Archive for the ‘Portfolio’ Category
The Changing Coffee Scene in Paris
Call a spade a spade: most coffee in Paris isn’t good. But thankfully that’s changing. I had the chance to have some in depth chats with roasters and baristas in town over the last couple of months to talk about that change, culminating in an article for Roads & Kingdoms. An excerpt:
The tide is turning in the French capital, though, with a flood of new craft roasters and cafes that all believe in good coffee. The French, however, are sensitive to change, especially in a city that’s known for its deep-rooted traditions, and while this expanding coffee scene is welcomed by many, it also comes with a side of criticism. For some, local craft roast might be the sign of a city looking forward, yet for others it’s the sign of a city undergoing an irrevocable transformation in food culture.
The Paris Roaster That’s Making Coffee Blends Named After Wine
My latest on Sprudge, all about one of my favorite Parisian roasters Cafe Lomi and their Burgundy and Bordeaux blends.
If you know anything about Paris, you know that it’s not acclaimed for its coffee culture, and what makes Café Lomi special isn’t just the fact that it serves good coffee, it’s the fact that it’s on a mission to educate people about coffee.
“Today the trend is acidic coffee,” says Cafe Lomi founder Aleaume Paturle, “but the French don’t like that.” With a history of importing from its colonies, and largely serving robusta beans, paired with the tendency towards supermarket coffee purchasing, Paturle points out that the French coffee palate is for a darker stronger brew. While cafes in Australia, England, the United States and especially Scandinavia might be serving lighter, fruitier roasts, that doesn’t always work with the French crowd. “For me, it shows a lack of personality to not adapt to the French,” says Paturle. “It’s up to us to adapt to the customer.”
That means that Café Lomi roasts on both angles of the coffee spectrum. You can get lighter more acidic tastes as well as the more well-rounded, full-bodied brews. But for a culture that for so long hasn’t embraced the nuances of coffee, there’s a learning curve in understanding beans, which is why Paturle has launched two particular blends that are seemingly very French: Lomi Blend Bourgogne and Lomi Blend Bordeaux.
Yes, that’s a wine reference, because if there’s anything the French know, it’s certainly wine.
Read the full article here.
The Paris Coffeshop for Freelancers: Cafe Craft
I am a big coffee drinker, and while in the first few weeks of the New Year I have made an effort to tone things down, normally I am a at-least-one-French-press-everyday kind of girl. It’s therefore totally normal to be thrilled about one of my new gigs for 2014: a contributor the coffee site Sprudge.
Yes. An entire website devoted to coffee.
My first piece was about a cool place in Paris that is set up for freelancers that need some desk space every once in awhile (hello: me!).
Drag your Macbook along with you to a cafe in Paris and you’ll probably end up being hard pressed to get any work done. While there are a handful of cafes that tolerate their space being used as a workspace, the hole-up-for-five-hours-and-get-a-coffee-buzz-that-only-a-freelancer-knows concept doesn’t really fly here. And yet…
As the French capital, Paris draws all kinds of people, from around France and from abroad, and amongst those people are plenty of creatives, students and entrepreneurial spirits that don’t always fit in the 9 to 5 category. This city is an iconic epicenter of art and culture, after all. While a more traditional work culture has been the dominant one, slowly but surely startup and freelance culture is starting to grow, and with it, the need for temporary workspaces.
Enter Cafe Craft, a cafe that calls itself the “premier café dédié aux créatifs indépendants.” If your French is rusty: “the first cafe devoted to independent creatives.” And that’s exactly what you get. Desk space, fast and free wifi (often an anomaly in this city) and most important, a plethora of outlets to charge your computer. You can literally sit here all day, and as long as you’re willing to pay for it, no one is going to hassle you or give you a nasty Parisian glare.
Read the full article on Sprudge
Fermented Foods 101: Yes You Do Need Bacteria!
Considering that I have been brewing kombucha for quite some time now, you could call me a bit of a fermented foods addict, so it was fun to get to do a fermented foods guide for Refinery29 and get to interview the fermented foods extraordinaire Sandor Ellix Katz.
“Almost all the fermented foods and beverages we know of are so ancient that they predate recorded history. Humans could never have settled many regions of the world without the benefit of fermentation, and agriculture would not be possible without it.” Ellix Katz explains, “How could people ever begin to invest their energy in crops that are ready at particular times of the year if they didn’t have techniques for preserving the harvest to get them through the rest of the year?”
It’s true: In a world before refrigerators, people had to preserve their food somehow, and often fermentation was it. Those preservation techniques are still used in cultures around the world today, from miso in Japan to cheese in France, and while fermented foods might sound like a fad, you’re probably already eating them. Coffee? Fermented food. Chocolate? Fermented. Wine? Also fermented. In fact, as Ellix Katz points out, “most people in most parts of the world eat or drink products of fermentation every day.”
Read the full article here.
Afghan Women Challenging Gender Roles with Bikes
I have found myself constantly inspired in the last year by the story of the Afghan Women’s National Cycling team, pushing the boundaries in a country where cycling is considered taboo.
