Ligia's Kitchen

Ligia’s Kitchen: The Elixir of Youth

Video

Here’s the latest episode from Ligia’s Kitchen: a fun mocktail we call “The Elixir of Youth“. We had a ton of fun making this video, as you’ll be able to see when you watch it and see the outtakes. The reason the presentation’s different is because YouTube and My Drunk Kitchen asked us to make a video that presents a “post-apocalyptic” cocktail/mocktail. We did our own twist on it and we hope you’ll enjoy it!

The recipe is presented at the end of the video, or you can find it in the video description on YouTube.

LK-023-EN-HD with Romanian subtitles
Released 1/2/12

Places

A walk in a snowy forest

Ligia and I went on a walk in one of the beech forests near Medias on Christmas Eve. This is a video I filmed during our walk. I loved the clear, crisp air and the quiet, punctuated at times by snow powder falling from the trees or the barking of distant dogs.

The background music is performed by a talented artist by the name of Donald Betts and is called “A Curious Story”.

Here are a few photographs I took on that same walk.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

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Thoughts

Meet Tira

Merry Christmas! We’re spending a quiet Christmas day at home, relaxing with old movies and old cartoons…

Here’s a quiet little video of our grey kitten, Tira.

We adopted her along with her brother, Bubu. Tira’s a lovely cat. She loves being around us. Wherever we go or sit in the house, we have to be careful, because Tira will inevitably fall asleep somewhere near our feet. She loves attention and once you begin to pet her, she’ll cling to you like sticky tape, asking for more. You can’t see it in this video, but she’s a fairly small kitten. Her brother’s huge, but she’s short and soft and very, very cuddly.

You can also see Tira and Bubu playing with Fritz, our grey bunny, who has since gone to a better place…

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Ligia's Kitchen

Ligia’s Kitchen: Glazed Chocolate Orange Brownies

Video

This the 22nd episode of Ligia’s Kitchen, and let me just say this first: yum! 🙂

This Christmas, make super-tasty raw chocolate brownies with juicy, honey-dipped orange peels, glazed with thick, creamy chocolate syrup! It’s a decadent holiday dessert that’s perfect for Christmas or New Year’s!

The video is exactly 3 minutes long because we were challenged to edit a full recipe (that would normally take 7-10 minutes) to that length by Chow.com. It was a challenge issued to the YouTube Next Chef winners. We met the challenge dead on and walked away unscathed, albeit a bit dazed! 🙂 While the video fits within the 3-minute space, it would do much better as a 4-5 minute video.

Here’s the recipe!

Chocolate Glaze:

  • 2 cups raw cocoa powder
  • 2 cups water
  • 3 tbsp cocoa butter
  • 4 tbsp honey
  • 1 tsp mesquite

Brownie Mixture:

  • 4 cups flour from sunflower seeds
  • 1/2 cup chocolate syrup
  • 1 cup orange peels, diced and dipped in honey

Decoration:

  • coconut flakes
  • almond slivers
  • golden raisins
  • anise stars
  • chocolate glaze
  • pomegranate

Enjoy and thanks for watching!

LK-022-EN-HD
Released 12/20/11

Thoughts

Where’s the Netflix Shelf?

The more movies and shows Ligia and I watch on Netflix, the more convinced we become that Netflix lacks a vital feature. We call it the Shelf. Where is it?

The Netflix Shelf would hold titles we’ve seen and loved. It would contain two collections: a smart collection, which would automatically bring together the titles we’ve rated 4 stars or higher), but more importantly a manual collection, where we could add titles we’d like to watch again in the feature — movies and shows we really love, perennial favorites if you will.

Within the Shelf, we could sort titles by genre, keywords, actor or director (using the metadata added by Netflix staff or metadata we could add ourselves).

There were so many occasions we saw a movie, loved it, wanted to store it somewhere so we could see it again in the future, but didn’t want to leave it in the queue, cluttering up the list of titles we still haven’t seen. There was and is no place for them yet, and that’s regrettable, because it’s a lost opportunity for Netflix to create customer goodwill at a time when they need it.

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