Six-second Videos and Other Newsy Tidbits

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Twitter introduced Vine just over a week ago and at Special Fork, we couldn’t wait to try this truncated video format – limited to just six seconds long! The video is ephemeral; once you post it to Twitter, it’s not readily findable again.

In order to share our Vine videos with you, I’ve captured the original links from Twitter. Since Special Fork is about solving the dinnertime dilemma, we didn’t want to just video six random seconds of cooking or eating. We wanted our Vine posts to be a teachable moment.

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A Winning Chili for Super Bowl Sunday

By Joy Taylor
For The Family Table, a blog for busy families

I’ll admit right up front that my favorite teams got knocked out of Super Bowl contention weeks ago. (Okay, if you must know: Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers; long story that I would like BOTH rivals. But, hey, I’m a Midwesterner.)

But despite their losses, I’ll still be glued to the TV come Sunday for the royal conclusion to football season. That means our home will be filled with people and enough food to satisfy the whole defensive line.

The most all-American of foods will be a part of the menu: chili. Now everyone has their favorite bowl of red – with or without beans, blazin’ hot or mildly sweet; pork cubes or ground beef. If you haven’t already settled on your Super Bowl game plan, food-wise, perhaps you’ll give one of my favorite chili recipes a try.

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How to Toast Spices

By Sandy Hu
A new video for Video Friday

Do you find you’re cooking with more spices, more often? I do! I’m lucky to have a floor-to-ceiling herb and spice cabinet in the Special Fork kitchen and I turn to it often – especially for Mexican, Middle Eastern and Indian dishes.

Many recipes I cook these days call for toasted spices or seeds. Toasting brings out the flavor and aroma of spices and takes away the raw taste – especially important when the spice is used uncooked, as in dips, salad dressings and salads.

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Pork Tenderloin – Better with Bacon!

By Debby Goldsmith
For The Family Table, a blog for busy families

I’ve heard it said often that everything is better with butter. With that, I can’t disagree! However, I also like to think that everything (almost) is better with bacon – especially pork tenderloin.

Pork tenderloin is a leaner cut of meat and that’s one of the major reasons it’s so popular. (Quick-cooking is probably a close second.) A few strips of bacon wrapped around a tenderloin can make a good thing even better.

This no-fuss recipe, always a popular one with my family, also works well for a dinner party. It’s just as easy to cook two tenderloins as it is to cook one!

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Homemade Bacon, Egg and Cheese Sandwich

By Lori Powell
For One or Two Bites, a blog for singles and couples

I love to make and eat breakfast on the weekends…especially cold, wintery ones that cause me to linger in bed for an extra hour or two.

My chickens are still producing quite a lot of eggs this winter (usually they slow down this time of year) so fresh eggs are always in abundance. Also uncured Applegate Farms Organic bacon is a mainstay in my fridge or freezer.

This past weekend, I thought, why not change things up a bit – well, just a little – and make a bacon egg and cheese sandwich with homemade biscuits that are a touch healthier? I swapped out half of the all-purpose white flour with whole wheat and replaced some of the butter with buttermilk. To my surprise, the result was a flaky, crumbly, better-for-you biscuit!

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