Material Monster

One of the main components of Barbecuing is the grill itself. Barbecuing is a cooking method that many people have learned to love because of its unique way of transforming meats, poultry, seafood and even vegetables into one heavenly dish. What’s more interesting is the fact that there are different ways to grill food. Actually, the difference lies in the ‘hardware’ used - charcoal, gas and electric grills.

These types of barbecue grills have divided barbecue lovers all over. Indeed, there are several factors to consider when choosing which is the right grill for you. But one primary factor we will focus on right now is their effect on taste.

Charcoal grilling, which includes using wood, may affect the taste of your barbecue in two ways. First, charcoal grills cook with more intense heat, thus affecting the cooking time. Second, when using wood to cook, the flavor it emits directly affects the barbecue’s taste the same way a seasoning does. This is precisely the reason why wood should first be burnt down until it’s reduced to coal before actually using it to cook food. You see, the meat may absorb certain resins and impurities, making the end product bitter and unpleasant. In addition, try experimenting on different types of woods as well as different wood combinations for different meats. Popular choices among pit masters include hickory, red oak, cherry, and pecan.

Gas grills, on the other hand, do not contribute anything in terms of flavor, that’s why they may result in barbecues with a slightly diminished flavor. Gas grills can however, create the same flavor effect as charcoal grills with the addition of lava rocks, ceramic briquets or metal heat plates or bars. The main advantage of a gas grills is that you can control the heat with a twist of a knob and you can expect to have properly cooked food. One of the downsides of the gas grill is the fact that you have to periodically refill the propane tank.

Electric Grills are the easiest of all Outdoor Grills to use, electric grills let you plug it in and start Grilling. But beware, what you gain in convenience you may lose in flavor. It is safer to use, because it does not need open flames or the flammable liquids, and it is convenient. The electric grills may also cook food a little more evenly because you can control the temperature easier. Another big bonus with the electric grills is they are easy to clean because they cool quickly and the cooking grid is typically dishwasher safe.

But hey, don’t stress yourself out thinking about which grill to choose for optimum barbecue taste. After all, having the right hardware is just half the battle. The other half lies in having the right ingredients, that is, the meat, a good rub and some gourmet BBQ sauce.

Chris McCarthy is the owner of InsaneChicken’s Hot Sauce and BBQ Sauce Catalog. Visit http://www.InsaneChicken.com and check out their wide variety of marinades, rubs, bbq sauces, and the world’s hottest hot sauces.

You are about to embark on the most exciting enterprise of your life — publishing a cook book! You will soon learn that writing a cook book is truly a fun, exciting and challenging project - more than you can imagine. Like me, you can publish your own wildly successful cook book. And if you ask me if I think publishing a cook book is worth the time and effort? You bet I do!

My cook book, Fit to Cook - Why ‘Waist’ Time in the Kitchen? sold over 250,000 copies (with, I might add, less than 10% of those sales coming from book stores). However, I wasted a great deal of time, back-tracking and scrambling in order to sell all those books because in the beginning I did not have a complete grasp of the publishing industry and the process of marketing a cook book.

Before you rack your brain figuring out how to write a cook book, and more importantly, how to publish a cook book, take some time to thoroughly research the why and what you are writing about, who you are writing for and when is the best time to launch your book.

Whether you want to get published or whether you want to self publish your cook book, the same basics apply - you need a good understanding of the publishing industry. Without the basics, will you know if your contracts are in order, that your book is the best it can be and that your cook book marketing plan is actually an effective strategy? No - but, knowledge is power. It is crucial that you take enough time to educate yourself about the entire publishing industry.

Understanding publishing, and the marketing of books, will clearly help you to identify why you are writing a cook book. Perhaps you are writing a cook book just to record secret family recipes or to have all of your own favorite recipes in a book format; maybe you are writing a cook book for a community or church fundraiser; or best of all, your goal is to create a bestseller. Cook books that are written for a very small group do not require business and marketing plans because you already know how many books will be purchased and who the buyers are. However, if you are planning to publish your own cook book for the mass markets, you need to understand that you have moved beyond author to publisher. That means that you are now a business person whose primary goal is the creation of a product to sell. There is no point in printing a book that no one will want to buy.

When I began writing my own cook book, I naively thought that it would be a two or three month process, and that in no time I would have a book on every book store shelf in the country. Ha, ha, ha, chuckle chuckle… Experience is a great educator, but who says that you have to learn the hard way? Obviously I had no idea how to publish a cook book in the beginning! However, through this article and via the publishing course that I and my partners have created, I intend to help you avoid losing time and money.

How did I create such a successful cook book? The short answer is research, research, research, and then more research. Thankfully I had the wisdom to do the research before going to print. But research can, and did, take years.

