"ghee" news and stories

Your supermarket shelf stocks more than plain old salted and unsalted bars of butter. Here, a few of our favorite choices.

• Tips and recipes for indulging in the pleasures of pound cake.
• Gee, do you know what ghee is? Also, what's a good substitute for mirin?
• Le ouch -- French wines are hurting after households drank almost 10 percent less wine in 2008 than 2007.
• Grill a whole chicken this summer, not just a part or two.
• Anthony Bourdain visits Seattle and chats about Mario Batali.
  
• How to get the whole family involved when you make super tasty and creamy mac 'n' cheese.
• Busting bacteria -- tips to keep away food poisoning at outdoor parties.
• Restaurant chains bust out more value meals to increase customer traffic.
• Diving into unusual varietals -- widen your palate with wines from Tempranillo to Malbec.
• Merlot is thriving in Washington state.
• Recipes: Grilled Eggplant and Red Pepper with Mint-Cumin Dressing, Lamb Loin Chops with Port Wine Sauce, Lemon Meringue Pie, Fennel Seed and Thyme-Crusted Grilled Shrimp, Smart Coleslaw with Pears, Walnuts and Cranberries, Smoked Turkey and Cheese Panini, Western Tennessee-Style Bone-In Pork Rib Chops

These days, many of the beauty treatments you can get at day spas and salons include edible ingredients. People get salt scrubs, seaweed wraps and honey facials all the time. However, have you ever heard of a ghee eye treatment?

According to Daily Candy, there is a spa in suburban Philadelphia that offers an Ayurvedic treatment called Netra Basti, in which a ring of dough is placed around the eye and the well is then filled with gently warmed clarified butter. Once the ghee has been poured, the individual receiving the treatment slowly opens their eye so that their optic nerve can get a buttery bath.

It is said to be an excellent treatment for strained vision, itchiness, dryness and glaucoma. It is also smoothes the wrinkles around the eyes. As we head into allergy season, I can see how it could be good for your pollen-inflamed peepers as well.

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Conventional wisdom when it comes to cooking with butter is that you need to be careful with it, as it has a fairly low smoke point. Often times, when I want the taste of butter in my food, I'll combine it with olive oil, to be able to take it up to a higher temperature and still get the flavor. However, there is a way to use butter so that you get the full flavor along with a remarkably high smoke point.

To do this, you need to make ghee (also known as clarified butter). A staple in Indian cooking, ghee is butter that has been boiled, so that the water evaporates and the milk solids cook off, so that all you're left with is solid butterfat. Over at Naturopath.ca, you can find helpful instructions as to how to make your own ghee (you can buy it at some health food stores, but making it at home isn't hard) as well as some recipes that specifically call for ghee.

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