As always here is what the FFF is all about. Finest Foodies Friday! FFF is a weekly Friday post featuring favorites from The Foodie Blogroll! We do this so we can share in the rich diversity of what The Foodie Blogroll has to offer by featuring some of our favorites and yours!
What is the Foodie Blogroll? It is the first and fastest growing free membership blogroll for food bloggers and has become a wonderful community to share ideas about all things food related. With a membership of over 3000 food blogs, I am sure you can find much inspiration and new friends!

The only requirement to be featured here on FFF is to be a member of The Foodie Blogroll and be displaying The Foodie Blogroll widget on your blog. If you are not yet a member, but you have a food blog and would like to join us, please click here!

If you have a favorite foodblog on The Foodie Blogroll, that you would like to be featured here on FFF, please join us over on The Leftover Queen/Foodie Blogroll Forum, and post your favorite Foodie Blogroll foodblogs here.

The Alchemist
This blog is written by Genevieve who believes that cooking is much like alchemy. It is a transformative event by taking commonly occurring elements and turning them into something beautiful and alluring. But also the person doing the alchemy is also transformed. She says: “Let your food create you, and creating the food will happen naturally.” She also believes that food is medicine and we use it as a way to nurture others. “Food is how we nurture, impress, and entertain, and great cooks are always part caretaker, part showman, and even part magician, giving of themselves and their talents in a stunningly personal way. “

Family Food and Friends
This is a great blog full of yummy eats. It is written by Patsy who is a gracious hostess. Her family is also in on the blog, because they review each recipe and they are not afraid to really give their opinions about the recipes, which is really helpful. So you know whether it is worth making, especially if you have picky eaters in your family! Patsy also likes to share her reviews of new food products and gadgets that make their way to her kitchen.

Cooking Star
This blog is picture perfect! I mean really, the food just jumps off the screen. You can tell that a lot of care and love goes into not only the food, but the food styling and photography. All of it is just so well done. Most of the recipes are written in both English and Hungarian. I would love to learn more about the author, but the “about me” section is in Hungarian. So I will have to settle for the recipes!

A Toast to Tiffany
Tiffany’s blog is really a fun blog. Her pictures look great – especially the comfort food that she makes – it all looks so good and I am sure it tastes delicious. She is a PA girl, originally from Pittsburgh (My family is from those parts as well) and you can guess that she is a huge Steelers fan. Therefore, there is a lot of fun pictures and stories about SuperBowl weekend on her blog right now!

Bong Mom’s Cookbook
This is a blog authored by a Bengali cook whi grew up around people who love to cook and eat, so it is not surprising that she also has a love for cooking, food and eating. She writes this blog to acknowledge all the family members who taught her to cook and as inspiration for teaching her own daughter to cook the Bengali foods of her homeland. “I get solace in cooking, the comfort of the spices sputtering in the oil…”

That’s it for this week! I hope you enjoyed this week’s FFF. Remember, if you would like to see a blog featured here, who is part of the FBR please visit the forum and nominate them.
I NEED NOMINATIONS!!!!!!

Also we all love to know how people came to find our blogs, so please visit all of our featured bloggers today and don’t forget to tell them that you found them via Finest Foodies Friday!

Well it is another year, which means another wave of chocolate-hazelnut love to hit the blogosphere with World Nutella Day!

This is a worldwide food holiday created by Michelle from Bleeding Espresso, Sara from Ms. Adventures in Italy and Shelley from At Home in Rome and something that all lovers of this wonderful spread celebrate in pure joy around the world due to the amazing sugar high this event produces!

I have to say that even though I have this date marked on the calendar, this year I wasn’t quite prepared. I meant to get the Trader Joe’s brand of Chocolate-Hazelnut Spread when we were visiting relatives up north, but totally spaced it. I wanted to get that brand because in the USA, Nutella now has Palm Oil in it. Bleech. But what is a girl to do? Sometimes sacrifices need to be made in the name of Nutella goodness.

Lately I have been having a massive craving for pudding. My mom used to make pudding a lot when I was younger – tapioca was one of my favorites, but I also loved her chocolate pudding – with the pudding skin, thank you very much! So I was going to make a lovely combination pudding – chocolate nutella tapioca, but could not find non-instant tapioca at the grocery store. So I decided to ditch the tapioca idea for now, and go for full on silky nutella bliss.

