The only problem said chai latte is $3 for small or tall or whatever stupid name Starbucks has for it. Bounce on one of those per day for a week and you’re in the hole $20. 

So check this.  I took the time to watch them prepare it one day and I saw that they were simply mixing a concentrate mix with milk and warming it on the milk steamer.  Hmmm, I wondered.  Do they sell that concentrate mix to the general public?

They sure as hell do: Tazo chai tea concentrate

But at $10 a container, you’re not saving much money. 

Alas, it is also sold at Amazon.  Many offerings of which are in bulk putting the price sub $4.  Each 32 oz. container is mixed half and half with milk, giving you 64 delicous oz. of chai tea latte at $4.50. 

If you don’t want to order online, Target stores also carry the concentrate mix at $3.99.

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The problem is that risotto is labor intensive and time consuming with some recipes calling for an hour or more of cooking time. Not to mention the fact that you have to be present for all of it, stirring constantly.  With a newborn in the house that ain’t gonna roll. Hell, I’m lucky if I get to shave my bikini line anymore.

One night I was making white rice in my rice cooker, when I said, “It’s just rice.”  Why couldn’t I cook risotto like you cook every other kind of rice by putting all of the liquid in at once and skip the stirring bit?  A hundred years of Italian culinary tradition be damned.

So I decided to compare the two.  I made one batch of risotto in the traditional method and the other in my new fangled lazy ass approach.  But the no-stir risotto couldn’t taste anywhere near as good, could it?

Risotto – Stir v. No-stir

My batch of traditional risotto turned out great.  Even before I added the Parmesan cheese it was thick and creamy with a good deal of starch suspended in the liquid as you can see in this photo:

The stirred risotto clings to the spatula and its sauce has some real body.  You’ll also notice too that the rice grains are pretty much intact.

For the no-stir risotto I followed the basic steps of the traditional risotto up until the point of adding the liquid bit by bit and stirring.  At that point, I just dumped all of the liquid in and let it boil.  Then I walked away.  I don’t remember what I did during that time, but I can guarantee you it was a hell of a lot more fun than stirring. 

When I came back to check on my risotto, I was quite pissed.  The risotto was more like rice soup with absolutely no body and hundreds of exploded rice grains:
 
You can see in the picture that the sauce is very watery and little or no starch suspended in it like the risotto I stirred. The texture in the mouth was horrible as well, flavorless mush.  I think I ended up throwing the pictured spatula across the room.

My traditional risotto got even better after I added the Parmesan cheese, down right luxurious if I do say so myself. 

Risotto perfection.

Although I was really ticked off about how poorly the no-stir risotto had turned out, I decided that I might as well go for the gusto and waste the Parmesan cheese as well.  I figured it could only make it better, it sure as hell couldn’t make it worse.

As I added the Parmesan something magical happened.  The grated cheese melted eventually it combined with the liquid and began binding the rice together.  Rather quickly, the no-stir risotto went from looking like the dog’s dinner to mine.
 
While it looked more like traditional risotto, I was skeptical to taste it.  It wasn’t exactly on the money, but it wasn’t that far off either.  I think that the burst rice grains softened the texture a bit too much for it to be perfect.  On the other hand, I had an hour of freedom I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Conclusion

You don’t have to spend an hour stirring to make some pretty damn good risotto, you can boil it like you do any other kind of rice.  It won’t be perfect, but it will be very close and if you’re anywhere as busy as I am, you can deal with that.

Bonus: I love left-over risotto almost as much as fresh and the day after, I couldn’t tell the difference between the stir and no-stir.

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1. Google Search – If it’s on the web, you can find it with Google search which is still the leader when it comes to helping you find exactly the right page.  I use Google search to find recipes, techniques, restaurants and even new food blogs, the possibilities are endless. Not only that, but the standard search works as a simple conversion tool as well.

2. Google Reader – If you’re not using an RSS reader, you’re doing yourself a disservice.  You can read all of your favorite sites in one place, have your news delivered right to you.  You can subscribe to RSS feeds from across the web, whether it be your favorite food blog, the Plain Dealer’s restaurant reviews or the latest news on Cleveland restaurants.

3. Google Books – Google in their effort to digitize everything on the planet has one hell of a lot of books in digital format for you to peruse.  While some of the books are only previews, there are a ton of books that you can read from front to back if so desire as well as downloading a PDF. The great part is that most of these books are older books that you can’t find other places.  You can find recipes, techniques and few offer food anthropology.  Here’s a couple I found today: 99 Practical Methods for Using Boiled Beef, 365 Orange Recipes from 1909, Diet for Children and Every Recipe Tried and Proved.  

4. Google Docs – Google Docs is like Microsoft Office online and I use it all the time to help me in the kitchen.  I use it to take notes if I am working on a new recipe.  I also use it to save interesting recipes I find on the web.  It’s an excellent place to catalog your own recipes, so you can easily search and find them.  If you had the gusto, you could even use the spreadsheets to create some cool conversion tools to use in the kitchen. 