In my experience, after I learned how to write a cook book I had to learn all about cook book publishing:

copyright

trademarks

ISBN numbers

cataloging in publication data

printing terms like cover stock, bindings, signatures and bluelines

learning how to obtain printing quotes, (crucial in knowing how many books you can afford to print)

barcodes

graphic design (makes the difference between great sales and no sales)

editing (cannot, and I mean cannot, be done by yourself, friends or family)

titles and subtitles (they can make or break a book)

title search (avoid duplicating someone else’s title)

distribution

Next, I had to learn about how to start a business:

business plan

incorporation

toll free numbers

corporate logos and identity

websites

shipping arrangements

accounting principles

Most importantly I had to become wise about marketing:

writing a plan

researching competition

understanding target markets

going through the difficult but crucial process of choosing a book title

discovering the importance of a book’s cover - both the front cover and the back cover - and how to design the cover

looking outside book stores for buyers

learning the importance of publicity

discovering the essential need for a stellar media kit and how to create one

approaching the media and the importance of a good publicist

I learned, and I will share with you, a key point to consider when you are discovering how to write a cook book. Before you even begin to write your cook book, you must identify your target market. Who will actually buy your cook book? It is amazing that so many authors think that “everyone” will want their book, but that is not so. Not “everyone” is a target for anything! - not even the Bible.

Know who will actually buy your book. Interviewing the owners of cook book stores and specialty cooking stores can help you to identify cook book trends so that you know what people are actually buying. It is also a good idea to think of corporations and organizations that might benefit by using your book as a promotional item. Approach them even before you go to print, offering them special discounts, opportunities to place their information in a special printing of the book, advertising chances to offer your cook book as a “freebie” with the purchase of their product - just to name a few cook book marketing ideas.

If your cook book is targeted to busy families, the recipes must be easy to prepare in a short time period; if it is targeted to gourmet cooks, the recipes must be of the quality that you would expect to find in a four or five star restaurant; if it is targeted to a specific ethnic group, the recipes must be authentic; but if it is targeted to the mass market, your cook book must have a very wide scope with recipes that make any mouth water, and the ingredients must be readily available in grocery stores.

Once you have identified who will buy your book, you can target your marketing plan and your book design with your customers in mind, such as:

Where do they shop?

Where do they play?

What style of book appeals to them? - (research your competition closely).

What price are they willing to pay?

How many pictures do they want in a cook book? (a lack of photos can kill book sales)

What colors attract them? (spend time in book stores and libraries, learning which books have the most appealing appearance)

What size of book is currently popular?

What type of book binding increases sales?

Are they concerned about health or other issues?

Do they appreciate little stories, jokes, cooking tips or other information in the book?

Sometimes I took two steps forward then had to take one step back, but at other times I took one step forward and two back. Don’t waste time the way that I did - use my experiences to your advantage. Once you have a grasp of the basics, you can actually begin to put your cook book publishing and marketing plans into action.

Of course, a cook book has special challenges that other books may not have. Your primary goal is to give people unique, delicious recipes that they can create successfully in their own homes. That means that you have to measure exactly and your instructions must be clear and simple. You will have to test each recipe over and over until it turns out perfectly every time, then you will have to enlist other people to prepare those recipes independently of you. No matter what their comments, you must take the critiques of your testers seriously because if they do not achieve great results the chances are very good that your customers will be unhappy with their “flops”. Finally, it is a good idea to have the recipes tested by a professional home economist or other food expert.

Depending on the focus of your cook book, you might want to include nutrition information such as calories and fat content. Fortunately, there is now computer software that will do the calculations for you. You must also provide an index at the back of the book, and thankfully, software is available for this chore also.

Food photography is a special challenge of its own, requiring many tricks to make good look appealing. A good food photographer is a vital part of your cook book publishing team. Great attention must be paid to every minute detail, down to the grains of pepper in a dish and to the bubbles on top of a cup of coffee. Each photograph can require four hours of shooting time, if not more, so plan adequate time for the photo shoot.

The services of a food stylist are very helpful, but with research you can do a great deal of the food styling yourself. Find as many books as you can on the subject and practice in advance of the photo shoot. I learned simple tricks like:

sticking sandpaper to the plate to prevent food from slipping

using whipped icing or shaving cream in place of ice cream or whipped cream

placing a shot glass under a very thickly cut slice of lemon to prevent the lemon from absorbing the liquid underneath

using beef bouillon in place of “coffee”

using dish detergent to create bubbles in the “coffee”

using a blow torch to make meat appear cooked

and the list goes on…

Food styling is such fun, but it requires a great deal of time, even in advance of the photo shoot. You will need all of your “props” in place, such as dishes, cutlery, flowers, table linens, food items and backgrounds. Many companies will happily lend these items to you in exchange for a credit in the book - this can appear on the Cataloging in Publication data page at the beginning of your book.