I recently got an awesome box of spices from my friend Tony, who with his partner Jonathan travel all over the world. On their trips, they collect spices. He realized he had too much, so he sent me a huge box full of delicious spices. One was cinnamon from Thailand, which is much lighter in color than what I usually get, and tastes like heaven. So I decided to garnish the tops of the pudding with a dash of this cinnamon.

This is a good pudding people. Make it. Make double so you can enjoy it longer or give some to your friends in celebration of this fantastic holiday! Happy World Nutella Day to you all!

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What is BloggerAid? BloggerAid is the brain child of Val from More Than Burnt Toast, Ivy from Kopiaste and Giz from Equal Opportunity Kitchen

They have started an online community to help end world hunger, that anyone can join.
This is their mission statement:

“We are a growing group of international food bloggers determined to make a difference in aid of world famine. The love of food and community that brings us together drives the compassion of its members to reach out to our world to help those less fortunate than we are. Banded by a mission of helping to make a change in a world where starvation affects such a profound number of people, we will raise money and awareness for the hungry in communities both at home and abroad .”

They have announced their largest fund raiser to date ever!!!! They will be publishing a cookbook with 100% of the profit from sales being directed to a chosen agency. The funds raised will be directed to specific programs of The World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations front line agency. The needs are great and choosing a specific effort is currently being negotiated. The best part is that the cookbook will be contributed to by food bloggers from all over the world…click through to find out how you can be part of this amazing opportunity to make a difference in the world!
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Two weekends ago, Roberto and I had the pleasure of spending the weekend with Peter and Christey from FotoCuisine. We met them back in September, when we were all at the Fooduzz sponsored Florida Foodies Dinner at The Blue Zoo in Orlando, FL. We sat next to them during dinner and just really hit it off. They are also a husband wife team, except the roles are reversed, HE is the cook and SHE is the photographer. So before the evening was over we made sure to discuss plans for a future get together.

(Did I mention how TALL they are…I am not a short woman by any means, yet they both tower over me! LOL!)

Peter and Christey live in Melbourne which is on Florida’s famous Space Coast and about a two hour drive from us. As soon as we arrived at their place, they whisked us off in their open air jeep for a lunch date at Matt’s Casbah, a new eatery that they enjoy. We had a great time at lunch catching up and getting to know each other better. Then we took a nice stroll through downtown Melbourne stopping in several antique and gift shops. When then headed back to their house for an evening of cooking, food trivia and videogames!

As you all know by now, Peter and Christey are the winners of POM Wonderful’s Featured Blogger recipe contest and so Peter decided to make his winning dish for us (although at the time he didn’t know he was the winner!). However, instead of duck, he made it with some lovely fresh grouper steaks. He started by making the sauce, showing us his procedure step by step.

Then he got me to chip in with frying up the tortilla strip garnish, at which point he dusted the grouper steaks with flour and white pepper and pan fried them.

The dish was delicious – the sauce was a perfect way to use pomegranate juice and the bed of fried tortilla
strips really soaked up the sauce!

After dinner Peter showed me some of his favorite cookbooks that he has spent the last year working through and learning from – like Bouchon by Thomas Keller, Think Like a Chef by Tom Colicchio and one of my favorites, Les Halles by my own food idol, Tony Bourdain. It was really fun to see the cookbooks that inspire Peter’s cooking as his style is so very different from my own. I am sure that his cooking would be praised by his favorite chefs for his attention to detail and fabulous sauce making skills, which he showed us again the next morning when he made prosciutto eggs benedict with the most delicious hollandaise sauce I have ever had. Another secret talent is Peter’s awesome martini making skills. He made sure to keep us full of yummy comos the whole night, while he himself, went for the classic martinis.

We had a great time visiting Peter and Christey and getting to see a bit of the Space coast on Sunday morning before heading back home. I am sure there will be many more food filled visits! Next time, here in Saint Augustine!

I wanted to come up with a great title for this article, something catchy that really describes the gravity behind what I was going to write on this issue, while at the same time not being confrontational. But nothing came to mind. This is a severe issue, with severe consequences, requiring a severe and to the point title. On this blog, in the past, I have mostly kept my food opinions to myself. But in certain instances, I feel that reaching the most people possible with vital information is the most important thing. This is one of those cases. I do this as a way of providing information, not preaching or shoving my values down your throat. Read it. If you don’t agree, that is fine, but at least educate yourself and make food choices based on knowledge.

