Recipe: Carrot Raisin Salad

Generally speaking, recipes are merely broad guidelines for the creation of a dish. Very few recipes are anything like the precision necessary in rocket science… although some websites would have their gullible readers to think so.

Fortunately, the best part of cooking and being a cook, is that you get to eat your own mistakes. And THAT is often the best teacher.

So, with the obvious being “said,” here’s a carrot raisin salad, which at its most basic, contains carrots, raisins, and mayonnaise. The dish depicted here contains the following jazzed up ingredients: A stick of celery, key lime juice + apple cider vinegar (ACV), sugar, a tad salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, raisins (of course), dried cranberries (aka “craisins”), and walnuts.😋

Naturally, shredded carrots are the primary ingredient. So if you’re planning on making this dish, you’ll need more carrots than anything else. How many? How about you being the judge of that? It’s YOUR dish, and you’ll make it YOUR way — which is another beautiful part about cooking: It’s highly customizable.

How much mayonnaise? Again, it’s “Player’s Choice” — as much, or as little, as your heart desires.

Don’t like mayonnaise? No problem. Use salad dressing, or some other condiment (though I dare say, mustard probably would not be a good substitution). But hey! To each, their own. One never knows.

Don’t like celery? Not a problem. Omit it.

Sodium restricted diet? (Celery is also sodium laden.) Omit the tiny pinch of salt. But I will say this, about that: Salt, common table salt, even just a slight amount, enhances sweetness.

Of course, there are other salt alternatives, such as

Ever had ORIGINAL, AUTHENTIC, GENUINE Homemade Aioli?

Perhaps you’d be surprised at the MANY “knock-off,” el-cheapo, wanna-be, so-called “recipes” for AIOLI.

For some, it’s a Johnny-come-lately to the faux phood scene, a veritable “flash-in-the pan” — here today, gone tomorrow — and something, some trick of “the new and kewl” to attract, and FOOL, or DECEIVE, folks into believing that a great amount of effort, or love, went into making a food item.

Pretty pictures adorn all kinds of websites, magazines, and newspapers — online, and in print — that depict food as an artistic creation… and to be certain, there’s little doubt that some of it is. Certain cakes come to mind, for example.

The finished product… GENUINE, AUTHENTIC aioli.

But most food is not “art,” though it can, and should be, presented attractively. And the reason for that, the reason why food should be presented attractively, is that we FIRST ‘eat’ with our eyes. That is to say, that, what we see whets our appetite. However, for food made in a restaurant, the olfactory sensation is largely missing, because almost no one goes into any restaurant and smells the food cooking. It’s not like your grandma’s, or mama’s kitchen, wherein the savory aromas of food waft throughout the house, eagerly increasing your expectations as mealtime approaches.

But, back to the aioli.

At its essence, aioli is almost pure garlic in a spreadable form. I write ‘almost’ because it has olive oil in it, and cannot be made without it. And, there’s some salt, as well. But the amount, volume, quantity, etc., of salt is up to the maker. And though salt may not be 100% absolutely required, or a mandatory item like garlic or olive oil, it is HIGHLY recommended to be a constituent part of aioli. In other words, just put some in. Don’t neglect it.

Now, invariably, someone, some wisenheimer, will ask something like

An Easy-Peasy, Quick-n-Easy Meal in Under 30 minutes!

Jasmine rice w celery, onions, carrots, bell peppers, cooked in leftover beef broth, with… yup — it’s SHRIMP!

Altogether, including prep time, a meal in under 30 minutes.

Like I’ve said previously… Rachel Ray ain’t got NOTHIN’ on me!

A tasty, nutritious, easy-peasy, quick-n-easy meal in <30 minutes!

Okay… so, What DO you do to make this?

1.) Get your ingredients, i.e., go grocery shopping.

2.) Select the groceries.

3.) Purchase the groceries.

4.) Go home.

5.) Unload the groceries.

6.) Fix the meal.

7.) Eat the meal.

8.) Wash the dishes.

9.) Dry the dishes.

10.) Put away the dishes.

Seriously…

Volumes/quantity are up to you. If you wanna’ fix enough to feed a small army, go for it.

If it’s just you, that’s cool, too.

Perhaps some may ask something like, “How much shrimp should I use?”

The EASY answer is… how much do you want?

The rice? What about it? How much should I use? What kind?

For Pete’s sake, PLEASE DON’T buy rice in a cooking pouch. Seriously. Just don’t. It’s just not that difficult to cook rice. I mean, if illiterate folks in jungles and their kids can cook it perfectly, you can too.

Just remember: Rice requires

Deep Dish Pizza: A How-To Guide

Who doesn‘t like pizza?

Why, it’s practically unAmerican to not like pizza! Have you ever made your own pizza at home? Ever wanted to make a Deep Dish Pizza at home? Good news – you can! And I’ll share images and a recipe which will help get you started.

This may come as a complete surprise to some, but pizza is BIG BUSINESS in the United States.

Top 50 Pizza Chains’ Annual Sales by State (Click to enlarge)

And as Marketplace Host and Senior Editor Kai Ryssdal says, “but first, let’s do the numbers…”

According to CHD Expert, a foodservice industry marketing trends & data organization, at the end of September 2016, there were 76,723 pizza restaurants in operation in the United States.

In their 2016 Pizza Consumer Trend Report, foodservice industry researcher Technomic found that 41% of consumers polled say they eat pizza once a week, a 55% increase from the 26% reported only 2 years ago.

And a 2016 Morgan Stanley report found that pizza delivery is a $30 billion industry, but could be be worth over $210 billion — which is the total amount Americans currently spent on off-premise dining. And of that $30 billion figure, over 1/3 – $11 billion – are delivery orders which are placed online, and nearly 2/3 of those online orders are… pizza.

So with impressive data like that, it should come as no surprise that a Harris Poll found that Americans’ No. 1 favorite comfort food is pizza, which also had twice as many votes as any other dish… including chocolate.

Now, for a recipe, and the how-to.

There are many seemingly innumerable styles of pizza, which vary with stuffed crusts, in shape, size, ingredients, and any other number of variations in pizza, and fortunately, this one will be simple enough to make at home.

We’re going to make the entire thing, including the crust.

What you’ll need is

Cooking Tips & Tricks: Just in time for Independence Day, July 4th cookouts and get togethers!

What’s your favorite outdoor cooked food? Barbecue? Grilling? Chicken? Beef? Pork? Fish?

What’s the deal with marinades?

Bunk, or not?

And what’s a “smoke ring” on barbecue?

And what about the red stuff that runs out of beef when it’s cut after cooking – is it blood?

For answers to all those questions, and ~more!~ tune in to

Butter really IS better!

How Food Marketers Made Butter the Enemy

By Tom Philpott

Wednesday, April 9, 2014 3:00 AM PDT

Louise Cukrov/Shutterstock

James McWilliams—a historian who has made a name for himself in prestigious publications like the New York Times and The Atlantic for his contrarian defenses of the food industry—is back at it. In an item published last week in the excellent Pacific Standard, McWilliams uses the controversy over a recent study of saturated fat as a club with which to pummel food industry critics like the Times‘ Mark Bittman.

Here’s what happened: A group including Harvard and Cambridge researchers analyzed 72 studies and concluded that there’s no clear evidence that ditching saturated fat (the kind found mainly in butter, eggs, and meat) for the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated kind (found in fish and a variety of vegetable oils) delivers health benefits.

Bittman responded to the study’s release with