Looking for a great way to spice up your parties or family get-togethers? A delicious dip can be a great snack for any special gathering, whether it’s for family, friends or coworkers. What makes these dips fun is that they are simple to prepare and store, so that when the party starts you can already have the dip ready and waiting to be served. It can be made the night before so that you have less to worry about on the day of your event.

Some of the most popular dips go well with tortilla chips. These chips contain the crunchiness that goes perfectly with a smooth dip, as well as the salty flavor everyone craves. Because the chips are usually made from corn and flour, they tend to have an all-natural taste that goes well with a variety of dips. Plus, tortilla chips are sold in many different flavors if you’re looking for one specific kind to go well with your signature dip. In most cases, tortilla chips are a great choice when you’re searching for something crunchy to pair with your dip.

Because tortilla chips are commonly paired with Mexican dishes, salsa is one of the most popular dips to serve with this type of chip. In fact, it’s also one of the easiest dips to make. First, dice several onions, tomatoes and jalapeno peppers. Pour these into a bowl and add in some olive oil, fresh cilantro, garlic and a splash of lime juice. Many people also like to mix in some fruit to their salsa for a bold taste. Common fruits for a salsa include mangos and peaches. After you have all of your ingredients, mix them together and allow them to chill in the refrigerator. When it’s party time, pull out the salsa and tortilla chips for plenty of snacking fun.

Another popular dip for tortilla chips is guacamole. For this dip, you’ll need avocados, which you should peel and pit before mashing. After the avocados are prepared, add some diced onion, diced tomatoes and fresh cilantro. Top it off with some minced garlic and lime juice, blend it together and then place the guacamole in the refrigerator. Like salsa, a guacamole recipe is perfect for parties where you want to have a portion of the food prepared in advance. Set out your guacamole along with a few bags of tortilla chips when your guests arrive.

If you want something a little more unique, try another kind of dip that goes well with tortilla chips. Some other ideas include seven-layer bean dip, spinach artichoke dip, queso, chili sauce or fruit dips. Any of these recipes will taste delicious with a crunchy, salty tortilla chip. Add a little flavor to your next get-together by making one of these fun snack recipes.

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Cape Town: V&A Waterfront and Long Street

The city of Cape Town is the most popular tourist destination in the whole of Africa. Table Mountain is the landmark of the city that offers attractions such as the V&A Waterfront and the Cape of Good Hope. Long Street situated right in the centre of the city is another popular tourist hotspot in Cape Town. You should also make your way to the Castle, a fort build by early settlers and is now the oldest building in the city of Cape Town.

The V&A Waterfront is popular among tourists and locals. Locals like to see it as a shopping destination and go here to enjoy some of the best cuisine at one of the many V&A Waterfront restaurants. Tourists on the other hand go here for the many gift shops where one can buy items such as postcards, small souvenirs and even crocodile hand-bags. There are also ferries going to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned during the Apartheid era. On Robben Island visitors can take the tour of the museum. Boats also leave for other destinations. At the V&A Waterfront there are also other tourist attractions such as street-entertainers and African artist performing. So make sure you take your camera along. All in all, the V&A Waterfront offers everything: A splendid shopping environment mixed with shops and restaurants for tourists and locals.

Another popular tourist hotspot is Long Street. It is known for its many restaurants and night clubs. The Long Street restaurants offer something for every taste. Here you will find any cuisine that you are looking for: Italian, Portuguese, Asian, African and many many more. These restaurants cater for locals and tourists. Most notably Mama Africa, offering African dishes like Kudu, crocodile and other wild game is most popular among tourists because of their adventurous menu, but even here you will find many South Africans. If that is not to your liking, you can try some of the other restaurants like Gourmet Burger or Royale Eatery. Mesopotamia and Addis in Cape also offer something different. After your dinner you can go to Cafe Mojito for some cocktails before you party it up at one of the many clubs situated near Long Street.

So, if you should decide to visite South Africa, you should also make your way to Cape Town and experience some of its many wonders. It will leave you wanting more. South Africa is definitely one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Due to this more and more tourist make their way to the country. Cape Town also has some of the best restaurants on offer; some even receiving accredited international awards. Every place offers something different – no restaurant is a like and all have a fascinating story.

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The “Old Timer” is starting to feel young again. More than a year and a half after restaurateur Wayne Ellis filed for bankruptcy and closed his well-known O.T.’s Neighborhood Sports Grill in Birmingham’s Lakeview entertainment district, a new O.T.’s has opened on Acton Road just off I-459 in Vestavia Hills, with Ellis as its manager.

“O.T.” is short for the “Old Timer” nickname Ellis’ friends gave him years ago. “Yeah, ‘Old Timer’ is back,” the 62-year-old Ellis said Thursday. “I’m getting my legs back under me again.”

