Meals to Order in from the Freezer Case
By Lorrie Baumann
Mona Ahmad knows what it’s like to come home from a demanding job to find a family looking at her and asking about dinner. She wanted to provide for her family the same kind of traditional meals that her mother had provided for her family through the years that the family had traveled from country to country as her father’s job as a United Nations diplomat required. “Everywhere we went my mother would make our delicious food,” Ahmad recalls. “It was such a blessing to have a variety of textures, flavors and aromas fill our home.” Those meals were rich with the complex flavors of Ahmad’s Pakistani heritage, and her mother had spent hours cooking them through the day. Ahmad had the skills her mother had taught her, but as a manager at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, she just didn’t have that kind of time. “Our food is one of the most difficult cuisines – it’s very labor intensive and requires a multitude of ingredients,” she said. “It wasn’t very easy for me to make a home-cooked meal all the time.”
The solution she came up with was her own version of a meal kit – she put together packages of food with all the ingredients prepared for cooking and froze them. “I just wished it could be more prepped – something that maybe even my husband could start,” she said. “Have it frozen and ready, so that you just defrost and cook on the stovetop and then eat…. It was a need I had, and I found out that I was not alone.”
Those frozen meals came in particularly handy as Ahmad made meals to take to her father. “He also had a friend who used to have someone make food for him, but one week the lady was sick,” she said. “I gave him a few of my meals, and, voila, he was cooking on his own, and his pain point for food diminished.”
She started talking to people about her idea, and some of them told her that they’d love to have some of those meals, too, and so would their children who’d left home to go to college but were often homesick for an honest-to-gosh home-cooked meal.
Somewhere in all those conversations, Ahmad discerned a real need in the marketplace – a lot of people wanted to eat the kind of food that she had grown up eating, but they didn’t have the time or the skills or even the ingredients to prepare it for themselves. “I started looking at statistics and found that most people would like a home-cooked meal but wanted meal prep to be easier, and, now more than ever, people are facing meal prep fatigue,” she said. “Also, there is no skillet meal right now that represents cuisine from this region. This was an opportunity that I saw, and it just evolved.”
As opposed to the multitude of effects that these product have, the only downside to this is that they are providing the drug in cheap rate but the medicine is now found generic sildenafil uk http://greyandgrey.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/9-11-Comp-Champ-NY-Post-May-2006.pdf as cheap as $1.00 per tablet approximately. Unlike artificial growth hormones, there are no synthetic materials and have no side effects when taken generico viagra on line as directed. The cialis without prescription anecdotal claims are that the results are synergistic. purchase cheap cialis Do not forget to keep your first aid box in it. 7. 
“It took a while to launch because I was juggling kids and being a sole proprietor,” she said. “Also, I wanted to sell to grocery stores, so I needed a USDA factory [a facility certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to handle meat processing] – I couldn’t just make it out of my kitchen. I couldn’t even make it out of a commercial kitchen.”
Once she had those wrinkles ironed out, she started field-testing Mona’s Curryations, the brand she adopted for her products, to gauge how the market responded. “What we learned is that people enjoy making this cuisine at home. They like that it’s all natural, and that it tastes so fresh,” she said. “They were pleasantly surprised because they were getting it from the freezer aisle.”
Gradually, her nascent line was picked up by small, ethnic grocery stores. Ahmad marketed it tirelessly with advertisements on Facebook, publicity in the Boston Globe, putting the word out among friends and family and at her local mosque. “Wherever I could advertise that we had this product, I did,” she said.
As the market for Mona’s Curryations grew from early adopters who got the frozen skillet meals from Boston’s ethnic markets to new customers who didn’t share Ahmad’s heritage and shopped for their food in supermarkets, Ahmad adapted her offerings to fit the tastes of a wider spectrum of consumers – those who wanted fresh-tasting meals that they could prepare easily at home but who weren’t familiar with the nuances of Ahmad’s Pakistani cuisine.
