Here a few tips to find the right balance between playing bingo or jackpot bingo and having a good time with the family:
1/ Communicate about your interest for bingo with your spouse and kids: you don’t have to make it a secret. If it’s a secret, they will be suspicious about it and it will be even worse. You don’t want that to happen. Communicate communicate communicate!
2/ Share the interest with them: explain what you like about the game and why you are excited about bingo. You can learn how to strategize in a game, learn from your mistakes and have some fun! There are some smart investors who play bridge (like Warren Buffett…) there might be a good reason why they like games!
3/ Bring them with you: bingo can be another opportunity to enjoy some great time with the family! That’s great news! Your spouse might complain that you don’t spend enough time with the family but in this case you would combine both!

It’s all about negotiation and having a great time together! Enjoy!

This is just what the Holiday Extras Customer Awards have done for the travel industry over the last three years. The awards are run and organised by the online travel service website Holiday Extras, the site allows customers to use just one website to find and search out the best deals for the bolts-ons that are essential for the smooth running of your trip away, whether it be with business or if you are taking a holiday away with family or friends.

Holiday Extras pride themselves on being a company that you can trust to help you to cut through the multitude of companies that are on the web that claim to be able to help you with your travel plans. It is this reputation for having an honest and trustworthy business that has helped the Holiday Extras Travel Awards become so successful.

The awards have been stripped right back and Holiday Extras have gone back to basics and made sure that all of the winners are chosen by the voters who visit their site (the Holiday Extras Customers).

The categories look at things like the best overall airline and the airline that have the best cabin crew. This year there were twelve categories with two new ones being included. These were the categories for the best travel guide publisher (that was won by the Lonely Planet guides) and the category for the most inspirational travel film (which was won by the cult film Shirley Valentine). Holiday Extras already have plans to add new and interesting categories next year as they expand the awards.

Here is a list if of the best performing travel companies from 2011:

- Best Airline: Emirates

- Best Airline Cabin Crew: Emirates

- Best Airline for Value for Money: easyJet

- Best Airport: Belfast International

- Best Airport Car Park: Edinburgh Park and Fly

- Best Airport Hotel: Gatwick Sofitel

- Best Airport Hotel Restaurant: Manchester Premier Inn

- Best Airport Lounge: Edinburgh Servisair

- Best Airport Hotel for families: Manchester Premier Inn

- Best Airline for Travelling with Babies: Virgin Atlantic

- Best Airline for Travellers with a Disability: Virgin Atlantic

- Most Inspirational Travel Film: Shirley Valentine

- Best Travel Guide Publisher: Lonely Planet

The awards this year were a lavish affair that saw celebrities and the top people from the travel industry attend and come to together to celebrate the crème de la crème from the travel world.

The ceremony was hosted by the well-known travel writer and radio presenter Simon Calder and with such a prominent celebrity from the travel industry lending his name to the awards, it is clear just how much weight these awards hold!

Here are 5 tips to help you out to pair drinks with food:
1/ Be aware of the ingredients: if you prepare meat with a specific sauce, you will have to take that into consideration to prepare a cocktail. Do you want your cocktail to be bitter or sweet?
2/ Too much liquid can kill the taste: Liquid is complementary of your food but this should not replace food. If you start drinking too much liquid, you will completely your taste and you won’t be able to enjoy your food.
3/ Try different liquids: there are so many liquids you can mix, try different things! You could try wine (Grosset Wines, Innocent Bystander Wines or Villa Maria Wines) but also cocktails done with fruits, fruit juices,… Try different things and you will see that you can mix lots of great things!
4/ Listen to experts: check out different food websites with great middle east recipes to get recommendations from experts. There are passionate about what they do. With great reviews, you will be able to prepare a nice meal!
5/ Enjoy your moment: It can be painful to prepare food and mix it with drinks but be prepared to enjoy it! You will have a lot of fun if you are ready to have fun!

Enjoy!

Here are a few tips you want to consider:

- First of all, relax! Your friends will be happy to see you anyway and enjoy some good food with you

- Avoid heavy meals because if they come from far away they might be tired jetlagged and not used to local food. Take that into consideration. You will have to plan wine pairing accordingly

- Do not go fancy if you don’t feel like it. It’s nice to have a nice bottle of French Wine but there are great wines from all over the world (probably not Australia as it is their home country…). You can try something different and light for such dinner!

- Think about pairing with Wine: fish with white wine and meat with Red Wine. With internet, you can also check pairings. There are tons of opportunities to check pairings and find the right wine for your meal.

- Mix wine with water. You don’t want to get too drunk at the end of your dinner.

Enjoy some good food and wine and give your hosts a warm welcome!

