Cooking And Baking With Sugar Free Chocolate

One option is to add Agave nectar and Xylitol to desserts, to make them sweet without adding calories found in many chocolate desserts.

These sweeteners are made from natural ingredients and will reduce the fat content of some of your favorite candy. This way you can manage or prevent diabetes from taking control of your life.

Choosing darker chocolate is the better option when you are making sugar free chocolate as it have less sugar and includes antioxidants to help your body fight infections and diseases.

Follow the instructions on the label with your choice of sweetener, in order to add the same quantity of "sugar" in all your sugar-free chocolate.

There are ingredients you can add to your sugar free chocolates, to make the desserts much more delicious. For example, you can add dried fruit, vanilla, citrus extracts, and exotic fruits to your brownies, cakes and cookies.

While making sugar free desserts, you can add low fat margarine or fat free cottage cheese to desserts, adding to the creaminess and moist texture, giving desserts more delicious flavors without adding extra sugar or fat, keeping you true to the aims of your diet.

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Regional Variations Influencing Italian Cuisine

There is more to Italian cuisine, than pasta and pizza. When you visit an Italian restaurant and look at the menu, you will see it contains a variety of different dishes, desserts and beverages.

Different Italian regions are influenced by different histories, with a different specialty cuisine depending on the dominant local ingredients.

For example, Roman cuisine is dominated by offal and Pecorino, which is a cheese made from sheep milk. Simple food, like white beans and meat dominate the cuisine of Tuscany. Their range of spices include parsley, basil and thyme.

Lasagna and tortellini is the food of Emilia-Romagna. While pastries and mozzarella cheese dominate the local cuisine in Naples. The island of Sardinia is known for its saffron and fennel spiced seafood and meat dishes. Calabria is famous for its salami.

Abruzzo's cuisine relies on chili peppers. The cuisine from the island of Sicily relies heavily on fish including tuna and swordfish. Sardinian cuisine features lamb.

Specific types of rice are grown in Piedmont and Lombardy. As a result, these areas are popular for their rice dishes.

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Knowing About Better Organic Coffee Beans

Two main species of coffee beans comprise almost ninety percent of the beans used in all the coffees of the world. This means that whatever it takes to grow the arabica (Coffea arabica) or robusta (Coffea canephora) plants, people are going to do so.

This includes growing them organically if they are included in a fair trade coffee program, no matter how difficult that might be. These are two very valuable crops, and there's always a market for them.

Different regions of the world will tend to feature fair trade certified coffees of different species, because the species grow best in slightly different conditions. Arabica needs higher altitudes and more shade, while robusta can grow in hotter climates and closer to sea level.

Robusta tends to be found more in central and western Africa, but also in Southeast Asia. In fact, in recent years, Vietnam has become the world's largest exporter of robusta, the only species it grows. A fair trade program working with growers in these parts of the world would deal mostly in robusta coffee beans.

Between the two coffee plants, it's the arabica that presents the greater challenge when it comes to producing certified organic coffee. With a plant that has greater susceptibility to pests, growing it without resorting to pesticides can be hard work.

But coffee beans from both arabica and robusta are so valuable in the world market that there will always be a market for them, and as long as fair trade principles are in place, it will always be worth growing either of them.

To read more Knowing About Better Organic Coffee Beans

Fair Price For Producers With Fair Trade Organic Coffee

The idea of fair trade organic coffee is a good one. With coffee industry profits second only to the oil industry, it's hard to fight big conglomerates, but the fair trade movement has tried.

Often farmers who produce coffee barely live at a subsistence level because big corporations don't pay fair prices. So many farmers have banded together into co-ops, negotiating for that fair price and providing a better living.

The certified fair trade product is often also produced with more organic farming methods, so it's better for the land, the farmers and even the taste of the coffee.

One reason why some doubt that fair trade coffee will survive the entry of big corporations into the movement is that these companies retain the same motives for consolidating everything into a huge organization that will short-change the smaller farmer all over again.

Whatever a large organization has to do to squeeze out the last penny of profit, it tends to do no matter what smaller player is hurt. Fair trade organic coffee may end up just the same old coffee under a new name, unless corporations change their own motivations and inner workings.

