(Family Features) Perfect for a picnic, celebrating a birthday or just enjoying time with family and friends, the classic combination of strawberries and cream serves as both a sweet treat and a crowd favorite.
This version adds another tasty treat – popcorn – so you can triple down on deliciousness. With just three ingredients, it’s easy to make and ideal for sharing. Simply drizzle popcorn with melted white chocolate chips and top with pulsed freeze-dried strawberries for a kid- and adult-friendly flavor trio.
An added benefit: Popcorn is a whole grain that’s 100% unprocessed with no additives, hidden ingredients or GMOs while providing nutrients like zinc, magnesium, B vitamins and fiber. At just 30 calories per cup of air-popped popcorn, it’s an energy-providing snack full of complex carbohydrates.
Visit Popcorn.org to find more sweet snacking solutions.
Watch video to see how to make this recipe!
Strawberries and Cream Popcorn
Servings: 4-6
1/4 cup freeze-dried strawberries
6 cups popped popcorn
1 cup white chocolate chips, melted
In small food processor or spice grinder, pulse freeze-dried strawberries until finely ground.
Place popcorn in large bowl. Drizzle melted chocolate over top; toss until well coated. Sprinkle evenly with ground freeze-dried strawberries; toss until well coated.
Scrape onto large parchment paper-lined baking sheet, spreading into even layer.
Let stand at room temperature 30-60 minutes, or until chocolate is set and hardened. To serve, break into pieces.
Tips: To melt chocolate: In heatproof bowl over saucepan of barely simmering water, stir chocolate chips 3-5 minutes, or until smooth.
To melt chocolate in microwave: In microwave-safe bowl or measuring cup, microwave chocolate on medium heat 1-2 minutes, stirring every 30 seconds, or until smooth and melted.
Visit our Food & Drink section to get the latest on Foodie News and recipes, offering a delightful blend of culinary inspiration and gastronomic trends to elevate your dining experience.
(Family Features) Keep the heat out of your kitchen this summer with these grilled Chicken Skewers. Enjoy them on their own, pair with rice, serve as chicken tacos or toss in a salad for nearly endless, delicious possibilities. Visit Culinary.net to find more summer flavor inspiration.
In saucepan over medium heat, cook brown sugar, tomato paste, apple cider vinegar, mustard, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, barbecue seasoning, honey and teriyaki sauce until well combined.
Cube chicken and place in large bowl. Pour sauce over chicken, saving some for basting. Marinate at least 1 hour.
Heat grill to medium heat.
Place marinated chicken cubes on skewers and arrange on baking sheet. Grill until chicken reaches 165 F internal temperature, 20-30 minutes. Baste with remaining sauce as needed. Serve over rice or use for chicken tacos.
Substitution: Use hot honey instead of regular honey to spice it up.
SOURCE:Culinary.net
(Family Features) A nutrition boost for your daily menus can go a long way for families focused on making healthy eating decisions. If you’re looking for an easy way to add nutrients to your meals, the ancient grain sorghum could be the solution you’ve been looking for.
Sorghum is non-GMO, gluten-free and a source of 13 essential nutrients. Sorghum can be enjoyed as whole and pearled grain, flour or popped like popcorn, making it a versatile ingredient you can incorporate into meal-planning. It’s perfect for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks.
Adding a new twist to mealtime can be a cinch. With sorghum, it’s easy to achieve flavorful meals that have protein, fiber and other nutrients. Simply use your stove, a slow cooker, rice cooker or oven to prepare sorghum and replace the grain in your favorite recipes. Or discover a new favorite like this Sorghum BLT Salad.
For a quick and healthy snack, grab a handful of Popped Sorghum and feel good about eating between meals. You can purchase popped sorghum or prepare it yourself using one of many simple methods. A delicious alternative to popcorn, popped sorghum is quickly becoming a favorite snack option.
To discover more recipe inspiration and find easy ways to add sorghum to your family’s favorite dishes, visit SorghumCheckoff.com.
Recipe courtesy of United Sorghum Checkoff Program
Prep time: 20 minutes
Cook time: 20 minutes
Servings: 4-6
Dressing:
2/3 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon freshly cracked pepper
salt, to taste
Salad:
1 pound bacon
3 cups cooked whole-grain sorghum
1 head romaine lettuce, rinsed, dried and shredded
1-2 cups mixed greens, torn into 1-inch pieces
1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved
1/4 cup fresh parsley, coarsely chopped
4 green onions, thinly sliced
salt, to taste
pepper, to taste
Parmesan or goat cheese (optional)
To make dressing: Blend mayonnaise, milk, garlic powder and pepper until smooth and creamy. Season with salt, to taste. Refrigerate until ready to use.
To make salad: In large, deep skillet over medium-high heat, fry bacon. Turn frequently until evenly browned. Drain on paper towel and crumble.
In large bowl, combine sorghum, lettuce, mixed greens, tomatoes, parsley, green onions and bacon. Season with salt and pepper, to taste, and toss with dressing. Top with Parmesan or goat cheese, if desired, and serve.