I recently wrote about them and a new film being made about their story on GOOD:
What if you were told you could not ride a bike because you’re a woman? What if your younger sister wasn’t allowed to ride? What if every single woman in your family was kept away from bicycles simply because riding them was seen as immoral?
While most of us have the luxury of being able to head out on two wheels whenever we want to, for the women of Afghanistan, the world of two wheels is reserved for men. Riding a bicycle is a taboo and a sign of immorality. Something so simple—a means of transportation that so many of us take for granted—is off-limits if you’re a female.
But that is changing.
Despite the cultural taboo of females on bicycles, there is an Afghan Women’s National Cycling Team in Kabul. These women who challenge their country’s gender expectations by riding are the subjects of an upcoming film called Afghan Cycles (Let Media). Earlier this year, co-directors Sarah Menzies and Whitney Connor Clapper travelled with Mountain2Mountain Executive Director Shannon Galpin to Afghanistan with a stash of cameras and more than 350 pounds of bike gear. The goal was to document these amazing, courageous women, but also to provide support for what is hopefully a growing movement.
You can read the full article here. And to support the team, Mountain2Mountain is currently doing a 100 Bikes by Christmas campaign – to help in the launch of a new women’s mountain biking team in Bamiyan – as well as a bike gear drive. To take part and support these women visit mountain2mountain.org/donation or email info[at]mountain2mountain[dot]org.
Can a Non-Vegetarian Still be a Conscious Eater?
This is something that I have been thinking a lot about lately, and is the subject for this week’s Foodie Underground column on EcoSalon. An excerpt:
There has been a repetitive question in my brain for the last few months.
“Why am I not vegetarian?”
I consider myself a conscious eater. I am the kind of person that nowadays passes up fruit and vegetables because they are out of season. Certainly, I still drink coffee and eat chocolate, and by no means am a 100% locavore, but I constantly think about what I consume and what I eat.
I am however, not a vegetarian. There, I said it.
Sometimes, ethically, that makes me cringe. In fact being a person that writes about conscious eating, publicly acknowledging that I am not a vegetarian puts me in a vulnerable spot; I get nervous about the response. The internet loves to hate, after all.
But I have watched too many under cover factory farm videos and read too many investigative reports about the state of affairs for mass produced meat to be able to avoid asking myself this question.
And so my personal policy to eating has evolved. I eat very little meat (in the past month I have eaten it twice), and I try very hard to think about it when I do.
What’s so bad about factory farmed meat? A lot of things. From environmental to human health to animal rights, there are a variety of things that are wrong about factory-farmed, cheap meat. Nearly 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the U.S. go to livestock farming. To make one hamburger, it takes more than 50 gallons of water. Around 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the global meat and dairy industry. The list goes on. And despite our awareness of how bad the situation is, we continue to become more carnivorous.
Read the full column here.
The Culinary Cyclist Cookbook: 3 for $20 Holiday Special
So this year I wrote a book, a cookbook actually, and it’s called The Culinary Cyclist. Yes, food and bicycles all together in one lovely REAL book (you know, those printed things with pages that you flip through?). Want one? You’re in luck. Through December 15, they’re on a little holiday special: 3 books for $20. That’s basically three books for the price of two. Snag a pack now: one book for you, one for your friend, and one that you can keep on hand until you have the “oh no! I forgot to get [insert name here] a gift!”
There’s a lot of good stuff in here, including recipes (all gluten-free + vegetarian) like Baked Egg in Avocado, Raw Walnut Butter and how to make cold brew coffee in a French press. In other words: you need this book.
Click here to buy.
How to Make Glögg
Recipe for Swedish glögg on Foodie Underground today. Hello, December.
Sexism in the Food Industry… in French
Alors que les femmes cuisinent beaucoup, elles ne le font pas, culturellement parlant, dans un contexte professionnel.
When Julia Tissier got in touch with me I had a bit of a freak out.
She’s the editor of a new online magazine called Cheek, a French publication that focuses on modern feminist issues (think: portrayal of women in the media, etc.) It’s smart and savvy.
“We’d love to have you contribute to Cheek since you write about food topics,” she wrote in an email. Note that this was all in French.
“Um, sure. You ready to edit?”
Fortunately she was.
We went back and forth a bit, and decided that I should address the issue of women in the restaurant industry. “Oh god, I’m going to write a feminism piece in French?” I thought to myself.
I did and the result is the first thing substantial thing I have written in French (emails do not count) since college. It’s a look at gender roles and sexism in the food industry, particularly in response to the recent Time “Gods of Food” article. If you’re French is up to par, you can read it here.
Moral: challenge yourself, it’s good for you.
How to Be an Explorer
Loved writing this piece for GOOD: Make Room for Discovery: Five Simple Steps For Explorers
Magellan, Columbus, Da Gama, Amundsen, Cook, Eriksson, Lewis & Clark, Shackleton—all names synonymous with adventure and exploration. They circumnavigated the world, discovered continents and became the subjects of history books. There was an unknown, and it was meant to be explored.
In the modern age of the Internet, cell phones, and around-the-world air travel, that sense of the unknown has changed, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared. While there may not be entire continents up for grabs, modern day exploring is just as important as it was during the Age of Exploration, if not more so.
Read the rest of this entry »
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