The push for fair trade organic coffee is part of the wider movement for fair trade food and other products. The aim is for the producers of products to be given a fair price for what they produce, rather than be pressured to live at subsistence level so end users in a more prosperous country can consume the product really cheaply.

That arrangement, as promoted by mega corporations, amounts to little more than slavery or a sort of feudalism. It's not yet clear whether those same mega corporations can now enter the fair trade movement without pushing everything back into the same kind of feudal system.

To read more Fair Price For Producers With Fair Trade Organic Coffee

Giving Friends Fair Trade Coffee Gifts

If you're not a coffee connoisseur but know someone who is mad about their coffee, then you may be interested in the sorts of coffee gifts you might give, since you know that will really please them.

Hold onto your hat, though, because the massive coffee industry of growing beans and creating the drink has spawned an entire secondary industry of coffee-related equipment and gifts in which you can become quite lost. If you want to give a gift, it's likely not enough just to buy coffee at some specialty store. You'll really need to research accessories too.

When contemplating coffee gifts, the world of accessories is another wide arena to play in. If you know your friend wants a coffee grinder of their own, and you can afford a very expensive gift, you might consider one of the masters in the field, the KitchenAid Pro Line Burr Grinder KPCG100, that has 15 different grind sizes.

But you may prefer to be a little more modest, buying a sleek pot or a package of gourmet coffee in a gift cup.

If your friend has a green thumb, then you might even give one of the most unusual coffee gifts of all, a coffee plant of their own. Some plant nurseries provide these plants, which will grow the beans under the right conditions.

Your friend can harvest this fruit in the autumn, roast in a homemade coffee roaster, and then grind their own coffee. It won't be gourmet, necessarily, but it can be fun and interesting.

As you research the types of coffee-related gifts you might give your friend, be sure to explore these unique ideas as well as more traditional gifts.

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Farmers Paid By Roasted Coffee Industry

In the eyes of people who believe in fair trade, the elimination of the middleman from the roasted coffee buying and selling process was one of the improvements brought about by the movement.

Big corporations buying coffee were never familiar with actual growers because it was coffee middlemen who bought the beans from them, as the driving force in the process was to make huge profits with the lowest costs possible.

These "savings" always tended to come at the expense of the farmers, and the idea of fair trade food originated so farmers could be given fair prices and be treated fairly.

The system has helped many farmers in the past few years, yet some people now worry that coffee middlemen are reappearing. Online gourmet coffee clubs, with special offerings to their members of different coffees they can't find anywhere else, is just one example of the new form of middleman.

Internet companies are forming that employ a similar model to the previous one. Farmers are generally anonymous, and the costs of this intermediary are added to the process of growing and selling beans, turning them into roasted coffee, and then selling the coffee to the consumer.

Some coffee roasters have begun to bypass even the official fair trade certification process, instead doing something called direct trade.

Because they have seen the middleman reappearing, and seen too many concessions made to big businesses who became involved in the fair trade roasted coffee industry, these companies have returned to the original concept of fair trade: dealing directly with farmers, using fair practices, and paying fair prices.

It seems to be the nature of business always to produce middlemen and short-change original producers for extra profits. But people interested in the welfare of the farmers will apparently re-invent fair trade as often as they must.

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Trend Towards Growing Organic Coffee

There has been a big movement in recent years toward growing organic coffee. And for various reasons, this practice lends itself to certifying the coffee for fair trade as well. The two ideas of organic and fair trade are not in fact identical, but they dovetail very nicely.

The main reasons for going organic, of course, involve environmental concerns and sustainability. The latter has to include the possibility of the coffee growers themselves being able to make a decent living, sustaining not just themselves but the organic growing methods too. This is where fair trade certified coffee and organic certified coffee may become the same thing.

When a coffee company would enter the market in a big way in the past couple of decades, one big switch they pretty much always demanded would be to move from a shade-grown method of producing coffee to an open field, sun-grown method that would produce higher yields.

But because of soil depletion and erosion, this would also require a great deal of chemical fertilizer and pesticides. In growing organic coffee, some farmers are now going back to shaded growth, but even if they don't, they use much more organic methods for watering, fertilizing and pest control.