‘I’ll have a coke – no, not Coca-Cola, Sprite.’
Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesValerie M. Fridland, University of Nevada, Reno
With burgers sizzling and classic rock thumping, many Americans revel in summer cookouts – at least until that wayward cousin asks for a “pop” in soda country, or even worse, a “coke” when they actually want a Sprite.
Few American linguistic debates have bubbled quite as long and effervescently as the one over whether a generic soft drink should be called a soda, pop or coke.
The word you use generally boils down to where you’re from: Midwesterners enjoy a good pop, while soda is tops in the North and far West. Southerners, long the cultural mavericks, don’t bat an eyelash asking for coke – lowercase – before homing in on exactly the type they want: Perhaps a root beer or a Coke, uppercase.
As a linguist who studies American dialects, I’m less interested in this regional divide and far more fascinated by the unexpected history behind how a fizzy “health” drink from the early 1800s spawned the modern soft drink’s many names and iterations.
Bubbles, anyone?
Foods and drinks with wellness benefits might seem like a modern phenomenon, but the urge to create drinks with medicinal properties inspired what might be called a soda revolution in the 1800s.
An 1878 engraving of a soda fountain.Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images
The process of carbonating water was first discovered in the late 1700s. By the early 1800s, this carbonated water had become popular as a health drink and was often referred to as “soda water.” The word “soda” likely came from “sodium,” since these drinks often contained salts, which were then believed to have healing properties.
Given its alleged curative effects for health issues such as indigestion, pharmacists sold soda water at soda fountains, innovative devices that created carbonated water to be sold by the glass. A chemistry professor, Benjamin Stillman, set up the first such device in a drugstore in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1806. Its eventual success inspired a boom of soda fountains in drugstores and health spas.
By the mid-1800s, pharmacists were creating unique root-, fruit- and herb-infused concoctions, such as sassafras-based root beer, at their soda fountains, often marketing them as cures for everything from fatigue to foul moods.
These flavored, sweetened versions gave rise to the linking of the word “soda” with a sweetened carbonated beverage, as opposed to simple, carbonated water.
Seltzer – today’s popular term for such sparkling water – was around, too. But it was used only for the naturally carbonated mineral water from the German town Nieder-Selters. Unlike Perrier, sourced similarly from a specific spring in France, seltzer made the leap to becoming a generic term for fizzy water.
Many late-19th-century and early 20th-century drugstores contained soda fountains – a nod to the original belief that the sugary, bubbly drink possessed medicinal qualities.Hall of Electrical History Foundation/Corbis via Getty Images
Regional naming patterns
So how did “soda” come to be called so many different things in different places?
It all stems from a mix of economic enterprise and linguistic ingenuity.
The popularity of “soda” in the Northeast likely reflects the soda fountain’s longer history in the region. Since a lot of Americans living in the Northeast migrated to California in the mid-to-late 1800s, the name likely traveled west with them.
As for the Midwestern preference for “pop” – well, the earliest American use of the term to refer to a sparkling beverage appeared in the 1840s in the name of a flavored version called “ginger pop.” Such ginger-flavored pop, though, was around in Britain by 1816, since a Newcastle songbook is where you can first see it used in text. The “pop” seems to be onomatopoeic for the noise made when the cork was released from the bottle before drinking.
A jingle for Faygo touts the company’s ‘red pop.’
Linguists don’t fully know why “pop” became so popular in the Midwest. But one theory links it to a Michigan bottling company, Feigenson Brothers Bottling Works – today known as Faygo Beverages – that used “pop” in the name of the sodas they marketed and sold. Another theory suggests that because bottles were more common in the region, soda drinkers were more likely to hear the “pop” sound than in the Northeast, where soda fountains reigned.
As for using coke generically, the first Coca-Cola was served in 1886 by Dr. John Pemberton, a pharmacist at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta and the founder of the company. In the 1900s, the Coca-Cola company tried to stamp out the use of “Coke” for “Coca-Cola.” But that ship had already sailed. Since Coca-Cola originated and was overwhelmingly popular in the South, its generic use grew out of the fact that people almost always asked for “Coke.”
No alcohol means not ‘hard’ but ‘soft.’Nostalgic Collections/eBay
As with Jell-O, Kleenex, Band-Aids and seltzer, it became a generic term.
What’s soft about it?
Speaking of soft drinks, what’s up with that term?
It was originally used to distinguish all nonalcoholic drinks from “hard drinks,” or beverages containing spirits.
Interestingly, the original Coca-Cola formula included wine – resembling a type of alcoholic “health” drink popular overseas, Vin Mariani. But Pemberton went on to develop a “soft” version a few years later to be sold as a medicinal drink.
Due to the growing popularity of soda water concoctions, eventually “soft drink” came to mean only such sweetened carbonated beverages, a linguistic testament to America’s enduring love affair with sugar and bubbles.
With the average American guzzling almost 40 gallons per year, you can call it whatever you what. Just don’t call it healthy.Valerie M. Fridland, Professor of Linguistics, University of Nevada, Reno
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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