When your book is ready to go to print, it is time to put your cook book marketing and publicity campaign into gear:

Decide on the best time of year to launch your book. September is usually the best month for Christmas sales, but you also face steep competition. Try to think of a time that is appropriate for your book, such as January for a healthy eating book, late Spring for a barbecue book, Valentine’s Day for a romantic book, Heart and Stroke month for a heart-healthy book, etc.

Produce galley copies.

Send galleys to appropriate book clubs (look at their websites to learn their submission requirements).

Research appropriate catalogs and send galleys to them.

Have your publicist approach magazines that review cook books (magazines have long lead times).

Stay in contact with any corporations and organizations that might use your book for promotions.

Find a reputable distributor to have your book accepted by the book store trade, as well as other retailers.

Contact non-book store book sellers.

When your book is ready to roll off the press, get your publicity campaign into high gear. You can have the best book in the world, but if no one knows about it, no one will buy it. The easy part is over - publicity and marketing now become your life. This part is the most fun, as you now reap the rewards of all of your efforts. Your goal now is to turn your cook book title into a household word. Go for it — publish your own cook book!

Ink Tree Ltd. helps authors publish, market and sell books. If you are considering publishing a cookbook, we will help you make it a success. http://www.inktreemarketing.com/PublishaCookbook.htm

1. Learn About You

If you don’t know who you are and why you think and act the way you do, it’s gonna be really difficult to make any positive changes in your life. Take a look first at your parents and close family members. Think about how they look and how they deal with life. This is the basis for who you are today. You’ve been instilled with the tendency to think as they think and act as they act. It’s just the way it is.

Now think about the big events in your life so far. The ones that stand out in your mind. The ones that made an impression - negative or positive - on you. These events have likely influenced how you think and act today. Oh sure, we can add in every little thing that you’ve ever seen, heard, felt, smelled or touched because “everything” has had some effect on you - on how you think and deal with life. But it’s the “biggies” that usually have the most impact.

You can write some of this down if you want to. Make a list of things you like or don’t like. Things you enjoy doing. Things that make you happy or sad. But you don’t need to if you’d rather not. Just thinking about this is a major step in the right direction. Just get to know you. It’s important.

2. Learn About Others

You already know now why you are you. Think about why other people think and act as they do. It should be fairly simple because they’re who and what they are for the same reasons you are who you are. They’ve just had a different family and life experiences. Therefore, they’ll all act at least somewhat differently - and think differently - than you. Why spend the time learning about others? Well because - the more you learn about why other folks think and act as they do, the more you’ll learn about yourself. And that’s still important.

3. Practice Thinking Differently

If you continue to think the same way as you do right now, nothing can change. Everything we do is based on how we think - about ourselves, about others and about life. If you think life is pretty crappy, well sure enough, it’ll be pretty crappy. If you think life is generally OK, sure enough, it’ll be generally OK. If you think you’re a loser, you are. If you think you have a lot to offer your friends, family and this world, you do. We think our way to our destiny. What’s your destiny?

4. Pour a Solid Foundation

You can’t build much of anything without a strong foundation structure. Roads, buildings, bridges, cars, life - all require a firm foundation to last and withstand the eroding elements of nature. If you haven’t already, you might consider looking into using a spiritually-based concrete for your foundation. (No, I didn’t say religious but if that’s your preference, use it.) Strong values and principles can provide reinforcement. If you’ll continue to work to add strength to your under-footing as you go through life, you’ll have all the support you’ll ever need.

5. Build a New Life

Use whatever references you think you need to start - and continue - your building process. There are plenty of organizations, schools and references of all types available to help you on your way. Find the experts and listen to their stories and advice. Identify a mentor, coach or a close friend who can give you lots of support and encouragement. And be sure to DO SOMETHING! ACT! All the information and knowledge is worthless unless you put it to work for you. Decide what you would like your destiny to be. Then just go for it!

Gene, through NuPathz.com, provides an easy reading self-help blog, articles and links along with affordable books and materials written to help folks find the road to a more enjoyable lifestyle, to pass on some of life’s “secrets for survival” in a chaotic world & offer a few smiles along the way. It’s a down-to-earth, simple approach to discovering a better life. You can visit Gene at http://www.nupathz.com/

gene@nupathz.com

Have you ever come across what appear to be white flakes floating in your bottle of wine? Did you assume that this snow-globe appearance somehow meant the wine was flawed or ruined?

