Category Archives: New Products

One Thick, Rich Chocolate Drink and Winners of the Veggie Seeds Give-Away

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Just how thick is Taza to Go, a new chocolate beverage drink?

Put it this way: To call it hot chocolate or hot cocoa would be an injustice.

Take a sip and it’s almost like pudding in your mouth.

Just look at the thick streaks it leaves on the rim of the mug above.

Super gooey, incredibly rich and with a deep, concentrated chocolate flavor, this drinking chocolate comes in an aseptic pouch ready to be enjoyed. Serve it warm or chilled over ice. You can even drizzle it over ice cream or cake.

The pouch serves two, but after trying a sample, I’d say you could easily get more servings out of it. It’s so filling that an espresso cup-full would more than satisfy most chocoholics.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of sipping hot chocolate in Spain with churros to dunk into, you’re familiar with this souped-up version of liquid chocolate. Appropriately enough, Tazo to Go is made by Valor Chocolates, a chocolatier in Spain since 1881.

A 14-ounce pouch is about $5.75, and a 32-ounce pouch is about $11.99. A 3/4 cup has 200 calories. Purchase at the Valor Chocolate site or Tienda.com.

Now, without further adieu, the winners of the Food Gal veggie seeds give-away contest, in which I asked you all to pick a fruit, vegetable or herb that was most like your personality.

I can’t tell you how many of these responses just made me chuckle in delight. But I could only pick three winners, who will each receive a load of seeds to grow lettuces and tomatoes, as well as a beautiful oval wooden cutting board — all courtesy of Cook’s Garden, a gourmet retailer of seeds. Thanks to everyone who participated in the fun. Here are the winners:

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New Peet’s Coffee Food Gal Contest and Winner of the Global Knife Give-Away

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For the first time in eight years, artisan roaster Peet’s Coffee is adding a new blend to its line-up of beans.

Uzuri African Blend, available  starting March 3 at all Peet’s coffee houses and at Peets.com, will help generate greater income for 6,000 small farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda.

Pronounced ”oo-Zur-ee,” the name of the new coffee means “excellent” and “beautiful” in Swahili. The name was chosen by East African farmers who are now producing the coffee to Peet’s exacting standards, and in the process, earning 30 percent more for their crop. That’s not insignificant, considering that coffee farmers typically live in extreme poverty, earning less than $2 a day, according to TechnoServe, an organization that empowers people in developing countries to build businesses to improve their lives, and which is collaborating with Peet’s to produce the coffee.

The new blend, which also will be available through March 31 on grocery stores nationwide, is smooth as can be with a subtle fruitiness to it. A 12-ounce bag sells for about $9.99.

Five lucky Food Gal readers will get a chance to try the coffee for free, too. Peet’s is generously allowing me to give away five 12-ounce bags of the Uzuri African Blend, one bag to each of five winners.

Contest details: Deadline to enter is the close of the day, March 6. Five winners will be announced March 8. The contest is open to only those in the continental United States.

To enter: Describe something that perks you up. The best five answers get the coffee.

Here’s my own answer to what perks me up: The smell of garlic sizzling in a hot pan. Just-washed laundry when it comes out of the dryer. Going for a long hike with a good friend on a perfect spring day — then pigging out on cake afterward. Fetching the mail, because I just never know what goodies are going to show up on any given day.

Now, it’s your turn…

And without further adieu, let me announce the grand prize winner of the Food Gal Global knife contest, in which I asked folks to describe something sharp and something dull. Faced with an unprecedented number of incredible entries (more than 70), I’ve decided to choose two runners-up, as well, who will each get a cookbook from my vast collection. Here are the winners:

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Creating A Tomato to Call His Own

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It takes sharp eyes, a steady hand, good tweezers, and loads of patience to create a new tomato from scratch.

But Fred Hempel, a geneticist turned farmer, has a knack for it. Owner of the 9 1/2-acre Baia Nicchia Farm in Sunol, he’s already created and named 10 new varieties of tomatoes over the years. You might already have tried a few, as he sells his seeds to Seeds of Change, the certified organic seed supplier, which in turn makes them available to gardeners across the nation.

Hempel invited me to his rented greenhouse in Berkeley recently to watch him work his magic on his newest project — a signature tomato for Chef Guillaume Bienaime of Marché restaurant in Menlo Park.

