http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_29507,00.html?rsrc=search

Drinking Lipton gives me a great escape…

the peach flavor actally really helps me reduce stress  and regain focus … I drink them religiously ! What do you drink all the time?

Post a comment and let me know …

Earn Money Reviewing this post

This is our incredible wedding cake…

Del.icio.us and Artful !

thanks Sweet Madaline’s & Mom Armstrong !

Wine has played a kingly role in the history of the world.

People have drunk it in majestic rituals and it has lived in the palace cellars. It has survived through the medieval times and has been used by the priests to cleanse the body and cure devotees their common maladies. Whereas it used to be enjoyed only by kings and noblemen, today wine is ubiquitously consumed by people all over the world. A buffet or a
fine dining experience will not go well without a Chardonnay, for instance. Most people drink wine to loosen themselves up, after a hard day’s work. Others imbibe wine as a form of epicurean art.

A meal will always be more enjoyable if paired with a great tasting wine.

The complication arises, however, as soon as you peer into the wine list and begin to squint in confusion. Of the thousands of wine choices now available, which of them should you set on the dinner table along with your steak? Which should you drink to wash your tongue after a fruity dessert? The common dictum is to drink white wine with fish, chicken
and other white meat, and to complement a rich lamb or veal dish with red wine. This idea is tried and tested and people have agreed that it works. But do you know not all types of red wine are for rich, red meat alone?

Red wine is indeed majesty of liquor.

Not only does it go well with almost all kinds of meal, it also plays an essential role in our health. The latest news is that red wine actually combats Alzheimer’s disease by preventing the build-up of plaque in the brain. Red wine contains resveratrol (a natural compound) which scientists say fights the slow degeneration of the nervous system’s
components as it combines with other anti-oxidants. Pinot Noir, for instance, has been discovered to be chock full of resveratrol. It has been reported, too, that this red wine compound can also help battle other degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease.

Now let’s go to the nitty-gritty.

Basically, there’s a wine for every meal but the bottom line is to rely on your sense of taste. Different people have different palates and even the connoisseurs cannot agree on one rule when it comes to the perfect wine for a dish. However, the distinct characteristic of each wine should dictate which meal it should harmonize with.

For example, Cabernet Sauvignon being a varietal wine (which is a blend of one dominant grape and other less distinct flavors), Petit Sirah and Bordeaux can jibe well with red, heavy meat dish such as lamb, beef (most dish with spicy sauces) and other intenseflavored cheeses. Because of its full body and strong tannic taste, it can balance the feeling of greasiness in the cheese and the meat.

Sweet, sour, fruity, acidic, smooth sharp, crisp ? Oh my.

You can recognize a particular wine’s characteristic through its acidity, its body, the tannic content, its sweetness, its aroma as well as its overall balance. Chardonnay harmonizes with poultry and cheese. There are many variations of this white wine that can run from sweet and fruity to sour. It can even be paired with seafood such as oysters and
can be served as aperitif. Chenin Blanc is also a white sparkling wine and goes well with fish and chicken. Most fish meals usually get paired with white wine but there are exceptions since fish dishes are prepared differently. The general rule is that wines that blend well with fish and other white meat contain high acidic flavor. The sharp, crisp hint of acid enhances the flavor of fish like a drop of tangerine juice would.

Pasta dishes & wine - An easy pair.

Wines that work well with pasta dishes are Merlot and Pinot Noir or Pinot Grigio. Pinot Noir makes a wonderful combination with steaks. It is a Burgundy wine that gets darker as it ages. It also matches well with fowl whereas Merlot is a good chocolate complement.

Advanced pairing, great combinations to enhance flavour.

Desserts are best paired with Rieslings, Port wines, or Madeira. Most oriental food and white meat dishes won’t go wrong when matched with a Riesling. Spicy Mexican foods on the other hand are best eaten with Shiraz. Shiraz (also called Syrah) is a versatile wine; it complements many popular meat dishes such as chicken (tenderloin, rib or prime) as well
as pork, beef and duck. If you like our regular fast food dishes like burgers and pizza or any meal with red spicy sauce Red Zinfandel is the perfect complement. A medium bodied wine such as Red Zinfandel will always taste better with red meat while White Zinfandel which is a newly-developed wine in the market goes in tune with pasta with light sauce, fish and most light dishes.

