If You Can Read, You Can Cook

My pizza quesadilla post has been included in the very second Yakezie Lifestyle Carnival. Read the other posts included in this carnival here.

This is a guest post from Kris over at Simple Island Living, where she writes about all things money and food from an island in the middle of the sea. Please visit her and view my guest post on the same topic.

I’ve been lucky enough to have had some pretty delightful meals in my lifetime; a plus when dating a man who works in fine dining restaurants for a living. There was an after-hours meal with friends at Bolo before it closed down, some fantastic beef tartar at Blue Ribbon in NYC, a luxurious 5-course prix-fix meal at Lumiere in Vancouver B.C., and some phenomenal cheese and salami from a tiny butcher shop in Venice that we washed down with jugs of cheap Venetian wine (did you know you can take a 2-liter and they’ll fill it up for you? Epic.).

So when Andi at Meal Plan Rescue organized a blog swap for the Yakezie Challenge, I had no idea what meal I would write about. My engagement meal? A perfect meal in Paris? A champagne brunch with friends? Sadly, most memories I have are great ones but not ones that I can remember exactly what I ate.

The only meal I can remember exactly what I had – what I drank, what I ate, how many bites I had – was a pre-shift tasting at the first restaurant I ever worked for – 727 Pine in the Grand Hyatt in Seattle. It’s closed now, and I don’t know how many people remember it. I don’t know if anyone remembers the celebrity chef they hired to run it, Danielle Custer. I do know that it was my first run-in with restaurant family, it was the first time I saw the Rock and Billy Bob Thornton in person. Snoop Dogg stayed there, the entire original cast of Hairspray ate breakfast there every morning (it was originally produced in Seattle) and by the end of it were friends with all the breakfast servers. The WWE stayed there every year, and every year the fire alarm would be pulled by some crazed fan to get all the wrestlers out of the hotel and into the street so they could scream at them. I remember Chris Jerico ordered a dozen egg-white vegetable omelet. I remember having one tiny sip of $7K Chateau Petrus that was offered to me from the wineglass of the young man who brought it. I remember an EVP of a very well known company getting drunk and peeing on the ground. I remember I loved that restaurant more than I could possibly imagine loving a place I worked at.

And I remember a meal that first introduced me to the beauty of food and wine. I liked food, and I liked wine. I liked them together, but I didn’t really understand them together. During a tasting meal one day, we all stood around one plate of steak and frites – 10 of us to one plate. Our manager went through the ingredients, and then popped a bottle of wine. It was a bottle of Condado de Haza, Ribera del Duero. It was their suggested pairing with the dish, and we were encouraged to try it. I managed to snag 2 bites of steak and 3 frites before it was gone, and, like our manager encouraged, tried those bites with the wine.

On it’s own, the steak and frites were wonderful. On it’s own, Condado de Haza is wonderful. But together? Together they made magic in your mouth.

The wine made the steak almost buttery in texture, elevating that piece of meat to god-like status. It became sumptuous, amazing. It was so incredibly good.

The steak made the slightly tannic wine smooth and silky. The berries in the wine meshed beautifully with the dark taste of the meat, the perfect char on the outside mellowing it until it became a bouquet in your mouth.

It was a taste I still remember, when I first learned that food and wine really do belong together, when I really discovered a passion for the two. And those two bites were probably, still, almost a decade later, the best meal I ever ate.

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• The “Condado de Haza” Returns to the Wine Cellar of Iberia (prweb.com)
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Linda Carol Wilson is a housewife who stays home and really enjoying making delicious food for her family. She have some really great cakes recipes, but also, some amazing cooking and decorating ideas.

Cupcakes make the perfect for treat or perhaps a best snack food for team conferences or celebrations of any type. But if you don’t give a small style, cupcakes can be monotonous. Luckily, there are lots of excellent cupcake suggestions to give a small prosper to those scrumptious treats and enhance any event!

If you’re doing desserts for those kind of vacation event, think about cupcake tips associated with that particular holiday break. You can always find a good homemade recipes for cupcakes, that will be amazing for further decoration. For Halloween night, try out designing desserts as pumpkins or spirits. Christmas time demands Santa Clause and reindeer head or even a “Christmas pine” created of cupcake decorations. Independence day could be famous along with red-colored and azure topping garnished with pearl sugars or whitened chocolate sprinkles to signify stars.

Valentine’s might be celebrated along with theme heart frosting styles, but when you want some thing unique, try doing heart-shaped desserts. To get this done, all you need to do is spot a pebble in every pocket of the cupcake container to ensure that a couple of humps are shaped towards the top of the paper cupcake sleeve. As soon as prepared, just enhance desserts properly with red-colored, pink or any other Valentine frosting!

If you want cupcake suggestions for sports, think about selecting frosting that suits team colorings. Obviously, it’s also simple to help to make desserts that appear to be just like baseballs, basketballs, football balls as well as hockey pucks. You may have to obtain imaginative using the frosting to create footballs, however it can be achieved. You may also help to make desserts look like soccer headgear for a body choice if preferred.

An excellent concept for cupcake tips is selecting a preferred children’s favourite cartoon character. Whether it’s Hello Kitty, Donald Duck or Garfield, designing desserts as toons is simple. In the situation like Mickey Mouse, try including little biscuits for your ear. Such things as choc chips or gumdrops is often useful for eye and noses. Enjoy the designing so those experiencing the desserts will love consuming all of them.

Blossoms are an excellent concept to make your desserts special. Merely select a suitable shade for any flower petals and swirl the frosting in a correct design. Take by including a couple of green simply leaves. No matter if you want red flowers for the partner, yellow-colored mums for the mom or violet tulips for the closest friend, flower desserts certainly are a wind to style.

To create your cupcake suggestions even more thrilling, search for good recipes and think about making all of them in 3D. Make use of the frosting to show circles into spheres. This makes your own styles be noticeable much more. Virtually whatever could be created like a ring could be broadened right into a ball. Clearly it might function perfectly for sports balls, it also suits cartoons and blossoms and many every other design also.

Discovering cupcake tips is actually just restricted to your creativity. Almost everything from easy spherical forms like golf balls and exoplanets to more complicated forms such as celebrities and wacky character types could be symbolized on these types of delicious sweet goodies. It’s enjoyable being imaginative, so don’t keep back. Go wild using these cupcake tips or envision a few of your personal!

Related articles

• Best Vanilla Cupcake Recipe: Recipe Sunday (ifyoucanread.com)
• Cupcakes Are Ruining Everything [Dessert] (jezebel.com)
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