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If there is one thing that most people cannot stand, it is when you open the refrigerator and find that a jar of something you need at that moment such as mayonnaise or jelly has become contaminated with mold.

Sometimes it is green or white and it grows either on the food itself or on the inside of the jar’s lid and you do not notice it is there until you are already scooping it out and putting it onto your bread. Yuck! A whole jar has just been wasted because of mold.

What about the other food near that jar? You should check to see if any other food in your refrigerator is contaminated with mold and throw it away immediately, especially if it is something that does not come in a jar.

Leftovers, fruit, or vegetables that we often end up shoving into the back of the fridge and forgetting about are common mold hotspots in our refrigerators. Maybe you made too much food one night and you just have not had a taste for the leftovers or maybe you just have not gotten around to throwing it away.

Cleaning out your refrigerator of old and outdated items is one of the best ways to prevent mold from starting to grow inside your refrigerator.

Wasting food is a bad thing to do no matter where you are and if you have any leftovers that have not been eaten up to around 48 hours after you originally prepared it, it is probably a good idea to get some Ziploc bags or Tupperware dishes and put this excess food in the freezer to eat at a later date.

Do not leave the vegetables or fruit in the plastic bags that you put them in when you pick them up from the produce section at your grocery store. This traps moisture inside the bag and it will cause your food to rot and eventually become moldy.

Any cracked eggs in the carton need to be removed. You should not buy a carton of eggs if any of the eggs appear to be cracked open; bacteria on the outside of the egg can get inside and begin to multiply.

Cheese is also a favorite food of mold in the refrigerator and if you see mold growing on a block of cheese (do not try to save individually wrapped slices), take a knife and cut an inch around the moldy spot and throw it away. Do not touch the mold with the knife and wash it immediately after.

Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of quality
Texas Residential Water Damage Restoration Contractors and
Water Damage Restoration companies across the united states.

I have always loved cooking and cooking equipment and owe it all to my grandma who let me “play chef” in her kitchen when I was a kid. My sister and I would take out her pots and pans, bowls, spoons and plates and make great concoctions of water and flour and whatever else she would give us to experiment with. Since growing up, my love for the kitchen has only grown stronger and I still find a certain delight in getting out all of my cooking equipment and making a great meal.

Over the years I have often been asked by my daughters and grand daughters to accompany them when registering for their kitchen items before getting married and starting their own homes. The main tip I give them is that since the cooking items you have in your kitchen are some of the most used items you have in your home, it is a good idea to buy quality items right from the start.

The cooking equipment you buy will greatly depend on the type of meals you cook. Even though every person has their own style of preparing food, there are some basic items every kitchen should have. These include mixers, grinders, beaters, steamers, cooking trays, mixing bowls, spatulas, wooden spoons, knives and cutting boards. Bigger items such as the stove, microwave, indoor grill and electric skillet are also very important and should be chosen for the quality of the product and not just the price.

Throughout the years I have found that there are many items that are “must haves” in my kitchen, such as the microwave. The convenience of being able to cook whole meals or simply warm up left over food is unbeatable and necessary in today’s fast paced world. That is why having the right tools on hand makes cooking much easier and will not only make your cooking a success but also save you time in preparation.

There are many places to buy home cooking equipment and kitchen appliances and each person has their preference. Something I have often done and many people find very convenient, is to buy online or by ordering from tv commercials. This can be a really great way to try new products and add to your basic kitchen items. The main thing to remember when doing this is to make sure the item you are buying is a quality product. I have bought my share of cheap appliances and have learned the hard way that it is better to pay a little more for a better piece of quality cooking equipment than to have to replace it over and over again.

Another important area to consider when shopping for the right cooking equipment and one of my favorites ways to cook, is outdoor cooking. Many people love to cook in the outdoors whether for a weekend picnic or hosting backyard parties for friends and family. Choosing the right cooking equipment for these occasions can be confusing because there is so much to choose from. The thing to consider though is what kind of cooking you will be doing. For cooking in your backyard, gas and charcoal grills give you a lot of options and allow you to also cook healthy foods.

I found that another great investment in outdoor cooking equipment was a camp stove. It turned out to be a very convient way to prepare meals when camping with my children when they were younger. These stoves allow you the freedom to make a great meal wherever you are and are even made in backpack styles for those who like to hike. Whatever your style, you can ensure your success, cooking in the kitchen or outdoors by having the right tools for the job and by choosing only quality cooking equipment.

