August 24, 2009
The Basic Ingredients
“To eat is a necessity, to eat intelligently is an art.” – La Rochefoucauld
Eating is by far one of the necessities of life as we know it, and as far as I’m concerned, eating dessert is insinuated within that necessity as well. Every nation in this world is somehow associated with food, creating their own culinary masterpieces that invoke a sense of pride. It is almost as if through their food, through dessert, that these culinary artisans are providing edible history, and what better way to learn than to devour it completely?
My goal of this blog is to therefore introduce fellow bloggers to dessert in a way that entails more than simply posting recipes and documenting the good, and however few, bad experiences in my relatively small kitchen. I hope through this experiment to also educate you on the historical and culinary significance of a multitude of desserts from various places, near and abroad. Also, I presume to teach myself by cooking each and every one of the desserts that I present to you, hopefully for pure educational purposes, and not to be the spokeswoman for the next Jenny Craig commercial. (Please feel free to encourage me as I adamantly try to do my P90X daily while doing this-I’ll need it!).
In order to do so, I’m going to take you back in time with me to various places that I was blessed enough to have seen in the not-too-distant past. Through pictures of my travels, historical tid-bits, and of course amazingly delicious dessert recipes, I hope to enlighten you, fellow readers, to the various venues of the culinary arts.
So, let the baking commence! Here’s a clue to our first place of travel: the chaps there are very fond of the 2nd (doubly so) and 3rd letters of the alphabet, don’t accurately define the word “chip”, are quite raunchy, and have an even more perverted sense of humor when it comes to their sweets. Can you guess where we’re off to first? Use your detective skills to see if you can solve the mystery…
Confections of a Traveling Baker 