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By Bill Long Most of us don’t make sauces at home because we’re…well, we’re intimidated. It seems so complicated and time consuming to mix all that stuff and season it and boil it and get it just right. And we don’t know how. We go to a fancy restaurant, and the sauces are so delicate and beautiful, and they are in French, and we know we could never make something like that. Oh, yes, it’s fear and our lack of knowledge that keeps us from enjoying sauces on our home-cooked food. It really isn’t as difficult as you think to make sauces, though. Once you know about the different kinds of sauces and master a few basic techniques, you can easily make sauces at home. You can even begin to invent your own sauces, based on your personal preferences and the things your family likes best. Sauces make your food look, taste and smell better. They make food more appetizing. The difference between a Ham & Egg McMuffin and Eggs Benedict is the hollandaise sauce. And it is a big difference, isn’t it? In the same way, sauces can turn your plain and simple cooking into something special. Sauces add flavor to bland foods, like rice and pasta. Think Alfredo Sauce, Marinara Sauce, Soy Sauce. Sauces also make dry foods moister and easier to eat. Before refrigeration, sauces were used to mask the flavor of tainted food. Although it’s not recommended that you serve tainted food, a good sauce can still mask the flavor of undesirable food. Kids are more likely to eat broccoli with cheese sauce than without, right? For those of us who are somewhat…indifferent cooks, a good sauce can sometimes mask a cooking mistake, too. Like, perhaps, rice that is just a tiny bit scorched. Served by candlelight and with a nice hollandaise sauce, no one will ever know. Categories of Sauces There are all kinds of sauces. Ketchup is a sauce. Salsa is a sauce. Vinaigrette dressing is a sauce. For our cooking purposes, though, there are four main categories of sauces. Sauces made from stock. Stock is the liquid that remains after you cook things in water. The water retains the flavor of whatever was cooked in it, and is used to flavor other dishes. Stock can be thickened or reduced, or various ingredients can be added to it to make brown sauces, white sauces and pan sauces. Sauces from roux. Roux is a mixture of flour and fat that is combined over low heat. Gravy is made from roux. Sauces from emulsions. Emulsions are mixtures of liquids that don’t mix. Mayonnaise is an example of an emulsion. Combinations: Combination sauces are often made from roux and stock, as well as other ingredients. Mother Sauces In the 19th century, Chef Marie-Antoine Careme developed a system for cooking that relied on “mother sauces” or “grand sauces”. Careme is considered the father of classic French cooking. His system was also used by Auguste Escoffier, another famous French chef. The five mother sauces provide the basis for other sauces that are used in classic French cooking. Espagole is a reduced brown sauce made from cooking meat. Veloute is white stock thickened with roux. Bechamel is milk thickened with roux. Hollaindaise or Mayonnaise is an emulsion made with butter or oil, egg yolks and lemon juice. Tomato Sauce is tomato sauce. This all sounds very complex, but it is not. Once you know how to make a nice roux, and how to make stock, you can make hundreds of different sauces. Once you can make the five mother sauces, your sauce repertoire is practically unlimited. Here are some examples: Cheese sauce is bchamel sauce with grated cheese added. Gravy is a roux made from pan drippings and espagole or milk. Cream sauce for vegetables is veloute with a few herbs tossed in. But you don’t have to tell your family and guests that it’s cheese sauce or whatever. Instead, you can serve them “steamed broccoli with a light cheese bchamel” or “steamed vegetables in veloute sauce.” And the list can go on and on. Using sauces to make your home cooked meals look better and taste better does not have to be intimidating. You just need to know a few basic techniques, and you will soon be a master sauce-maker. Bill Long is the administrator of GatewayGourmet.com, a website with culinary how to’s, resources and recipes for anyone interested in cooking by focusing on sauces and culinary schools. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bill_Long http://EzineArticles.com/?Making-Sauces-At-Home-Is-Easier-Than-You-Think&id=361966 unsecure bad credit installment loans paycheck applet have bad credit no co-signer will topay high interest graduate school loan no credit check homes in atascocita texas

By Patrick Collins If youre reading this article, it means youre interested in studying abroad. Even if youre just casually researching the possibility, you should definitely continue the thread of interest that brought you to this article. Why? Lets consider your situation (I would say youre extremely lucky to even be able to consider studying abroad, but for some reason we dont like hearing that type of thing so lets be objective about it): youre probably young, unmarried, without children, dont have burdensome financial responsibilities holding you down and have parents that are willing to help you through college. This is a time in your life when you can just pick up and go without looking back. Being a college student allows you to do this; if youre interested in traveling, it probably wont ever be as easy to do so as it is now. Once you graduate, the system begins clamping down on you; student loan repayment, work, the various responsibilities of home ownership, insurance and thus the cycle begins. None of this will stop you if youre truly passionate about traveling, but for someone in your situation its almost effortless. Just consider the fact that institutions are actually on your side to help you get out and explore new worlds. A great example is my brother: if he can get his grades up, his school will actually send him to study abroad for free. I suppose someone set aside a chunk of money in their will and stipulated that it be used to help business students at the university gain international experience. These kinds of opportunities are not unheard of for students, but are certainly difficult to come by later in life. Not that you wont have to do anything for yourself or run into any difficulties. What can sometimes prove problematic is when you bring the assumptions that for your entire life have worked smoothly in your homeland and try to apply them to another culture. Another example: my sister just went to