With the help of (and based on an idea by) my friend Alexia Colson-Duparchy, I am pleased to launch a new series on Chocolate & Zucchini titled Draw Me A Fridge, in which she will be grilling personalities from the food world and beyond about what’s in their fridge. Those who feel inspired will be providing a doodle to illustrate it.

But first, meet Alexia Colson-Duparchy!

Raised on quinoa and wild rice from her early days, long before they were on the savvy foodies’ radar, food never left Alexia indifferent. It wasn’t until she flew away from the parental nest and moved to the land of poutine (Quebec) that she realized that when you invite a bunch of friends over for dinner, well, you better start cooking.

She discovered the luxury of a well-stocked fridge when she started to work as a lawyer and aspired to a) eat things other than greasy slices of cold pepperoni pizza at her desk; and b) maintain some sort of a social life. Her successive moves to the lands of bobotie (Cape Town), fish and chips (London) and laham mashwee (Abu Dhabi) and back to oeuf mayo (Paris) only amplified her natural curiosity for other people’s vision of culinary delights.

Today, she plans on using this column to bring peace to the world, one open fridge at a time!

While I adore fresh fava beans {a.k.a. broad beans}, I find it hard to justify the time commitment they require.

Mind you, I’m not against making an effort in the interest of great flavor. But unlike fresh pea pods, which are a delight to pop, these particular pods are rather tiresome to rip open, and between the blanching and the peeling that follow, I’m frazzled before I’ve even started to cook the actual dish.

I used to restrict my fava bean eating to restaurants, where I was happy to pay for someone else’s thumbnails to get grimed with green gunk.

Because of this, I used to restrict most of my fava bean eating to restaurant settings, where I was happy to pay for someone else’s thumbnails to get grimed with green gunk.

But then I started subscribing to a vegetable delivery service, and the late spring to early summer crop often includes young fava beans, so I had to devise a counter-strategy.

I found two: the first one is inspired by the way the Japanese prepare edamame, boiled soy bean pods. It’s effortless, and the fava pods can then be served warm or cold, in little bowls, as an appetizer or a side, for each eater to shell and eat himself.

The second consists in tossing whole fava bean pods with olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasting them in the oven. The pods become soft and golden, and you can easily tear them open to collect the sweet beans inside. Even better, if they’re young enough you can eat the whole thing, pod and all, a fact sure to appeal to the thriftiest of us.

Continue reading »

Today I bring you an interview with Domantas Užpalis, a bean-to-bar chocolate maker from Lithuania who contacted me a few months ago to tell me about his project, Chocolate Naive: he and his team roast, winnow, grind and temper their own chocolate in a manufacture based in the Lithuanian countryside.

He offered to send samples of their new collection, which includes a 43% milk chocolate, a 68% Uganda chocolate with fleur de sel, a 71% Grenada chocolate, and a 63% cinnamon-orange chocolate. I received the bars, tasted them, and was truly impressed: this was excellent chocolate, complex and refined. I was also wildly intrigued by the story behind it, and asked Domantas if he would answer a few questions for me.

It turns out this self-described chocolate lunatic is quite a character, and I hope you enjoy reading about his chocolate-making adventures as much as I did. I know I would love to fly to Lithuania and visit his dacha and chocolate factory!

And if you want to taste his chocolate too, it is distributed in select stores in Europe, and can be ordered from the Chocolate Naive website.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

My name is Domantas Užpalis — blue-eyed, medium height, big smile. Seriously, I am the founder of this weird project called Chocolate Naive. We have been manufacturing fine chocolate in the middle of nowhere for one and a half years now. We are small-scale chocolate makers, who create chocolate from scratch, and by that I mean we roast, winnow, conche and temper chocolate ourselves in the countryside, in Lithuania. I will add that, at this very moment, I live the dream!

What sequence of events inspired you to create Chocolate Naive, and what is your vision?