Craig Chambers is a cooking enthusiast who enjoys using good cooking equipment and offers extensive free cooking guides, tips and resources on his website www.cookingyourbest.com

No cook or chef, whether professional or just beginning, would be complete without a collection of great cooking tips. I have always loved finding an easy solution to a problem that makes the meals I cook better or saves me money. Over the years, I have collected these gems of knowledge from many people including my grandma, gourmet chefs of five star restaurants and the locals from the countries I have visited.

I have not only used these great ideas but have also awed friends and family with solutions to little problems everyone encounters in the kitchen. You will find that there are cooking tips for everything from preparing a meal to using substitutes in recipes. These tips will save you time, money and a lot of hassle. You may also find that once you think about it you have many of your own ideas that you can add to your collection simply by writing down.

There are many places to find great cooking tips and only requires a little investigating. Many people have great ideas that you will find very useful and a good way to start your collection is by asking your friends and family. Many people have come up with their own ways to prepare a meal faster, better or cheaper and you will benefit greatly from the experience of others. I have found that some of my most valued tips have come from the unique ways others do things.

The internet is also a great place to find helpful information and you will find great tips such as adding a little sugar to your pancakes to make them brown faster or putting your unripe fruit in a paper bag in a dark cupboard to ripen. By doing a little research and asking others for their ideas, you will soon acquire a collection of helpful kitchen hints and will have a wealth of knowledge available at your fingertips.

You will find many cooking tips that save you time in preparing a meal. I save a lot of time by chopping vegetables ahead of time or buying them precut. Buying prepared foods such as mashed potatoes, rice, or bagged salad instead of trying to make everything from scratch also reduces the time spent in preparation. I also like to use disposable paper or plastic plates, cups and utensils when appropriate.

This makes cleaning up after a meal or party very easy and allows you more time with your guests when entertaining. Another great tip my mom once gave me and one that has saved me many trips to the store, is to keep a running grocery list in the kitchen and write down the items I need throughout the week to avoid running to the store over and over again.

The more you look, the more simple solutions to every day kitchen problems you will find. For example, you can easily salvage an overly sweetened dish by simply stirring in a half teaspoon of vinegar to balance the flavors. I have used this tip for a number of dishes that I thought were ruined and managed to create a great meal. Another one of my favorite cooking tips is coating the inside of the pot lid when cooking pastas, custards and milk to keep the pot from boiling over.

This saves you the hassle of having to clean up a mess and possibly ruining the meal or dessert you are making. Cooking timers can also help prevent a pot from boiling over or a meal from burning and allow you to turn your attention to the task at hand and prepare other items. Because you will come across so many great tips, it is a good idea to write them all down or include the appropriate tip along with the recipe in your recipe box. Before long you will have a valuable collection of ideas and many great cooking tips.

Craig Chambers is a cooking enthusiast who enjoys sharing cooking tips and offers extensive free cooking guides, tips and resources on his website www.cookingyourbest.com

It starts with the cacao tree, which is about as far away from a Hershey bar as you can get. It is a small evergreen tree native to the deep tropical regions of South America, ranging from far southern Mexico to the Amazon. You pick a big, green, almond-shaped melon off of this tree and split it open. If you are lucky enough to have found one of the five in one hundred cacao tree pods to produce cacao beans, you find about twenty to forty of them inside.

These beans don’t taste even remotely like chocolate at this point. They have to be washed, laid out in the sun to ferment and harden, dried, and shipped off to be cooked, ground, and processed before they can even be used as an ingredient.

The cacao bean’s first use is shrouded in the legends of the tribal customs of Mesoamericans, Amazonians, and Aztecs, and decorated with rich myths involving Mayan gods and sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl. It was a food, a tonic, a gift from the volcano gods, a medicine, a shaman ritual. It is written about in the most ancient carved stone hieroglyphics on the walls of crumbing temples.

It was even used as currency. Not just a back-up currency, but the main unit of wealth amongst the native South Americans. Two hundred beans was a male turkey; one hundred beans was the daily wage of a laborer. A mere three beans bought an avocado. No less than 980 canoe-loads of the cacao bean were the annual demanded tribute of taxes collected by the Aztec empire.

None other than Christopher Columbus himself first discovered the cacao beans, though he described them as “almonds” which he at first mistook for rabbit droppings. Columbus captured a canoe filled with these artifacts, but the crew dumped it out as worthless garbage. The Spanish explorer Cortez was the first to knowingly encounter cacao, which was consumed by the natives as a drink during Cortez’s meetings with Montezuma.