study in Mexico City. The day she arrived she had to start looking for a place to stay, a task that became unexpectedly challenging when she found that her university was closed and wouldnt open for another week. Little problems and obstacles like this will probably crop up along the way, but you have to expect this and take it in with an air of open-minded flexibility. And thats part of the adventure, too. My sister ended up boarding a room with a family that took in travelers and met a girl from Spain who was in her same situation. They became friends and together found a place they couldnt have been happier about. The interesting part about studying abroad is that you put yourself in a situation where you have to employ your own ingenuity and resources. You take on a challenge and are given the opportunity to prove your abilities to yourself. At the same time, you have an element of support: loans, your family back home, your university Not to mention that youll find your adventure abroad a highly enjoyable, stimulating and rewarding experience. This is especially true if you havent broken free of your countries borders yet. Theres nothing wrong with living in one place your entire life, but no experience can replicate or teach you the same lessons as living outside of your native land. Youll learn about another culture and other people, but most importantly youll learn something new about yourself. What that is I cant tell you you have to experience it for yourself. Patrick lives in Malaga, where he works for AASS (http://www.academiaadventurespanishstudies.com), a Spanish language institution with over 20 years of experience. AASS schools are located in Alicante, Barcelona, Granada, Madrid, Malaga, Salamanca, Seville and Valencia. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Patrick_Collins http://EzineArticles.com/?Study-Abroad,-Learn-About-Yourself&id=284553 defautling on pay day loans fast cash low fees unsecured loans with poor credit no credit check apartment in anne arundel county

By Andrew Pritchard What’s the single most important factor in the success of a marketing campaign? How clever the advertisements are? How good the product or service is? The price being charged? If you said “none of the above”, then I have to agree with you. The most important factor in marketing is targeting. You simply have to know what to sell, and to whom to sell it. If you’re selling something that doesn’t appeal to the people you’re speaking to, then you can forget about a good return. Regardless of how good your product is, regardless of how brilliant the advertisements are, and regardless of the price you’re charging, if your targeting is off, then your whole marketing campaign will be missing the mark. Moldy Grape Juice or Heavenly Elixir? If I offered you a bottle of 1995 Domaine de la Romane Conti La Tche for $500, would you buy? For the non-oenophiles among us, the Domaine de la Romane Conti is a producer of wine in Burgundy in France. They make some of the finest and most highly coveted wines in the world, and La Tche is one of their finest. But at $500, would you buy? Some people might, but many others wouldn’t. And fair enough. Some would argue that no wine is worth that kind of price. Some people just don’t like the taste of wine and wouldn’t buy no matter how highly esteemed the wine was. And others, for whatever reason, just don’t drink alcohol. But if I make my offer to some serious wine-lovers, to people who have no problem dropping a hefty wad of cash on a great bottle, then however many bottles I have available will be gone soon. That’s because a bottle of 1995 La Tche for $500 is a steal. But it’s only a steal to the people who are interested in that sort of thing. So if I want to sell my bottles, I have to do everything I can to make my offer to people who are interested. Targeting: The Key to Effective Marketing So how do I get my offer in front of people who are interested? That’s where targeting comes in. If I were to advertise the bottles of wine that I wanted to sell in Car and Driver magazine, I’m sure you’d agree that I’d be wasting a lot of my advertising dollars. I’d have a better, more targeted audience if I were to advertise in a wine-oriented publication such as Wine Spectator. This magazine’s readers are obviously interested wine, and many of them are probably even interested to the extent that a mere $500 for the wine I’m pitching would have them licking their lips and dusting off the Riedel glasses. All this stands to reason. You’re obviously going to get a better response advertising high-end fine wine to an audience that is at least predisposed towards wine. But can we do better? While Wine Spectator caters to wine-lovers, not all of them will be sufficiently loaded to seriously contemplate dropping that kind of moolah on a single bottle of wine. In other words, I’ll be paying for the privilege of advertising to Wine Spectator’s millions of readers, when all I really want to do is advertise to the five percent or so who are likely to be interested in my offer. With Car and Driver I was way off-target. Wine Spectator is on-target, but I’m using a shotgun. To get the most bang for my buck, I want to find a way to put my offer only in front of people likely to be interested. I want to use a rifle to hit my target and nothing but my target. There are several ways I could do this. Obviously if there were a publication geared more specifically to wine-collectors, that would be a good place to advertise. Another excellent alternative would be to send a mailing to my existing customers. I could search through my customer database and select only those customers whose buying-history indicated an interest in the wines on sale, and send the mailing to them. If I didn’t have a large customer list, I could find additional prospects by arranging for access to a related business’ customer list. In this case, a company specializing in wine cellar installation might be a good choice. As you can see, the mailing would be going out to a very select group of people. By zeroing in on my target market, I can get the results I need much more cost-effectively than if I either failed to target altogether, or took the shotgun approach. And that’s really all there is to it. The more you can target your offer, the better your response will be. How to Target Your Marketing As you can see, the concept of targeting is pretty simple. Take your product or service and offer it to people who are likely to be interested. But there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind. Narrow