All my life I was involved in corporate careers — finance, marketing, or insurance. I graduated with a master’s degree in Urban Development in London and 2008 was the year I came back home to Lithuania, all arrogant and self-confident. I was expecting high recognition and a full-speed career, but the international crisis turned everything upside down. And here I was — jobless, socially isolated, with no personal life, in poor health and with savings running out. When I look at that period in retrospect, I can clearly say that it was the lowest point of my life. For more than two years I literally struggled to survive.

The solution was obvious: what else if not chocolate? Shall I go from uber negative to super positive paradigm? I bought one ton of cacao beans and threw myself into chocolate very spontaneously. The beans arrived at my warehouse: a bunch of jute bags full of aromatic cacao beans. I had no idea how to process them, where to process them and what machinery I needed, but from that very moment on, we started assembling the puzzle very quickly.

First of all, we moved to the beautiful countryside near the lake. We secured a business loan and the first machinery started arriving to our rustic dacha in the middle of nowhere. Robust chocolate bars were born with the help of our local employee Kristina, a mother of seven, who is now the head of production. Some time ago her daughter Sabina joined the team, so now we can say that it is a true family business.

Twenty tons a year — that is our end goal. We have set this upper limit for the total Chocolate Naive production and we will keep that promise. The upper limit is to remember that the project started as a getaway from the corporate world, and if we exceed the limit we will run the risk of throwing ourselves back to the office (no way!).

Here is our end vision: to develop our farm and to acquire one in a cacao growing country in order to develop full vertical integration of manufacturing; to manufacture the most sophisticated chocolate and bring back the crown to the Food of Gods; to spread joy, peace of mind, and to educate people about the importance of finding their Chocolate of life.

Continue reading »

There will be a special place in my baker’s heart for the first project I undertook post-baby, and I take it as a fine omen that it is also an exceptionally good cake, one I have already baked again twice since then.

Our son (it still feels surreal typing these words) is now six weeks old, he is thriving, and although the first weeks were challenging in ways I had been told about but couldn’t truly penetrate until I experienced them firsthand, our little family is finding its rhythm and every day brings new reasons to feel lucky that we landed this particular charming baby.

We have had friends and family come over to meet Milan, and it is on one of these occasions that, feeling uncannily energetic after a night during which the little guy only woke us up every three hours — consider our drastically lowered sleep standards — I decided to bake a cake for our guests.

The recipe is drawn (and marginally adapted*) from a fun new book by Julie Andrieu, a French cook, food writer, and television personality who gathered dessert recipes that use vegetables.

Her carrot cake is among the more classic items in this collection, but it is the one I was drawn to the most: one, because I have to steer clear of dairy for breastfeeding reasons, and this cake uses oil as the source of fat; two, the ingredients list and process were simple enough for my circumstances and I only needed to buy the carrots; and three, I adore carrot cakes but had yet to adopt a particular recipe as a standard in my repertoire.

On the eve of baking day I measured out the ingredients and grated the carrots, and on the day of I assembled the batter and plopped the cake into the oven, all with the baby sleeping against me in his wrap — an absolute godsend if you’re the kind of person who likes to use both of your hands every once in a while.

It was a truly wonderful cake: moist and flavorsome and lightly nubby from the use of cornmeal, with a thin crust on top and the meaty crunch of pecans punctuating every bite, we ate it with an enthusiasm that nearly matched that with which we discussed the important matter of whose eyes and whose nose and whose mouth the baby seems to have taken (the consensus, respectively: mine, Maxence’s, as yet undetermined).

* Here are the elements I modified from the original version: I lowered the amount of sugar a bit, and the amount of spices as well (I prefer a gently spiced carrot cake); I doubled the amount of cornmeal and added salt; I skipped the diced candied orange rind; I used pecans in place of walnuts ; I changed the order in which the ingredients are combined to follow the simple rule of wet ingredients vs. dry ingredients.

Continue reading »