A Literary Culinary Journal
These photos are by SandeeA, author of the column Food Play, and who runs a site called La Receta de la Felicidad. SandeeA is never lacking ideas when it comes to playful, fun recipes. Click here to find the recipe for this Giant Oreo Cake. It would be a great recipe to get your kids in the kitchen!
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by Jonell Galloway
Here’s a quick, unfiltered overview of the photos I took at the first Salon du Chocolat Zurich.
These are here to help you get an idea of what was on offer at the show. They are not professional photos, yet they are mine. If you want to use them commercially or copy them, please be so kind as to contact me beforehand by clicking on the blue Contact Us button at the top right of our home page.
I’ll be adding more tonight or tomorrow morning, so stay in touch!
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We love this beautifully illustrated recipe for making the perfect brownies. This is a keeper!
The explanations are better than a video because they let you go on with your work and refer back to the photos when you need to.
Click here to go to the recipe.
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See more food photo compositions at Meeta K. Wolff. She runs a popular food blog, What’s for Lunch Honey.
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Let’s face it if you have to choose, you can’t go wrong with chocolate. You’re not falling into anything, although a nice vat of it could be inviting and you’re certainly not pining for the one who left you. Chocolates: you take them or you leave them. Even if you leave them, they stay in their box till you come back and want them again.
Unless you live with a chocoholic. Then you have twelve-step programs like Choc Anon, CODACE (Codependent Anonymous Chocoholic Enablers) and various other support groups where people wear brown, eat brown, drink and think brown. I’ve even heard talk of this day becoming a national holiday replete with parades…can’t you just see the marching strawberries slipping on their chocolate cloaks, the brownie floats, the truffle-shaped Porsche inching along where Miss Chocolate 2011 stands waving in her edible Amazon-wear, hot off the Paris runways?
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Too Little Chocolate, Too Little Time
There’s a new bakery in Kensington, Maryland. Tiny, charming and open early. This is great news for a town which has so little to offer on the culinary front, you might think you were in North Dakota.
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by Jenn Oliver
I love to make food creations as gifts for holidays, because I communicate through food (definitely better than through words). With words I find myself trying to be very precise, searching rather unsuccessfully for the most succinct way to express a thought. However, with cooking, I let loose a little more – I find the constraints and structures of recipes to actually encourage a bit of play. It’s one of the reasons why I have come to love gluten-free cooking, because the restriction in effect serves as an impetus for ingenuity; so amidst all of the rules surrounding the preparation of food, I find the freedom to express myself. Today, I tempered chocolate to tell my husband, “I love you” for Valentine’s.
Tempering chocolate is one of those techniques that is all about rules. It takes care, patience, and most of all, constant attention. A bit of a hassle if you don’t have a temperature controlled device – but, if dipping fruit or other chocolaty Valentine’s confections, there are definitely some advantages to using tempered chocolate. For one, the melting point of the chocolate is higher, so it doesn’t melt as easily, making it less messy to eat. Tempered chocolate is also prettier. It has a more glossy sheen to it, and snaps a bit when you break it apart. Besides aesthetics, tempered chocolate is less likely to bloom – the process where fat rises to the surface giving chocolate unattractive gray splotches.
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With all we remember about chocolatini, her legendary eyes and films and husbands and tireless efforts on the behalf of AIDS victims, the Hollywood queen was also, by the way, an icon of the chocolate world.
In 1953, her face sold Whitman’s chocolates ads for Valentine’s that year. In 1955, she and Rock Hudson invented the Senator John Warner, a concoction of vodka, Kahlua and Hershey’s syrup after working long hours on the set of Giant in Marfa, TX. Taylor proclaimed it “the best drink I ever tasted.”
But my favorite Taylor contribution to the chocolate world was one you could order just five blocks from the White House. During her marriage to National Velvet, she frequented the show restaurant in Washington DC, Dominique’s. It may not have had the best food in town, but its patrons attracted attention like no one else and people went to see and be seen. Autographed photographs of Ted Kennedy and Tony Bennett, Robert Redford and others glammed the walls while exotic mounted animals, an alligator, a lion and several other large creatures loomed near diners craning their necks between bites.
I don’t remember what I ate for dinner at Dominique’s since already in those days, my sole focus was on dessert. And the Elizabeth Taylor Special was as extravagant as she was. I ordered it every time.
It looked heavenly, a large cloud of whipped cream, but inside this cumulus pouf hovering on the signature Dominique plate, were the real jewels: five chocolate truffles, brown diamonds every one.
Dominique’s no longer exists having been sold by its original owner in 1987, but that dessert will float on in my memory more than Cleopatra, poet or any other work Liz Taylor graced with her fierce talent and jaw-dropping beauty.
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On The Chocolate Trail: Christina Daub is an American The Poet’s Cookbook who has spent her life traveling around the world in search of great chocolate. She is also the editor of the Food Poetry section. Published in The Poet’s Cookbook series, she has work in the first volume, which included poems and recipes from Tuscany (in English and Italian), and the second (in German and English), published by the Goethe Institute. She teaches creative writing at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
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Food photographer Steve Homer of Sabor de Almería in the southeast of Spain is a regular contributor to our site.
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Meet Jonell Galloway, a freelance writer and editor specialized in French cuisine. 
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