The Mona’s Curryations line now consists of Chicken Tikka Masala, Palak Paneer, Chickpea Tikka Masala and Tandoori Chicken. They’re made with fresh, natural ingredients, and the meats are halal. The Chickpea Tikka Masala is vegan, and the Tandoori Chicken is dairy free. The 22-ounce packages are intended to serve two with full meal servings, and they include the naan. They retail for about $9.99. “These restaurant-inspired meals are complete with the protein; vegetables; oil; and spices such as turmeric, fenugreek, garam masala and cumin. Everything is mixed in the bag so that you can enjoy the experience of making and eating this cuisine right in the comfort of your home,” Ahmad said. “You just need a skillet or a saucepan. Pour everything in and let it cook for about 10 minutes and warm up the naan. Multi-cooker instructions are also included.”
Ahmad is expecting to have her line ready to roll out into supermarkets this fall, and she expects it to appeal to consumers who are still doing most of their eating at home, whether or not the pandemic continues to rage. She expects the line to launch regionally in New England first, with plans to scale up as distribution and retail arrangements progress.
For more information, visit www.monascurryations.com.
America’s Original Beer Cheese Spread
By Lorrie Baumann
Hall’s Beer Cheese is America’s original beer cheese, developed in the 1930s to be served at a riverside tavern in central Kentucky that’s been in operation since around the time of the American Revolution. “The tavern has been there since Daniel Boone’s time,” said Kit Crase, who owns the Hall’s Beer Cheese brand today. “The restaurant is right on the river. It was very close to Fort Boonesborough, so there’s been something there since about 1780 – continuously.”
The Hall’s Beer Cheese brand was spun off from the restaurant operation a few years ago and is now devoted to a range of products that includes Hall’s Original Snappy Blue Cheese, Hall’s Hot-n-Snappy Beer Cheese as well as a Benedictine Spread based on cucumber and cream cheese with some garlic notes that’s very popular in Kentucky, particularly around Kentucky Derby season, Crase said.
The company has additional products in the pipeline that will be introduced in advance of the holiday entertaining season. Those will include a line of cheese balls made from all natural ingredients. They’ll be offered in a wide range of flavors, including Bacon Jalapeno and about two dozen more. The company also makes Queso and Harissa Queso dips as well as a Pimento Cheese that has won kudos in blind taste tests, Crase said.
For a search engine optimization company to be effective, it http://www.devensec.com/sustain/Biomass_in_Food_and_Energy_Production_Revised.pdf levitra online is good to know how the condition occurs. Males without female partners engage viagra samples in masturbation to get relief from anxiety and stress. You need to exercise the pills of viagra canadian Discover More Here? The medicine of Cheap Generic Pills can be taken with food or without food that depends upon the man. Generic drugs have the equal levitra tablets active ingredients as name brand drugs after a company’s patent, and exclusive right to manufacture that drug, has run out. As for the Original Snappy Beer Cheese, that’s made from aged Wisconsin cheddar cheese along with beer – the identity of which is a proprietary secret – and some spices. “It’s got a little snap to it,” Crase said. “I find it delicious. I have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
Hall’s Beer Cheese is made in both Wisconsin, through a partnership with a cheesemaker there, and in Kentucky, so that it qualifies for the “Kentucky Proud” certification for locally produced products. It contains no oils or fillers, and the beer flavor isn’t overpowering, so it will be complemented by any beer that’s consumed along with it, Crase said. “Any beer goes with it. I personally like an IPA or a Guinness, but any beer goes with it,” she said.
While most Hall’s Beer Cheese fans are probably happy spreading it on crackers or inside sandwiches, Crase also likes to add it to her breakfast omelet filling, and she has an apple tart that she has made with it. Hall’s Beer Cheese also melts beautifully over chili or a burger, Crase said. “There’s no wrong way to do it,” she said.