For years I have had a personal battle with HFCS and ridding it from my diet. Having worked in the health industry, I saw what it can do to people, physically and mentally. Consuming HFCS has been the underlying cause in many of the cases I saw from pain syndromes and digestive problems, to severe acne, and depression. I have spoken out against the consumption of HFCS to my family and friends, and it has been years since I have knowingly eaten anything that contains it. This is not a case of over-reacting, because “a little bit won’t kill you”, because in fact nothing can be further from the truth.

This stuff will kill you, eventually. But it will take its time and make you suffer along the whole way.

HFCS is one of that many ingredients on the market currently that for the past 20 years has infiltrated much of the food people eat. We live in a society of instant gratification and hurried lives, and the food companies bank on this (pun intended). They know we want something quick and fast to put on the table and in our mouths to quickly re-fuel and move on with our busy lives. They know we don’t have time to read labels. But, we are just now starting to understand the very detrimental ramifications that occur over long periods of time when people eat these convenient ingredients – and there are many others, besides HFCS that are just as bad, but I am not discussing them today.

Here is where all the problems from consuming HFCS come from. The body processes the fructose in high fructose corn syrup differently than it does old-fashioned cane or beet sugar, because it has been chemically altered by a laundry list of enzymes to give it a longer shelf life. Once this altered fructose enters the body, it alters the way metabolic-regulating hormones function, causing the liver to kick more fat out into the bloodstream. The end result is that our bodies are essentially tricked into wanting to eat more and at the same time, we are storing more fat. This causes all sorts of health problems, namely obesity and diabetes. But this really is nothing new. People have known about the link between HFCS and these diseases for years and yet we still continue to buy products that contain it. So, I guess obesity and diabetes is not too great of a concern for people to demand the end of HFCS by refusing to purchase products that contain it. So maybe this next bit of information will.

A very recent study shows that half of the tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contains MERCURY, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient.

“Mercury is toxic in all its forms. Given how much high-fructose corn syrup is consumed by children, it could be a significant additional source of mercury never before considered. We are calling for immediate changes by industry and the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] to help stop this avoidable mercury contamination of the food supply,” the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Dr. David Wallinga, a co-author of both studies, said in a prepared statement.

HFCS is used in nearly all processed foods and many foods that are directed at children. Things like soft drinks, juice blends, yogurt, cookies, salad dressing, most condiments (ketchup, BBQ sauce, etc.) crackers and bread, even some baby formulas. Also a lot of “health foods” as a way to make the shelf life longer, the texture better and prevent it from rotting faster. That is pretty gross – basically we are eating plastic food, lots of it and loving it. Loving it so much, that we are willing to risk our health for it.

It is up to us, the consumers to change this. So please read the labels at the grocery store. Basically, HFCS is in nearly everything that comes in a package. Why is that? Well, HFCS is cheaper for the food companies to put in food than sugar, because it is easier to transport and store and cheaper to produce.

Isn’t that special?

Although the refineries that make HFCS are stating that this study on mercury in HFCS was researched based on old material and that they have been using mercury-free versions of the two re-agents mentioned in the study, how would a consumer know if the HFCS in their food or beverage was made with a mercury free re-agent or not? Are you willing to take a chance or gamble on yourself or your family’s health?

We, as consumers need to start putting our money where our mouth is. We must advocate for ourselves and vote with our money because it is clear that the food industry doesn’t care about us and won’t be our advocate. They care only about profits. If the majority of people don’t buy these products then the food manufacturers will have to stop making it and we will all be better for it.

However, in the meantime, this does require us to make sacrifices – it does mean more time in the grocery store reading labels. It does mean not being able to eat certain foods or products, and it may require of us more legwork and time as we find alternate products to fill in the void or it may require us to make certain products at home ourselves. But it is a good exercise to do, because once you start reading the labels, you realize how HFCS is in the majority of packaged foods, and it is shocking and scary to realize that this is being done in order for corporations to make a larger profit at the expense of our health. Let us not even talk about the link between food companies and the prescription drug companies…

Here is another good article about HFCS

And another great resource is Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which discusses the food industry’s role in HFCS taking over our food supply.