Fighting Deadlines Since 2003

Check out the previous article out of the college cooking series before reading on.

Hard cider is a fabulous addition to many foods and can make some items palatable when nothing else will. The combination of sweet fruitiness and that bite of alcoholic content tenderizes meat and takes the edge off of bitter greens and other vegetables. Let’s look at some ideas for using hard cider in cooking.

Perry is the proper term for fermented pear cider, and some places, Maryland, for example, will offer cherry cider at certain times of the year. Try them all! If alcohol is forbidden to you, boiling it briefly will disperse the offending volatile.

Hard cider is less widely available in the USA than in the UK right now, but this was not always the case. Up until the temperance movement, more apples were used for hard cider than for eating or pies. If you don’t have hard cider from your nearest specialty beer distributor, unpasteurized, unfiltered cider will happily ferment in your fridge. Leave the cap loose – carbon dioxide expands!
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Wait! First – check out part 1 of this awesome article! It’ll teach you how to get ourself drunk and how to cook at the same time!

Since the dawn of civilization, or at least since the invention of the beer keg, people have been making the most of fermentation. Happily, these beverages are great in food as well.

If you are not permitted to take intoxicating drinks, a brief period of heating eliminates the alcohol. Here are some ideas to use up that pesky half-growler stealing space in the dorm refrigerator after a big party!

Beer makes chili even better! Routinely, in chili cook-offs (if you have a chance to attend one of these wonderfully idiosyncratic American phenomena, do so!) the top contenders seem to include at least a splash of beer at the beginning or the end, or both.

Chili is a great cheap way to feed large hungry crowds, and here is a BASIC rule for it:

Brown ground beef in a large frying pan, remove with slotted spoon, and pour off most of the fat. Sauté chopped onion/bell pepper in the remaining fat.
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Even if you don’t drink socially yourself, you can enhance your thrifty campus or apartment cooking with the world’s bewildering array of fermented beverages.

On the other hand, if you are a regular imbiber, do you know all the ways to include the fruit of the vintners and distiller’s arts (perhaps leftover in your refrigerator) in your food? In this series, we’ll offer tips for alcohol-enriched dishes literally from soup to nuts.

To wit, many soups, especially from legumes, benefit from a last-minute addition of a dollop of sherry or vermouth. Canned soups, especially, wake up and lose that tinned taste with last-minute splashes of sherry.

If you are not allowed, for religious or health reasons, to have alcohol, drive off the intoxicating part of the fortified wine with a few minutes of cooking before serving.

Here is a useful general rule to create many different bean soups, made in a slow cooker or stove-top (of course – with alcohol):
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Still spending more time online than in real world, socializing with your friends? You have to do something about it! How about creating a real social networking, in real life? Read on to find out more and be sure to check out part 1 of this article, which should shed some more light on this topic!

Social networks exist in fact and function even to a greater extent in the usual life of communities around the world, from the smallest and most remote village to the busiest cities and the liveliest university campuses.

Life itself in a human society truly is the best social network that you can find, as no amount of online social networking quite compares to meeting people in person and doing things together.

So use online social networks for the opportunities they offer to expand your horizons, but don’t forget to explore as well what is in fact closest to you: your life lived and full experiences with your family, friends and people that live in the same town, city, or country.

To do so, make sure that you don’t spend too much time online and spend instead more time with your family and with your friends, both old and new.

Do you spend too much time online?
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Online social networks can surely be fun, interesting and downright useful: you get to read about the most diverse things, find out the most hilarious, outrageous or curious facts, discover new places, new thoughts, new ways of thinking, new people. But all those uses are truly valuable only as long as you take them and use them in fact to enrich your whole life.

After all, you have only a limited amount of time every day and spending too much of it on online social networks can be done only at the expense of your activity in offline social networks.

Does that matter? Of course it does! To see just how much it matters being an active part of your offline social network and not only of an online one, let’s explore what offline social networks really are and why you should spend more time as their active member.

What are offline social networks?

Similarly to their online counterparts, offline social networks are groups of people that are linked together by some common interest or activity. The main and crucial difference is that the links between members of offline social networks are often tighter than those that are established online: after all, online you can discuss with the other members and share thoughts, images and sounds, but offline you can share the experience of playing, working, having fun and simply being together.
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