ORCAS ALCHEMY
{please visit Orcas Alchemy here}
Miss Lindsey seeks gratitude every day and believes life is a celebration. She blogs about creative, inspiring and beautiful finds at her blog, GreatFull Day.
Fantastic flavors can create a culinary experience that evokes conversation over the dinner table. Having learned this first hand through her own entertaining, Lisa Trifiro began experimenting with top of the line artisan sugars, salts, and spices to create the unique taste combinations she offers via Orcas Alchemy.
Using all natural, organic ingredients in your kitchen will take your dishes from ho hum to haute in no time. Exciting sugars flavored with the essence of lime, lemon, habanero, caramelized onion, clove, lavender and vanilla make baking possibilities endless. Salts graced with smoked serrano, vanilla bean, roasted garlic, thai ginger and spicy habanero can round out your collection. I’m drooling on my keyboard here thinking of all the options! And if you aren’t used to culinary experimentation, fear not–a detailed list of suggested culinary uses comes with every purchase. Livening up your kitchen has never been so chic and easy!
Orchas Alchemy is offering up two Artisan Salt Collections with Magnetic Spice Racks to one lucky Foodie (and their foodie friend). To liven up your meals answer the question below before Sunday, November 15, 2009.
What is the most unusual ingredient you’ve cooked with and how did you discover it?
Please begin checking the winner’s box on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 to see if you won. Good Luck!
I get a weekly box of organic produce delivered to my house, and sometimes there are unusual ingredients in there! My favorite has to be garlic shoots. They are like slightly garlicky green beans when cut up and stir-fried. LOVE THEM! (One thing I wasn’t as fond of was French radishes….)
In the 1930s, my grandfather brought back a bunch of rum from Cuba. He became diabetic not long after, so was never able to drink it.
I’m lucky that it was re-bottled in screw-cap bottles a few decades ago.
The stuff is thick, black, and smells like pipe tobacco and pirate! It is also ridiculously alcoholic, and must be sipped in tiny quantities. It’s good for two other things however…smokey, explosive bananas foster and rum cake with a buttery rum sauce (one that my grandmother perfected.)
Using it is like no other spirit I’ve cooked with.
It’d probably be tigerlilies. In Asian cultures, we use the buds in soups!
I make lotus root soup all the time, it’s a very popular Chinese soup!
Actually the most unusual ingredient I’ve ever cooked with is a salt. I went to one of the most highly acclaimed, but now defunct, restaurants in Atlanta and the chef “cooked” and served tissue thin slices of beef on a big chunk of Himalayan pink salt. I thought it was gorgeous and unusual and it had such an amazing flavor, that I went online and bought some that very night. That was several years ago and now I can’t imagine not using it, I even keep a small piece in my baa with a grater so I can season food with it when I am eating out!
I started to experiment with Agave Nectar as a substitute for sugar. I found this after my mom got sick with cancer and we wanted to eat healthier. It’s fun to experiment.
I guess the weirdest thing I’ve ever cooked with is agar-agar, a Japanese powder made from seaweed which is used as a gelling agent to make Japanese desserts. The only problem with agar agar is that you have to measure the right proportion: if you put too much agar agar, your dessert will be as hard as a stone, if you don’t put enough, it will stay liquid. Anyway, the only time I used it, my dessert wouldn’t solidify and stay liquid, so it was not really a success! I’ve been to a Japanese cooking lesson since and I know the exact right proportion to put in order to have a wonderful dessert, yeah! I hope I’ll get it right next time I try, without the cooking teacher next to me.
My most unusual ingredient is a curry powder made by my father. He was given the recipe years and years (and years) ago by an old Indian woman that he worked with. It is truly the most fragrant food item that I have ever come across – in restaurants, in local Indian sections of town, in food markets, anyway. As a child, I would spend ages just smelling the curry powder and in later years, it became the secret ingredient in my “world famous” butternut soup. In addition to more staple curry ingredients like turmeric and coriander, the curry powder contained unusual spices like cardamon and allspice. UNFORTUNATELY this recipe was a “casualty” of my parents’ divorce and so is lost to the family. It’s a culinary tragedy, believe me.
While in Hawaii I purchased some sour plum powder which is very very sour but strangely delicious over pineapple. Always reminds me of my trip.
It is a toss up between Kaffir Lime leaves which add that secret touch to any Thai dish…or squid ink that I used to color home made pasta. Once my kids and I made the ink pasta we decided to try adding color with all kinds of fun vegetables and spices! If I can cook something that creates a curiosity for cooking in my children, then I have done something right (even better if they actually EAT it!!!!)
huh, I don’t cook much…. maybe corriander (sp?)
You mean I have to choose just one? My husband has introduced me to all sorts of interesting ingredients. Our spice collection tops 100, and I discover new and fascinating spices all the time. The latest discovery is Javanese long-tailed peppercorns. While “peppercorns” is not the most unusual spice title on the rack (it does, after all, share space with galangal, panch phoran and advieh), the flavor is like no other pepper I have ever had (spicy and floral)!
I LOVE discovering new flavor combinations…but I think the one ingredient that has stuck with me is ginger. I guess it’s basic for some people, but being from Texas, we just don’t use it often. An asian friend turned me on to this root, and I am continually delighted at how many things it can go in! Most recently, I’ve discovered that it also has healing powers. Whenever a friend is sick, I always boil ginger with a whole lemon or grapefruit, making sort of a tea. My friends have nicknamed it “crack tea” because it makes them feel so good! :)