Christmas Recipes - Jube Jube Marshmallow Popcorn Balls

This is a very easy, delicious popcorn ball treat that my family just loved each Christmas. It is easy to prepare like rice crispie squares.

Ingredients

3 qts or 12c of popped pop corn
1/4c butter
1 (10 oz)bag of marshmallows
1 small bag of baking jube jubes (optional)


Method:

1. Pre - butter muffin tins or cookie sheets to put the popcorn balls on
2. Pop popcorn and put into a large bowl or roasting pan and set aside. Mix in small baking jube jubes with the popcorn or add them after with the marshmallow mixture which ever way you prefer.
3. In a heavy pot melt butter and marshmallows at a low heat and stir constantly so it doesn't burn.
4. When all marshmallows are melted pour the mixture onto the popcorn and jube jubes until they are well coated.
5.Grease your hands with some butter first then grab some popcorn ball mixture and shape it into a ball. I would let my children help me do this step. Put the popcorn balls into a muffin tin or on a cookie sheet and continue until you use up all the popcorn mixture.
6. Put them into the fridge to harden quicker and then you can put them into a container and keep them in the fridge to hold their shape. You can keep them on a plate but they soften. They are great gifts to give as well.

Optional: You can use food colour and food flavours instead of jube jubes if you wish but mix the food colour and food flavour in the pot when you finished melting the marshmallows. If you can't find any baking jube jubes you can buy the regular jube jubes and cut them into smaller pieces as this works as well.

These are a delicious treat and they never lasted long in my home.

The Sweet Summer Treat That Banishes the Bulge

By Chris McCombs

This is my favorite time of the year. The summer fruits start hitting the supermarkets and produce stands. Every cooking magazine is chocked full of simple and delicious recipes with fruit as the main ingredient. Fruit is a powerful food when it comes to health, happiness and weight loss.

Truth be told, you don't really have to do much to summer fruits to make them taste amazing, you just merely wait until they're ripe and dive right in.

When I was a kid, my mom used to buy a big basket of strawberries and cut them up, put them in a bowl, and sprinkle sugar on top. She would put them in the fridge and wait a few hours until they mixed with the sugar to make a syrupy sweet mess at the bottom of that bowl. I used to love that. But these days, I don't want to ruin berries, or any fruit for that matter, with silly sugar. Let the delicious summer fruits subtly seduce you on their own. Taste the sweetness only nature can produce.

Luckily, new trends in weight loss are now showing that perhaps we don't need to steer clear of the calories in fruit, but instead load up on mostly fruits that contain more water in a larger package. Watermelon is the perfect example. It is a huge fruit, can take up a lot of room on your picnic plate, tastes amazing and is mostly water.

Which means, you can eat a bunch of watermelon, feel full and eat fewer of the high calorie foods you would have eaten instead (i.e. evil culprits like mayonnaise-laden potato salad or an extra hot dog). This little trick can help you fell fuller longer and might even eliminate those cravings for the brownies or ice-cream that can be typically served at summer get-togethers.

Other great fruits to consider are raspberries, grapefruit, melons, peaches, and pineapple (and to me these are the all-stars). These fruits are full of a soluble fiber called pectin (which is also sometimes contained in fruit-like gummy candies and jelly beans) which can cling to fats in the digestive tract and flush them out before they can be absorbed by the body. Don't go crazy though, this is merely meant as an aid in slimming down, not an excuse to eat more.

Another great tip and one that is dear to the green movement, is to try to buy and eat local produce whenever possible. It supports your own community, and because it doesn't need to travel as far, it doesn't require as much gas to be consumed and in turn can even be slightly less expensive these days. In addition, because it travels a shorter distance to the consumer can actually be picked and sold when it is ripe. Vine-ripened fruit is shown to contain twice as much of something than that of green-picked fruit- super-oxidants known as nonfluorescent chlorophyll catabolites (boy is that a mouthful!). These fabulous NCCs (can we call them that?) assist the liver's ability to burn fat. Hoorah!

It does make sense that the longer something is in the soil and absorbing the sun, the more nutrients it contains...

I have to say, this is the some of the best news I have heard all week. So go out and buy some ripe and local sweet fruit and have a fun weekend. You may just be a delicious baby-step leaner.

