Little known Gourmet Food Recipes

This is a collection of gourmet food recipes as my mother taught me and I creatively enhanced and adapted to the actual conditions. Try them with special occasions and I guarantee you are going to impress your guests. If you are getting hooked please visit this blog often since new recipes are going to be posted. If you need exotic recipes for special occasions, please contact me at info@foodrecipesbooks.com and I will create that unique menu for your event.

Romanian cuisine is little known internationally although includes a variety of very tasty dishes. It is influenced mostly by the Greek, French, Russian, Middle Eastern, Italian, German, and Hungarian cuisines based on the geographical position and historical background of the country. It is also marked by an abundance of natural ingredients available for cooking a gourmet meal. Try more recipes at www.foodrecipesbooks.com

Smoked Fish Salad

Ingredients: smoked fish (preferably smoked whitefish), mayonnaise, potatoes, olives (I preffer Kalamata olives), salt, black pepper, sweet onion.
1. Boil the potatoes in water with one teaspoon of salt. Do not overboil them.
2. Peel the potatoes while they are still warm and let them cool down.
3. Slice the potatoes in 1/4 inch pieces.
4. Clean the smoked fish of the bones and skin and dice it in 1/2 inch pieces.
5. Pit the olives and cut them in halves.
6. Slice the sweet onion as thin as you can.
7. Mix the potatoes, smoked fish, olives, sweet onion and mayonaise in a bowl.
8. Add salt and black pepper to taste and mix the salad carefully to not mash the potatoes.
Refrigerate the salad for a few hours and serve it cold with fresh Italian or French style white bread.

Turkey Hot and Sour Soup

Ingredients: turkey dark meat and organs (wings, necks, gizzards, harts, livers, drumsticks), onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, carrots, parsnip, dried black pepper seeds, sauerkraut juice, salt, lovage, chili peppers.

1. Boil the turkey meat with a couple of whole onions, a little salt and dried black pepper seeds in a deep pot untill the meat is almost completely cooked, scooping the foam out.

2. Slice the carrots and the parsnip in 1/2 - 1 inch pieces.

3. Take the meat out on a plate, add the carrots and the parsnip and boil them.

4. Slice the bell peppers and the tomatoes and add them together with the meat.

5. Add the sauerkraut juice and salt to taste, and boil the soup for a few minutes.

6. Dice the chili peppers and add them to taste.

7. Dice the lovage and season the soup.

This soup should be served hot with white Italian or French style fresh bread.

Spring Salad

Ingredients: tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, cucambers, salt, black pepper powder, vinegar, and sunflower oil.
1. Slice the tomatoes and the bell peppers.
2. Slice onions very thin.
3. Slice the cucambers thin.
4. Mix the tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, and cucambers with the sunflower oil and vinegar added to taste.
5. Add salt and black pepper powder to taste and mix well.
Could be served as appetizer or together with the main course.

Eggplant Salad

Ingredients: eggplants, sweet onion, sunflower oil, tomatoes, salt.

Make sure the eggplants are hard. The soft ones usually have a lot of big seeds, and this is not what you need. You want to use hard eggplants with less seeds. The Chinese eggplants are ideal for this dish, but the Italian ones will work as well.

1. Grill the eggplants on medium fire untill become very soft and the peel is changing color. Sometimes the peel might open up with a popping noise.

2. After they are grilled, and while they are still warm, peel off the eggplants in warm water.

3. Squeeze the peeled eggplants very well one by one and put them in a food processor.

4. Add sunflower oil slowly and little by little taking a 2 minutes break after each one-spoon add. The adds should be made while mixing. The color becomes lighter.

5. Add salt also little by little during mixing (to taste).

6. Fine-dice a sweet onion (you can use the food processor for this) and squeeze it untill most of the water is eliminated.

7. Add the diced onion to the spread and mix it vigorously with a spoon.

Refrigerate the salad for a few hours and serve it with sliced tomatoes and Italian or French style fresh white bread.

If you want to really impress your guests, use the eggplant salad to fill up tomatoes and serve them on a nice aperitives platter.

Here are a couple of more versions of the eggplant salad for different taste:

A. Instead of sunflower oil you can use mayonnaise to taste and mix it with the eggplants in the food processor without adding any onion.

B. For the garlic lovers: fine-dice a few garlic clovers and add them to the eggplant salad before refrigeration.

One Middle Eastern version of this spread is known as Baba Ghanoush.

Tomatoe Salad with Feta Cheese

Ingredients: tomatoes, a couple of red and yellow or orange bell peppers, scallions, black olives (I prefer Kalamata olives), sheep feta cheese (my preferences are Romanian or Bulgarian sheep feta cheese), salt, black pepper powder, and olive oil.
1. Slice the tomatoes and the bell peppers.
2. Dice the scallions in half inch pieces.
3. Pit the olives and dice them.
4. Cut the feta cheese in half inch cubes.
5. Mix the tomatoes, bell peppers, scallions, and feta cheese, with the olive oil.
6. Add salt and black pepper powder to taste and mix well.
7. Top the salad with sheep feta cheese crumbs or graded sheep feta cheese. Serve imediately with fresh Italian or French style white bread.

