Family Recipe Central Blog
Cashew Extract May Help Prevent Type 2 DiabetesSubmitted by editor on July 22, 2010 - 11:37am The following article was submitted by Linda Miller who writes for Diabetic Cookbook ... School of Montreal researchers recommend us one good way cashew extract may treat type 2 diabetes.New research published in the journal Molecular Nutrition and Food Research advises cashew seed extract may play an important role in preventing and treating diabetic issues.
Scientists at the College of Montreal and the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon analyzed how cashew products affected the responses of rat liver cells to insulin. In Canada, over three million Canadians have diabetes and this number is expected to reach 3.7 million by 2020, according to the Canadian Diabetes Association. In U.S.A, according to the American Diabetes Association, from the 2007 National Diabetes Fact Sheet, there are total 23.6 million children and adults in the United States - 7.8% of the population - have diabetes. 1.6 million new cases of diabetes are diagnosed in people aged 20 years and older each year. Scientists looked at cashew tree leaves, bark, seeds and apples. They found that only the cashew seed extract increased the absorption of blood sugar by the cells.
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How Will You Celebrate National Oatmeal Cookie Day?Submitted by editor on April 29, 2010 - 11:40am Are you surprised? Didn't know today (April 30th) is National Oatmeal Cookie Day? That's OK, you're probably not alone. Unless you're really tuned into oatmeal cookies.
For example, our US Congress, by Senate Joint Resolution 193, designated March 6th (in 1984) as "Frozen Food Day", and requested the President, then Ronald Reagan, to issue a proclamation for this occasion. In Proclamation #5157, President Ronald Reagan declared: "Now, therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim March 6, 1984, as Frozen Food Day, and I call upon the American people to observe such day with appropriate ceremonies and activies". And so it goes ... Now, you probably won't track down an official proclamation for "National Oatmeal Cookie Day" by a US president. However, this food holiday has been celebrated for many years, and there is plenty of documentation to support that National Oatmeal Cookie Day does really exisit. |
Is it Parmesan or Parmigiano?Submitted by recipebob on March 27, 2010 - 5:50pm I must admit, we take the cooking and food vocabulary that we use and hear every day for granted. At least, that's the case for me. And so it is for Parmesan as in Parmesan Cheese. I was playing around with a recipe the other day that called for Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. And I had to pause with a brief pondering question "what's the difference between Parmesan and Parmigiano or Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese"? It occured to me that I've been buying and using these cheeses for years and I've never stopped to understand the difference. In fact, I've probably been mistaken in my assumption that these are just different names for the same cheese. Well, to some extent, that may be true, but it's a bit more complicated than that as I've come to learn. OK, some of you (maybe many of you) are probably saying at this point, this one's pretty obvious. Of course, Parmesan is simply the French version of Parmigiano which is Italian. So are these just the French and Italian language equivalents for the same cheese? Not so fast.
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Recipe Ingredients Feature ImprovementSubmitted by editor on March 13, 2010 - 10:08am
More continous improvements at Family Recipe Central While some of the adjustments, fixes and enhancements that we make at Family Recipe Central might seem small and insignificant, sometimes these minor improvements make a big difference for our users. One of the frequent questions submitted to our support team is "how to have duplicate ingredient items" in the ingredients section of a recipe. Seems reasonable enough, but this has been a limitation in our system up until now. For example, let's say you have a recipe that has two sections, a fish preparation, and a sauce that is served over the fish. You might want your ingredients list to look something like this ...
Ingredients Fish
Sauce
Previously, the problem that you would bump into has been our limitation on duplicate ingredients. In this case, the sea salt in the Sauce section is flagged as an error because it's a duplicate ingredient entry of the sea salt in the Fish section.
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New Family Cookbook How-to Get Started GuideSubmitted by editor on March 4, 2010 - 9:11am We've just added several new get-started guides all about how to create your family cookbook. If you're wondering how to use the cookbook and recipe publishing system at Family Recipe Central to create your family cookbook, be sure to see these helpful tutorials ...
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Improvements to Recipe Editing and Recipe IngredientsSubmitted by editor on February 28, 2010 - 10:06am We've made a few adjustments to the Recipe editing module at Family Recipe Central that our users will want to know about.