Not all fair trade coffee is also organic, but about eighty percent of it is. This indicates that some coffee companies are not just taking account of profits but are recognizing other costs involved in the more recently favored methods of mass production.

Organic coffee production can prevent environmental losses that will eventually lead to such depletion that coffee may not be able to be grown at all. If organic methods are combined with fair trade practices, then both land and farmers can be sustained in a healthy way, thus ensuring a future for both coffee bean crops and the growers.

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Ethical Commitments Made By A Fair Trade Coffee Roaster

One thing that distinguishes fair trade certified coffee from other coffee is that the fair trade company knows something about the farmers who grow the beans. This is very different from large corporations that often have no clue who the farmers are.

They only know they get beans from suppliers who have bought from the farmers, and the conditions under which the farmers live are not important as long as the beans come in at a low price. But this sort of ignorance of the source is not an option for a fair trade coffee roaster.

The fair trade coffee roaster indeed commits to certain things that center on the ethical treatment of farmers and the production of an environmentally responsible product.

It first commits to sourcing beans as directly from the original farmers as possible, bypassing the middlemen and paying a minimum fair price. Coffee roasters are also encouraged to give as much technical assistance as they can to help the farmers transition to more organic ways of growing the plants.

When the fair trade movement began and spread beyond the fair trade coffee roaster and into certification of other products, the coffee people didn't realize how much more life-and-death the issue would soon become.

Prices have recently collapsed, and the big corporations now buy coffee at the new prices while charging customers the old prices, thereby creating even more gigantic profits.

Proponents of fair trade believe the tragedy of the loss of livelihood and loss of life among farmers demonstrates more than ever that the coffee industry needs to be entirely recreated as a fair trade industry.

To read more Ethical Commitments Made By A Fair Trade Coffee Roaster

Making A Delicious Meal While Cooking With Wine

When cooking with wine and you want to impress your friends at the dinner party with your cooking, then you need to use a good quality wine as an ingredient. A poor quality and a bad tasting wine, will create a poor quality meal and will leave a bad impression at the dinner party. You do not need to buy an expensive wine to create a delicious meal, as there are moderately priced wines that are of excellent quality.

Avoid "cooking wines" as they are often of poor quality and often contain added salt. It may be better to leave the wine out altogether, if all you have is cooking wine. Your better option is to run to the wine store and get a nice of bottle of quality wine.

Most people use either red or white wines in cooking, but you can use other types of wines like sherry, port, and vermouth. They are classified as fortified wine, as they are manufactured with an extra grain spirit, as a result contain a higher alcohol content.

When shopping for these fortified wines at the wine store, you may notice sherry, port, and vermouth are divided into different groups according to their sweetness. While experimenting with these wines, take care not to use the wrong wine in a recipe.

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Better Ideas For Cooking With Free Baby Food Recipes

More and more parents are opting to make home made baby food as an alternative to buying commercial foods. This is an excellent choice because it allows you to eliminate excess salt, sugar and chemical additives from your baby's diet.

However, infant food must be prepared, cooked and served with care to avoid potential health hazards.

Banana and avocado yoghurt is a super fast snack to prepare for your baby because there's no cooking involved. As another of the free baby food recipes, all you need is 1/2 of a ripe banana, 1/2 of a small avocado, and 4 tablespoons of full fat natural yoghurt.

This may sound like a fatty meal to you, but babies need the good fat from the avocado and yoghurt to grow. Mash the banana and avocado together with a fork or puree in a blender until soft. Stir in the yoghurt and blend thoroughly.

The Internet is loaded with enough free baby food recipes to keep you cooking until your child turns eighteen! However, there are a few basic rules that always apply. First, make sure that all of your dishes and utensils are clean.

Bacteria hidden in cutting boards or an improperly cleaned food processor can ruin a healthy recipe in no time. Second, make sure that the food is well cooked and soft enough to puree. Thirdly, make sure that the food is at a comfortable temperature when you serve it.

This is especially important if you microwave a meal. Microwaves can create pockets of heat that will burn a baby's mouth. Keep these three important rules in mind and enjoy the experience of discovering new foods with your baby.