5. Google Video/YouTube – If there is a technique in the kitchen that you’ve been trying to master, but haven’t been able to, look no farther than Google Video/YouTube. I can’t think of anything they don’t have on here.  And it’s not some fancy pants chef showing you how to do it, it’s regular folks in kitchens like yours.  Let’s see what they have: How to Filet a Fish, What is a Bouquet Garni, How to Tie a Roast, and How to Make Pasta. 

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Here are 5 great places to find restaurant coupons:

1. The restaurant’s website – Almost every restaurant has a website and that is the first place to go to find restaurant coupons.  The chain restaurants like Red Lobster, Mongolian Barbecue and Qdoba all have online “clubs” that you can join where you will receive coupons via email.

2. Online Deal Forums – A quick search of online deal forums is an excellent place to find virtually any type of restaurant coupon.  Two of the better ones are Slickdeals and Fat Wallet.

3. Wow Coupons – Always a great list of current restaurant coupons for the savy diner.

4. Valpak – Although I think that their weekly mailings tend to be a bit annoying, there can be some good deals on restaurants on Valpak’s website.

5. A Simple Online Search – There is this great website out there, its called Google. And you can search for whatever you’re looking for by just typing it into the search area.  As an example, you could type “subway restaurant coupons” or “local restaurant coupons” in the search area and you would get results asking for what you’ve put in.  Pretty sweet.

One place that a lot of people will tell you to go for restaurant coupons is restaurant.com, but I honestly think the place is a scam.  I’ve looked on there a number of times over the years and I’ve never found anything of value.  It’s all setup so the customer loses and to me that is just not right.

Photo: Bright Star

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• Our Town and All Around – Coupon Book
• Restaurantica – One In A Million
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If you’ve never dried tomatoes before, you don’t know what you are missing.  While plum tomatoes are the best to dry, from the picture above you can see that any tomato can be dried and preserved.   Plum and grape tomatoes can be sliced lengthwise, but its best to slice round varieties across the axis. 

All you need is a warm oven and some time.  Lay out your sliced tomatoes, cut side up in the case of plum tomatoes, on a cookie sheet.  I lined mine with a Silpat sheet for easy cleanup.  Set your oven on the lowest setting possible, mine is somewhere around 200°, and find yourself a good book.

The tomatoes will take 8 – 10 hours to dry depending on thickness, but you’ll know they are done because they turn into leather.  They’ll be a little sticky from the juice drying, but they should not be squishy.  You’ll be able to tell if they are still holding moisture.  If they are, put them back in for another hour.

They’ll even become a bit translucent as you can see from this photo.  You’ll have to keep yourself from eating these once they are done, they are that good. 

Dried tomatoes have a ton of uses.  Not only can you eat them as a delicious and healthy snack, but there are countless recipes in which they can be used.  I like to toss them with garlic and olive oil for pasta, but my favorite is using them in a sun dried tomato cream sauce for chicken and pork. 

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Kristin over at Cookthink, says that those rinds can be added to soups and stews for a deep rich flavor you won’t be able to find elsewhere.  Pretty awesome.

Photo: abbyladybug

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Eating healthy foods doesn’t have to break the bank though, WebMd offers 10 healthy foods for under $1.  I don’t necessarily agree with their choice of oranges.  While healthy, oranges are pretty damn expensive; maybe it’s because they have to travel so far to reach our stores.

I do like their choice of canned tomatoes which cost a fraction of their fresh counterparts.  Not only that, but they have a consistent flavor when making sauces or chilis. 

A way to save a ton of money on the already cheap canned tomatoes is to buy a large “commercial” can at Sam’s Club or Costco.  An entire gallon can may only be $5 or $6 and you can freeze whatever you don’t use in plastic bags, ice cube trays or plastic containers.

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The 88 Least Healthy Foods
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10 Foods to Help You Fight Cholesterol
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11 Mood-Lifting Foods
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10 Tips for Low-Fat Cooking
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6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World
8 Foods You Should Eat Every Day
100 Foods to Improve Your Productivity
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10 Pantry Staples for Quick Cooking
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100 Cooking Secrets
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62 Little Known Uses for Vinegar
6 Superfoods that Prevent Disease
50 Things Every Foodie Should Do
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8 Steps to Hamburger Perfection
10 Tasty Breakfast Ideas
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5 Easy Ways to Find Great Food When Traveling
10 Ways to Improve Your Cooking
10 Best and Worst Foods
15 Foods You Shouldn’t Live Without
10 Foods for a Good Night’s Sleep
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4 Foods to Fight Cancer
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17 Foods to Try Before You Die
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Nowadays, internet websites describing lose weight emphasize upon using xenadrine and hydroxycut. The tenuate, too is a widely used drug for the purpose of weight loss.

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• Food Hacks: 99 Cent Big Mac
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Here is what you do: You order a 99 cent double cheeseburger without ketchup and mustard.  Then, you ask for a side of the Big Mac sauce.  9 times out of 10 you won’t get charged for the sauce and you’ve got yourself a 99 cent Big Mac.

Got some other food hacks?  Leave them in the comments.

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