Monday, April 30, 2007

Salads and Salad Dressings

Salads and Salad Dressings by Adrian Kennelly

Salads bring fruits and vegetables to the table crisp, cool, and color-bright. With greens, fresh vegetables, or gay fruit, they add a light touch. Or they may be the sturdy kind that feature such items as meat, potatoes, cheese, or beans.

Light salads are usually served in portions of about 1/2 cup. Heavier salads, often used as main dishes, may provide about 1 cup for each serving.

Start with good fruits and vegetables:

Selecting top-quality fruits and vegetables in market or garden is a good start toward a good salad. Crisply fresh food has eye and taste appeal, and the best nourishment, besides.

Watch for smooth, colorful skins on apples, plums, cucumbers, if they are to join the salad with jackets on.

Give salad foods the best kitchen care to avoid bruising and hold freshness. If prepared ahead of time, store salad ingredients without dressing in refrigerator. Keeping them cool saves nutrients.

What kind of dressing?

What shall it be-sweet or tart, thick or thin-for the salad dressing? The answer lies in your family's taste.

Main-dish salads made with meat, fish, poultry, eggs, beans, cheese, or potatoes usually call for a mayonnaise-type or cooked salad dressing. But some of these more substantial salads are good with tart french dressing-salad oil combined with lemon juice or vinegar plus seasonings.

Tart french dressing is the most likely choice for vegetable salads and vegetable-fruit combinations. But some vegetable salads may well take a mayonnaise or cooked dressing.

Reserve the sweet clear french dressings for fruit salads. Mayonnaise made milder with whipped cream or thinned and sweetened with fruit juice is good for fruit salads too.

For appetite appeal:

Chill ingredients before mixing-except for molded salads.

Provide tartness in the body of salad or dressing.

Use salad greens other than lettuce sometimes. Have you tried chicory, escarole, endive, kale, spinach, dandelion greens, romaine, watercress, and Chinese cabbage?

Sprinkle orange, lemon, lime, or pineapple juice on fruits that may turn dark-apples, peaches, and bananas, for instance.

For tossed green salads, tear greens in fairly large pieces or cut with scissors. Larger pieces give more body to the salad.

Prevent wilting and sogginess by drying the greens used in salads, draining canned foods well before adding to salad, using just enough salad dressing to moisten. For raw vegetable salads, add dressing at the last minute.

Fruit combinations
1. Sliced pineapple, apricot halves, sweet red cherries.
2. Watermelon balls, peach slices, orange slices.
3. Grapefruit sections, banana slices, berries or cherries.
4. Grapefruit sections, unpared apple slices.
5. Peach slices, pear slices, halves of red plums.
6. Pineapple wedges, banana slices, strawberries.
7. Cooked dried fruit, white cherries, red raspberries.

Fruit and vegetable combinations
1. Shredded raw carrots, diced apples, raisins.
2. Sliced or ground cranberries, diced celery and apples, orange sections.
3. Thin cucumber slices, pineapple cubes.
4. Avocado and grapefruit sections, tomato slices.
5. Shredded cabbage, orange sections, crushed pineapple.

Vegetable combinations
1. Grated carrots, diced celery, cucumber slices.
2. Spinach, endive, or lettuce, with tomato wedges.
3. Sliced raw cauliflower flowerets, chopped green pepper, celery, pimiento.
4. Shredded cabbage, cucumber cubes, slivers of celery.
5. Cubed cooked beets, thinly sliced celery, sweet onions.
6. Cooked whole-kernel corn and shredded snap beans, sweet pickles, onion rings.



This is an extract from Family Fare Food Management and Recipes

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Friday, April 20, 2007

Have You Ever Considered Humor As A Viral Marketing Technique?

Have You Ever Considered Humor As A Viral Marketing Technique? by Don Resh

A study by Sharpe Partners, an interactive marketing agency, revealed that 89% of adult Internet users in America share content with others via e-mail. This is excellent news for those companies who use self-propelling "word-of-mouse" e-mail techniques to sell their products.

The study generated some interesting results regarding the type of content that is most often forwarded, as well. The most popular content is humorous material.

The second most popular category is news, followed by healthcare and medical information, religious and spiritual material, games, business and personal finance information and sports/hobbies ... in that order. So it is easy to see that humor is the best content for your viral e-mail campaign.

Cartoons, jokes and funny video clips are among the things that can be added to an e-mail to ensure that it will go viral. People will want to pass along something that makes them laugh.

They are a lot more likely to hit the forward button and send your email to their friends and relatives if it is an "advertainment" rather than an advertisement.

Not along ago, about 35 million people got an e-mail containing a picture taken in Disneyland. It took a minute to see it but there was Donald Duck lying prone in front of the famous Cinderella Castle. The title of the picture was "Bird Flu has hit Disneyland". It was a viral e-mail advertising Disneyland and used the edgy strategy of making light of what's serious ... and it works.

I'd guess that most people who own a computer have seen that picture ... and thus the advertisement for Disneyland. The bird flu epidemic is newsworthy and has the potential to attract an enormous amount of attention to any brand that might, for whatever reason, associate itself with it.

Remember that people are much more likely to share a joke or a funny picture than anything else so you would be well advised to include humor in your e-mail campaign.

Be careful, however, as some people are offended by certain subjects. Try to maintain a certain level of political correctness and sensitivity. That being said, some make a huge amount of money being the exact opposite. I just depends on how you want to be perceived.

To illustrate the above, have you seen The Subservient Chicken?

Created for Miami Advertising Agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky by The Barbarian Group, the Subservient Chicken is a viral marketing promotion of Burger King's line of chicken sandwiches.

The campaign is based on a web site that features a person in a chicken costume. The actor performs a wide range of actions based on a user's input, showing pre-recorded footage and appearing like an interactive webcam. It takes, literally, the advertising slogan "Get chicken just the way you like it".

There are more than a hundred commands the chicken will respond to, including:

- Michael Jackson dance moves such as moonwalk
- River dance
- The elephant
- Lay an egg
- Walk like an Egyptian
- Yoga
- Rage
- Spank
- Taco Bell
- Fight

When told to do anything the Subservient Chicken thinks is offensive, like perform sex acts or take off his mask, the chicken walks up to the camera and shakes a scolding chicken finger in disappointment. If he is told to eat food from rival fast food places like McDonald's he approaches the camera and places his finger down his throat but when told to eat Burger King he has a more positive response. The chicken responds to the command "smoke crack" by smoking but when told to "smoke a bong" he waggles his finger scoldingly. He hasn't mastered the entire "bad things" dictionary.

Burger King's Chicken Fights campaign was recently introduced. The two cockfighting chicken characters are modeled off this chicken.

There seems to be no end to the variations on the theme from Burger King. There has also been a lot of criticism leveled at the chain about the Subservient Chicken but for now it looks like Burger Kind is crying all the way to the bank.

A successful viral campaign isn't always in good taste ... maybe that's what makes them so tasty.



Don Resh is CEO of WebForce, Inc. A more detailed bio is available at:

WebForceSolutions
BizBuildSoftware
TurboMaxSoftware

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