The Husband Cooks Wednesday

Hey all, we’ve made it to the middle of the week. I could certainly live with a 4-day work week, working 10 hours a day. Think of how much more productive we’d all be on the weekends!

The Husband cooked tonight, but I helped, making the salad and the dessert. We had a Spinach Salad with Cranberries and a Maple Syrup Vinaigrette to start, Lemon Spaghetti for the main course, and one of The Husband’s favorite desserts, Creme Brulee. Very simple stuff, tried-and-trues, and using ingredients I already had on hand. Perfect.

I was honored to be invited to be a Guest Poster on Chef Michele’s site, and you can read my post here, which appeared today. Combining both food and frugality, you can see how I came up with tonight’s menu. Thanks for the opportunity, Michele! If you haven’t had the opportunity to visit her site yet, you might want to make a pit-stop there. She’s got terrific ideas on cooking within budget, keeping it healthy and realistic, with ingredients you usually have right on hand.

Along the lines of my ARF/5-A-Day Tuesdays, I came across a recent article in CHOW Magazine that is quite timely. The topic is on one of the hot new fruits we’ve been hearing a lot about recently, Pomegranates. In everything from pomegranate juice to ice cream, the little-known fruit was even the official drink of the 2004 Oscars, in the form of a martini. I’ll be the first to admit it … before I made Oprah’s Pomegranate Martini, which is fabulous if you haven’t tried it yet, I don’t think I had ever had a pomegranate before. Perfect for our ARF/5-A-Day Tuesday, although they’re not on the Top 20 list, they are rich in antioxidants. And why have you heard more about pomegranates in the last year than you have, say, in the last 5? A lot of it has to do with Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the masterminds behind Teleflora, The Franklin Mint and other uber-successful businesses. Their holding company purchased Dudley Ridge Ranch, which, at the time, had a 100-acre plot of pomegranates. After the company caught wind of the serious health benefits that pomegranates have, they started focusing their production on putting out juice concentrate. But in a completely unique marketing twist, instead of throwing their money at slick Madison Avenue ad campaigns, they poured it into funding scientific studies to tout the healthful attributes of pomegranates. Their campaigns talked about their POM juice as “Healthcare in a bottle” and encouraged consumers to drink POM to “Floss your arteries. Daily.” Unfortunately, they monopolize the market in the way that Bill Gates did with Microsoft. They own all the rights to the process they use to extract the juice, so while a cupful of POM juice might set you back a bit, just think about the money you’ll save by drinking to your good health. Bottoms up!

And on that note, folks, I’m calling it a night. Tune in tomorrow to see who gets the next nod for New (to Me) Blogger on the Block Thursdays. Until then…

Print it!