Recipe Ingredients - Reordering the Ingredients List
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Thin Crust Pizza Dough - Video Step by Step InstructionSubmitted by editor on February 7, 2010 - 10:51am Pizza is definitely a popular convenience food. And while it may seem easier to have that pizza delivered from your local pizza shop, you may not realize that homemade pizza dough is really not that difficult to prepare. If you're a pizza fan, nothing quite compares to a fresh, homemade pizza! |
Cooking Up a Glossary of Cooking Terms at Family Recipe CentralSubmitted by editor on January 31, 2010 - 12:03pm See our newly added "Glossary of Cooking Terms" under the "Help" section at Family Recipe Central. It's a modest collection of cooking terms at the moment, with about 60 entries or so. We'll continue to add cooking terms and definitions on an ongoing basis, but it's a nice start to kick off the section. |
Recipe Index Cards are Popular and EasySubmitted by editor on January 10, 2010 - 9:57am Once you start entering and keeping your recipes online at Family Recipe Central, you'll find that printing your recipes on recipe index cards is simple and convenient. I must confess, as much as I really appreciate working with recipes online, I still prefer to read recipes from a printed copy while cooking in the kitchen. For the environmentally conscious, if you're committed to saving the trees, then by all means, you can bring your notebook computer into the kitchen and refer to your recipes online as you cook. But there's something familiar and comfortable about keeping recipes in journals, index cards, or just piles of scrap paper (although, that gets pretty disorganized). Of course, with a little bit of improved technology, we're all about solving the hard-copy recipe chaos! At Family Recipe Central, we suggest a "best of both worlds" solution. You can manage your recipes online with all the convenience and facility to share, collaborate and organize your recipes. And keeping your recipes online provides easy access to your recipe collection no matter where you happen to be. For the kitchen, when it's time to cook, with the push of a button, print any recipe in a clear, beautifully formatted 4x6 inch or 5x8 inch index card, as well as a full 8½ by 11 inch page if you prefer. Printing your recipes on standard index cards is pretty economical too. No expensive special photo paper necessary for your ink-jet or laser printer needed, just ordinary standard index cards that you can find at any office supply including Staples or Office Depot. At last check, a 500 pack of 5x8 inch plain (not ruled) index cards was about $10. That's about 2 cents a card. We like to use 5x8 inch index cards. They're large enough to contain a more detailed recipe on a single card, yet still convenient to store in a recipe file box or small 5x8 inch 3 ring binder (more about that in a moment). Most ink-jet and laser printers today can easily print 5x8 index cards. Similar in size to photo paper, index cards typically load into an adjustable printer tray. And some printer models allow a 5x8 index card to be fed individually, similar to an envelope single feed. At 2 cents per card, you can afford to print a fresh copy if you spill some sauce on your recipe index card while you're cooking in the kitchen. But we like to protect the index cards with the thin plastic film protectors you see in the pictures below. A 25 pack of 5½ x 8 inch top loading plastic sheet protectors runs about $5. You can protect 2 recipe index cards per sleeve (front and back), so it's quite affordable. If you spill something on the sleeve, it easily wipes off clean with a paper towel. (1 vote)
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Chile Pepper Heat Rating - The Scoville ScaleSubmitted by editor on December 25, 2009 - 10:13am Chile peppers add a special flavorful dimension to cooking. Not only just the heat and spice, but a variety of flavor sensation too! When you visit the grocery market today, you'll find more variety of chile peppers than ever. Some peppers are more on the mild side and other chili peppers pack enough wallop of heat, they can take your breath away. There's actually an somewhat standard and commonly used method to rate the heat level of chili peppers. Although you may not see these ratings on display at the supermarket, "Scoville Units" are a useful way to classify the various levels of heat from one variety of chile pepper to another. The Scoville method was developed almost 100 years ago by Wilbur Scoville, a pharmacist, in 1912. Originally, the method employed human tasters to determine by how much an extract of a pepper's pungency would have to be diluted by sweetened water to neutralize the sensation of heat from the chile peppers on the tongue. Today, a more modern process is used called "High Performance Liquid Chromotography" (or HPLC) which measures the amount of capsaicinoids (capsaicin) in parts per million. Capsaicin is the compound found in chiles that is responsible for the heat.
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It turns out, almost every day of the year is a 