Returning back to school one common question that we all get is, how was your summer?  The best part of mine by far was traveling to Indonesia for a month with GIEU, an international travel program offered by U of M.  I made 15 best friends, experienced two breathtaking islands, and took in one of the most harmonious and beautiful cultures I have ever witnessed.  One part of Indonesian culture that was hard for me to adjust to was the food.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been a picky eater, but after finding out that I developed gluten, lactose, and fructose intolerance last year my diet has become super limited.  With many things either fried or covered in soy sauce I had a bit of a challenge finding things on the menu, especially since it was all in Indonesian!  My fallback option was always seafood, which quickly became one of my favorite parts of the whole trip.  The seafood in Indonesia is some of the freshest, biggest, and most delicious that I have ever tasted.  With king prawn, otherwise known as large shrimp, that came still whole and skewered on a plate, my taste buds were in heaven!  Another dish that always caught my eye was seafood soup.  Unlike most soups in the U.S., seafood soup in Indonesia was chock full of almost every type of seafood one could imagine, such as shrimp, crab, lobster, squid, scallops, etc.  Overall my trip had many highlights that topped any meal imaginable, but the seafood in South East Asia was one awesome aspect of my travels to a new and foreign land.

“For me, it began as a love story,” translates Mbala, our professor on our GIEU (Global Intercultural Experience for Undergraduates) trip to Gabon.  Madame Rachiwa, an elderly Gabonese woman who is roughly 70, sat perched on a tree stub.  She held a large stalk of sugar cane in one hand as her other rested on a table of freshly harvested cacao and hand-processed coco as she began telling us her story.

Cacao, a native fruit to Gabon, is abundant within the country.  It is an oval-like yellow fruit that brings pleasure to millions worldwide in the form of chocolate.  I had never tried the actual fruit myself before visiting her plantation, and to my surprise it was remarkably refreshing and strikingly similar to mangosteen, a tropical fruit primarily found in Asia.  The flesh of the fruit is white and hangs tightly around an oval pit, where each piece is small and the cluster of pieces together is what makes up the fruit as a whole.  The fruit is broken apart into the individual pieces and left out to dry so only the pits remain.  From there, the pits are ground up and transformed into coco powder.  Once the pits are ground into this powder, a variety of different processes can be employed to make items such as chocolate bars, hot coco powder, coco butter, and more.  It is just the fruit that is needed first, then everything else, well, that comes later.

Madame Rachiwa grew up in a house stocked full of European imported chocolate.  She sat there smiling as she began explaining how she used to have such a sweet tooth she would often opt to spend her only money on chocolate instead of on staple foods, I mean, how many of us wouldn’t?  But the irony, she explained, was that as she ran around her garden with a chocolate bar in one hand, she and her siblings would throw the cacao fruits in her yard at one another not knowing that the sweets she ate so voraciously actually came from the fruits growing in her backyard. Eventually her parents explained to her that the two were one in the same, and that’s when she had her “ah-hah” moment.  Essentially, it was the moment that came to influence her whole future.

Madame Rachiwa has two plantations outside the town of Lambarene.  Our group went to visit her first business venture: a cacao plantation where she also grows star fruit, papaya, cassava, and pineapple.  The property is small in comparison to any industrialized farm; however, she is trying to process her own chocolate for distribution on site.  There are approximately five sheds used for drying the fruits, while the remainder of the process occurs in her kitchen.  The lack of financial support, employees, and machinery is stopping her from turning her plantation into a full-fledged business.  So what exactly is missing here? Well, this is why it is a bittersweet love story – the Gabonese government does not invest in local agriculture. 

Madame Rachiwa is not the only local trying to increase the scale of her work.  In fact, she is among many who work and strive to produce local agriculture for the Gabonese people.  However many farmers have already invested everything they have to make the business into what it is today and are now at a standstill because they can’t expand their farms enough to increase distribution and turn a profit.  The lack of government investment in local agriculture negatively affects the people in two ways – everything is imported and therefore far more expensive then it needs to be, and two, local farmers are losing money by simply trying to keep their farms afloat.  In a country where the climate permits everything to grow, these people have everything to gain if someone just gave them a helping hand.

As I sat there listening to her story and drinking the hot chocolate that was made fresh from her cacao, I realized that what she wanted most was simply to get her story out there.  So, for all and any of you interested in helping Madame Rachiwa spread her story or in directly contacting her with any ideas, I encourage you to take the initiative and spread the word.