Cortez was the first white human to get a sip of the tasty concoction, and even he only got that lucky through being mistaken for a white prophet prophesied by their legends. This time cacao beans made it back to Europe, introduced to the royal court of Spain in 1544. Chocolate had at last been introduced to the New World.

It spread like wildfire across all of Europe within a century, being used for everything from the basis of liqueur to a medicinal tincture. As a beverage, chocolate was consumed in a bitter, spicy drink called “xocoatl”, flavored with vanilla, which you would expect, and also flavored with chile pepper and annatto, which is alarming. It was believed to be a stimulant, and hence used to fight fatigue. This is now known to be from the compound theobromine, which is like caffeine and is found in chocolate.

Other drink combinations involved a maize paste, assorted fruits, and honey. Coming up to 1689, the physician Mans Sloane developed a chocolate drink which was originally intended for apothecary use, but the recipe for it was eventually bought by the Cadbury brothers. The first modern commercial interest in chocolate began.

In the scheme of things today, two thirds of the cacao bean harvest comes from Ghana, the Ivory Coast and other counties along the African equator. Cacao is also cultivated in the rain forests of Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica, and other parts of Central and South America, as well as the Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. The manufacturing of chocolate occurs mostly in countries such as Switzerland, France, Belgium, Italy, England and the United States.

A percentage of about 70% cacao beans is considered necessary to call candy “chocolate”, although there’s no accounting for chocolate flavoring, cocoa extract, and artificial flavoring. The cheapest chocolate candy commonly sold in the United States bears about as much resemblance to cacao-based chocolate as it does to car wax, being mostly sugar and fat. Milk chocolate usually contains up to 50% cacao.

White chocolate contains only about 33% cacao. The mass-produced chocolate contains much less cacao - as low as 7% in many cases - and are made with fats other than cocoa butter. Currently, mass-manufacturers such as Hershey and Nestle are lobbying the United States congress to remove the restriction against calling something with no cacao content “chocolate”. That 7% is just killing them!

Other chocolate manufacturers in Europe boast up to 88% cacao bean content, and one hard-core Swiss chocolate and confectionery company founded in 1845, name of Lindt, boasts a bar that is 99% pure. The Lindt chocolate is an interesting experience, best taken in very small quantities rather than in fistfuls like the average candy binger. It really separates the true chocolate gourmand from the casual sugar-craver, as it is actually quite bitter and strong.

But what, you didn’t think there was just one kind of bean, did you? Oh, no, wine snobs know their grapes, coffee addicts know their beans, and as a chocolate fancier, you’ll never get anywhere without knowing your cacao. The three main cultivated varieties are Criollo, Forastero and Trinitario.

Criollo is the rarest and most expensive cacao, native to Central America and the Caribbean islands. Forastero is the wild and cultivated cacaos which are native to the Amazon basin, but can be cultivated in places like Africa. Trinitario is just a natural hybrid of the other two varieties.

Nearly 95% of the chocolate you find in the world is of the Forastero variety, so seeking out the other will be quite a hunt. Cacao is naturally hard to cultivate; it grows only in a narrow band limited to twenty degrees north or south of the equator. A single night of below-sixty degree temperatures kills a cacao tree.

To settle an old dispute: yes, eating chocolate really does feel like falling in love. The consumption of a chocolate piece releases both dopamine and serotonin in the brain, the exact same two chemicals which the body rewards the brain with during passionate love. This is a marked effect of the chocolate itself, not the sugar and fat.

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In Japan, koji has been used to make sake for hundreds of years and what might be the surprising thing is that it is actually a kind of mold. The scientific name for the mold is Aspergillus Oryzae and it creates a few different enzymes as it reproduces and these are what cause the starches in the rice to turn into sugars that feed the yeast cells that produce both alcohol and carbon dioxide. Without the addition of the koji, the Japanese alcoholic beverage of sake cannot exist. There are other beverages in Asia that have been known to use koji, but the ways they are brewed are very different.

Sake is produced differently than a beverage such as wine, so it might be useful to explain just how different the production methods are. Wine is created from fermented grapes that already have sugar (or glucose) in them and sugar is what yeast has to eat. Even though there are other kinds of sugars in existence, the yeast cannot metabolize them and so when wine is made, the yeast is put into a liquid that already has sugar in it.

Sake is brewed somewhat similar to beer, but it is not malted. It is made from steamed rice that has had its husk removed and the rice is milled in order to remove the outer covering. It is not uncommon for a rice to be washed down to 50 percent or even less of its former weight in order to get to the innermost part of the rice, which does not contain all of the proteins, amino acids, and fats that can give the sake an unwanted flavor or smell.

