Tag: Snails

Holiday Italian Food

Have you ever wanted to celebrate the holidays with Italian food? Maybe you want to try something different this year and love Italian food, or maybe you’ve been invited to spend the holidays with Italian friends or are fortunate enough to actually be spending the holidays in Italy. What Italian food is appropriate and traditional? Well, like many other cultures, Italians have certain food traditions for certain holidays.

The biggest tradition is with Christmas and it starts on Christmas Eve. The traditional Christmas Eve meal doesn’t include a lot of Italian food that foreigners may be familiar with. That’s because the Italians observe a type of symbolic fast which actually equates to more of a light dinner. This means that there will be no Italian food that includes the typical meats. Instead the Italian food will be centered more around seafood including fish, snails, and frogs. That may sound a little more French than Italian, but it’s a great time to experience some excellent traditional Italian food that is hard to find outside of Italy.

The next day on Christmas the food may be a little more familiar. The first course is a very well known Italian food, tortellini. This pasta dish filled with meat is more in keeping with what most people envision when thinking of Italian food. After the meal dessert consists of one of two types of cake, either panettone or pandoro. If you’re in Milan or spending the holidays with a family from Milan it will be panettone. This cake like bread takes days to make and is an Italian food that not many people know of, despite it being a symbol of Milan. The other traditional cake is pandoro, a sweet bread that is often made to look like a mountain complete with white sugar icing giving it a snowy finish. Christmas is a great time to taste the sweeter side of Italian food.

Easter Sunday is another holiday that brings families around the table. The holiday starts out with breakfast. Not too many people think of breakfast when thinking of Italian food, but Easter Sunday starts off with a feast of salami and boiled eggs with cakes and pizzas all washed down with fine wine. That night the Italian food of choice will be dishes that rely on lamb, avoiding other meats. The evening will be finished off with wine and cakes.

The last holiday that has importance to those who love Italian food is St. Joseph’s Day. This holiday is in commemoration of St. Joseph saving Sicily from famine. This holiday centers on a rather unknown Italian food, the fava bean. It was this bean that saved Sicily from starving. So, while this bean is not native to Italy, there are many Italian food dishes that are centered on it in celebration of St. Joseph’s Day. The day is spent giving food to the needy, eating doughnut like pastries and enjoying good Italian food.

Anytime is a good time for Italian food, but the holidays really make authentic Italian food shine as families get together to celebrate with traditional dishes. Try celebrating the holidays with Italian food and you’ll be introduced to a side of the cuisine that many don’t know exist.

4 Components of How to Become a Personal Chef

In learning how to become a personal chef, you have to realize that people require much more than the certificate ion order to hire you to cook for them personally. There are certain skills and attributes expected of you. Some of these skills can be acquired in the normal course of study at a culinary school, while others can be acquired through experience. Here are some of the skills that people expect you to acquire when you learn how to become a personal chef:

1) Hygiene Would you hire someone to cook your food if it you are not sure of their cleanliness? In learning how to become a personal chef, people expect you to have great hygiene. If you are applying for a position as a personal chef, you should not treat it as an application for just another job. You have to make sure that your appearance is not just presentable, but neat. You should expect people to observe your every move, looking for signs that you have poor hygiene and you should definitely make sure that they will not find any.

2) Taste Basically, a personal chef will share his or her taste of food with whoever employs him or her. In learning how to become a personal chef, people expect you to have acquired a taste for fine food. That is, future employers expect you to give them food which they will like.

Oh sure, some people think that eating escargot is the peak of fine dining, but would your employers really want you to prepare snails? In learning how to become a personal chef, you need to learn how to let go of your personal taste and how to expand it to include the preferences of other people. If you own a restaurant, then you can scoff at the person who wishes to have more salt. But if you work as a personal chef, then you have to realize that your livelihood depends on that person and you must make accommodations.

3) People skills Some people think that in order to become a personal chef, you need only to know how to cook well. However, you also need to learn how to interact with the people around you. In learning how to become a personal chef, you need to realize that you will not be working alone.

Personal chefs depend on their assistants to make sure that they create delicious dishes. Personal chefs need to be able to manage the kitchen staff with efficiency in order to make sure that people get their meals on time.

You need people skills most of all because you need to interact with your employer. You need to be able to tell what a person wants to eat. You need to excite them with the next dish you prepare. Not many people know that a huge part of taste is psychological. No matter how good you say your cooking is, if people don’t want it, then it is useless. Learning how to become a personal chef does not require you to develop telepathic powers, but you need to know what other people are thinking just the same.

4) Showmanship In learning how to become a personal chef, you should have acquired at least a bit of showmanship. Learning how to become a personal chef will show you that some dishes need a little bit of flourish in order for people to enjoy them.

Calcium Carbonate Not Just for your Health

CaCO3 or calcium carbonate in chemistry. Does it make sense to you?

Although you hear about this chemical compound before and see it as one of the ingredients in calcium supplements, there are still things that you need to know beyond the finished product. Read on and the rest of this article and learn more about this chemical compound.

Calcium carbonate, as mentioned earlier, is commonly used as a supplement. But there are also other uses of this chemical compound, which will be discussed in the later part of this article.

Aside from the aforementioned applications, calcium carbonate is also a natural ingredient of various elements. It is one of the active ingredients in agricultural lime, as well as a natural substance that can be found on rocks all over the world. Furthermore, it is also one of the major components of sea shells and the shells of the snails. Even the shells of the chickens egg contain an estimated 95 percent of calcium carbonate.

Calcium carbonate that is used in the industry is sourced out from minerals or rocks such as calcite, limestone, chalk, and marble by means of quarrying or mining. Pure calcium carbonate which is used in processing foods or pharmaceutical applications is generated from a pure source, normally from marbles, and prepared by adding another chemical compound which is the carbon dioxide into the calcium hydroxide solution where the calcium carbonate precipitates out of the chemical reaction.

As mentioned earlier, calcium carbonate is used on various applications. These are as follows:

It is mainly used in the construction application, whether as a building material (marble for instance) or limestone aggregate for road building purposes. It is also an active ingredient of the builders lime together with the cementor.

It also used as an extender in commercial paints, particularly in emulsion paints where thirty percent of the paints net weight is either marble or chalk.

It is also used as a filler in plastics.

Calcium carbonate that is in the form of fine ground is important ingredients in the microporous film used in baby nappies.

It is also used on adhesive applications, particularly in ceramic tile adhesives where it contains seventy to eighty percent limestone.

It is mainly employed as whiting elements in ceramics application.

It is the main component of the blackboard chalk.

It is now used as an alternative to kaolin with regards to glossy paper production.

It is not just for your healthit also serves other purposes as well. So do not be surprised if the chalk that you are using in your classroom has the same main content as of the supplement that you are taking everyday.