Food Diet and Exercise can prevent Cancer

This article was attributed to John Hopkins Hospital initially but the hospital claims that they did not publish it. However, the article contains a lot of information which makes sense to me:

1. Every person has cancer cells in the body. These cancer cells do not show up in the standard tests until they have multiplied to a few billions. When doctors tell cancer patients that there are no more cancer cells in their bodies after treatment, it just means the tests are unable to detect the cancer cells because they have not reached the detectable size.
2. Cancer cells occur between 6 to more than 10 times in a person's lifetime.
3. When the person's immune system is strong, the cancer cells will be destroyed and prevented from multiplying and forming tumors.
4. When a person has cancer it indicates the person has multiple nutritional deficiencies. These could be due to genetic, environmental, food and lifestyle factors.
5. To overcome the multiple nutritional deficiencies, changing diet and including supplements will strengthen the immune system.
6. Chemotherapy involves poisoning the rapidly-growing cancer cells and also destroys rapidly-growing healthy cells in the bone marrow, gastro-intestinal tract etc, and can cause organ damage, like liver, kidneys, heart, lungs etc.
7. Radiation, while destroying cancer cells also burns, scars and damages healthy cells, tissues and organs.
8. Initial treatment with chemotherapy and radiation will often reduce tumor size. However, prolonged use of chemotherapy and radiation do not result in more tumor destruction.
9. When the body has too much toxic burden from chemotherapy and radiation, the immune system is either compromised or destroyed, hence the person can succumb to various kinds of infections and complications. 10. Chemotherapy and radiation can cause cancer cells to mutate and become resistant and difficult to destroy. Surgery can also cause cancer cells to spread to other sites.
11. An effective way to battle cancer is to starve the cancer cells by not feeding it with the foods it needs to multiply. CANCER CELLS FEED ON:
a. Sugar is a cancer-feeder. By cutting off sugar it cuts off one important food supply to the cancer cells. Sugar substitutes like NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, etc are made with Aspartame and this might be harmful. A better natural substitute would be Manuka honey or molasses but only in very small amounts.

b. Table salt has a chemical added to make it white in color. Better alternative is Bragg's aminos or sea salt.
c. Milk causes the body to produce mucus, especially in the gastro-intestinal tract. Cancer feeds on mucus. By cutting off milk and substituting with unsweetened soy milk cancer cells are being starved.
d. Cancer cells thrive in an acid environment. A meat-based diet is acidic and it is best to eat fish, and a little chicken rather than beef or pork. Meat also contains livestock antibiotics, growth hormones and parasites, which are all harmful, especially to people with cancer.
e. A diet made of 80% fresh vegetables and juice, whole grains, seeds, nuts and a little fruits help put the body into an alkaline environment. About 20% can be from cooked food including beans. Fresh vegetable juices provide live enzymes that are easily absorbed and reach down to cellular levels within 15 minutes to nourish and enhance growth of healthy cells. To obtain live enzymes for building healthy cells try and drink fresh vegetable juice (most vegetables including bean sprouts) and eat some raw vegetables 2 or 3 times a day. Enzymes are destroyed at temperatures of 104 degrees F (40 degrees C).
f. Avoid coffee, tea, and chocolate, which have high caffeine. Green tea is a better alternative and has cancer-fighting properties. It is best to drink purified water, or filtered, to avoid known toxins and heavy metals in tap water. Distilled water is acidic, avoid it.
12. Meat protein is difficult to digest and requires a lot of digestive enzymes. Undigested meat remaining in the intestines becomes putrefied and leads to more toxic buildup.

13. Cancer cell walls have a tough protein covering. By refraining from or eating less meat it frees more enzymes to attack the protein walls of cancer cells and allows the body's killer cells to destroy the cancer cells.
14. Some supplements build up the immune system (IP6, Flor-ssence, Essiac, anti-oxidants, vitamins, minerals, EFAs etc.) to enable the body's own killer cells to destroy cancer cells. Other supplements like vitamin E are known to cause apoptosis, or programmed cell death, the body's normal method of disposing of damaged, unwanted, or unneeded cells.
15. Cancer is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. A proactive and positive spirit will help the cancer warrior be a survivor. Anger, unforgiveness and bitterness put the body into a stressful and acidic environment. Learn to have a loving and forgiving spirit. Learn to relax and enjoy life.
16. Cancer cells cannot thrive in an oxygenated environment. Exercising daily and deep breathing help to get more oxygen down to the cellular level. Oxygen therapy is another means employed to destroy cancer cells.
17. No plastic containers in microwave. Recently, Dr. Edward Fujimoto, Manager of the Wellness and Lifestyle Medicine Department at Castle Medical Center in Hawaii, was on a TV program to explain this health hazard. He talked about dioxins and how bad they are for us. He said that we should not be heating our food in the microwave using plastic containers. This especially applies to foods that contain fat. He said that the combination of fat, high heat, and plastics releases dioxin into the food and ultimately into the cells of the body. Instead, he recommends using glass, such as Corning Ware, Pyrex or ceramic containers for heating food. You get the same results, only without the dioxin. So such things as TV dinners, instant ramen and soups, etc., should be removed from the container and heated in something else. Paper isn't bad but you don't know what is in the paper. It's just safer to use tempered glass, Corning Ware, etc. He reminded us that a while ago some of the fast food restaurants moved away from the foam containers to paper. The dioxin problem is one of the reasons.
18. No water bottles in freezer.  Dioxin chemicals cause cancer, especially breast cancer. Dioxins are highly poisonous to the cells of our bodies. Don't freeze your plastic bottles with water in them as this releases dioxins from the plastic.
19. No plastic wrap in microwave. Also, Dr. Edward Fujimoto pointed out that plastic wrap, such as Saran, is just as dangerous when placed over foods to be cooked in the microwave. As the food is nuked, the high heat causes poisonous toxins to actually melt out of the plastic wrap and drip into the food. Cover food with a paper towel instead.
This is an article that should be sent to anyone important in your life.