Online coupons are spectacularly popular all of a sudden – there were tens of millions of these coupons redeemed in the last year alone. These coupons actually pay for themselves. The thing is, advertisers have always had this big problem with how to spend their advertising budget. Until now they’ve only been able to scatter their advertisements around, and the most sophisticated insight they could have into how well spent their money was, could be through looking up readership information about a newspaper or the ratings for a show on a channel. With Internet coupons though, they get a valuable look into exactly what it is you do on the Internet. They’ll know which product promotion you looked up, which online banner ad. you saw in the lead up to visiting their website, and so on. And they’ll know all this stuff not just about a generic “consumer” – they’ll know that about you, by name. They’ll know that you, John Moore, researched for food coupons for Omaha steaks on Ebates, downloaded the coupon and came in to buy them two hours later. They’ll be able to look into exactly everything you searched for in the lead up to that coupon download, so they’ll know exactly what you’re looking for. If a specific customer looked for cheapo cheap wine for a party, they’ll know that if you searched for “cheap party beverage supplies”. If another person searches for “cheap wedding gifts” they’ll know that person did that too – by name and address. With a name and address to go with that information.

There is just no limit to the amount of information they can usefully collect about you anymore. Now this is a system that successfully sidesteps Google’s privacy policies of keeping advertisers from looking deeply into user behavior. A Google advertiser account for instance finds out the name or the IP address of a customer. If you can bait customers with food coupons, appliance coupons, movie coupons or anything else, they’ll just voluntarily give you that information. Actually, that information is not altogether voluntary. There is a certain sleight of hand that goes on. To actually get specific information about what search term you really use on a search engine, they use a whole new way of running a website on the Internet. They will have dozens of copies of the same website, on the Internet. Each will show up on Google, for different search keyword strings. So any time you get to a particular version of their website, that is available only to searches for a specific keyword string, they’ll know what you used to get there. They could put that information on your coupon. Of course, there are other more direct ways they have of getting your keyword string too.

For instance, when you sign up on a coupons site, the coupon providers can easily get your personal information through a few simple roundabout ways. Let’s say that you are looking for food coupons, and you happen to be signed up as a fan on a Facebook page. The advertiser can take note of this, and with a little manual research, make out who you are. Privacy activists are concerned of course; but when people can get a few discounts and coupons, the privacy argument will be a hard sell.

If you were to make a list of all your favorite foods, you’d find that, while chips and dip and chocolate may first come to mind, there are plenty of healthy foods which are worthy of inclusion in food diets designed to lose weight. For example, you may not be big on veggies, but you love avocados, carrots, lettuce and artichokes. These veggies are packed with nutritive value, while being relatively skimpy on the calories. Give these beloved veggies a starring role in your menus. You’ll enjoy what you’re eating, feel happy, pampered and satisfied and still achieve your goal of weight loss. Do the same with your list of meats, poultry and seafood. If you enjoy chicken, custom food diets are a snap! Chicken is on the menus of almost every cuisine in the world. Find new ways to prepare this economical and lean meat. Think about fruit-based recipes ?who doesn’t like a fruit smoothie of their favorite fruits? The smoothie makes an excellent breakfast, mid-afternoon snack or dessert. Make your smoothie with yogurt or low-fat milk to keep those calories in line.

Speaking of beverages, if you’re a coffee-with-sugar hound, try sweetening your coffee with Splenda(R) ?this product tastes just like sugar, without the calories. The same goes for sodas ?there are now several major soda brands made with Splenda(R) too. You also might find it useful to insert a few new fruit juices into your beverage lineup. Chilled Chai tea, with a tad of milk is another delicious alternative. Varying the types of foods and beverages within your usual food choices goes a long way towards relieving dietary boredom.

Condiments and seasonings are just one of the secrets of successful food diets. Herbs and spices can really put some zip into an otherwise bland recipe. One tomato, cut into wedges or slices, may not seem an exciting menu choice ?that is, until you make this into a small salad plate adorned with snips of fresh basil leaves and a few slices of fresh (naturally low-fat) mozzarella cheese. If carrots rank high on your list, try a dish of cooked, sliced carrots in a sauce of orange juice laced with ginger for a real taste treat. Bring the orange juice to a simmer, add a touch of cornstarch to thicken and some powdered ginger. When the sauce is thickened, return the cooked carrots to the pot, stir and serve.

Produce is fast becoming a ‘luxury’ food, due to cost. However, this doesn’t mean that food diets should be geared to less of these nutritious foods. Choose the best and freshest produce you can find. Use your best-loved fruits and veggies list to cruise the net in search of new recipes to use these favorites. Then, don’t let them go to waste! If you find you bought too much, remember that many fruits and veggies can be blanched and frozen for future use.