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Cooking Healthy Baby Foods

Commercial baby foods often contain lots of extra salt, sugar and chemical preservatives. If you're a health conscious parent, then you may want to consider making homemade baby food.

There are countless quick baby food recipes available in books and online, but there are some safety concerns that you should know.

If you're introducing solid foods, then this fish dish is like a gourmet meal for infants, but check with your doctor first as there is some debate about the age at which fish should be introduced.

Soft fishes like sole are ideal because the flesh is tender and it has a mild flavor. For this meal you'll need half of a sweet potato that has been peeled and cubed. You can use carrots instead if you wish.

You'll also need 2 broccoli florets that have been cut into small pieces, 4 ounces of sole or other white fish fillet, skinned and cut into little-finger size strips, 1/4 cup of milk and 2 tablespoons of Gruyère or Emmental cheese. Steam the sweet potato and broccoli until they are very tender.

While the veggies are steaming, put the fish into a small saucepan, cover with the milk and cook until it flakes easily. This only takes a couple of minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the cheese until it melts. Put the vegetables and fish mixture in a blender and puree. You can add some more milk if necessary. This is one of the many baby foods that will freeze very well.

Adding sugar to otherwise healthy recipes is not a good idea, and never add honey or corn syrup. This can cause botulism, which is a potentially fatal form of food poisoning in babies. When freezing the baby food you have made, use an airtight container or ice cube trays.

After the cubes are frozen solid, remove them and store in plastic freezer bags. Fruits and vegetables frozen this way will last six to eight months. Meat and fish will last one to two months. When reheating baby foods in the microwave, allow the food to sit a few minutes and test the temperature to make sure the food is not too hot.

Ideally, the food should be body temperature. You can be confident that your home made baby food will be packed with nutrients, which will help your baby be healthy and strong.

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Finding Free Bread Recipes Online

You can try more free bread recipes at Ladies’ Home Journal (www.lhj.com) and www.ivillage.com. Most of these recipes are very easy to make, and you do not need to have a bread maker for most of them.

It is easy to include your own twist to most bread recipes. You can include your own ideas to improve the taste by adding nuts or raisins for some bread recipes for adding fiber and vitamins.

Another idea is to create your own buttery, fruity, or garlic spreads for the bread you make, to give them your own special twist.

Free bread recipes can be found on the boxes of products or websites of the better brands. If you buy Pilsbury or Bisquick products, you may notice a recipe on the box.

These recipes can be your inspiration, especially if you have a bread maker, to create a casserole with bread topping, or make a dessert (most bread machines can mix cake batter).

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Finding Recipe Sites With Yeast Bread Recipes

You can bake more than just sweet breads with yeast bread recipes. For example, you can make French-style bread, to use as an accompaniment to pasta or salad.

Alternatively, you can make bread rolls and biscuits for breakfast or dinner. Russian black bread can also be a welcome change from the traditional bread for your family, and these are all yeast bread recipes you can use time and again.

If you make a bread with yeast, you want to make sure your bread machine allows for the dough to rise just enough for the bread to be light and fluffy.

You also want to ensure your bread bakes evenly when you’re trying out new yeast bread recipes. Try using the recipe several times before baking the bread for guests and your family.

If you want to know more about where to find the best bread recipes, you can visit sites like www.glutenfree.org, which has a number of bread recipes for those who may be on a special diet, free of gluten.

Ladies’ Home Journal also has a large database of yeast bread recipes that you may be able to use without a bread machine. You can checkout www.eatingwell.com for ideas to compliment your bread and complete meal ideas.

To read more Finding Recipe Sites With Yeast Bread Recipes

Basic Ingredients For A Pasta Salad

Pasta salads aren't just vegetarian recipes, even if they lend themselves beautifully to vegetarianism. In actual fact, there's something of a formula for making a pasta salad, and the great thing is that when you come to the "protein" category, you are just as free to add beans and cheese as you are to add cold ham or slicked chicken.

You really just need to remember this formula, and you can almost do without consulting formal recipes at all.

The website www.allrecipes.com/HowTo/Five-Steps-to-Perfect-Pasta-Salad/Detail.aspx has a feature called "Five Steps to Perfect Pasta Salad" that starts, of course, with bite-sized pastas themselves.