Your Niche I don’t care what you sell; your market is smaller than you think. A large percentage of the population owns a car, but a much smaller percentage is in the market for a new car this month. Many people use an accountant, but far fewer are looking to switch accountants. If you blast away with the shotgun approach and try to hit everyone, you won’t like the results. You might argue that even if people aren’t in the market yet, you should still try to expose them to your advertisements so that when they are, your company’s name will be at the top of their minds. This is a really dangerous approach for a small business to take for several reasons. The response to your advertisements (if there even is any) won’t be immediate and will be much more difficult to track. You’ll therefore have a much harder time determining whether the advertisement is working for you or not. Anytime you can’t tell if your money is well-spent, you’re dicing with death. The investment required to effectively achieve top-of-mind awareness is usually enormous. There are cheaper ways to get good results. People are really good at ignoring advertising. When an advertisement does finally get their attention, it’s frequently because the advertisement is selling something that will be of immediate benefit to them. In other words, good luck getting them to pay attention to your advertisements and remember your name when they aren’t even interested in what you’re selling yet. To avoid these problems, do yourself a favor and take dead aim at a much smaller target by narrowing your niche. In the above example, we went from advertising a wine to millions of Wine Spectator readers, to sending out a mailing to only those people whose buying-history demonstrated an interest in the specific wine we were pitching. We went from everyone interested in wine to only those interested in high-end red Burgundy. That’s a much smaller niche! The accountant mentioned above might market to people who are unhappy with their current accountant for one specific reason. Alternatively, she might narrow her niche by marketing directly to one specific type of customer, such as dentists. Narrowing your niche doesn’t mean that you won’t also do business with customers outside that niche, it just means that a given marketing campaign or an individual advertisement might not be aimed directly at them. Instead, your marketing takes dead aim at a much more specific target that is a whole lot easier to hit. Determine Your Ideal Customer One of the best ways to get your marketing aimed at a smaller target is to identify your ideal customer and market only to prospects that fit that profile. This is actually one of the healthiest things you can do for your business. We all end up doing business with customers who are not ideal. In many cases we do business with customers who are far from ideal. These customers are often difficult to deal with, unprofitable, and extremely hard to please. Now imagine an influx of your ideal customers. More angels who always pay their bills on time, who revere the work you do for them, and who provide word-of-mouth recommendations frequently. Wouldn’t that help your business? If you don’t know what your ideal customer looks like, think about which of your current customers are most profitable. With whom do you most enjoy doing business? Who can benefit most from your product or service? It shouldn’t take long to form a picture of your perfect client. Putting It into Practice Start taking dead aim with your marketing today. Here are some suggestions: Targeting Your Website Review the content on your website. Are you addressing everyone or are you zeroed in on your target market? Make some changes to your pay-per-click advertising. Don’t just use the same advertisement for everyone. Instead, create different advertisements for the different types of prospect you’re targeting. Experiment with different landing pages. Landing pages are the pages that people who click on your advertisements are taken to. You should create targeted landing pages for each type of prospect in your target market. Targeting Your Print Advertising Don’t run the same advertisement everywhere. If you’re targeting different types of customer, create an advertisement that addresses each customer type directly and then do everything you can to get the advertisement in front of the prospect it’s targeted on. If your advertisements reference your website, you might consider setting up different landing pages for the different versions of your advertisements. Doing so would enable your prospects to continue experiencing highly-targeted communication. Experiment with different publications. One publication might have a smaller circulation, but it could be much more targeted for your advertising. Targeting Your Direct Mail Break your mailing list into segments based on demographics such as the type and size of business or the income level of the household. Any actual buying-history data should also be factored in. You can then target your mailings based on these factors. If your offer is likely to appeal to customers who have purchased a specific product before, you can extract those names from the list and send the offer only to them. Establish relationships with non-competing, but related businesses and get permission to market to their clients. In the wine example above, I suggested building a mailing list by gaining access to the customer database of a wine cellar installation firm. If you can arrange for a letter from the other company introducing you (and recommending you) your response will soar. Just be sure you’ve agreed details such as a commission on any sales and what happens to the list after the campaign is over. Typically you’ll get to keep any customers who respond to your mailing, but the master list stays with the other business. If you direct people to the website for more information, don’t let the targeting stop with your letter. Create mailing-specific landing pages so that prospects continue to experience highly targeted communication. Andrew Pritchard is the owner of Inspire Consulting, a marketing company in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Inspire Consulting offers several free reports on marketing more effectively that can be downloaded from their website (http://www.inspire-consulting.com). Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Pritchard http://EzineArticles.com/?Take-Dead-Aim-At-Your-Target-Market&id=382833 cash now loan faxless payday loans payday select personal short term loans that can be paid monthly