Vote for Foodie Underground in The Kitchn’s Favorite Health + Diet Cooking Blog!
Ok, so beyond running, drinking coffee and writing, I keep up the site Foodie Underground. And it’s currently on the nomination list for The Kitchn’s Favorite Health & Diet Cooking Blog.
I would of course make me ever so happy if you went and gave it a vote.
Happy Valentine’s Day. Give Love.
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”
-Dalai Lama
Give love. Receive love. Share love. That is what we should do today and everyday.
(I also made heart-shaped scones in celebration – they’re gluten-free, vegan and super simple – just to bring a little more cheer into a gray and dreary February day. Enjoy!)
The Obligation of Food Lovers
“If you are a food lover, then you have an obligation to think about what you’re eating. You have an obligation to know where your food comes from, and you have an obligation to know how the broken food system is negatively affecting so much of the population. We have to start to learn how to turn passion for food into a passion for improving the food system, taking the pleasure that we get from eating and transforming it into advocating for real food, not only for the privileged, but for everyone.”
From this week’s Foodie Underground column on EcoSalon.
Recipe: Flourless Olive Oil and Sesame Seed Brownies
With all this running lately, I have been craving anything loaded with protein. I can’t get enough of raw nuts and seeds. So it only made sense to make some brownies with them, right?
1,000 Miles: Month 1
61.1 miles.
“Yes!” was my initial reaction.
Then came the second.
“Shit, that’s less than I should have run…”
When I first committed to the 1,000 Miles thing (yes, running 1,000 miles in 2014) I did some quick calculating.
Running 100 miles a month would put me over the 1,000 mile mark, meaning if I clocked a few months with 100 miles I would have some leeway. I then went to a calculator and figured out that what I really needed to do was hit about 20 miles a week, or about 80 miles a month. Doable, but after a month of not running I needed to work my way back up.
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.
Recipe: Winter Squash and Kale Millet Burgers
A new recipe that I am in love with, this was originally posted on Foodie Underground.
I spent last Saturday morning at the local organic market. Unfortunately it was the Saturday after New Year’s and my favorite local producer wasn’t there.
“It’s France, aren’t all the market people local producers?” you ask. Well, you would like to think so. It’s romantic to envision all the Ile-de-France farmers descending upon Paris to sell their goods, a basket of local produce only a market away for the food lover, but the reality is that many of the markets are filled with distributors as opposed to producers, which makes it easy to get mangoes and pineapple in January in Paris and yet more of an effort to track down a locally grown potato. I exaggerate to make my point, but there’s an element of truth in it.
From Portland to Paris: 1,000 Miles
When you move (and the move is far far away) there are things you end up missing that you don’t initially expect. You expect to miss impromptu coffee dates with your friends and you expect to miss your favorite restaurants. You expect to miss your favorite bookstore and, if you’re moving away from the Pacific Northwest, you expect to miss weekend hikes and trips to the coast.
I expected all of this when I moved last year. I use the word “move” lightly because it was really a one-way-ticket kind of trip that was intended to end eventually but never did. Sometimes that’s how things go.
Back to the story of missing things. The one hole I really felt in my life last year was running.
Oh, I ran, but it was different.
In Portland, I had my running partner (and Running Partner is really just a short title for friend/therapist/sounding board/general motivator) Megan, and we had gotten into a semi-neurotic habit of getting up for what we liked to call “Rise and Run.” This meant hitting the pavement at 6:30am – sometimes 6 if one of us had an early meeting and didn’t want to miss out on a run.
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
blog.annabrones.com 