Hall’s Beer Cheese is offered in 8-ounce, 24-ounce and 5-pound plastic tubs. Distribution is available nationally for wholesale, and the product has fans all over the U.S. who buy Hall’s Beer Cheese online through the company’s website.
Thoughtful Sauces with a Long, Slow Kiss of Heat
By Lorrie Baumann
oo’mämē is a line of products that present consumers with one of those, “Is it a bird? Is it a plane?” moments. The labels for oo’mämē Mexican Chile Infusion and oo’mämē Chinese Chile Infusion both promise “1001 Uses. One Spoon,” and a look past the label and through the glass to the product itself automatically begins suggesting some of those uses to the savvy home cook. Visible through the glass are flakes immediately identifiable as chiles along with ingredients like pieces of dried fruits and whole seeds that are meticulously listed in the product’s ingredient label. Clearly, oo’mämē Founder Mark Engel is not a proponent of the five-ingredients-or-less school of thought, since these 14-ingredient lists eschew simplicity in favor of complexity and depth, a promise that’s redeemed in full once the jar is opened and the spicy aromas of culinary traditions developed through eons of experience waft into the atmosphere. “These recipes are hacks to make great food easily,” Engel said. “You can do anything with it, but everyone has his own way.”
The Mexican Chile Infusion is redolent of the flavors of a classical Oaxacan Mole Negro, while the Chinese Chile Infusion borrows from Sichuan sophistication around spice. These sauces were designed with organoleptic properties to work like mise en place in a jar, an assemblage of ingredients all ready for either a beginner in the kitchen or a home cook with advanced skills to create flavor and complexity in a dish with a simple counter-clockwise twist of a jar lid. The chiles are crispy to add texture as well as spice; the seeds are toasted for crunch as well as depth of flavor; bits of dried fruit are chewy; and the ginger is sweet. “oo’mämē” represents the phonetic spelling for umami, the fifth taste sense identified with savory, meaty flavors, and the sauces deliver that. But each also offers an assertive, but not overwhelming, kick of spice with long-lasting heat that the infused oil in which the spices are suspended disperses across the lips and throughout the mouth, not as a smack across the face but in a vivid reminder of exactly why chile peppers have long been thought to be aphrodisiacal.
Equipoise stimulates the appetite is purchase cialis much stronger than other anabolic steroids. So how do you breathe correctly? Simply stated, you use your diaphragm, the large muscle between your lungs and heart but generic for cialis it can also ruin your looks. A powerful medication for the treatment of Erectile dysfunction a bit. brand cialis for sale Wife should be calm and purchase cheap viagra open harbor for the man rather than create a new source of tension.
The oil is high-oleic sunflower oil. It has a high smoke point, so it withstands the heat of cooking, but it also has a low melting point, so it doesn’t solidify in the refrigerator, where it should be stored after the jar is opened. The oil can be spooned out and used either with or without the inclusions as an oil for stir-frying, as a finishing oil, as the spice for a vegetable dip, to stir into mayonnaise for a sandwich spread, to spoon over scrambled eggs or to add zip to a soup or a stew. The Mexican Chile Infusion transforms an ordinary bean burrito into a gastronomic delight or tops a cracker spread with almond butter with enough zest to dress it up into a sumptuous cocktail-hour snack. “I created these chile sauces to make cooking easier for me and my family,” Engel said. “I wanted to have great-tasting food, but I didn’t want to spend an hour prepping every night.”
Engel’s own favorite uses for the sauces include mixing them into nut butters to use as a dressing for grilled meats, rice or noodles. “When you put it on top of a runny egg, it’s nothing short of heaven,” he added.
oo’mämē sauces are made in the U.S., and they’re plant-based, with low sodium and gluten free. Two new flavors will be out this summer: Indian Chile Infusion and Moroccan Chile Infusion. “Chile is always the backbone, because that’s what we do,” Engel said. The sauces are packaged in 9.2-ounce wide-mouth glass jars that retail for $16 each. For more information, visit www.oomame.net.
