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National Herbs & Spices Day

June 10^th is National Herbs & Spices Day.

Herbs & Spices are to some extent the basis on which many nations were built. At one point and time believe it or not, Spices such as Black Pepper were far more valuable than Gold. Culinary use of the term “Herb” typically distinguishes between herbs, from the leafy green parts of a plant and spices from the other parts of the plant including seeds, berries, bark, roots, and fruit. Culinary Herbs are distinguished vegetables in that, like spices they are used in small amounts and provide Flavor rather than Substance to food.

Great Culinary Herbs such as lavender, thyme, basil, rosemary, bay laurel should to highlighted as some of the most flavor enhancing herbs that are commonly used.

Spices on the other hand are dried seeds, fruit, bark, or vegetative substance used in nutritionally insignificant quantities as a food additive for flavor, color or as a preservative that kills harmful bacteria or prevents growth. 
Many spices, like herbs, are used for their medicinal effects;

for example, tumeric is used as preservative, liquorice is used as a medicine, garlic as a vegetable and numerous other cases can be found around the world of just such uses.

Tamales Dulce w/ Mango & Black Beans

We got hit up by an East Coast cohort of ours who was looking for a sweet and savory dessert recipe to make for one of his new female friends he was to be entertaining for the evening. 

With today being National Raisins & Spice Day, and figuring since the guy hardly eats meat and is trying to turn vegetarian at some point in his life, we would give his a great recipe for a sweet yet savory Tamale that would give his date the impression he could cook (and was intuitive enough to not order takeout.) 

Needless to say the date was a success, the Tamales came out perfect and we couldn’t be happier (well that is unless he paid us for this lesson,) but hey who are we to complain, we do this for the love of food and full stomachs.

Now back to the recipe, these Tamales go perfect with a bit of Black Beans & fresh Mango, so we decided why not give you all the steps to make yourself a delicious dessert (that doesn't cost that much.)

Enjoy this dish and make sure you let them know how many painstaking hours it took you in the kitchen to pull it off.  

(Click READ MORE to read the entire recipe)

Flavorstorm. The Finest Flavored Sugars, Smoked Peppercorns & Spices

Good cooking is about knowing your ingredients and what flavors go together, essentially. The knack for picking flavors and combining them to create some of the most illustrious flavors found on Earth is amazing. But for the rest of the world, who if it weren’t for instructions, recipes and websites such as ours, wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between pink peppercorns and curry powder, gaining that enhanced palate takes time and patience.

I am not saying this to insult anyone by any means. I believe that in most cases, when people don’t know what they are eating, they tend to enjoy it more, because of the mystery factor, myself included. But now with the help of Flavorstorm and their Natural Flavoring Innovations, everyone under the Sun can experience clean, fresh and most importantly natural flavor enhancing salts, spices and sugars such as the amazingly incredible tasting Lemon Sugar which blew our minds when we Bruleed a few dashes atop of our Supreme Lemon Bars yesterday.