While living in Germany this summer, I was neighbors with a girl named Solenia from Bologna, Italy.  And as I have a slight obsession with Italians, Italian food, and basically anything that comes out of Italy, I always hounded her for recipes.  She made a lot of great dishes, but the best—by far—was her bruschetta.  Thankfully, she gave me her recipe!  I’ve converted it out of the metric system (I don’t think anyone wants to try to measure out tomatoes in grams), and attached the recipe at the end of the article.  

Before Christmas break, a few friends and I decided to try our hands at re-making the bruschetta.  Since Solenia’s recipe was for feeding a big group (it called for sixteen Roma tomatoes), we cut it in half and used eight.  We diced the tomatoes, and combined them with the basil, vinegar, olive oil, salt, and mozzarella.  We chopped the garlic separately and kept it to the side. 
A lot of bruschetta recipes call for putting the bread and tomato mix in the oven once you’ve put the mozzarella on top, which is the way I’d always made bruschetta.  But when I first tried Solenia’s bruschetta and asked her if she ever melted the mozzarella, she looked genuinely confused.  She said that in Bologna they never melted the cheese, or warmed up the bread with the tomatoes…eh, I guess it must be an American thing.   So, we left the oven off.
The last two steps were to slice the bread and add the garlic.  Solenia’s bruschetta tactics were to keep the bread in a loaf as long as she could, and then slice it right before serving to keep it fresh.

And then, finally, we put it all together.   We put the tomato mix in a bowl and sprinkled the garlic on top. In Italy, bruschetta isn’t served with the tomatoes already on the bread.  Instead, it’s served with the sliced bread and a bowl of the tomato mix.    It turned out great, and I’d definitely recommend it.  The dish gave us a yummy taste of Italy during Michigan’s snowy winter.  Buon Appetito!  

Solenia’s Bruschetta Recipe: (for big groups!)

--16 Roma tomatoes, chopped
--3 tablespoons of Balsamic vinegar
--5 or 6 cloves of garlic, minced (or more if you’re a big garlic fan!)
--about ½ teaspoon of salt
-- a little over ½ cup of olive oil
--1/2 cup of basil, fresh
--about 4 cups of mozzarella, cut into thin slices
--two (or three) fresh baguettes
--fresh pepper (optional)

1. Combine the tomatoes, salt, olive oil, vinegar, basil and mozzarella in a bowl.  Stir until mixed, and then set aside.  
   
2. Slice the baguette…as near to serving-time as possible!
   
3. Sprinkle the garlic on top of the tomato mixture, and spoon the mixture onto the baguette slices.
   
4. Finally, grind some fresh pepper on top.  Enjoy!

While living in Germany this summer, I had the chance to experience a lot of different foods…and my favorite was, very stereotypically, the German pretzel.  The Germans are known for being pretty serious people, and they’re definitely serious about their pretzels.  

Now as Americans, we might associate the word “pretzel” with being a snack or something you get in one of those rotating cases at the movie theatre, but not in Germany. Pretzels there are huge, fresh, and made from scratch in almost any bakery you run across.  

According to Germans, pretzels are rarely eaten plain.  They’re actually treated more like bread; many people will slice open the thick bottom part of the pretzel, layer on slices of cheese and salami, and take it to work for lunch.  Or, my personal favorite, slather it with Nutella and call it breakfast.  

So if you’re ever in Deutschland, be sure to stop by a bakery and snag a fresh “Brezel.”  Oh, and the best part: they only cost about ninety cents! 

You might say that my taste in food has borders. I like hamburgers, pizza, chicken noodle soup, and while I am normally willing to try exotic foods, I rarely venture beyond my comfort zone. However, I was intrigued last week when I got a look at a very non-traditional type of food: dim sum. This week on Top Chef, debatably the most entertaining program on television, the “cheftestants” were tasked with preparing dim sum dishes and running a popular Chinatown restaurant during the lunch rush. The variety of food was staggering. There were tradition Asian dishes, such as pork buns and spring rolls filled with shrimp, as well as some surprises, namely short ribs—a food I normally associate with high-end steakhouses—and chicken feet. Interesting fact: chicken feet are sold in bulk with toenails still attached. Now maybe I’m naïve, but chicken feet sound a bit too interesting to begin with, but the fact that they are sold with toenails makes me shudder. The diversity of the menu presented by the chefs made me wonder what dim sum actually is. Dim sum, or “small heart”, is a form of Chinese food served in small portions, so one can think of it as a sort of Asian tapas. Often, dishes include steamed or fried dumplings, rolls such as egg rolls, spring rolls, and summer rolls, and wontons. There aren’t too many dim sum restaurants in the Ann Arbor area, but for those who are willing to make the trek, there is Lai Lai in Ypsilanti and Great Lakes Restaurant on Carpenter Road.