Saturday, January 29, 2011

Jan 28, 2011: Adzuki, Bocuse d'Or and Chocolates

Spiced adzuki beans and rice
Today's Food Diary
Breakfast: Wholemeal toast with boiled egg
Lunch: Spiced adzuki beans and rice 
Dinner: Pasta with spinach sauce
Baking/sweets: Sweet adzuki bean paste (experiment), chocolate shortbread cookies
                                          
What kind of beans does a cannibal like? Human beings of course!

I bought adzuki beans for the first time. Interesting taste, though its too early to give my critical view on adzuki’s. The dish in the photo looks quite red, the beans received a liberal dose of paprika.

Chocolate chip shortbread
The chocolate shortbread cookies I made this afternoon were not short, instead they were crunchy and bit tough. The dough was a bit dry/crumbly so I added golden syrup. How clever of me! The cookies may look innocent in the photo but those innocent looking things could cause serious damage to your teeth if you were not careful. On a positive note I made only 6 cookies, and happily ate all of them! There is no such thing as a bad cookie, correct?

Today's Favourite Photo
Winning dish from the Bocuse d'Or


Today's Favourite Blog
Blog post about artisanal chocolatiers. What I found particularly interesting were the discussions relating to artisanal chocolatiers, and the discussions took place in the comments section. Here’s my 2 cents worth on this issue . Many years ago I did restructuring advisory for a chocolatier located in a small island in the middle of nowhere! In spite of small size and remote location the factory had good prospects (restructuring was due to management issues, not quality/market related). These days with rising cocoa prices, more focus on fair trade, ecological products etc the chances of survival for small scale operators is higher I think. There is a larger number of customers willing to pay a higher price for higher quality sustainable products. The world is changing, in a good way. Long long time ago there was mainly relatively smaller chocolatiers, then the bigger ones came giving the smaller ones a hard time. Now with fair trade etc the smaller ones are coming back in force while the bigger ones continue to get bigger. For us it means more choices.

4 comments:

  1. Wow I missed reading your blog posts, I just came from a two week holiday in Gold Coast and never did dare to go online. Now I am back to read those wonderful posts again like this one that food photo is the best I have seen so far online.

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  2. Hi Raymund, I hope you had a good vacation. I vacation from blogging also I see:)

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  3. I really enjoyed your post this morning. It was a great read. I thought your comments about small businesses were very interesting. The high end of the market is always the last to collapse, so I believe well-positioned artisanal operations can survive bad times. Out local merchants, however, have found that the general population moves away from organic and specialty items when times are tough and dollars must be watched. So, it pays for any business not to get too comfortable. I hope you have a great day. Blessings...Mary

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  4. Hi Mary, I agree with you, during tough times demand for premium products falls, unless its a super-premium product which is generally unaffected by economic conditions. In any case as you rightly say, businesses should not get too comfortable. Already I am starting to see lot of artisanal products in the supermarket and this is growing by the day.

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