Aspergillus oryzae has a very powerful affect on the final product and its cultivation is taken very seriously. It is produced in a different room in the brewery that is known as the koji-muro. When it is ready, it is added to more steamed rice. Later on in the batch, it is put into a large tank where the rice, yeast, water, and koji will continue to ferment. One account says that a brewer presented a bottle of sake with an apology, saying that they had rebuilt their koji-muro the year before and that the cedar wood used in the walls was not as ready as they had thought. The cedar could be tasted and smelled in the sake.

Koji is what gives the rice its unique flavors depending upon what kind of rice it is cultivated on, the pH level of the water, the mineral content of it, and many other things are what make koji one of the most important ingredients of sake.

Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of quality
flood and water damage cleanup and
water damage restoration> companies across the united states.

A food called red yeast rice in English has been a favorite dish in Asian countries for a long time and is a traditional part of Peking duck. Traditional Chinese medicine has used the dish for over 1,000 years in order to help the body keep up a good circulatory system and heart.

In China, its use has been noted as far back as the Tang Dynasty of China back in 800 A.D. There might be a good reason for this use, since recent research has shown that red yeast rice is quite good at assisting in lowering a person’s cholesterol. Just what is red yeast rice?

Red yeast rice is made by fermenting a mold called monascus purpureus on top of rice. There is a unique process that is used to separate the naturally occurring ingredient called mevinolin and this somewhat similar to other drugs that doctors give their patients to fight high cholesterol like Lipitor and Zocor.

While everyone needs cholesterol in order to have a healthy life, having too much of it as most people know can lead to problems. Our livers produce about eighty percent of the cholesterol that the body needs and the other twenty percent comes from the food that we eat.

What the red yeast rice does when you eat it is block the enzyme that exists in the liver to induce the production of cholesterol. Unsaturated fatty acids in the red yeast rice could also possibly add to the beneficial attributes of it.

The possibility of its medical uses has only recently been noticed in western countries, even though it has been used in Asia for centuries.

An extract of one of its natural ingredients, mevinolin, is often sold over the counter as a dietary supplement of sorts to be used for controlling cholesterol. You do not need a prescription for this supplement and some people are taking advantage of this.

It is not recommended to eat red yeast rice or take the dietary supplement of mevinolin if you have already been prescribed a drug for high cholesterol such as Lipitor or Zocor.

What about the mold that is used to make the dish? Monascus purpureus is a purplish-red mold in the family Monascaceae and it is used mainly in Asian dishes for color, however it can also impart a pleasant flavor to the food, as well.

Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of quality
flood water damage restoration chicago and and other states such as
Connecticut Water Damage Restoration companies across the united states.

If you enjoy spicy food then you will really love trying out various dishes that are classified as Indian cuisine. Some of the common spices used to liven up their various dishes include chili pepper, black mustard, cumin, ginger, and garlic. Indian foods are served in grounds rather than individual entrees.

Each meal should consist of a starch such as rice or Indian bread. There should be at least one main dish but it is customary to serve two. The main dishes are generally made with meat or fish. Two vegetables should be offered with each meal. One of them should be a dry form while the other wet such as a soup.

Make sure you save room for the delicious Indian desserts as well though. The majority of them are very sweet so the servings are quite small. Caramel custard is a traditional favorite in the Indian culture. It is quite simple to make and it is very soothing after a heavy meal.

Many people offer Mukhwas after a meal of Indian food because it helps with digestion. Some people have a hard time digesting Indian food without it because of the spices in the foods. It also helps freshen your breath after you eat. This is a sweet type of candy that can be made from a variety of different flavorings.

The most common drink to compliment Indian food is tea. There are several good varieties of Indian tea you can choose from. Other common drinks include lemonade and beer. However in various Indian restaurants you can also select from soft drinks and wines to compliment your meal.

It is customary for Indian food to be eaten with the fingers in a very casual setting. Authentic Indian food restaurants even serve it in a traditional setting with very low tables and cushions to sit on the floor on instead of chairs. If you aren’t comfortable eating with our fingers though many of these restaurants will offer silverware upon request.

If you are interested in making various Indian foods at home you will find plenty of great recipe books. There are also numerous recipes to be found online. Depending on where you live you may have an Indian grocery store close by where you can get the various ingredients. If you don’t then consider purchasing them online for many great sources. For the best tasting Indian food you really need to work with quality herbs and spices.

Get South Indian Recipes from http://www.numkitchen.com