This makes for a nice change from the ordinary pizza base! Polenta is made with ground yellow or white cornmeal and depending on the region in Northern Italy, it can be ground coarsely or finely. It was originally classed as peasant food eaten in the early Roman times but these days all levels of society…

Looking for an aromatic snack to share with your friends? These little treats are mouth watering and quite easy to make. Cumin adds a bit of nutty and peppery flavor with slight citrus overtones to this recipe. It has been used in Indian and Middle Eastern cuisines for centuries as well as Mexican and Tex-Mex…

My family loves Indian food and this dish covers off all the flavors we enjoy tasting. This salad is served as a main course at Gordon Ramsay’s, The Boxwood Cafe. It’s such a simple meal to make, packed with vitamins and looks good, too. Lamb is a good source of protein, zinc (immune function) and…

A fresh, easy dish to make and ready to eat within 30 minutes! Couscous is a grain product made by drizzling salted water onto coarsely ground hard durum wheat to form tiny balls of dough. The balls are rubbed until uniform in size and then dried. Its texture is nuttier than long-grain rice and the…

Involtini (meat rolls) is a popular dish among the Italians and is usually eaten with polenta. You can fill the rolls with whatever you like. The many flavors coming from this dish makes it difficult to say no to seconds! There are also vegetable versions of involtini such as Nigella Lawson’s simple grilled aubergines stuffed…

We eat a lot of salads with our dinners but this one can easily be eaten as a main dish. Ginger has been revered in Indian and Chinese civilizations for over 5000 years for its powerful health promoting properties. It has anti-inflammatory properties that can lessen the pain of rheumatoid arthritis, relieves the severity of…

This is old fashioned comfort food for the soul and is one of my son and daughter’s favorite foods although my daughter does tend to like the Kraft dinner version! Macaroni and cheese was first made in the nineteenth century and was made even more popular when Kraft Foods introduced the Kraft Dinner (macaroni and…

Over the years I have built up a substantial collection of cookbooks and food magazines. While the list of my cookbooks would be too long to mention here, the following are some of my favorite food magazines: Fine Cooking, BBC Good Food, Gourmet Traveller, ABC Delicious, Dish, BBC Olive and Good Taste. I have a…

This is our tenth year living in Asia and we’re always asked what our favorite Asian cuisine is. That’s a tough question as we like Chinese, Singaporean, Thai, Indian, Malaysian, Japanese, Indonesian etc. Having said that, for me, I always come back to Chinese food and in particular, dim sum. Dim sum is a Cantonese…

My all time favorite, easy to make, cookie! And, who hasn’t made a batch of these cookies at least once in their cooking lives? Chocolate chips were invented in 1933 by Ruth Graves Wakefield. She added chunks of semi-sweet Nestlé chocolate bar to a cookie recipe and they were a huge success. She reached an…

Moussaka is the best known of all Greek foods. Greeks believe that moussaka was introduced when the Arabs brought the eggplant, although Arabs, especially in Lebanon, think of this dish as a Greek dish. Moussaka is also found in Turkey. Some Moussaka recipes show potatoes as part of the ingredients. However, potatoes would never have…

One of my all time favorite desserts! A quintessentially French dessert that is easy to prepare ahead, is rich in flavor and extremely delicious! Use the darkest chocolate you can find for an intense chocolate flavor. Dark chocolate is rich in flavonoids, which are antioxidants that keep cholesterol from gathering in blood vessels, reduce the…