Budget-Gourmet.com is your Ultimate Gourmet Consumer Guide! We are your one stop gourmet directory for coupons, discounts, deals and freebies for high quality gourmet foods and food gifts and offer you savings of up to 60%. We also offer nutritional information, specifications and advice about chocolate, gourmet coffee,tea, cheese, seafood and a variety of specialty foods.
Vegansim is rapidly gaining acceptance in the food world as being not only a healthy choice, but an environmentally conscious one. However, if you’re used to using meats and cheeses as meal staples, attempting to create a meal revolving around plant based foods can take some getting used to. But don’t give up! Many vegan meals are actually easier to prepare than meals that involve meats. For one, cooking time can be cut way back since plant-based foods generally cook through much quicker than animal products. And you don’t have to worry about the dangers of consuming something that’s undercooked like you do with meat. In addition, your pocketbook will thank you for not having to spend so much money on expensive meats. At happyvegetable.com, a tasty vegan blog, you can learn a great deal about the vegan lifestyle including recipes (under the “yummies” category), nutritition information, and much more. I even discuss the raw lifestyle, provide some recipes, and take you on my journey of 40+ days when I ate only raw foods.
Does the title make you hungry? If not, some of the pictures will. Nibbles of Tidbits is a Food Blog published by Shelly Borrell, a Freelance Copywriter based in Costa Mesa, California. It specifically emphasizes the good, the bad and the funny regarding food, by featuring many terrific meals and recipes, as well as those dishes gone wrong. There?s no shame here. The writer hopes you?ll learn from her mistakes and others, and hopefully not your own. Nibbles of Tidbits includes restaurant reviews, cooking tips and experiments, taste tests, and stories about all things food-related. Shelly Borrell has been cooking and writing for more than twenty years and has extensive knowledge regarding food. She?s also been lucky enough to win a couple recipe contests. As a matter of fact, she won the Grand Prize in the Soup category in a contest sponsored by Milk. Her picture and recipe ended up in a Gourmet and Bon Appetite Magazine issue. Nibbles of Tidbits is updated daily, so check back for the many informative posts to come.
Must Love Food is a social network for foodies. The site is up and live in a very basic version and is now accepting foodies who wish to join. In the coming months, the site will take on a lot of changes but since it is free to join why wait? And what are the upcoming changes you may ask? Well, talking to Mark, the former chef extraordinaire, a recipe section will be added that is streamlined to make it easy to add your recipes with photos, the existing blogs, events and groups section will receive a face lift and improved functionality and there will be a complete redesign. That sounds like a lot of work to me but Mark has assured me he want to make Must Love Food the best site for foodies on the web.
As a general rule of thumb, good chocolate should have a high percentage of cocoa about 55-75% is a good number. Of this, some 30% should be cocoa butter. Most of the remaining 25% or so of the bar consists of sugar. The best is made with natural sugars. When looking for good chocolate, a good rule of thumb is to first start with dark chocolate. Swiss Chocolate is one of the best tasting chocolates.
Some fell that that good chocolates should be “shiny.” This is an indication of the cocoa butter content (which is higher if it is shiny). Watch out however, that the chocolates do not contain paraffin which WILL make them nice and shiny. Some chocolatiers put it in to make the chocolates keep their shape & look better when you get them. The paraffin takes away from the taste & makes them slightly “waxy” even though it does not harm you to eat it. If the chocolate is “whitish” or has a “grayish cast” don’t bother with it…the chocolate has seen its better days. This is called “bloom.” The most destructive type of bloom, sugar bloom (when the sugar crystals rise to the surface of the candy), can develop if moisture contacts the chocolate (which happens easily in the refrigerator if you’re not careful). You will NOT find this in the all natural animal product free VEGAN CHOCOLATE.
You may also go by how the gourmet chocolates taste and smell. Ultimately taste and smell is rather personal; if you (or the person you’re buying for) likes the flavor and aroma, you’ll do fine
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