Category: Salad

It is sweltering!
The thought of making dinner is overwhelming.

There are two solutions:

Pour yourself a cold, frosty drink
Order take-out.

If you insist on cooking, keep it simple and this summer salad is the perfect answer, easy, tasty and filling.
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Recipes & Travel:
Healthy Salads, Healthy Salmon recipes, Meal salads, Panzanella salad, Salad, Salmon

Forget magret de canard and moules frites – couscous served with its savoury slow-cooked stews is popular in French cuisine. It was voted France’s 3rd favourite meal in a study conducted for Vie Pratique Gourmand (2011). There are references to couscous consumption in France that date as far back as 1630 (Toulon) and 1699 (Brittany).

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Recipes & Travel:
Easy Couscous Recipes, Food info in France, French Food, Travel in France

Nutmeg has learned a few things about technology in the last couple months including:

It is a brilliant idea to keep back-up files
Software version updates can cause problems
The benefits of saving documents to a cloud

Luckily, there are a few loyal readers including CardaMOM, who prints everything.  Nutmeg has rebuilt the recipe database on this blog over the last few weeks, and she has been able to recover 99% of the recipes.  The new format is much better for printing.  Rather than make you search back through old posts for the French recipes, some of them are captured below (click the links) and enjoy!

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Recipes & Travel:
Easy Beef Recipes, Easy healthy desserts, Easy sweet tart recipes, Food in France, French Food, French Recipes, Recipes with Pears, Stew Recipes, Tart Tatin

Halloween (“Old Hallows Even”) has been typically associated with the Celtic festival of Samhain.  The name means summer’s end.  The celebration is to denote the end of the lighter half of the year and the start of the darker part of the year.  Ginger loves Halloween, a big kid at heart he loves to buy the candy and hand it out to the many visitors who come by on that evening.  Ginger loves the interaction with all the ghosts, goblins, princesses, cats, action figures, pirates and anything else that shows up looking for a sweet hand-out.  Nutmeg is not as interested in this process of moving into the darker part of the year.  She does however, love to see how her brother (Papa Q) and sister-in-law (Sugar) celebrate the event with much joy and festivity (and crazy outfits). (more…)

Recipes & Travel:
Food info in France, Healthy Pumpkin Recipes, Healthy Salads, Provence in Autumn, Provence Travel, What is Courge

Have you ever had an interview, and after an hour they have tested your ability to answer probing questions like:

Describe a situation when you had to report bad news to a client  (So sorry, too bad so sad…)
Why are you the right candidate for the job? (Don’t you know who I am?)
What are your weaknesses?  (Like I am really going to tell you…)
Describe your greatest accomplishment and why it is significant (Getting paid)

Then out of left field they throw in the wild card question, you know the interview is almost over at this point. What fruit would you use to describe you and why?  Nutmeg was able to answer that one without hesitation.  Without a doubt, her answer is the mango, it grows in warm, frost-free climates, it has a unique flavor, very sweet when ripe and it is widely used in tropical and Asian cuisine.

There are many kinds of mangoes and the growing season varies around the globe. …

Recipes & Travel:
food info, Green Mango Salad Recipe, Healthy Asian Recipes, Healthy Salads

Quinoa pronounced “keen-wha” is a really old grain.  It is classified as a pseudocereal, which means it is not a cereal or a grain.  Quinoa is a chenopod, so it is the same family as beets and spinach.  It was a sacred grain for the Inca’s, who called it chissaya mama “mother of all grains”.  It has been cultivated for over 6000 years in the Andes.  It does not grow like a rice; quinoa has a long growing season, likes well drained soil and easily grows at high altitudes up to 4000 meters.  The Spanish conquistadors (really bad guys) who called it “food for Indians” forbade the production and strongly encouraged the farming of corn (maize).  Quinoa is also really good for you, it is gluten-free, high in phosphorus, magnesium, iron and it is high in protein.  Best of all it cooks in 15 minutes or less.
Ginger hates quinoa but he is away…. so Nutmeg (who loves it) got…

Recipes & Travel:
food info, Food Nutritional Facts, Healthy Salads, Quinoa Recipes, South American Food

Chili Pepper (Nutmeg’s Dad) loves the “wedge” salad.  Essentially, a large wedge of iceberg lettuce with blue cheese dressing.  This salad can be found in every steak restaurant in North America,  if they do not have it on the menu you may want to check their credentials.  There are of course variations on the classic theme; add bacon bits (real or not so real) or add tomato pieces (mostly for color) or nuts (way too healthy).  In the end there is very little nutritional value, although who really cares as it will most likely be followed by a rare steak and fully garnished baked potato.  The wedge salad is truly a classic, there are historical references to the lettuce from the 1920s and to the salad mixture from the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Print Iceberg Wedge a Classic Salad Recipe type: Salad Prep time:  5 mins Total time:  5 mins …

Recipes & Travel:
Healthy Salads, Wedge Salad Recipe