When you consider that we eat not only to allay our hunger, but to also please our palate, it makes sense that variety, food quality and seasonal produce are smart criteria on which to base food diets.

The last of our tips on constructing food diets concerns food portion sizes. The majority of the trendy food programs rely on small portions. When your dinner plate has too much ‘white space’, the psychological effect is that you ultimately feel deprived. Here’s a great trick to using small food portions that are still, at the end of the meal, satisfying. Start serving each course on a separate plate. For example, you might begin with a small fruit cup with a flavored yogurt as the ‘sauce’. Take the time to enjoy this course, as well as the table conversation. Don’t rush through it! Your next course might be your meat and a side of veggies, seasoned in an interesting way. This technique also gives your tummy a chance to catch up with your eyes.

Now, what about that dessert? Taking the time to savor your food, with a few minutes between courses might find your tummy full and happy, not in need of the conventional sugar-laden dessert. If you do crave a finisher to your meal, try a small, fresh fruit and cheese plate. Again, quality counts, but you don’t need much to refresh and satiate your palate.

In the end, custom food diets such as this tend to work for you “the unique individual”. Give this method a try and see those pounds disappear!

But the FDA and the Institute of Medicine are not stopping there. They’re wondering now if diet supplements and nutrition supplements are being marketed accurately either. They’re wondering if the strict standards that they apply to drugs before passing them for sale to the public, should be applied to diet supplements too. That’s quite a thought there – no one will be able to sell vitamin tablets without proving that they actually do any good. The FCC says that there is really no scientific reason why you should have strict standards for drugs, and lenient ones for nutritional supplements. There may be no scientific reason why they should be treated difeferently; but there certainly is a political one. The food and diet supplements industry is a richly funded one.

So according to research done by the FDA, it is now believed that the best way to get makers of diet supplements to prove the merit in their products, is to get them to use biomarkers – standard measures of the way the body responds to a drug, a diet supplement or anything. This could be really big. If the makers of diet supplements were made to prove that their products actually did anything, nine out of ten of those companies would go under. You’d better be prepared now to see most of your favorite supplements and potions are wiped off the face of the earth. There is certainly going to be some terrible opposition from the industry over this. You can expect a lot of news coverage too.

Most of the makers of diet supplements are set up in Utah, home to Senator Orrin Hatch who under President Clinton, pushed through laws that let manufacturers of diet supplements and foods say just about anything they wanted. Still, in removing the diet supplements firms from existence, the FDA has a pretty tough job cut out for it. It needs to prove that the products are actually harmful. It took the FDA years to do anything about ephedra for instance; and that was a product that was actually killing people.

Enjoy the previous salad? You surely will not just satisfy with this lighit delicious side dish. So, are you ready to level up and learn something more advanced recipes with raisins? The most traditional dish with a very long long history that I like is Pilaf. In fact, the word “pilaf” is originated in Turkey while pilaf recipes were developed in Iran, Central Asia and Turkey. There are a lot of cooking variation in Pilaf as it includes many ingredients with the rice including carrots, raisins, peas, potatoes, lamb or beef.

Ok…so ready to get started now!

Pilaf Recipe

Ingredients:

- 1 cup long-grained rice
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1/2 yellow diced onion
- 1.5 peeled and diced carrot
- 1 tbsp crushed garlic
- 2 cups chicken broth
- 1/4 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 cup raisins
- 1/4 cup toasted, slivered almonds

Instructions:

1. Saute the onion, carrots and garlic in the olive oil until they become softened.
2. Add the rice and continue cooking for approximately 2 minutes
3. Add the broth and cinnamon and bring the mixture to a boil
4. Stir well and lower heat, allow the mixture to simmer for 15 – 20 minutes until the broth is absorbed
5. Finally, don’t forget to stir in the raisins and almonds before serving.

Carrot Raisin Salad Recipe

Servings: 3

Ingredients:

- 1.5 cups of carrots, grated
- 1/5 cup raisins
- 1.5 tbsp olive oil
- 1/8 cup strained yogurt
- 1/8 cup slivered, toasted almonds

Directions:

Combine the carrots and raisins in a medium sized bowl
Stir in the yogurt and olive oil and mix well
Add the almonds and refrigerate for 2 hours before serving
That’s it! Bon appetit!

Therefore, in order to create authentic Middle Eastern food at home, I highly recommend to add raisins in the dish, not only it can help add sweetness and flavour, it can also help bring the taste of the Middle East to foods of all kind.

Just want to give more magic tips about raisins in different dishes.
Add raisins to lamb with time can allow the moisture to reintegrate with the raisins.
Add raisins to salads, stews and meats can help balance out stronger flavors.
In the next post, I would try to include my favourite Middle East dishes contains raisins. Stay tune! =)