A Major Award!

This caption is lost on our illiterate readers, but they appreciate the photos.

The experience of 'blogging' is still relatively new to me.  I suppose that we've reached a point in our culture where blogging is just another actual verb and does not require the quotation marks, so perhaps I will drop them from here on out.  You'll have to forgive me if I end up using them later; I still remember growing up in a time where no one had a cell phone and we didn't waste time on the internet because there was nothing on the internet to waste time on...and nobody was using it.  Cats were generally less famous.  Looking back now, I'm actually grateful that my own childhood was bereft of these things, though I am beginning to digress from the topic at hand.

So, blogging.  Christa had actually set-up the blog itself.  She chose the formatting and put it together, established the theme and wrote the initial description and first post.  I had assumed that while I would do most of the cooking, she would in fact take care of the technical side of things and do most of the posting.  She is a child of the cellular/internet age...a digital native.  She is also well versed in maintaining a blog, as she has had her own for years, and has kept journals for longer than I have known her.  Thus, as I'm now writing my 20-somethingeth post (and I know that's not many, but as I pointed out I'm still new to this), I just had to take a moment to think about how much more involved I have become in the writing/blogging end of things.  I've never kept a journal, I've never really had any kind of public forum such as this before to express myself, and it seems that I had no idea that it was something that I was missing.  I really enjoy this, and it turns out that this has become one of the many ways in which Christa has brought joy into my life.

Now that I'm actively blogging an really enjoying myself doing so, I have found that I am really generally interested in things like how many visitors actually come here, and who is reading what we have to say.  It's a pretty young blog without any revolutionary content, so that number is still 'not many', and I'm pretty sure that most of them are friends and family.  That's cool, though, because we aren't really trying to reach the world just yet, but to share our experiences with food and share some tasty recipes that are legitimately healthy.  Our friends and families are really our target market in that regard. 

Now, allow me to finally get to the meaning behind the title of this post.  (No recipes today, I'm afraid, but I did make some killer venison pot pies that will be up sometime soon.)  Very recently, an external factor recognized the legitimacy of what we are doing here.  I had written to Pure Indian Foods in order to inquire about obtaining a product sample for review on our site.  They had posted an open invitation to do so on another social media website, so I decided that I had nothing to lose in submitting our little blog for their potential approval.  I had found out about this company for several reasons.  I am a fan of ghee, but the only ghee that I have used has been that which I've rendered myself, so I was curious about trying a prepared product.  Their ghee is certified organic from grass fed cows, so that fit in with my own nutritional ethics.  Additionally, they offer a naturally condensed cane sugar product called jagger, which is essentially pressed sugarcane juice that is naturally evaporated (not separated, not refined; all minerals still intact).  Baking sweets can be challenging with only natural and unrefined sweeteners.  Maple syrup does impart additional flavors, and you can't really bake with raw honey because once it is heated it's no longer raw.  One more bonus - they're actually a local family run business, based out of Princeton. 

We're under no obligation to crack this open, but we will.

I decided that I had nothing to lose by inquiring about sampling their ghee and their jaggery, but I really didn't expect to receive anything.  Call it an exercise in rejection.  However, I was really excited to find out that they had decided to select us to review some samples, and were shipping out ghee and jaggery.  So, it's not a major award, but it felt good to have what we are doing validated in that way.  Of course, I'm also extremely excited to try these out in all kinds of recipes.  Some things I already have in mind, and for others I'm hoping for some feedback from you.  So please, if you happen to be in our core audience, or just wandered in from someplace near or far, I'm hoping that you'll take a moment to leave some suggestions down below in the comment section of what we can do with these two foods; particularly the jaggery as I have never used it before.  I found a couple of rice dishes, and I might also try to use it next time that I make pumpkin pie (which I promise to put up here as a recipe post).  My pie crust is pretty fantastic if I do say so myself.  Which I just did. 



Oh, so I have to add this down here.  Disclaimer: Pure Indian Foods provided me with a free sample of this product to review, and I was under no obligation to review it if I so chose. Nor was I under any obligation to write a positive review or sponsor a product giveaway in return for the free product.





I closing, another photo for those of you who can't read, or are in fact fantastic readers but also like looking at pictures, or just managed to make it all the way to the end of this posting. 

Gratuitous shot of the aforementioned pot pies and pie crust.  Stay tuned.