What you had most likely seen are tartaric crystals, commonly referred to as “wine diamonds” or Weinstein (”wine stone”) in German speaking countries. So do these wine diamonds signal a bad bottle of wine?

Opinions about this issue are divided and the reason is simple: you have bought flawless wine, but you have not bought aesthetically flawless wine. Depending upon where you are from, this can matter to you more or less.

The American wine drinker is not used to finding wine diamonds in their bottles. Here, most wines undergo a cold stabilization process, which is when a wine is cooled down before it is bottled so that the white flakes, called crystallized tartaric acid, “fall out” and can be separated from the wine. But what price beauty? Cold stabilization influences a wine’s balance and taste: as some winemakers put it, the wine is actually being ripped apart, and the rapid cooling changes the wine’s colloidal structure. One might call it a clear case of style over substance.

There is another interesting correlation between wine stones and the quality of a wine: the longer the grapes hang on the vine (familiarly called “hang time”), the more wine acid will accumulate in the grape, and it is this wine acid which is the building block of wine diamonds. Furthermore, the more time the wine is given to ferment, the less wine diamonds will fall out during fermentation, but the more they will instead build up later in the bottle.

In other words, wine diamonds are an indicator that the grapes ripened for a long time, and that the winemaker fermented the wine slowly and with great care. Both are important precursors to crafting high quality wines.

Hans Gsellmann, head winemaker of the famous Gsellmann & Gsellmann winery in Austria, explains it this way: “Part of the grapes acid are tartrates, aka salt. As the wine ripens these tartaric acid crystals fall out. It’s a natural process a wine will go through on its path to the peak of its development. When you see these flakes at the bottom of the bottle or on the cork, you can be almost certain that you are opening the wine at the right time. You should consider yourself lucky.”

Wine aficionados in the Old World are known to seek out the bottles with wine stones as a sign of quality: it shows that the wine has not been robbed of its structure through unnatural chilling, and it is a sign of a well-matured wine. Perhaps it is due to the longer history of winemaking in these countries that people have become accustomed to wine stones and seem to accept them. At least they seem to know that, if anything, the wine diamonds will have added roundness to the wine by subtracting some of the acid from it.

There is new technology coming out of France that promises to circumvent the entire colloidal issue: electrodialysis. But until every noteworthy winery has bought one of these fancy French machines (and that will certainly be a few decades) this rule of thumb applies: cold stabilization is like tossing out the baby with the bathwater. Perhaps you are left with an aesthetically flawless wine, but you are also left with a lesser wine.

Stephan Schindler is a wine importer living in Los Angeles. You can read more of his wine writing, and find the great wines that he imports and sells direct to consumers, at http://www.winemonger.com.

A po-boy consists of a piece of French bread. Typically the French bread is cut in half. On the bottom half is usually placed the main ingredient of the sandwich, usually items such as fried seafood, roast beef, or hot sausage just to name a few. On the top half is where the items which make up the term “dressed” are usually placed, i.e. tomatoes, pickles, mayonnaise and lettuce. The two halves are put together to make what is known as a po-boy.

Now, you ask, “What makes a good po-boy stand out above the rest? The first key ingredient is the bread.

French bread comes in all shapes and sizes. Typically it is presented in a straight loaf. The loaf is then cut into smaller sections to make the piece of bread the sandwich is to be made on. The hardness of the bread is an important factor when determining the best po-boy. The bread should be crispy when bitten into, but not so crunchy as to remind you of chewing rocks, however the bread should not be so soft that you have to tear a piece of it off in order to get it separated from the sandwich.

Another key ingredient is the meat of the sandwich. The two most popular po-boys found in the city are roast beef and fried shrimp. The roast beef should be tender and dripping with brown gravy. When it comes to the roast beef, the sloppier the sandwich the better. The shrimp should be fried to a golden brown and the amount should be enough to fall off the sandwich as you are eating it. The dressing should be according to your tastes. If using mayonnaise, I suggest enough on the bread to coat the bread and then a little extra. I also recommend fresh crisp shredded lettuce, ripe tomatoes, and crispy fresh pickles. Other items typically placed on the bread are butter, hot sauce, and even tartar sauce to replace mayonnaise. I also recommend trying dipping the sandwich in ketchup and accompanying this sandwich with a side of French fries.

So next time you’re in the south take a look around and find a po-boy shop that claims it has the best po-boys in the south. Give it a try, keeping in mind what I stated above, and rate the shop yourself. Ask yourself, “Is the roast beef sloppy? Is the fried shrimp fried to a golden brown? Was the sandwich dressed the way I wanted it?” Then when people ask who has the best po-boy in the south you can assuredly say you have the right answer.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to Food