So while some of our side projects are going away completely, our favorite one is coming over here to Living the Dream! The International Food Project is now going to be a permanent feature on this site, and we've just finished bringing over all of the old posts from the past 3 years to be featured in our archives.
Since we're bringing a lot of new content your way, we thought it would be worth it to explain a little more on what The International Food Project is and while you'll be hearing a lot about it in the next few years.
What Is The International Food Project?
As you know, Angie and I love food. Part of the reason we travel is to find local food in their most authentic forms. From the ones we've been craving for years to others we've never heard of before, you'll never hear us complain when it comes to trying something new.
The one thing that makes us sad about traveling for the food is that once we leave a region, finding an authentic version of a dish we come to love is difficult. Short of going back to the country, we sometimes have to do without for months or years until a restaurant opens up near us that may try to take on the dish.
This is unacceptable to us.
When we fall in love with a food, we want it all the time! So our goal for The International Food Project is simple. Find tasty foods around the world, and work on published recipes we find to recreate the food while at home. There is only one goal, and that is recreating the taste we had from our travels for an authentic meal whenever we want it.
This Will Be a Long Challenge
Those who read The International Food Project while we had it as a separate site will know that it is a slow moving goal. It often takes many trials on a recipe to tinker with the flavors and ingredients to get it to be acceptable, and many more to make it perfect.
Until now, we weren't doing a very good job with it. One of the reason is, naturally, we're traveling. The second of which is we never dedicated our time and money completely to the goal as we were always saving for this trip. So part of us merging The International Food Project onto Living the Dream is to give the series a reboot. This restart will allow us to look at all of our favorite dishes with a fresh perspective, a stronger budget for the recipe phase (outlined below), and an ability to achieve food perfection.
For The International Food Project, we have to break up our content into two phases.
Phase 1 - As you can imagine, with us traveling for the next year or longer we will not be recreating any dishes for a while. This part of the project is what we like to refer to as the Research Phase. During this part of the project we're going to be bringing all of the world's best dishes to you while sharing what they're like, why they're famous, and anything else we can learn along the way (and perhaps a recipe or two if we take a cooking class). As of publishing this post, all archived entries into this series are from the Research Phase of previous trips including Egypt in 2009, East Asia in 2010, and all cities we've visited on this current trip thus far.
Phase 2 - When we return home, whenever that will be, we'll enter into a Recipe Phase. During this part of the project we're planning on going to great lengths to recreate the world's best meals at home. First we'll start with online recipes, tinker them to the right flavor profiles, and from there will go to the extremes. Does Bordeaux's famous Canele dessert need a copper mold or will silicon do? Can you cook an Italian pizza without a pizza stone in the oven? How about on the grill? These are just some of the questions we will answer when we return home and start cooking!
We'll Have Food Topics That Are Outside of This Project, Too!
Of course, we're not limiting the food topics covered on this site to just those featured in The International Food Project. We've got a lot of other tasty topics to discuss! From restaurant reviews, market tours, and anything else having to do with our favorite activity, you'll find it on Living the Dream just like always.
So hopefully you'll come back to our site with an empty stomach, because we intend to bring a lot of international food your way very soon.
To follow The International Food Project feature on Living the Dream, check out our "Food" tab on the sidebar. On this landing page we'll be keeping a running tally of all the foods we've discussed on the site and will be linking to all the recipe pages we work one once we get home. All food related posts covered on this site, whether it is for The International Food Project or not will always be found in their respective country in our menu header!