Columns

These are monthly columns that cover plenty of cooking, travel, and food adventure. Check back here on a regular basis for new recipes, interviews, and design inspiration.

Of Emergency Travel Kits and Daydreaming

by Aida Mollenkamp —

Escape with Ghirardelli dark chocolate #escapewithdarkchocolate @ghirardelli

Daydreaming is an art – it truly is a special skill. My high school French teacher would disagree, as he wrote my daydreaming as off as lack of concentration, but I believe it’s the key to creativity. And, let’s be honest, it’s a coping mechanism for escaping from reality. Especially when your reality comes in the form of travel headaches like lost luggage, cancelled flights, and poor customer service.

I’d like to think I have pretty good travel karma, but really just it’s just a matter of time before the bad stuff hits. And, when you travel as much as I do, it hits pretty often. This winter I’ve been caught in a Nor’Easter, had luggage fly east when I was heading west, and clocked in time at airport cafés while coping with grounded flights. And, that, my friends, is when I daydream.
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The Dental Hygienist And Her Sugar Stash

by Aida Mollenkamp —

Chocolate-Almond Butter Easter Eggs from www.aidamollenkamp.com

My mother loves Peeps. And cheap white cake. And candy corn. Which is totally ironic because she was a dental hygienist and rarely had sugar in the house when we were growing up (that we knew of).

Her sweet tooth goes into overdrive during the Easter season when she can be found diving into her stash of Chocolate-Peanut Butter eggs with abandon. But those over-the-counter eggs are loaded with all sorts of subpar ingredients never mind the fact that they could just be so much better with a few tweaks. So, this year I made her homemade chocolate eggs. 
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Urban Legends And Eggs

by Aida Mollenkamp —

Aida-Mollenkamp-Pretty-Easy-Eggs-Header-1020

So, I’ve got a thing with eggs. I could eat them for any meal, at any time, and any number of ways. There’s a culinary urban legend that the number of pleats in a traditional chef’s hats is directly correlated to the number of ways to cook eggs and, while I’ve never found concrete evidence backing that claim, it’s fair to say there are at least 5 kajillion ways to make eggs.

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