If you like ham and sausages a wine called Gewurztraminer will serve you well. This is also best for Asian foods and is known for its fruity flavor. Another wine that is in perfect harmony with pasta chicken and fish is the Sauvignon Blanc, more popularly called Fume Blanc. Most grilled dishes like fish and vegetables as well as exotic spicy foods go with Rose.
Turkey served on Thanksgiving should be paired with a white burgundy wine called Chablis. If smoked salmon is served on the dinner table, it’s best to enjoy sparkling wines.

Waiter, I’ll have the … how do you say it?

Apart from knowing which wine to drink along with your meal, it also essential to know a few important vintner’s terms. If you’re buying wine you must recognize whether it’s brut, demi sec, sec or off-dry. These terms refer to the sweetness of the wine. Demi sec wines are a bit sweet and brut wines are not sweet at all. You will have a fair idea of the sweetness of it before actually opening its cork if you look at the label that’s printed under the brand of the wine.

Because wine selection can be baffling, it is essential to understand some rudiments that you can use in your own dinner hosting or restaurant visits. If you have no idea at all as you gaze at the wine menu board which wine is what, ask your local chef or connoisseur. These people have fair enough experience when it comes to wine tasting, preparation and
serving that you can bet they can give you what you are asking for. Once you have received some expertly advice, do the wine tasting yourself. Remember that one person’s taste bud is different from another so you will have a notion of what really appeals to your taste.

The purpose of a good wine is to enhance, not bury.

A wine’s purpose is not to overwhelm or overpower the dish served with it, but to complement, highlight or contrast its strengths and hints of flavor. For most people this requires a really fine and discerning taste bud. Some wines take time to mature and in this process their tastes change and either mellow out or grow more intense. You should be
aware of this aging process of each wine. Some of these wines absorb the flavor of their storage barrels such as oak. Other wines can have complex taste through their color and smell. The rule is to sniff the wine for a good nose (a vintner’s term used to denote the overall smell of a wine, including the aroma and the bouquet) and if you like the nose, it is
highly likely that you will also adore its taste.

‘ Wine Connoisseur ‘ is just a friendlier term for ‘ English Major ‘ !

It is important to experiment with different wines. Connoisseurs may have a fairly good idea of what wine suits their taste, but you can’t ask for a connoisseur’s help each time you will prepare a meal with a wine. Experimenting helps you open up your wine vocabulary and expand your wine knowledge. It will give your taste buds a chance to explore the art of wine expertise. When trying out many different wine brands and learning each wine characteristic, make sure that you take note of each wine’s uniqueness. In other words, a single wine tasting session does not make a wine taste consistent. The next time you taste red Bordeaux, for example, when paired with another dish, it will not be the same Bordeaux wine that you used to know. As you expand your tasting capabilities, you tend to forget a particular wine’s characteristic too. That is why keeping an olfactory note of any wine is a must for anyone wishing to explore its complexity.

Your nose knows good wine, trust it.

Finally, trust your own taste when it comes to selecting wine either for aperitif, for dinner or for dessert. Do not be concerned about the “right” or the perfect wine. The key is to find which will complement and highlight the taste of your meal best. As you taste more wines and learn more, your confidence will grow. Don’t shy away from new wines; instead
give yourself the opportunity to be an expert yourself. Always exchange wine information with your local restaurateur/wine expert/wine merchant. Try new wines and mix them with various meals. You can break rules for as long as you as a host and your guests will enjoy your discovery.

The point is, wine is an enjoyable meal complement and a dinner table’s best friend. It should always stay that way.

