Recipe: Salted Cherry Cardamom Chocolate Bark
You’re having a chocolate craving. Resist the urge to down a box of cherry cordials and make this elegant yet simple chocolate bark instead. With dried cherries, a dash of sea salt, and some lemon zest, it’s the perfect after dinner treat.
If you’re the kind of person that really loves dark, bitter chocolate, you can even make this with 100% cocoa baking chocolate, which I discovered by accident. Note to self: always read the package before baking. Just be sure to sprinkle a little bit of organic cane sugar over the top before you put it in the fridge to cool to add just a touch of sweetness.
A Menu For When You’re Just Not Sure About Turkey
If there’s one thing I don’t like about Thanksgiving it’s the stress that goes into making the holiday “perfect.” Hint: it’s about being with friends and family, being grateful and in the process hopefully eating some delicious food. But too often we’re hung up on what has to be served.
Over on Foodie Underground, a story of why turkey will not be served in my family anytime soon inspired a full turkey-free Thanksgiving menu, complete with eight vegetarian, partly vegan, mostly gluten free recipes to get you from appetizer to dessert.
I could barely get past positioning the wings under the heavy carcass in the roasting rack. I am not a vegetarian, but I rarely prepare meat and quite frankly I was almost convinced that the thing was going to get pissed that I wasn’t treating it well, come back to life and start pecking at my face. Thanksgiving stress level successfully upped a notch.
Friday Photo: Creative Inspiration is Everywhere
You just have to be looking for it.
From a wall in the Women’s Garden in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Listening To: Postiljonen – How Will I Know/All That We Had Is Lost (Whitney Houston Cover)
Swedish group Postiljonen does a beautiful rendition of this song with a beautiful video.
Via: The Chuckness
Bringing Travel into the Kitchen
My latest over on Foodie Underground:
A freakish commitment to perfecting a recipe picked up while abroad might seem off, but don’t we all have food obsessions when we return from voyages? We come back from our travels, whether near or far with stories of “have you ever heard of [insert odd local dish here]?” and “they had the most amazing [insert normal dish] but with [insert oddball ingredient that is representative of the place traveled to here]. I wish we had that here!”
Ask someone which bus line they rode most often during a trip and you’ll get a blank stare, but ask about the best local meal and you’ll be sure to be listening to an animated story for a minimum of seventeen minutes. Food is often one of the biggest takeaways when we travel, be it just a half hour from home or on the other side of the world. That roadside diner with the house special sauce can be just as exotic as sambusas on a street corner in Kabul. Through food we experience a culture a people and a place. We are forced to stop and take things in, listen to our senses. It’s no surprise that the result is memorable.
Read the rest here.
Recipe: Fig and Coconut Walnut Cake
Packed with protein, omega 3s, and antioxidants, walnuts are an excellent source of energy. Their rich flavor also makes them perfect to bake with. And why wouldn’t you want to bake a cake entirely out of walnuts? Enter the Fig and Coconut Walnut Cake.
This dense cake was inspired by a recipe in an issue of Bon Appetit from earlier this year, but with a few tweaks it quickly turned into a gluten and dairy free version. Add in figs, coconut and chocolate and you have a cake that’s just as good for breakfast as it is for dessert.
Kabul Bike Commute
A crisp Friday morning on the road passing Darulaman Palace, southwest of central Kabul. Men cruise by on their way to work, pedaling heavy steel frames, dodging potholes. Many faces are swathed in scarves to protect against the morning chill. A group of men gathers at the road that leads to the palace, crouching low to the ground to drink a glass of tea and exchange the morning news. Even in the midst of conflict there is normalcy.
Women’s Rights: Thoughts from Afghanistan
Thanks to a project with Mountain2Mountain I had the opportunity to travel to Afghanistan to help produce a series of public art exhibits. Afghanistan certainly isn’t the top pick destination for most people, and before my departure the mention of it would inevitable spur a handful of emotions and comments, somewhere along the lines of “are you sure that’s safe?” One of the common reactions also had to do with women’s rights, reminding me that the state of affairs in the far off country was different than the one I had at home. During the two week trip I had a lot of time to think about women and women’s rights, and I came up with the following essay, reprinted from the Moutain2Mountain blog. Hopefully it spurs some thought.
***
“Remember that being a woman is different in Afghanistan.”
I was getting yet another opinion on my decision to travel to Afghanistan. The statement was made out of love, wanting to remind me that I should be aware of my surroundings and behavior, that just because I was a strong, independent woman, I should remember to respect local culture. But it was also coming from someone that had never traveled to Afghanistan.
Recipe: Baked Egg in Avocado With Parsley and Goat Cheese
Earlier this year, pictures of eggs baked in avocado were the darling of the online food porn world. Then I tested out the recipe myself, and the result was so good I wonder how I ever lived without this creation.
The concept is simple: bake an egg in an avocado. If you were looking for a way to put all those eggs from your backyard chicken coop to use you should certainly put this recipe on the breakfast list.
Recipe: Beet Pesto
My mother is known for always having a couple of homemade spreads on hand. In fact, if we’re out of pesto to put on open faced sandwiches in the morning (we’re Swedish after all) she has been known to make a fresh batch at 6 a.m. Completely normal in a food appreciating household.
Which is why I was in no way surprised when I was home this summer and in the midst of trying to come up with an appropriate crust recipe for a gluten free appeltaart, she exclaimed, “oh! you have to try the beet pesto!”
Of course.
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