Bienaime, who accompanied us that day, has been buying all his tomatoes, as well as winter squash, lettuces, lake, mustard greens and chard for the restaurant from Hempel for the past two years. Hempel grows about 30 different types of tomatoes, many of which you’ll find available in the summer at the Menlo Park Sunday farmers market. But Bienaime has been eager to add another to Hempel’s lineup, which will be available exclusively to him.

“I just thought it would be fun to create something that’s my own,” Bienaime says. “I’m not sure what I’ll call it yet, though.”

That’s OK, because he’s got plenty of time to mull over names. Forget a nine-month gestation period. It will take seven generations after crossing breeds for this baby to develop into a consistent tomato. Hempel can speed that up a little because he makes use of a greenhouse. Even so, it still will be about 2 1/2 to 3 years before Bienaime’s tomato fully comes to fruition.

Bienaime already knows what tomatoes he wants to cross to create his own: the Amana orange, a large, low-acid heirloom from Iowa that has the ability to hold well for three or four days even after it reaches peak ripeness; and the Costoluto Genovese, an Italian red heirloom from Genoa that’s squat with ridges like a pumpkin, and boasts magnificent flavor.

What the end result will look and taste like, though, is anyone’s guess.

“You just don’t know what you get until you cross them,” Bienaime says.

The greenhouse is where Hempel does his cross-breeding. Inside, where it’s balmy and bright, containers of lovely, elongated cherry tomatoes of every hue are growing, even though it’s still gray and chilly outside. The tomatoes that grow here can’t be assessed accurately for flavor because nurturing them under artificial lights doesn’t result in a flavor as developed as they would have if planted outside in a field. However, Hempel can tell if he’s on the right track or not just from the look of the tomatoes. Plumpness is an indicator of good flavor, he explains.

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Beautiful Bubbles for Valentine’s Day

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Valentine’s Day calls for a glass or two of bubbly.

And a vibrant, rosy pink-hued sparkler is sure to up the festive factor even more.

Spain’s Freixenet has created a pretty new sparkling wine made with Pinot Noir grapes blended with a touch of the Spanish grape, Trepat.

I had a chance to try a sample bottle of the Elyssia Pinot Noir Brut ($18), which is made in the traditional methodé champenoise style.

The bottle is tres chic. In the glass, the sparkling wine has big, plentiful bubbles. Quite dry, Elyssia has flavors of cherry, raspberry and toast.

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Artsy Chocolates

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Meet my edible fossil.

It looks like one doesn’t it? What with all those strange embedded pebble-like pieces stuck in it, right?

In reality, it’s a custom chocolate bar decked out like some eerie moonscape with my own chosen ingredients. In this case, a white chocolate bar strewn with an eclectic mix of orange pepper, Rice Crispies, dried orange, gold flakes and a few rather bulbous wasabi peanuts.

German chocolate start-up, Chocri, has just expanded to the U.S. market to let chocoholics design their own white, milk and dark chocolate bars with more than 100 different toppings. Yes, we’re talking everything from bacon to cheese-curry cashews to paradise grains to plum bits to organic mint leaves. Apparently, more than 10 billion combinations are possible. I’ll let you do the math.

The bars are made of organic, Fair Trade chocolate from Belgium, and many of the ingredient options are organic.

Chocri reps invited me to try three complimentary bars recently. The step-by-step design process on the Web site is straight-forward. You choose your base bar, then go to town on the toppings, choosing up to five for each 6-by-3-inch bar. You can even give your bar a name, too.

It takes about two weeks to receive your chocolate bars, which are shipped from Germany. They’re not necessarily inexpensive — my three bars were valued at a total cost of $35. One percent of every purchase is donated to DIV Kinder, an organization that supports children on the Ivory Coast, the largest exporter of cocoa beans in the world. To date, Chocri donations have helped build a well, buy refrigerators and build an orphanage there.

As with custom-burger restaurants, if you hate the end product, you have no one but yourself to blame for choosing the toppings that you did. But it sure is fun to get inventive.

I’ll use my patented scale of 1 to 10 lip-smackers to critique my own creations, with 1 being the “Bleh, save your money” far end of the spectrum; 5 being the “I’m not sure I’d buy it, but if it was just there, I might nibble some” middle-of-the-road response; and 10 being the “My gawd, I could die now and never be happier, because this is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth” supreme ranking.

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