1 teaspoon cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon cold cream
1/2 teaspoon water
Food coloring
Mix the cornstarch and the cold cream together. Add the water and stir. Add the food coloring one drop at a time until it is the shade you want. Do this for each color that you want. Paint on the child’s face with a small paintbrush. Store in an airtight container.

Dude I swear - dont nobody know how to cook like this one guy I know !
He and his girlfriend are a cooking duo !

I think he like me just do what we know tastes good and trick things out like any other work of art we do… we are naturally virtuoso’s like that…! anyhow, he made this kewl idea up for Hallows eve… I call it goul surprise ! LOL

.. of course the glass of vampire wine to finish it off !

YUM!

… sorry no recipies here …

Why Are We Eating His Chicken?

By Michael Browning
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 17, 2002; Page F01

Each evening, thousands of Americans drift into Chinese restaurants or, if they are too lazy to go out, pick up the phone and order one of the most popular dishes on the menu: General Tso’s Chicken, a sugary-spicy melange of dark-meat tidbits, deep-fried then fired up with ginger, garlic, sesame oil, scallions and hot chili peppers.

Not one in 10,000 knows who General Tso (most commonly pronounced “sow”) was, nor what terrible times he lived through, nor the dark massacres that distinguished his baleful, belligerent career. Setting their chopsticks aside, patting their stomachs, the satisfied diners spare scarcely a thought for General Tso, except to imagine that he must have been a great connoisseur of hot stir-fried chicken.

Who was he?

General Tso Tsungtang, or as his name is spelled in modern Pinyin, Zuo Zongtang, was born on Nov. 10, 1812, and died on Sept. 5, 1885. He was a frighteningly gifted military leader during the waning of the Qing dynasty, a figure perhaps the Chinese equivalent of the American Civil War commander William Tecumseh Sherman. He served with brilliant distinction during China’s greatest civil war, the 14-year-long Taiping Rebellion, which claimed millions of lives.

Tso was utterly ruthless. He smashed the Taiping rebels in four provinces, put down an unrelated revolt called the Nian Rebellion, then marched west and reconquered Chinese Turkestan from Muslim rebels.

Arthur W. Hummel devotes five double-columned pages to the general in the monumental 1944 “Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644-1912)” published by the Library of Congress.

Tso emerges from several sources as a self-made man, born in Hunan province, a hilly hot-tempered heartland, whose cuisine rivals that of Sichuan for sheer firepower. (While Sichuan food is hot right up front, in the mouth, in your face; Hunanese cuisine tends to build up inside you, like a slow charcoal fire, until you feel as though your belly is filled with burning coals.)

As a young man Tso flunked the official court exams three times, a terrible disgrace. He returned home, married and devoted himself to practical studies, like agriculture and geography. He took up silkworm farming and tea farming and chose a gentle sobriquet, calling himself “The Husbandman of the River Hsiang.” Like Sherman, stuck teaching at a military academy in Louisiana on the eve of the Civil War, he seemed washed up.

He was 38 when the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850. For the rest of his life, Tso would wield the sword, becoming one of the most remarkably successful military commanders in Chinese history.

The Taiping Rebellion — a movement that in part advocated Christian doctrine — nearly toppled the Qing dynasty. It was founded by Hong Xiuquan, a Chinese mystic who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus. The whole astonishing episode has been described admirably by Yale scholar Jonathan Spence in his “God’s Chinese Son.” (Norton, 1996).

Tso made war, and war made Tso. He began his military career as an adjutant and secretary for the governor of Hunan province. He raised a force of 5,000 volunteers and took the field in September 1860, driving the Taiping rebels out of Hunan and Guangxi provinces, into coastal Zhejiang. There he captured the big cities of Shaoxing, still famous for its sherrylike rice wine. From there he pushed south into Fujian and Guangdong provinces, where the revolt had first begun and spread, and had crushed the Taipings by the time the rebellion ended in 1864.

The Taiping Rebellion was the greatest upheaval in 19th century China. It caused massive displacements and shifts in population. Hundreds of thousands of people fled or emigrated, many to America, where they worked building the transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869.

