Food Point

1. Use small pieces of lumber as a turkey rack. We all know turkey cooks better if it’s sitting up on a rack, not in the bottom of the pan stewing in its own juices. But how many of us actually bother to get this special piece of equipment for something we cook only a couple of times a year? Metal jar lids are usually recommended for improvising a rack, but wood does nicely too. We used two eight-inch long,unfinished pieces of 1×2 - finish grade. (Yes, wood can be both finish grade - the non-splintering kind used for woodwork that shows - and unfinished.)
2. Stuff the turkey only partway, with vegetables and spices. This is an idea I got from Rick Rodgers’ Turkey Cookbook. One onion, one carrot, one stick of celery, and a few spoonfuls of spices are all you need for a small turkey. The turkey cooks much more quickly, and the vegetables combine well with leftover turkey, gravy, and mashed potatoes to make a pie the next day.
3. Put the turkey neck on to boil on top of the stove, and if you need liquid to keep the pan drippings from burning, use that. When you’re getting ready to make gravy, combine the remaining liquid with the pan drippings. Take as much as you need for the gravy and put it in the fridge so the fat will rise to the top. (Save the rest for later.) Then spoon off the fat, thicken, and there’s your gravy.
4. Make raw cranberry sauce or relish. This is something else I got from The Turkey Cookbook. Just grind up the berries with sugar, maple syrup, fruit, and nuts. No standing over a pot of boiling water and sugar - no settling for canned cranberry sauce, either. And it tastes great.
5. Bake some pumpkin pie filling without a crust. Got too much filling for your piecrust? (This happens a lot, no matter what the recipe on the canned pumpkin label says.) Just pour the excess into a greased baking dish and bake it along with the pie. This makes a somewhat lighter dessert for the days after Thanksgiving, with enough of the pumpkin pie flavor to bring the holiday mood back for a moment.

Chocolate is a perennial gift, almost as common as soap and fruitcake. The quality ranges from High Fructose Corn Syrup tubular brown goo in Brand’s candies and Tootsie Rolls all the way up to $2000 boxes of exclusive Beverly Hills handcrafted cocoa confections. Most of us prefer something in between. While my wife always goes for the Belgium variety, I like the bitter raw flavor of the cocoa. My favorite is an 85% dark.

Despite the myth that chocolate causes pimples (it’s the sugar, not the cocoa!), chocolate has a wide spectrum of health benefits. It can lower blood pressure, reduce the instance of blood clots, and even help prevent cancer. It’s rich in phenolic phytochemicals-or in layman’s terms, antioxidants. Cocoa has even more antioxidant flavonoids than green tea or red wine.But not all chocolate is created equal.

It’s not just the taste that separates A Nestle’s Crunch from a Scharffenberger’s dark chocolate bar. When trying to maximize the health benefits of chocolate you are receiving, always go for the dark. In fact, the higher percentage of cocoa, the better. 50% cocoa is really a good place to start, but I’d suggest jumping up to 70% if you can handle the strength. The reason health benefits in milk chocolate are so low is because such a low percentage of what you are actually eating is chocolate in the first place. In most cases, milk chocolate contains many more sugars and milk solids, which all but nullify the antioxidant from the actual cocoa powder.

So you’ve decided to go with the healthy dark chocolate. Now you need to weed out the processed from the natural brands. Heavy processing can dramatically reduce the antioxidant and flavonoid levels in otherwise healthy chocolate. Dutch processed chocolate is a particular culprit, not healthy chocolate in the least. So, go with organic brands. Or even better, find “single source” batch of chocolate. Higher end chocolate makers will source their bars like wines, making entire batches of bars harvested from one particular date from one particular region. To maintain authenticity, these brands of healthy chocolate go through minimal processing. Connoisseurs collect and cherish particular batches of single source cocoa bars. These chocolates offer some of the highest phenolic phytochemal levels and some of the best chocolate health benefits.

Vegetarian burgers unlike burgers made of meat are a healthy and substantial food. There are several ways to make a vegetarian burger and I will list the way I like mine made.

The first is a vegetarian burger recipe, for one, that not everyone will like because it has onions:

Ingredients:

1 small onion chopped fine
1 very small or half of a medium size bell pepper (green, red, yellow does not matter)
1 small shredded carrot
1 cup of cooked dark beans (drained can of kidney beans is fine)
salt and pepper to taste.

Procedure:

Place chopped onions, peppers and shredded carrots into a bowl and add the beans. Mash all of the ingredients together thoroughly. The beans will act as the base for the burger keeping all of the other ingredients together. Form into a burger. Dip the formed burger first into milk (vegans use soy milk) then into either cracker, corn flake or bread crumbs. In a skillet heat about one tablespoon of olive oil. Place the burger into the olive oil to fry. Brown it on both sides and serve on a bun with a slice of tomato and some lettuce. If you love onions place a thin slice of onion on it too. You can serve this with any kind of side dish you like along with a slice of pickle.