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Sunday’s are pretty much a leisurely time around our home, especially in the evenings. We usually are finishing off our homemade pizza from Saturday night and watch some TV such as Extreme Makeover Home Edition and Masterminds.

This Sunday evening we had our leftover pizza with chocolate beer. Occasionally I try an exotic beer, or stout as it is properly called, that we get at Downtown Produce in the beer and wine section. This store sells not much more than produce, meat and beer and wine from all over the world. As I was perusing the beer section one day I happened to find a chocolate beer and decided to give it a try. It turned out to be absolutely delicious and is somewhat of a treat for us since it costs about $3.69 for a 17 ounce bottle.

The beer is known as Young’s Double Chocolate Stout and gets rave reviews over at BeerAdvocate.com except for an occasional weirdo that doesn’t like chocolate. Now, if you’re thinking chocolate beer would be gross, this isn’t. It doesn’t taste like chocolate milk or a candy bar, it’s more like a bitter coffee flavor with a hint of chocolate. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect at first, thinking it would be sweeter, but it turned out to be very good.

As you can see below it has a nice dark rich look and the flavor is as heavy as it looks.

I like my beer ice cold (cold enough to make your teeth hurt) so we usually put it in the freezer along with a couple of heavy glasses 30 minutes before it is to be consumed. Unfortunately this time the beer only got about 5 minutes in the freezer because I was busy writing another blog post and forgot about it before the pizza was being heated up. It was still delicious though.

We’ve tried other chocolate beers before, but Young’s Double Chocolate Stout is definitely the best. I don’t remember what the other one was, but the flavor was wimpy compared to this. If you find this anywhere or get a chance to try it in a restaurant you should. Make sure you ask for a frosty mug.

Cheers!

Alan
PS - This hardly fits in the Healthy Dining category, but I didn’t know where else to put it.

Tags: chocolate beer, beeradvocate, pizza, stout

I didn’t realize how much of a seasonal niche healthy dieting and weight loss was until this last Thanksgiving and Christmas season has passed us by. During the month of November I was somewhat concerned about our healthy diet web site because the traffic was nowhere near what I expected.

I initially expected that people would be looking up healthy recipes because they would be interested in avoiding those fattening holiday treats that seem to be everywhere leading up to Christmas. I thought our traffc would increase in a big way. I couldn’t have been more wrong about that!

Apparently, from the looks of our traffic numbers in December, many people disengage from the thought of eating healthy during this time of year. We experienced about a 12% drop in traffic to our healthy diet podcast blog and our health diet, healthy living web site. We know from personal experience that trying to be strict when there are tons of treats everywhere is a hard thing to do. At the building where my wife has her counseling office, they are known for having some of the tastiest goodies during this time of year and my wife does engage in grabbing something to sample as she passes by the table in the break room. And I too drop my guard somewhat if there is an interesting chocolate dessert waiting to be consumed.

However, this actually turns out to be a good thing, at least for those of us doing business in the healthy lifestyle niche. After the holidays people start feeling guilty and are ready to recommit to a healthier diet. We do the same and say, “No more junk after New Year’s!”

With this new drive to be fit, consumers start googling all kinds of healthy eating and weight loss kinds of terms and consequently we’ve seen about a 30% increase in traffic so far in January to our healthy living related web properties.

I missed the buying rush this last Christmas because much of what I do is not seasonally related, but thankfully, because we cover several niches in our web ventures, one of them has picked up substantially after the biggest buying season of the year. I hate to think that a big part of what we do is based on people feeling guilty, but if the trend is there, you have to work it.

The lesson in all this is to broaden your reach and look for niches that aren’t what everyone else is doing or aren’t apparent from the usual trends. Brainstorm niches that people engage in for a few months at a time and then figure out what they do after those few months have passed by.

People are in fairly typical buying patterns during the first of the year shopping for and buying clothes, housewares, small appliances, things for work like computers, office supplies, etc., and then comes summer when much of everything slows down including most consumer spending. The only thing left to do is take a vacation.

Now, what do you suppose you could do with that information?

Alan 

Tags: weight loss, healthy diet, niches, traffic, consumer spending

After reading John Chow’s latest fine dining entry about his trip to Tony Roma’s I thought I’d try to give bloggers a little bit more of a healthy choice in food. This is one of our cooked recipes that accounts for about 20% of the food we eat. It certainly isn’t the most healthy thing you could eat since it is cooked and has a little cheese on it, but it’s way healthier than anything you would get at Pizza Hut or Domino’s.

As a tradition my wife Jean and I make pizza almost every Saturday night. This is no ordinary pizza as it is completely made from scratch, except for the sauce which is organic Muir Glen pasta sauce. It is a fairly labor intensive process that takes about 2.5 hours to prepare the dinner, which includes salads, for the evening.

