CookingDiva

From The Valle Escondido Resort Newsletter & Blog:

We are very proud and most fortunate to have a renowned new executive Chef for our restaurants, Melissa De Leon. As most of you know, we have been working the past year on improving the food and beverage operation of our resort as we believe this to be one of the most important part of a successful resort business. Last year we made significant improvements in our decor and menu, and now, we take it up a notch, a really big notch! Read the Complete Post...

Now you know what I have been doing! Will post photos soon... Have a delicious week, Melissa

Award winning Colombian Chef Patricia McCauslad is the creator of Pachi The Colombian Cook. We invite you to head over to her blog and learn about her adventures all over the globe. Now, from her new cookbook "Passion for Coffee" we are sharing this delicious recipe:

Asian Vinaigrette 2/3 cup, 4 servings My favorite of all! Just try it . . . Keep this dressing on hand at home or at the office. Mix with some greens and vegetables and voilà—a midday energy booster! 2 tablespoons minced parsley 4 teaspoons rice vinegar 4 teaspoons maple syrup 1 teaspoon freeze-dried or granulated instant coffee 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1/4 teaspoon dark sesame oil 6 tablespoons canola oil In a nonreactive bowl, stir together the parsley, vinegar, maple syrup, coffee, salt, and pepper. Add the oils and whisk with a fork until thick and emulsified.

To get the perfect consistency and flavor, use butter. No doubt It makes the best liver pate. The basic recipe to prepare duck or chicken pate is to brown the livers in butter, deglaze with brandy, dry white wine or stock add seasonings and stir until the liquid is mostly gone. Then toss in the food processor with softened butter and season with salt. For a variation, process with sauteed onions and mushrooms. This one keeps refrigerated 3-5 days, and the plane version lasts well covered and refrigerated for 5-8 days. Serving suggestion: For a quick meal or snack, serve on toast or prepare a sandwich with melted Swiss or Mozzarella cheese. The most important, the nutrition part:

So what makes liver so wonderful? Quite simply, it contains more nutrients, gram for gram, than any other food. In summary, liver provides: An excellent source of high-quality protein Nature’s most concentrated source of vitamin A All the B vitamins in abundance, particularly vitamin B12 One of our best sources of folic acid A highly usable form of iron Trace elements such as copper, zinc and chromium; liver is our best source of copper An unidentified anti-fatigue factor CoQ10, a nutrient that is especially important for cardio-vascular function A good source of purines, nitrogen-containing compounds that serve as precursors for DNA and RNA. ...From The Weston A. Price Foundation files

For more information visit: The Liver Files: Recipes and Lore About Our Most Important Sacred Food

Thank you Karina Arrue and The Green Magazine for featuring The Cooking Diva this month!

Food blogging is a thriving enterprise these days; with over 48,000 blogs in theu.s. dedicated solely to culinary pursuits, these palatable web diaries are changing the way we relate to food. From popular blogs like Chocolate and Zucchini to Gluten-free Girl and Smitten Kitchen, there is bound to be a self-proclaimed foodie on the net, armed with the recipe needed to satisfy your precise hankering—say for an artichoke and goat cheese mille-feuille—at any given moment. Their growing number leads me to believe that a small culinary miracle occurred when I stumbled upon the Cooking Diva a couple of months ago. I was looking for a recipe for carimañolas, a yucca fritter made in my father’s homeland, when I first came across Chef Melissa De Leon’s charming blog, and I have been a regular visitor since. The 30-something Panama native drew me in with her knowledge of Latin American cuisine, which is a rarity on the Internet—especially in English—despite the food blog boom. While her perspective on cooking is exceedingly cosmopolitan, no doubt a product of many years of living and traveling abroad, her voice is refreshingly warm and lacking the pretension often found in elevated culinary circles.

Open the PDF file with the complete article...Download MarApr08_DailyBREAD.pdf

The day was perfect and the company fantastic! We (The Nokia Food Bloggers) went on a tour of the Borough Market in London. The charming Celia Brooks Brown was our guide. To give you an idea of what we experienced, next follows an excerpt from Celia's website:

...Hear the extraordinary history of this ancient market and share an insider's view. We start the day with elevenses / brunch at the glorious ROAST restaurant perched above the market, then follow with lots of specially arranged tastings: scallops, rare breed meats, olive oils, Ceylon tea, exotic Mexican chillies, Italy's most prized Parmesan cheese, and many more, plus a chance to hear the stories behind the creation of these fabulous artisan foods. We'll sit down for a wine tasting at Bedale's accompanied by a spread of delicious French goodies, concluding with a tasting of simple tapas combinations at Brindisa Spanish Foods. Head over to her website to learn more about her gastrotours...

Now enjoy the photos, they were all taken with my new N95 8GB: