Spicy Chocolate Bark

Flip through any speciality food store catalog or scroll through its Web site, and you're sure to come across chocolate bark - and how crazy expensive it is. Delete it from your online cart because it's ridiculously easy to make your own.

This recipe is adapted from my favorite cookbook, Moosewood Restaurant's "Cooking for Health," and can be easily adjusted to the recipient's likes and tastes. This is how I made it:

Spicy Chocolate Bark (yields about 16 pieces)

Ingredients (fair trade and organic):

- 12 oz. of dark, semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate (chocolate chips work great)

- 1 cup/handful of pecans, toasted and chopped (walnuts, almonds or pistachios can be substituted)

- 1/2 cup chopped dried cranberries (or candied ginger, orange rind [chopped] or lemon zest)

- 1/8 tsp./pinch of coarse sea salt

- pinch of cayenne pepper

Recent batch of my Spicy Chocolate Bark

1. Line a cookie sheet or jelly roll pan with a piece of parchment paper.

2. Heat the chocolate in a double boiler, OR microwave for three minutes until the chocolate melts and is smooth. Don't add liquid - the chocolate won't set properly. 

3. Mix half of the pecans, cranberries and the pinch of cayenne into the chocolate. Once well combined, pour into the prepared pan and spread evenly with a spatula. Add the rest of the ingredients, pressing them into the chocolate to stick, and sprinkle the sea salt.

4. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes or in a cool room until the chocolate is firm. Once set, cut into pieces. (If you're giving this as a gift, place the bark in a tin or small bag. This is your chance to get crafty!)

As you can see, you can add almost any flavor combinations you want. Other reasons to like this recipe: It's gluten-free; vegan (unless you add other non-vegan ingredients); and it stores really well.

Happy holidays!

Homemade for the holidays

Recent news segments and articles report that consumer spending is up. Yay, materialism! Hopefully, some of you sane people who are in the same boat I am (um, poor and/or refuse to go to the mall) can fall back on the homemade gift idea this holiday season. 

Making your own gifts** and self-sufficiency can be seen as many things: heartfelt, economical, traditional and, yes, cheap. But, when you find yourself baking cookies for a friend, knitting a scarf or even shoveling snow, these actions also make you address questions of self-worth, success and social and political empowerment. 

Shannon Hayes, author of "Radical Homemakers," writes an insightful article called "Homemade Prosperity" and addresses this issue  in the current issue of Yes! Magazine. An excerpt from the article:

[M]ost American lives reflect a transition that happened in households following the Industrial Revolution. Before then, the home was a center of production, not very different from the original households that first emerged in 13th-century Europe, as the feudal period was coming to an end. The family’s economic security was a result of the householders’ combined efforts to produce what they needed. They raised their food, cured their meats, made soap, wove fabric, and produced their own clothing.

Once the industrial revolution took hold, the household changed. Men were first to leave the home to work in factories, where they earned wages and used them to purchase the goods and services they were no longer home to produce. The more men worked outside the home, the more households had to buy in order to meet their needs.

For a time, women continued to produce from within the home, but factories eventually supplanted the housewives’ duties as well. As time wore on, domestic skills were no longer paramount for survival. Instead of cultivating skills to provide for our own needs, we pursued skills to produce for others’ needs in exchange for the money to buy what was once produced in the home. The household had changed from a center of production that supplied most of its own needs to a center of consumption that bought nearly everything it needed.

At first, there were some pretty great consumer items that, in all fairness, lightened a burdensome domestic labor load—automatic washing machines, for example. But the idea of buying labor-saving devices that can’t be made at home gradually turned into our modern consumer culture—where everything from bread to entertainment must be bought—and generated our national assumption that a middle-class family requires one or both spouses to make lots of money.

"Homemade" is making waves. The birth and widespread popularity of farmers' markets, Etsy and other venues that promote small business and local movement ventures is encouraging, and people seem to be making a living from their success and crop of loyal followers.

You'll never become monetarily rich from your adventures in self-sufficiency. Learning to grow your own food, make your own gifts, minimize your economic and environmental output, test your strengths and limits, and, most important, boost personal happiness are externalities that can't be neatly factored into standard input-output/cost-benefit models. I can say with a great degree experience and confidence that learning to be self-reliant is one of the greatest gifts you can recognize.

Don't have your own sheep to sheer and not planning on knitting a matching hat and scarf set? No worries. At least try to make a commitment to other local artisans and producers. Make the pledge to Buy Handmade this season.

Go to BuyHandmade.org to make the pledge!

(**You may change your mind on the whole homemade/cheap thing - I'll be posting a really easy recipe for Chocolate Bark that's perfect for anyone whom you might have forgotten to give a gift to/couldn't make shipping by Christmas...)

If you like good food, do something!

Change.org's Sustainable Food cause page is an excellent resource for all issues about food.

If you're passionate about seeing change in the current American food system AND want to stick up for your favorite farmers and small, local food producers, I encourage you to check out the site, sign some petitions and join a cause.

The Black Isle Brewery: "Save the Planet - Drink Organic"

I'll first start off by saying that I don't know much about beer nor pretend to. But, I guess because I'm a white person, I've always been interested in the process, craft and story behind small breweries. Recently, I had the opportunity to visit a burgeoning brewery in Scotland - The Black Isle Brewing Co. - and see the process from hops to glass. So, here goes my first post about beer...

The Black Isle Brewery is located in an unassuming locale - close to Inverness and off the winding side roads and sheep-dotted fields of the A9. The Brewery itself is a small operation, marked only by the empty kegs in front of a processing barn and an adjacent gift shop where tours of the facility begin. The tour, lead by a cute, enthusiastic gray-haired woman lasted only about 20 minutes and took us through the grain and hop store, where the malt is mashed, the boiling and hopping station, the fermentation and conditioning tanks, and the sealing and packaging room. Our guide told us that in addition to kegs for local bars - including nearby Hootananny, which in itself is an experience (award-winning Thai food and traditional Scottish music mixed with every stereotype of a pub) - 10,000 bottles of Black Isle beer are shipped out every week, bottled, sealed and labeled by only three individuals. It's an unfathomable yet impressive number when you see the size of the space.

Since its creation in 1998, Black Isle and its founder and managing director David Gladwin maintain sustainability as a cornerstone philosophy. All of the barley and hops are sourced from organic operations, primarily from the U.S. and Germany. Any waste - from hops or malt - are used as compost or animal feed for nearby farms. So, even more reason to drink! 

Click here to check out Black Isle's range of beers. (I tried three different kinds in the taste-test at the end of the tour - Organic Blonde, Organic Yellowhammer and Organic Red Kite, the first beer made by the Brewery. At the pub, I ordered the Organic Red Kite. I can't really articulate why I liked this one the best, because, again, I know nothing about beer, but I just liked it.)

Maybe, even in the case of small breweries, it's that pastoral image of a small producer toiling away to perfect his or her craft that makes us want to root for them and see them succeed. Yet, the Black Isle Brewery doesn't need my praise - or that of the two friends, whom I'm traveling with and who do drink beer and thought it was excellent - to do so. It's won accolades from the Soil Assocation in the Organic Food Awards 2008 and 2010 and won the Society of Independent Brewers' Champion Beer of Scotland 2009. 

Black Isle is also in the process of completing a larger processing facility to keep up with demand, but in a controlled manner to maintain the quality and preserve what makes it popular among its loyal customers. The older facility will be used to make ginger beer, and perhaps, become a more appropriate facility for families.

Our tour guide also mentioned that the Brewery is in the process of finding a distributor in the U.S., so you may soon have a chance to taste Black Isle wares. But, if you ever do find yourself in Scotland, I recommend visiting The Black Isle Brewing Co. and see where it all began.

**The Black Isle Brewery: Old Allangrange, Munlochy, Ross-shire, Scotland. Tours: Monday-Saturday (10-6 - all year); Sunday (11:30-5 - April to September, inclusive)

SWYF Find: The Edinburgh Farmers' Market

Just below the grandiose Edinburgh Castle exists the lively Edinburgh Farmers' Market. Even on a rainy Saturday morning, loyal market customers came out in droves to support their local farmers and producers, all located in or just outside Edinburgh. Nearly 60 vendors, including small organic vegetable and meat farmers, cheesemakers, soapmakers, specialty tea and coffee kiosks, talented knitters and craftsmen, non-profits and bakers, line the sidewalks of Castle Terrace.

The market offers regional delicacies - including venison, wild boar and haggis for the meat-eaters - as well as ewe and goat cheeses, breads made from natural yeasts, wheat, spelt and other grains grown within the British isles.

Some of the vendors you should visit:

• The Chocolate Tree: hand-crafted chocolate truffles, bars and other treats. Uses fair-trade and organic ingredients. Excellent flavor combinations. Business right in Edinburgh!
• East Coast Organics: incredible looking produce - the bright green, purple, red and off-white veggies provide a much-needed color boost against the dreary November weather.
• Caurnie Soaps: a range of handcrafted, herbal and vegan body-care, available to the Scottish community since 1922. Unique scents, including a range of nettle-based soaps said to be good for dry skin sufferers - it smells excellent too.
• Stoats Porridge Bars: the most decadent granola bars you've ever had. Very few ingredients in each bar, but filling and good for breakfast or snack for hikes.
• Kate Sharp Knitwear: Some of the most beautiful sweaters and hand-spun wool I've seen from my trip. Wool from the artisan's own flock of sheep.

Many of these artisans have online stores, but for the sake of the environment and staying truly local, try to experience the market if you visit Edinburgh and support its local economy.

**Edinburgh Farmers' Market: Castle Terrace, Edinburgh; year-round, Saturdays (9-2). Visit the market's Web site for more information, recipes and news from vendors.