The usual toppings for the pizza include green peppers, red peppers, zucchini, olives, onions, jalapenos, fresh garlic, 3 different kinds of cheese and sauteed crimini mushrooms. The mushrooms are sliced up and sauteed until all the water cooks out of them and then I pour a little sweet vermouth in the skillet and saute it down again. This makes the mushrooms nice and tangy. Occasionally we will add some sun-dried tomatoes prepared in our dehydrator when we have them.

The crust is prepared by my wife Jean and the process starts by grinding our own wheat. She uses our Vita Mix blender to grind hard red wheat berries into whole grain flour. The flour is a little more course than your average white flour which makes for a nice consistency to the crust. If you’ve never used a Vita Mix blender, they are incredible machines and you will never own a traditional blender again once you own a Vita Mix.

After the dough is made it is rolled out onto a large cutting board to let it rise for about 30 minutes. We then heat our pizza stone for 15 minutes at 450 degrees F. Jean then slides the crust onto the hot stone and cooks it for 8 minutes so it will be firm when adding the ingredients. This is the secret to great pizza. Every time you get a pizza from the major delivery outlets, the center of the crust is uncooked and gooey. By cooking it you get a firm pizza that you can actually pick up and eat with one hand.

After the crust cooks for 8 minutes we take it out and add all the ingredients and sprinkle on about as much cheese as there is in probably 2 to 3 slices of Pizza Hut pizza. As you can see there is a little more cheese on the right side, my side. That little bit of cheese is still on of my weaknesses. To give the pizza an extra kick we use fresh crushed garlic on top and sprinkle Italian spices directly on the crust right after we take it out of the oven and then we put more spices on the top as the last ingredient.

The pizza cooks for an additional 8 to 9 minutes. I like the cheese to just start to get brown and the I know it’s done. This pizza last us for 2 meals.

It is a lot of work, but we look forward to our pizza dinners nearly every Saturday night.

Alan

Tags: pizza, healthy diet, john chow, vita mix blender, pizza hut

Taking our weekly break from the rigours of affiliate marketing we start with a funny title. The title comes from a Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner we had at my last employer, BellSouth, which is now the new AT&T. I used to be a graphic artist in another life, designing Yellow Pages advertising all day, but just like my other life, that’s another story.

Anyway, at this dinner it was my duty to bring the salad because that’s about 70% of what my wife Jean and I eat on a regular basis. I thought it would be the easiest thing to do since we make them all the time. As we were setting up to eat I came in with my salad and the boss looked at what I had in my hands and then looked at me and said, “What is that?” to which I quizzically said, “Uh, it’s a salad.” What was just another salad to me was some sort of foreign looking concoction to my boss, of the likes she apparently had never seen. She asked if their was a recipe to this magnificent creation she was beholding and I said again, “Well, no, it’s just a salad.”

So the day before yesterday I had a salad for lunch pictured in the photo above. It may appear to be something different than the usual iceberg lettuce, tomato and onion salad you get at the strip mall Italian restaurant. Yes, there are a few more ingredients, but it’s just a salad none the less.

So what goes into one of these uber salads you may be wondering? Here’s a list of ingredients for the one in the photo:

Fresh green leaf lettuce
Cucumbers
Zucchini
Cherry tomatoes
Avocado
Kalamata olives
Sweet onions
Raisins
Green peppers
Red peppers
Shaved almonds
Raw corn shaved off the cob

And the dressing consisted of a sprinkling of:

Braggs Amino Acids
Honey
Organic taco sauce

There’s your recipe. And remember…

It’s just a salad.

Alan

PS - You can check out a bunch of healthy recipes right here.

Just to add a little variety to the blog here and to try and one up John Chow’s Fine Dining category occasionally I’ll be posting about one of our healthy recipes whipped up into a special meal made at home. Hey, you have to take a break once in a while from the rigors of affiliate marketing.

We eat a roughly 75 to 80% raw vegan diet, not because we are into saving the whales or anything like that, we’re into plant based food because it is bursting with nutrition and extremely good for you. It is the fuel for your body.

Okay, enough preachy stuff.

First up is this past Monday’s lunch made by my lovely wife Jean. It is our faux tuna salad recipe from our Healthy Diet website. Yes, it really tastes like tuna, but it’s made from a combination of soaked sunflower seeds, soaked almonds, celery and just the right amount of spices such as garlic, dill, lemon juice and other ingredients to get a tuna taste.

The lettuce and scallions you see under and on the salad are from our garden we just started. We don’t use any pesticides on the garden, but use marigolds to ward off some insects because they don’t like the smell and we use red pepper and paprika around the border of the garden to ward off other critters, like our giant Siamese cat.

I’ll have to be completely honest in that normally I don’t care that much for this recipe (the texture is kind of funny), but I was really hungry and when Jean let me know the lettuce was harvested from our garden I was excited to be eating some of our own home grown food. I dug right in and it hit the spot.

Alan