O.T.s on Acton Neighborhood Grill, as the new place is called, opened about five weeks ago, Ellis said, and the Birmingham restaurant got its liquor license approved last Friday. Ellis does not own the restaurant but runs it for owners Dean Sanders and Paul Gartman, fans of the old O.T.’s who came to Ellis about opening a new sports bar and grill and naming it after him. “O.T. is doing the cooking and the talking,” Sanders said Thursday. “He is the face.”

Gartman is executive vice president for Birmingham-based Definicare, which provides clinical research software to pharmaceutical companies, and Sanders has worked in the mortgage business and was a part-owner of the old Ezell’s Fish Camp restaurant in the Oak Mountain area. From the start, the owners wanted to keep the O.T’s name that Ellis spent 18 years building and wanted O.T.’s to stand out amongst other Birmingham restaurants. “They knew my reputation as a restaurateur, and they said, ‘We want you to run our restaurant and we will name it O.T.’s if you will come run it for us,’” Ellis recalled. “So I said, ‘Well, come on fellows. I’ve been looking for something to do for a while now. I’ve got to pay off some debts.’”

They have found what they believe is an ideal location in the former Veracruz Mexican Restaurant in the Dolly Creek Shopping Center — an easy drive for diners in Hoover, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook and the U.S. 280 area. And for Ellis, the restaurant is only a couple of miles from his home on Rocky Ridge Road. “My old customers, a lot of them have moved out here,” Ellis said. “A lot of them had lived on Southside over the years, and they had gotten married and had kids and moved to the suburbs.”

Many of those longtime customers are thrilled that their old friend is back in business. Mike Weeks and his wife, Dee, who live in Vestavia Hills, have eaten dinner at O.T.’s on Acton a couple of times already. “You see Wayne in there, and that puts a smile on your face,” Weeks said. A balding, bearded Vietnam vet with a gravely voice that sounds just like Billy Bob Thornton in “Sling Blade,” the gregarious Ellis and was a familiar face on the Lakeview scene for 18 years before the parent corporation he formed, MWE Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection in August 2008, listing assets of $50,000 and debts between $100,000 and $500,000. “When I closed down there, it was like losing one of my children,” Ellis said. “I was really depressed.” I was no longer one of the best bars in Birmingham.

Last August, a year after Ellis closed his restaurant, Kelley Rhea Harris, who used to wait tables and tend bar at the old O.T.’s, opened Kelley’s Neighborhood Sports Grill in that same Lakeview location. In the meantime, until Gartman and Sanders came along, Ellis continued to cater parties, cook private dinners and take special orders for his famous ribs.

Ellis’ financial woes did not, and do not, worry the new owners, they say. “I knew all of that going in, but I have a business background and know how to run things operationally,” Gartman said. “We are well-backed, well-funded, and it was a low-risk investment with Wayne focusing on the quality of the food and the environment itself, and Dean and I focusing on the business side of the equation.”

Gartman and Sanders, friends since they were teenagers growing up in Florence, named their Whipper Wheel LLC after an old favorite childhood swimming hole. Including the bar and dining area, O.T.’s on Acton seats about 125 guests, with seven flat-screen televisions for sports fans and video games in the back for the kids.

“It’s more family-oriented here,” Ellis said. “I’ve got 15 baseball fields behind us, so we’ve been getting a lot of Little League teams down here.” The setting may be different, but it the vibe is much the same. Ellis has decorated the place with the same New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival posters that hung on the walls at the old O.T.’s, and he still plays the blues of B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan on the stereo.

He’s also brought back much of the same menu — from the fried pickles to the crawfish pie — while adding a few new dishes, including a kids’ menu. To make sure they get the recipes right, Ellis has also rehired a couple of his old cooks, Carolyn Green and Fernando Pardo. Green, whose daughter Karen also works in the kitchen, cooks lunch at Kelley’s in Lakeview and then comes to O.T’s to make dinner.

The time away from the restaurant business also offered Ellis the opportunity to perfect his popular dry-rub ribs. “Since I was off work for a year and a half, I had time to sit around the house and experiment,” he said. “So I’ve got a new marinade and rub.”

For now, O.T.’s on Acton is open for lunch, dinner and cocktails from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays.

It will start opening on Sundays in about a month, Ellis said.

This article was written by Bob Carlton — The Birmingham News

You here it everywhere, the number of overweight and obese children is growing at an alarming rate. Adult onset diabetes is becoming more common in children, as is stroke, heart attack, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. It is an epidemic, but it has a cure. It won’t be easy, wrangling these kids back into health, and it will include lots of kicking and screaming (and that’s just from the adults) but it needs to be done, and soon. The quicker you take charge of your child’s health including diet and exercise, the sooner you will see a reduction in serious health risks.

