Bavarian Sauerkraut

This dish is a German staple and goes with everything you could imagine, especially if its a potato or sausage.  Bavarian sauerkraut may sound like a complex dish but with a handful of cabinet staples and a few minutes time you can whip up a batch for the gang and eat like a baron.  Its…

Iceland – The Blue Lagoon

This iconic, and expensive, spa offers guests a silica mud mask, fruit juice or alcoholic beverage of choice, along with wet and dry saunas, and of course, the many amazingly milky, blue outdoor thermal pools set beside steaming volcanic backdrops. You can even get a floating massage in a semi private thermal pool there.  It…

Preserved Lemons – Recipe

Preserved lemons are common in Moroccan cuisine and in the nomadic culture of the Sahara.  They are amazing, let me show you why!  Preserved lemons bring out the natural flavor of the ingredient being used and the salt curing the lemon kind of removes the citric notes of the lemon to make act as more…

Do Your Homework

When planning a trip its always fun to take a few hours and research some of the history and culture that shaped the place.  A little insight can help you understand what you are seeing and why things are the way they are presently.  Our way of living isn’t always the “right way” or “best…

Berlin Beirgartens

Beer gardens are to Berlin what tires are to cars, essential to smooth daily commuting.  Beer gardens make a special space outdoors under giant chestnut trees providing maximum shade as you drink some of the most incredible beers in Germany.  These brewers are held to the strict Purity in Bier Law insisting that the brews…

Marrakesh, Morocco

The Red City has an amazing ancient medina full of snake charmers, fortune tellers, con artists and street vendors all ready for you and your tourist dollars. Long ago this vibrant square was used for public beheadings!  Nowadays, fresh fruit stands, street vendors and tasty juice stalls line the squares by day. By night food…

Chicken and Preserved Lemon Tagine

A typical dish in Morocco involves steam cooking a roast of carefully placed veggies with or without a meat base into a pyramidal shape in order of cooking time so that we achieve the perfect textures for each veggie in the tagine. This is all set in special clay earthenware for which the dish is…

Moroccan Spice Traders

Everywhere you go in the medina you see spice and fruit traders lining the streets and filling vendor stalls with their wonderful fruits and spices. Try a sampling of dates and figs while you tour the shops! Who knew there were so many varieties of each fruit?  I made sure to stock up on Zanzibar,…

Berlin – City of Architecture

As far as cutting edge architecture is concerned, Berlin is full of iconic buildings on display that entertain the eye and challenge contemporaries to push boundaries. This city is unlike most others in Germany because after it was completely destroyed in WWII and  then impacted further by the rise and fall of the wall separating…

Berlin Street Art Scene

An eclectic mix of international street artists make Berlin their canvas in various forms and styles. Some artists have adapted to making massed produced copies and pasting them up so that fans can collect the pieces by sponging off and pressing the peeled off graphic between sheets of paper to dry intact.