Food: Page 16

The Kawakawa tree is a teeny little thing that grows in New Zealand. The leaves of this tree are thought to relieve everything from bruises to toothaches to bladder problems, and can be pounded into an infusion for tea.

The holiday season means you're going to be doing a LOT of entertaining and a lot of going to parties where you'll be expected to offer up a thoughtful hostess gift. While you could always make a last minute run to the store to purchase boxed chocolates or a nice bottle of wine, it's so much more personal to make something.

Um, okay, the question here is why WOULDN'T you want to decorate a cake shaped like a hamburger?

Are you a vegan who dreads Thanksgiving with your folks because there's so much, well, meat? Get some yummy in your tummy this Thanksgiving without meat by making this homemade tofurky.

Do you dread the holiday season because you're the only vegan in a largely carnivorous family? You don't have to be left out of the festivities - or go hungry - this Thankgiving, though, if you make your own food.

Amy Wisniewski's Thanksgiving Turkey Cake looks like a yummy carrot cake with fluffy pumpkin pie frosting, but it's not. SO not. Amy's creation may be shaped like a cake, but its ingredients include ground turkey breast, yams, and mashed potatoes.

In this Thanksgiving day guide, we learn how to prepare fresh cranberry sauce from scratch. You'll need cranberries, orange rinds, brown sugar and water. It's as simple as that. For a complete recipe, and to get started making your own fresh cranberry sauce, watch this free video cooking lesson.

If you recently unearthed your silver from storage hoping to use the pieces to set your holiday table, you may have been a bit disappointed at how tarnished all those spoons and forks look.

Forget Reese's Peanut Butter Cups! This recipe will keep you out of the candy aisles and in the comfort of your kitchen. Megan shows you how to make her wonderful, raw and vegan-style jungle peanut butter cups. The best in the world! You'll be using raw and organic ingredients, making this a healthy and guilt-free treat that hits the spot— every time! You can substitute the jungle peanut butter for almond butter or cashew butter or anything you have laying around. Make sure you watch the raw...

Chocolate chips are in everything, but it's hard to find some really great chocolate chips, especially some vegan-friendly ones. Megan shows you in this video how you can make your very own raw chocolate chips, which is a different process than just making plain old chocolate. The hardest part about this chocolate recipe is getting them to stand up and not be flat discs. The ingredients for this are cacao paste, cacao powder and clear agave.

Don't be the Grinch Who Starved Through Christmas just because you're a vegan and your meat-loving family won't budge to make any dish other than buttered green beans for you.

For some reason, McDonald's hamburgers are mysteriously unsusceptible to Mother Nature's inevitable toll of decomposition. Yep, you pretty much have to dip a McDonald's cheeseburger in acid if you want it to decompose. So we're left with the question: Why? Why does a McDonald's hamburger retain its original shape, color and texture after 12 years?

Thanksgiving is coming up within a matter of weeks, which means soon enough you'll be gobbling down truckloads of turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and stuffing. Not to mention copious amounts of butter, which is used to add flavor to nearly every dish.

Thanksgiving is coming up in a matter of weeks, which no doubt means you'll be consuming lots of pumpkin pie. And while pumpkin pie is heavenly on its own, adding a dollop of whipped cream on top makes it simply godly. But don't waste your time on those yucky whipped cream cans you can buy at the store.

If you don't know what namak pare is, you soon will. The Indian snack dish consists of delicious flour, yogurt, and sometimes butter deep fried in oil or ghee for a crispy, crunchy texture. These crips are sweet and can be dipped into sauces if you wish.

If you're a meat lover or a foodie then you probably can't get enough of meatballs. Tender, meaty (duh), and bursting with flavor, they're like the meat version of a bag of chips: You eat one and you can't stop yourself from finishing them all.

If you've seen or read V for Vendetta, you may remember him preparing a dish he called Eggy in a Basket. It's basically an egg cooked inside a slice of bread that makes a hearty snack and which you will learn how to make in this video.

First things first: The Mat is a large, well, mat that acts as a fondant tool for pastry chefs. You roll the fondant on, flatten it, and use the mat to apply the fondant layer evenly to your cake.

Plain white fondant looks elegant and classic on its own - just think beautiful wedding cakes and birthday cakes - but sometimes white on white just gets plain dull. For times when you crave a little more pizzazz in your life, or at least in your cake decorating, check out this video to learn how to add zebra stripes to your fondant. If you're really adventurous, turn that white fondant pink with some food coloring!

Crumb coating, also known as dirty icing, a cake, does not, as its name suggests, mean adding crumbs to the outer coating of a cake. Instead, crumb coating is the step that most pastry chefs take to make sure that all the loose crumbs on a cake are trapped in an initial coat of icing so that when you add the second (and actual) icing layer no crumbs mix with the icing and look bad.