Owner of Positively Fit Personal Training, Chris McCombs runs a program called Personal Trainer Long Beach that specializes in helping people lose fat fast. To discover more about this program go to http://www.socalworkout.com/

Article Source: http://www.artipot.com

Six Ways To Break Into Food Writing

SIX WAYS TO BREAK INTO FOOD WRITING By Pamela White

These are the times that try writers' souls.

Publishers post guidelines for writers that require published clips to be sent with query letters. Writers cannot get published clips unless they've been published. The logic is just as perplexing when writers try to break into new niches. Food editors ask for food-related writing samples prior to assigning stories to new writers. Never fear, there are ways to conquer that old "Catch 22."

Here are six ways writers and chefs can break into food writing. Some are sneaky roundabout ways; others make use of editors' needs for new writers to pen essays and travel pieces. Combining food with another writing niche is yet a third way to acquire those valuable food writing clips.

One: Try a sneaky way to get a food writing clip. Look at your professional expertise. How does it connect with food? If you are an architect or you've worked with one to design a kitchen, use that to write an article for a handy man magazine. Include tips on how to lay out a kitchen so that food lovers or amateur chefs will be delighted with the results. Do you know a professional party planner or are you known for your gatherings? Write up a holiday event, including recipes, for your local newspaper or a regional magazine. Love the outdoors? Write about building a barbecue for a do it yourself magazine, or share tips on fileting fish for the weekend fisherman.

Two: Write a personal essay about food. It's not only professional food writers that are writing essays about food memories, favorite meals and picky eaters. Everyone has a tale to share about summer fruit, Fourth of July cookouts or first bites of TV dinners. Who is going to buy these essays? Read the food magazines. Saveur runs expressive essays on everything from bread soaked in milk to a first experience with a mango. "The Square Table," an online, non-paying market, accepts essays on dining. "Woman's Day" and "Family Circle" publish essays on food and its impact on family, life and relationships. "Parents," "Parenting" and "Child" publish advice regularly on getting picky eaters to try new foods.

Three: Report on your vacation. But instead of writing something as banal as "what I did on my summer vacation," write a travelogue, including short reviews of restaurant meals. Oh, you didn't travel to Provence last June? Write about traditions at your family reunion. Why not do a round up of five or six small barbecue joints in Kansas City? Stayed close to home? Write about the food at the water, amusement, or theme park – what was good, bad, or healthy. If you did travel abroad, I hope you took plenty of notes and photographs. Once you have your idea for a travel and food piece in mind, start looking for markets. Local newspapers in both the place you visited and where you live are possible markets. Frugal-themed newsletters and websites use articles on traveling and eating on the cheap. An article about how to dine well at amusement parks and fairs would interest readers of parenting and women's magazines.

Four: Teach a cooking class; take a cooking class. Write it up as a publicity piece for the cooking school. Alternatively, write up how to teach a cooking class as a home-based business for women's magazines or entrepreneur publications. Maybe you live in a city that has food events, like Taste of..., wine tastings, chili cook-offs, or baking competitions? Alternative newspapers, weekly newspapers and regional magazines are possible markets for articles on how to put on a baking, or cooking, contest, the best in local wines, or which restaurants offered the best bites at a large gathering.

Five: Combine food writing with another niche. Write about kitchen gardens, herbs grown in window boxes, winter gardens, starting seeds. Interview organic gardeners, local farmers, and who's selling at the farmer's market. Combine camping, RV's and fishing with recipes and quick snacks to pack that are easy to transport yet tasty. Think further – sports-minded magazines (don't forget dance and cheerleading publications) can use recipes that provide quick energy with minimal fuss. Health writers can write articles on diets that help chronic conditions: pain, yeast infections, migraines, arthritis.

Six: Pick a lesser known holiday and write it up for fun. St. Swithin's Day is an ongoing joke at our household. It falls on July 15, so we claim St. Swithin to be the patron saint of barbecue. You can pick an actual holiday -- something that isn't done to death -- or write about a special holiday your family has created.

These ideas are also starters for established food writers looking to expand into other markets. Pick one, or mix and match for your food writing success.

(c) Pamela White, 2006

Want to use this article in your ezine or on your website? Feel free as long as you include the following:

About the author: Pamela White publishes Food Writing, the free ezine for food writers from her website: www.food-writing.com She teaches food writing classes, and her book, Make Money as a Food Writer in Six Lessons, is available at Amazon.com .