Let us start by getting the blame out of the way, so that we can focus on the true problem. It’s all the fault of the parents, the fast food companies, the television corporations, the grocery stores, the schools, the government, the fashion industry, the makers of video games, the criminals that roam our streets, the economy that forces dual incomes just to survive, day care, society in general, and don’t forget the kids. There I think I covered every layer of blame. And Yep, it’s all true, each of these groups/dynamics have contributed in some way to our kids being obese, or overweight, while also being malnourished (lack of the essential vitamins and minerals needed to produce optimal health). NO, No Bad People.

Now we can get back to basics. The USDA produces a food pyramid if you haven’t seen one, type food pyramid in the search bar and take a look at it. This nifty little graph tells you what a body needs nutrition wise to be healthy. (You can also check out the USDA’s sister site, MyPyramid.gov for a menu planner along with dietary information to benefit you and your kids.) Now look at your child’s diet… Does it in anyway resemble the pyramid? I thought not. You will notice that things like soda, cool-aid, snack cakes, and cheese curls aren’t on it. It uses terms like fruits, vegetables, meats and beans, grains, milk, oils, discretionary calories and physical activity. There is actually one other thing that should be on the pyramid that they didn’t include and that is water.

The food pyramid and its guidelines is a great start to getting your children off the obese list and back to happy healthy kids. It isn’t easy to incorporate into a diet that has been mediocre to lousy though. It will take time, patience and extra work on your part to begin increasing the good and garbage canning the bad.

Tip’s for a gradual but steady change:

Grains – most kids get their grains from white bread, white rice, noodles/pasta, frozen waffles, cereal, corn chips, snack cakes and cookies. I can hear you now, I bought whole wheat bread and they wouldn’t eat it. Yes I know. But there are alternatives. Try the whole grain white bread, while not as good as whole grain it is better than the processed to death white bread they’ve been eating. The same is true with noodles/pasta, waffles, cereal, and cookies look for a variety that has whole grains. Cereal is easiest of all since on of the major manufactures has made all their cereal whole grain (just watch the sugar content). For rice, try adding a handful of brown or wild rice to the pot about 15 minutes before the white rice, then cook as usual. Call it confetti rice and let them try it, you’ll have converts before long.

Vegetables – First, gradually wean your child off the notion that to eat a vegetable you have to drown it in ranch dressing or any similar condiment of choice. When they can once again taste the vegetable in its pure form. Let them pick out the ones they want to try. Buying just one to sample, is easiest. Encourage them to pick a variety of different colored vegetables. Please never tell them its gross, never say yuck, or you won’t like it, they might actually enjoy rutabagas or kohlrabi, they may have a hankering for radicchio its ok to experiment with your food.

Fruits – For the most part look at vegetables, but I have a word about bananas. They are wonderful, but a steady diet of them isn’t, they are a high calorie fruit and should be regarded as such. Buy the baby bananas (cool and small) or just give them a piece of the large banana, with other fruits!

Oils – As difficult as it is, stay away from fired foods. Incorporate raw nuts into your kids diet, and read labels. If it has a high fat content put it back on the shelf. Look for leaner options. Yes fat is a flavor enhancer, but if the food is good to begin with it doesn’t need that much enhancement. Again look at the condiments your child is eating, that ranch dressing can have 9 to 15% fat….OUCH!

Milk – Like fats you need to be aware of the percentage of fat you are giving your kids. Look for low fat varieties not fat free. Why, because usually fat free, especially in yogurt, ice cream and cheeses has extra sugar and or salt, which the kids don’t need. And the low fat ones just taste better.

Meats and beans – a hamburger is a hamburger, and chicken is chicken right? Not quite. Once again read the labels, lean hamburger with 7% or less of fat, cooked so that the fat runs off, way better than 20% fat, sizzled in its own juices. As for chicken, look at the added fat that they put in those chicken nuggets or strips before you buy them. A good choice is making your own, out of lean chicken, breaded with bread crumbs or cereal crumbs, then lightly sprayed with cooking oil and baked. They taste good too! Now for beans… Did you know that you don’t need to eat meat every day. Beans are an excellent source of protein, and fiber. Eat up, twice a week and it will be easier on your wallet, too.

Water – again, not on that pyramid, but very necessary. 8 to 10 glasses per day, of pure water, no additives, no colorings, no flavorings. And while I’m talking beverages, please begin cutting down on their soda (pop) intake. No more than 1 per day, they may revolt in the process, but in the long run at least their stomach will thank you!

Physical activities – That means off the sofa, floor or recliner and moving. Walks, bike rides, playing at the park or in the back yard. At the very minimum a half hour per day. Make sure they are safe. Be sure to put sunscreen on them. But get them moving. If necessary hide the darned video game. Their heart will adore you for it even if they are throwing a fit in the process!

