or anytime for fun. You’ll learn the 411 about what makes a great ham, in the process. Learn more and enter. Read more about our favorite hams in the Pork, Ham & Bacon Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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Win this 12- to 14-pound ham for Easter dinner. |
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March 7, 2008 at 6:06 pm
· Filed under Cookies/Cake/Pastry, Recipes, Tip Of The Day, St. Patrick's Day
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Bite me, I’m Irish. |
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You’ve got plenty of time to find a shamrock cookie cutter before the St. Patrick’s Day festivities begin. Then, bake up a batch of delicious butter cookies. (If you don’t have a shamrock cookie cutter, you can always make regular shapes with green décor.) Use your own favorite recipe, or try this recipe from Land O’ Lakes. Unless you need to use margarine for dietary reasons, always use butter—fresh butter, not a bar that’s been sitting in the refrigerator for a month, picking up flavors from other foods. You can also use the shamrock cookie cutter to make shamrock toasts for hors d’oeuvres, shamrock pancakes and even vegetable cut-outs. |
If you don’t want to bake, treat yourself to these hand-decorated cookies from Eleni’s, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week (read our review).
- See more of our favorite cookies in the Cookies & Brownies Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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March 7, 2008 at 3:17 pm
· Filed under Purim
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| The story of the Jewish holiday of Purim, as told in the Bible’s Book of Esther, tells of the deliverance of the Jewish people from an annihilation plot of the Persian king Haman. Like most Jewish holidays, this one has its traditional food, hamentashen (also spelled hamantashen), which means “Haman’s pockets” in Yiddish. Hamentashen is a triangular-shaped pastry with a cookie-like dough, not particularly sweet, originally filled with a sweetened poppy seed or prune paste. Today hamentashen is made with a variety of fillings to please modern palates. You can order a gift bucket of Exceptional Hamentashen from Claire Saueroff, award-winning baker of the Exceptional Brownie (read our review), in an assortment that includes Awesome Apricot, Puckered Prune, Rockin’ Raspberry and Poppy’s Poppy (Claire recognizes that some diets preclude poppy—it’s our favorite). There are also chocolate-dipped varieties. You’ll get approximately two dozen hamentashen to enjoy with a nice cup of tea (black tea, please—find some of our favorites in the Tea Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine). |
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You can’t steal Ben Stein’s money, but you can take a bite out of Haman’s pockets (that’s what hamentashen means).
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The hamentashen are kosher, of course (OU Parve). But if you’re not kosher, not Jewish, and/or have never had a good piece of hamentashen (there are plenty of questionable pieces out there), here’s a good place to start. This year, Purim is celebrated on Friday, March 21; but you don’t have to wait until then to start nibbling on the hamentashen.
- Purchase Exceptional Hamentaschen at TheExceptionalBrownie.com.
- A half gallon in a reusable white bucket, shown, is $45.00. Gift boxes are available from $25.00.
- Read what what happened to King Haman and see him immortalized on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo.
- Find more delicious kosher products in the Kosher Nibbles section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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March 6, 2008 at 8:36 am
· Filed under Cocktails & Spirits, Recipes, St. Patrick's Day
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Skip the green beer, have a green Grey Goose cocktail, the “Dublin Delight.” |
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Don’t color the beer green at your St. Patrick’s Day party. Let the beer drinkers enjoy fine craft beer in the golden color it should be. Those who want a vodka cocktail can go green with a Dublin Delight from Grey Goose Vodka. It was specially created to abet drinkin ‘o the green by master mixologist, Nick Mautone, author of Raising the Bar (“Better Drinks, Better Entertaining”). Starting with Grey Goose Vodka’s popular Le Citron lemon-flavored vodka, the ingredients include kiwi, simple syrup, a sprig of mint, a small piece of vanilla pod and a splash of club soda.
It’s not as simple as pouring tonic water into the gin, but once you make up a pitcher, it’s smooth sailing—and you have something memorable for your guests.
- Read the full Dublin Delight recipe.
- Find more seasonal cocktails in the Cocktails Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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March 3, 2008 at 1:08 pm
· Filed under Chocolate, Gifts, St. Patrick's Day
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| You don’t need the luck of the Irish to enjoy Leprechaun Bombs from Cosmic Chocolate. You just have to read THE NIBBLE (or else, live in Oakland, California and wander into this boutique chocolate shop). Part of the shop’s “Cosmic Bomb” series, these bonbons are the bomb: beautifully hand-painted chocolate shells, dappled with edible glitter. The Leprechaun Bombs are filled with a ganache that is infused with Bailey’s mint liqueur, Irish whiskey and Green Chartreuse, an ancient herb liqueur of more than 130 medicinal and aromatic herbs, flowers and other plants (who can even name that many?). Taken from an old alchemical recipe for an “elixir of life,” it was first made in the 1600s by monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the Chartreuse Mountains of eastern France, intended as a medicine. |
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You don’t have to be Irish to deserve a set or two of Leprechaun Bombs from the Cosmic Chocolate Shop. |
The recipe was enhanced and became popular as a beverage. It’s green in color, hence appropriate to the Leprechaun Bombs. A second Chartreuse liqueur, colored with saffron and milder and sweeter than the original, is called Yellow Chartreuse. The yellow color with the greenish tinge known as chartreuse takes its name from the Yellow Chartreuse liqueur. But back to the chocolate. You can purchase four bonbons for $8.00 in a transparent box, allowing the cosmic glow of the Emerald Isle to shine through (well, not really—but the candy looks great) at CosmicChocolateShop.com—and you can see the other Cosmic Bombs as well. We haven’t tasted the Leprechaun Bombs, but we’ve enjoyed every other Cosmic Bomb that has crossed our lips, so our money is on the Leprechauns. When you order, please tell the Cosmic Chocolate folks that it’s St. Paddy, not St. Patty (you’ll note that error in their website description). No one likes his name spelled wrong, not even the patron saint of Ireland. When your name gets spelled like a girl’s name, even a saint has his limits.
- See our other favorite St. Patrick’s Day chocolate, candy, cookies and more. |
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March 3, 2008 at 8:12 am
· Filed under Meat & Poultry, Tip Of The Day, Easter
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| The Chinese may have been the first to cure hams—or it might have been the ancient Egyptians. Whoever deserves the credit, thousands of years after the fact, we tasted dozens of hams to select a few that deserve the honor of gracing your table. See our favorites in the our review of the best hams in America. The comedian Steven Wright commented, “When you buy a cured ham, do you even wonder what it had?” We found an enormous difference between supermarket hams and artisan hams, which deliver rich meat flavor with much less salt. That said, quite a few of the hams in our tasting that arrived from artisan producers still needed to be “cured” of excessive saltiness, which purchasers tend to counteract by coating and baking them with sweet toppings! Why? We don’t need that excess salt or the sugar. |
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Kurobuta ham, Japanese black hog, which originated in Berkshire, England, was purportedly discovered by Oliver Cromwell’s troops, and is now one of the best hams available in America, if not the best. It’s produced in Iowa. What a voyage! |
| Many mass-produced hams are cured simply by injecting them with brine. An artisan ham is immersed in brine or dry-rubbed with spices, then lightly smoked and aged. The quality of the pig is far superior, as well. Baked ham is a traditional Easter dish. This Easter, kick up your tradition by serving the most delicious artisan ham you can find. Read more about our favorite pork products—and find some gourmet ham glaze recipes—in the Pork, Ham & Bacon Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine. You can also take our Ham Trivia Quiz. |
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