It would be possible to leave the story here and say that General Tso’s Chicken simply honors a great personality, just as Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, is honored in Beef Wellington; Pavel Stroganoff, a 19th-century Russian diplomat, in Beef Stroganoff; Count Charles de Nesselrode (another 19th-century Russian diplomat) in Nesselrode Pudding,; or Australian opera singer Nellie Melba in the dessert, Peach Melba. Indeed some believe it quite likely that the dish was whipped up for the general after some signal victory, just as Chicken Marengo was whipped up for Napoleon after he defeated the Austrians at Marengo on June 14, 1800.

Still, the recipe is not particularly original — the ingredients are used in many stir-fry Chinese dishes — and the dark meat chicken argues for a humbler origin. It’s a poor man’s dish, not a feast for a field marshal.

Is it possible that, struggling to carve out a new life in America under backbreaking adversities, and having heard of the sword skills of the remorseless General Tso (who had the top leaders of the Nian Rebellion executed with the proverbial “death of 10,000 cuts”), the overseas exiles indulged in some gallows-humor about their old enemy? That the chopped-up chicken dish may have gotten its name from the sliced and diced victims of Tso’s grim reprisals?

This might conceivably explain why General Tso’s Chicken is very much an overseas Chinese dish, filtering the hot, peppery taste of Hunan cuisine, through the sweetening process of Cantonese cooking. Most of the immigrants to America came from coastal regions: Shanghai and Canton.

Tso Much For That

The details of Tso’s life are easy to document. But how the chicken got named for him is another matter. In “Chinese Kitchen” (Morrow, 1999), author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo says that dish is a Hunan classic called “chung ton gai,” or “ancestor meeting place chicken.”

But to others, General Tso’s chicken recipe may be no more ancient than 1972, and may have more in common with Manhattan than with mainland China. On “The Definitive General Tso’s Chicken Page” (www.echonyc.com/~erich/tso.htm) New Yorker Eric Hochman theorizes “It was invented in the mid-1970s, in NYC, by one Chef Peng.

“Around 1974, Hunan and Szechuan food were introduced to the city, and General Tso’s Chicken was an exemplar of the new style. Peng’s, on East 44th Street, was the first restaurant in NYC to serve it, and since the dish (and cuisine) were new, Chef Peng was able to make it a House Specialty, in spite of its commonplace ingredients.”

My own research led me to the same city, but a different Manhattan restaurateur, who claims the dish is the brilliant invention of his former partner, a gifted Chinese immigrant chef named T.T. Wang.

“He went into business with me in 1972,” said Michael Tong, owner of New York’s Shun Lee Palaces, East (155 E. 55th St.) and West (43 W. 65th St.). “We opened the first Hunanese restaurant in the whole country, and the four dishes we offered you will see on the menu of practically every Hunanese restaurant in America today. They all copied from us.

“First, Lake Tung Ting shrimp. Lake Tung Ting in northern Hunan province is very famous for its shrimp.

“Second, crispy sea bass. We roll them in cornstarch and we fry them crispy. Then we shower them with the sauce. A lot of restaurants will use catfish, but they don’t know how to cook them in the sauce, so they put the sauce on the side. Sometimes they just give you plain soy sauce. We know how to cook them in the sauce.

“Third, orange crispy beef. This is very, very popular with us. Any Hunan or Sichuan restaurant, if you call them and ask for orange crispy beef, they will know what you are talking about. We invented it.

“Fourth, General Tso’s chicken, sometimes called General Tsung’s chicken or General Tsao’s chicken.”

If Tong’s tale is true, General Tso never ate the dish named after him. The great warrior, the prop of the Qing dynasty, the subduer of rebels and uprisings who carved his name into Chinese history at the point of a sword, had to wait more than 100 years for an inventive expatriate chef to award him his American triumph and make his name famous in the West.

General Tso, most likely, was a man ahead of his dish.

Michael Browning is a feature writer for the Palm Beach Post. He spent nine years in China as a correspondent, based in Beijing, for Knight-Ridder newspapers.