Joan’s Country Kitchen

his holiday season, many are looking for money saving ideas. One easy way to save money on gift giving is

to make your own gifts in the kitchen. Homemade holiday treats are a wonderful way to say how much you care to everybody on your gift list. They’ll appreciate the gift even more, knowing you made it yourself.

Visit our cool Cookbook Store

Would you like to review your favorite - or not so favorite - restaurant and read what others have to say? FoodConnect offers a FoodConnect Restaurants section where you can search for restaurants in your own city or town or find a good eatery when you go on vacation.

Membership with FoodConnect is totally free and sign up only takes a few minutes. Once you sign up, when you go to the restaurant section, your own city automatically comes up. For instance, I live in north Texas so area restaurants come up with type of cuisine, address, phone number, web address and any reviews that have been posted by other members. I can sort through them for my favorites and write my own review and add a photo or search for a new place to eat. If I don’t want to write a full review, I can also give it a rating of how many forks it deserves out of 5 or answer quick questions about price, service, parking, whether or not it has take out and delivery and other topics.

I travel with my husband when he takes business trips so if I’m going on a trip, say to Washington, DC, I can change the city to Washington, DC and find great places to eat on my visit. You can also search restaurants by type of cuisine or restaurant name.

With FoodConnect you can create a file of your favorite restaurants to go back to later or browse others favorites in the featured section.

FoodConnect.com also offers great articles, recipes, featured cookbooks, menus and a food-loving community to make new friends. One new article I really liked was on Spicy Seafood Kakiage by Luke McKinney of Toronto.

FoodConnect currently has many Canadian members but not many from the USA. Sign up for a free membership today and tell everyone about the great restaurants in your hometown.

This was a paid review by Foodconnect.com. However, I am a member and love their site.

I love my crock pot. It’s easy to make just about any type of recipe in the crockpot from soups to desserts. I always love to add to my crockpot cookbook library and recently found this terrific addition by Stephanie O’Dea entitled Make It Fast, Cook It Slow: The Big Book of Everyday Slow Cooking which even offers a crockpot version of banana bread, chai tea latte and caramel apples. This isnt’ just another crockpot cookbook!

Stephanie’s crockpot cookbook offers 454 pages of delicious-sounding, easy to understand recipes with ingredients you actually have on hand. I haven’t had a chance to try more than a few but Stephanie gives readers her family’s “verdict” on each recipe, including the specific verdict of her young children. If you’re a mom who wants to cook delicious food for hard to please youngsters, this book is for you.

Stephanie O’Dea’s blog, crockpot365.blogspot.com, is dedicated to slow cooking and offers more delicious recipes.

I just found a great new foodie resource called FoodConnect. This cooking and recipe site is a terrific

social network too. Membership is free and sign-up just takes minutes. From there you can connect with cooking friends, sign up for a weekly cooking and recipe newsletter and more.

FoodConnect.com is all about recipes and food! Members post their own recipes - one terrific sounding recipe I am going to try is Chicken and Herbed Dumplings with Aromatic Vegetables posted by Alex Firman. Members can review the recipes and rate them too. Once you’ve chosen recipes that interest you, you can use the shopping tool to create a shopping list, making it easy to fix that special recipe.

Find a few recipes you love and don’t want to forget? Add them to “My Recipes” so they’ll always be there to refer back to at any time. You can also create and post your own favorite menus and search for info on cookbooks.

Another foodie area on FoodConnect.com is restaurants. You can search for restaurants by zip code or city, add your own favorite restaurant or rate the ones that are listed. It’s a great way to promote your favorite eating hot spots in your town or city.

There are lots of interesting food-related articles on FoodConnect as well. Here is one by Judy Witts called Liquid Gold about olive oil.

Almost all of the members I looked at on the site were from Vancouver, BC so FoodConnect could use some members from the United States! Take a moment to sign up for it’s free membership and browse. You could be the first in your city to post your favorite restaurant or make some new friends in BC.

This was a paid review by FoodConnect.com but, as with all my reviews, I fully checked out the site and really like it. FoodConnect has great potential and you can be part of it so sign up and post those recipes.