Retreating to flavour and mindfulness
The Buddhist Retreat Center a couple of hours by car from Durban in rural South Africa is a haven of tranquility and beauty where mindfulness and kitchen magic connect in a vast, poverty-stricken, harshly beautiful landscape.
Romancing the exotic, erotic truffle
At lunchtime on a recent Sunday in the demo kitchen-cum-dining room at historic Beringer Winery in California’s Napa Valley, a bunch of us are gathered to indulge in the world’s most expensive — and some would say exotic, erotic, mysterious and carnal — culinary offering. Namely, the European “black diamond” Périgord truffle.
Poland: a six-day culinary-cultural study tour
Would you like to join a study tour of Poland in the event of their being one? “Is the Pope a Catholic?” pops to mind. The formal invite comes via a heavily accented voice on my cellphone. The duration will be six days. In October, “Poland’s golden autumn.”
Why Sunshine’s Felicity Vonmoos is a good egg
Felicity Vonmoos has stuck her finger up more chicken a-holes than she cares to remember. Hey, she’s a good mom! “Nine times out of 10 if a chicken looks unhappy, it’s because there’s an egg stuck in breach position. I turn it, make it easier for her to lay. Then she dashes off to eat.” Hens are great little creatures, she adds. “They just ask for food, love and water and in return, they work really hard and earn their keep. They lay an egg a day.”
Portugal’s queen of tarts: where to eat them
Portugal is known for its pastries. The most famous is the pastéis de nata. The original version of the famed pastéis de nata dessert was created more than 200 years ago. If you are in the Belem district of Lisbon and see a line of eager people as the author of this piece did, they’re likely waiting outside Café de Belém, better known as the Pastéis de Belém, home of the pastries and where 19,000 are sold on an average day.
Travel to Poland: visit Wieliczka Salt Mine near Krakow
Entering Wieliczka Salt Mine is like being transported into another world. A unreal, mystical, subterranean nether-world. Salt mining started here in the 13th century. Not surprisingly if a little eerily, the adventures, the stories, the lives of men and women who have lived and worked (and sometimes died) here, deep in the bowels of the earth, infuse the place. You feel it, sense it — or at least I did — as you descend after entering. As you climb down, down, down the narrow wooden stairwell into a nether world of caverns and tunnel-paths and overhangs. Small wonder this UNESCO Heritage Site is one of Poland’s top tourist attractions.
Plentiful: The Big Book of Buddha Food launch notes
Plentiful: The Big Book of Buddha Food (Jacana) is the Buddhist Retreat Center’s third cookbook. Plentiful was launched at Adams Bookstore in Durban by journalist and longtime Zen student Wanda Hennig. Plentiful’s chef is Paul Atkinson. Editor is Chrisi van Loon. Photographer is Angela Shaw.
Foodies and yogis head for South African Buddhist Retreat
Pudding and Prana had us do a lot of yoga with Amy Best and cooking demos (followed by eating) with Paul Atkinson. Vegetarian curries and a Moroccan stew. A beet and feta salad. A “bejeweled’ cous cous. Poached pears in a yummy rich chocolate baked pie topped with whipped cream blended with double-cream yogurt. All were recipes he had perfected while working in the Buddhist Retreat Center kitchen and were destined for Plentiful: The Big Book of Buddha Food (Jacana).
Thailand Travel 34: Nai Yang lunch at a surprise local market
Search and you will find. No need in fact to search. Just take a walk and chances are you’ll find a market. Fresh and local. The equivalent but down-home and just-how-it’s-always-been version of the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Saturday farmer’s market.
Thailand travel 31: Dinner with top Chef Tammasak Chootong (Noi) at Suay
The strips of texture, it turns out, that I thought might be strips of mushroom, is young bamboo, grated. There are mushrooms. There is onion, red chili and spring onion, a mix of intense and subtle flavors. The rice noodle roll is somehow sensual in texture; the fish plump and decadently fatty and warm. Perhaps another nine on the mouth orgasm scale.