The next step includes key ingredients, such as slightly cooked or raw vegetables, some protein like seafood or sliced cooked chicken, or perhaps canned beans and crumbled mild cheeses. She suggests one major flavor supported by two others.

Her third step is "Intense flavors," which involves things like peppers, onions or stronger cheeses. Step four is onions and herbs, and then you would want a creamy or vinaigrette type of dressing.

There are all sorts of good, even responsible reasons to create your own pasta salad. You might not have any other ideas for using the last couple of carrots in your fridge, or perhaps you want to finish off that feta cheese before it goes bad.

Making a salad like this isn't just quick and easy, but can help you make good use of all the food you buy. You can make sure you're not wasting any food, and improvise a healthy meal at the same time.

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Changing Of The Seasons Influencing Italian Pasta Recipes

Like many other types of food, Italian pasta recipes tend to change their nature and composition with the changing of the seasons. You may want the heavier, meatier dishes like spaghetti and meatballs or the thick, meaty, cheesy layers of lasagna during the dead of winter.

But as spring progresses into summer, you may find yourself leaving the meat recipes on the shelf and favoring something lighter, with spring vegetables as the main elements. These pasta dishes can accommodate any season and any mood.

Sometimes all you need in spring and early summer is not so much a bunch of Italian pasta recipes, but just a few herbs and perhaps some feta cheese and kalamata olives with olive oil, or tomatoes with basil and Parmesan cheese.

The pasta itself is almost like a blank canvas upon which you add your own artistic details in the sauces and vegetables you include. But there's no doubt that if you're in the mood for something light, herbs add springtime appeal to pasta dishes.

Italian pasta recipes can please almost any palate and provide meals adapted to virtually any time of year. These dishes can be vegetarian or even vegan, since you can do a lot with herbs and don't always need cheese.

Or the pasta can serve as a bed for delicious, thick meat sauces. It's true that Italian food makes serious use of tomatoes, but even if you can't eat tomatoes, you can also find many Italian recipes with creamy sauces that have not a tomato in sight.

Italian cuisine has a way of pleasing and providing for almost everybody.

To read more Changing Of The Seasons Influencing Italian Pasta Recipes

Educating Your Family About Children Food Allergy

"We still like to sit here and watch him eat," said the Ringstroms. Skin and blood tests showed that six-month-old Blake was severely allergic to just about all foods, save for pork and white navy beans.

After a visit to the Mayo Clinic, their son Blake had a tube implanted in his stomach because he had such horrible food allergy symptoms. "We just changed our mindset," mother Becky recalls.

"We felt like this is helping him... this is his food. Some people eat with a fork, but for him... he eats with his tube." Once Blake was at school, his parents began seeing how much his children food allergy affected him as he watched other kids eat. The Ringstroms decided to look for another approach.

More often than not, a suspected children food allergy turns out to be a false alarm of some sort. "The fear of possible reaction markedly reduces the quality of life amongst peanut-allergic patients and their families," stated Dr. Adnan Custovic, MD, PhD of the University of Manchester.

"However, avoiding peanuts only makes sense if child is really allergic." In a recent study of 79 children who tested positive in blood allergy tests, Dr. Custovic found that just 13 developed allergic symptoms at all and only 7 actually had peanut allergies.

Researchers concluded that misdiagnosis was very possible for 7.4% of those tested by blood or skin prick tests and that the only way to really tell for sure was with a Food Challenge study.

Four-week-old Grayson Grebe had such bad eczema on his cheeks that his doctor suspected he was experiencing a severe children food allergy. At six months, he was diagnosed with child food allergies to wheat, eggs, nuts, oats, rice, barley, dairy, chicken, pork, corn and beans.

By 10 months, fruits and vegetables had been ruled out and he was resigned to a life of living off special formula.

Unable to accept this prognosis, the Grebes took Grayson to the National Jewish Health Hospital in Denver, Colorado, where doctors were able to add twelve foods to his diet after Food Challenge testing. "It's made so much difference in our lives," says Amy Grebe.

To read more Educating Your Family About Children Food Allergy