No more obese children – ‘Nuf said!

I can’t say as though I have ever met a person that said, “I just love dieting!”, have you? Probably not, dieting is just not that fun mostly because you miss out on anything you actually might enjoy eating, but we can make that diet a little easier by learning how to make diet shakes that taste great.

What is a diet shake? Truthfully, they are often little more than a fruit smoothie or protein shake, which anyone with a blender can make at home. The idea is to use them as a meal replacement, so rather than greasy bacon and eggs (oops shouldn’t have mentioned those), you can have a healthy and still filling shake in the morning. Though I am not currently dieting I actually drink these every morning. Usually I make them the night before and store them in the fridge until the following day, I love them! I have even managed to get my husband addicted to the morning diet shake.

I guess I should quit flapping my gums and get on with how you make them hmm. I will cover a couple of different shakes to give you an option and keep in mind that you can always change the ingredients to something that you might like more, you won’t hurt my feelings. But if you do have a great recipe of your own I would love to hear it, you can share the recipe with everyone in the comment section at the bottom of the page. Alright so hear you go:

How to Make Diet Shakes

Super Dooper Fruit Shake – This particular diet shake is my favorite and what I often drink in the morning as a meal replacement. I do sometimes change out the types of fruit used for something a little different, you can also add a rounded scoop of any protein powder from your local supplement store for a little extra kick.

In your blender mix:

1 8oz container of non-fat plain yogurt

1-1/2 cups of fresh or frozen strawberries

1 whole banana (peeled)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup skim milk (more or less for desired thickness)

2 tablespoons pineapple juice(gives it a great tropical flavor)

Blend all ingredients on puree for about 10 – 15 seconds or until smooth. Pour into glasses and enjoy your way to a better body.

Creamy Chocolate Delight Shake – This diet shake is my husbands personal favorite. You can again vary the ingredients, but it is made with chocolate protein powder which I would imagine could be substituted easily enough.

In your blender mix:

4 ounces of water

4 ounces of skim milk

4 ice cubes

2 scoops of chocolate protein powder (any brand should work)

1 whole banana (peeled)

Again blend all of the ingredients until it has a smooth texture, pour into glass and enjoy. You can also leave out the milk and use 8 ounces of water, though the milk makes it much creamier.

Let me know how you like them

Once you get a chance to try out the diet shake recipes above I would love to hear what you think about them. And remember, if you have your own recipes on how to make diet shakes please share them with the rest of us.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk going around about a new sub-culture called freeganism or freegan. Freegan, a mash-up of words, combining free and vegan, has been hitting the already strict lifestyle of vegans in major metropolitan cities around the world.

So what exactly do freegan’s do? Well, imagine that you need a new pair of shoes or some more fresh produce for your family, rather than hopping in the car and heading down to the local superstore, you would wait until night fall and head for the dumpsters in your area. That’s right, freegan’s place their focus on ridding the world of corporate America’s wasteful nature and putting discarded items back to good use, along with saving money and focusing on a “simpler” lifestyle.

While the process of dumpster diving is nothing new to our country, in fact I have crossed paths with several people that make a living from reselling discarded treasures such as electronics and furniture, but I must admit that salvaging food may be a little over the top for many of us, certainly myself.

Now you are probably thinking that the people taking part in this frugal lifestyle are those that are less fortunate than many of us. This however is not the case at all. In a special aired on the television recently, one of the featured couples consisted of a lawyer and doctor in New York City, but these are not the only well payed freegans, no, actually it would seem that quite a few of the people participating in freeganism are by no means experiencing a shortage of money. It seems that people are not turning to this lifestyle due to a lack of finances but rather to more of a rebellion against consumerism.

I must admit that while some of the freeganism methods seem to make sense, I have a hard time stomaching the thought of eating food out of a grocery store dumpster. My life has not always been easy and I am, by no means, used to the finer things, but I do worry about disease and illness, which I can only imagine is a very real concern for people taking part in this lifestyle. Take a look at the video below and decide for yourself.

Well, after watching the video what do you think? Did it make you hungry or sick?

There is a lot to say about this type of urban foraging, the idea of living without any concern of money and schedules almost makes freeganism seem sort of surreal, nothing matters. Its almost as if they have found a way to float through life without all of the worries we face on a daily basis, but at the same time we have to imagine that it really takes a certain type of person to flourish in this lifestyle.

I wish freegans the best with their movement, I think it is a positive step in the right direction, the videos that have been shown on YouTube and the news, really manage to show us all how much is being wasted and that is surely a good thing. For now I will stand on the sidelines on this one, but at the same time feel a little more compelled to do my part. Thank you freegans!