Foodie Gossip: 2010 Top 10 Food and Beverage Trends

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Foodie Gossip: Top 10 Food Trend Predictions for 2011

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Gail Simmons' Toasted Coconut Macaroons Recipe

Want to make a dessert that’s guaranteed to please? Follow Gail Simmon’s lead and try out her Toasted Coconut Macaroons recipe. After all, how could the Food & Wine editor/Top Chef Judge be wrong?

Ingredients (Makes 24):
- 3 egg whites
- ½ tsp. cream of tartar
- 1 tbsp. sugar
- 1 (14-oz.) can sweetened condensed milk
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1 tsp. lemon zest
- 20 oz. sweetened shredded coconut
- 7 oz. dark chocolate (60-70% cocoa)

Preparation:
1. Preheat oven to 325ºF.
2. Beat egg whites in electric mixer on low. Once whites are broken up, add cream of tartar and sugar. Increase speed to medium and beat until whites are frothy.
3. Shut off mixer and fold in condensed milk, vanilla and lemon zest. Add coconut and mix until well incorporated. Let mixture sit for 2-3 minutes.
4. Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper. Drop 12 heaping tablespoons of the batter on each tray, spacing them apart evenly. Bake for 20-25 minutes. Let cool.
5. Melt chocolate in a double boiler over low heat or in the microwave. Dip half of each macaroon into the chocolate. Place on tray to allow chocolate to set. Serve when cooled.

Enjoy!

Gossip Girl’s Jessica Szohr shares her Silver Dollar Cookies Recipe

Jessica Szohr whips up silver dollar cookies with her grandmother, and boy do they look yummy!

(Makes approx. 36 cookies)

Ingredients
- 1 cup butter
- 4 tbsp. sugar
- 2 tbsp. vanilla
- 2 cups flour
- ½ cup finely ground almonds
- Powdered sugar for sprinkling

Preparation
1. Cream together butter, sugar and vanilla. Stir in flour and ground almonds.
2. Place dough on a piece of plastic wrap. Roll up into a 10-in. sausage shape and refrigerate until firm, at least one hour.
3. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Remove dough from refrigerator and slice into ¼-in. rounds. Place on parchment-lined cookie sheets. Bake cookies for 20 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from oven and immediately sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Enjoy!

Can Beer Replace Milk in the Ultimate Cookie Pairing?

Watch out Milk – There’s a new player in town! That’s right. Beer is making it’s move to replace the “milk” in “Milk & Cookies”. I was skeptical at first – and I’m still not 100% sold on the concept – But the pairing doesn’t exactly suck.

What sparked the idea of pairing beer and cookies? A strong declaration my friend made, swearing that any type of beer and chocolate chip cookies equalled a grat pairing. I looked at him cross-eyed, but realized I couldn’t "knock it ‘til I tried it". So I bought a selection of beers and cookies and rounded up a few friends to help me test out this new “beer and cookies” theory. And, of course, I made my poor friends rank each beer and cookie combo on a scale of 1 through 10 so that I could more precisely measure our findings.

Before you look at the results, please keep the following in mind:
1. Unlike wine and food pairings, the results of each beer and cookie pairing sometimes varied significantly, person to person, because some combinations played out differently on each of our palettes.
2. The graph is an average of the results of 5 different people. Based on #1, there isn’t a huge sway between what pairing was most loved and what wasn’t. I’ll be testing this on a larger audience the next time.
3. The results of this graph should only reflect these specific combinations. There could very well be other beers that could pair well with the selected cookies and vice versa.
4. Most importantly, none of us had ever had beer to wash down our cookies.

And the results are as follows (drum-roll please)…

As the averages show, most beer and cookie pairings didn’t exactly knock our socks off. However, Indian Wells’ Spicy Pumpkin and Pipeline’s Porter were definitely the best matched to our selection of cookies. And we all agreed that pairing Bison’s Gingerbread Ale with ginger snap cookies made our taste buds happy.

In the end, this eccentric taste test did make me a believer in the beer/cookie theory. However, I’m not sure if beer will ever replace milk in my heart.

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