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Issue 3 - January : Food & Relaxation |
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This January, we at Gourmet Shopper are celebrating the addition of new merchants to the site including Gwydir Grove Olive Oil, Anna's Cuisine and The Cookery Book. We will also be featuring over 500 tested and loved recipes that can help you expand your repertoire of dishes so even if it is too hot to cook this month and next you will have enough ideas to set you up for the rest of the year.
Summer - Food & Relaxation
All of us at the Gourmet Shopper hope that you had a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones and your New Year celebrations involved plenty of champagne and plenty of resolutions some of which we hope you keep!
Now that we have launched into 2002 with the warmth of January and February, we should all give thanks for the plethora of fresh fruits and vegetables that are available at this time of year. No one wants to be spending time over a hot stove so salads, barbecues, cold cuts, and grilled meats and fish are the foods of choice.
This Summer, we at Gourmet Shopper are celebrating the addition of new merchants to the site including Gwydir Grove Olive Oil, Anna's Cuisine and The Cookery Book. We will also be featuring over 500 tested and loved recipes that can help you expand your repertoire of dishes so even if it is too hot to cook you will have enough ideas to set you up for the rest of the year.
Anyway many of us take our holidays during summer, so we want to relax and enjoy the beach or the bush and we want to make our cooking lives easier. During the summer nothing could be better than fresh salads with great dressings or marinated fish or meat placed on a hot grill or barbecue and lightly cooked. Having just come back from Vietnam (I'll bore you to death next month when I cover some of the marvellous foods of that country) I was entranced by their use of banana leaves for wrapping fish before it goes on the grill, using the flowers in salads and the threading of marinated chicken on sugar cane skewers. Now I realise that not all these ingredients are easily available but certainly many of us have a banana tree but how many of us think of using the leaves instead of foil? Or using lime or lemon leaves when preparing a marinade or as a flavouring for salad dressings.
I especially love the fruits we get in summer. Obviously from my last column this includes mangoes, but summer is also the height of the berry season and the stone fruit are at their best - peaches, apricots, plums and nectarines. Cherries are still around and melons are lush with flavour.
I always think it is a shame to do anything with such marvellous fruits but must admit that a bowl of barely poached peaches with fresh raspberries chilled and eaten is one of the joys of summer. I intend to make a lot of summer puddings because my family demands this as part of their inheritance and cherry or peach clafoutis (a batter type topping to the fresh fruits) makes an easy dessert.
And what has happened to the iced fruit soups that were so popular decades ago and which have disappeared from menus everywhere? If you subscribe to the theory that everything comes back into vogue you may very well find yourself restarting a trend for this wonderful start to a summer meal.
Enjoy the tastes of summer and fulfill one of your new year's resolutions not to stress out. Make your summer easy and laid back time - a time of relaxation and recuperation and a time to recharge the batteries.
See you next in March
The Happy Gourmet
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