Ski season is officially open!

by Kraig Becker on

It may be hard to believe, considering its only the middle of October, but ski season has officially begun in Colorado. Yesterday, the Arapahoe Basin Ski Area opened for business and today skiers will hit the slopes at Loveland for the first time as well.

Early fall snowfalls have already been dumping fresh powder across the Rocky Mountains, and when combined with the artificial snow-making machines, both ski areas have a good base for the start of the season. Loveland began the week with roughly six inches of snow already on the ground, and more has fallen over the past few days, and when A-Basin kicked off the season yesterday, it was covered in 18 inches of powder.

Last year’s ski season was one for the record books, with heavy snows falling across much of the western United States. Those snowfalls continued well into the spring, which extended the season into July. That has made for a very short off-season for Arapahoe, which was closed for just 100 days this year. Long term forecasts are predicting similar weather patterns for this winter, which is good news for skiers and snowboarders.

Over the course of the next few weeks, other ski resorts will begin to open throughout the U.S. as the new season gets into full swing. For now, those of us not lucky enough to live close enough to one of these hills, is going to have to sit and wait.

Expat fusion cuisine: combining foreign foods with favorites from home

by Meg Nesterov on

Part of the fun of traveling is trying new and exotic foods. Many travelers try to eat only locally and eschew the familiar, though eating at American chain restaurants abroad can be its own experience. But when you make a foreign country your home, you have to adapt your tastes and cooking to what’s available locally while craving your favorites from home. I’m lucky enough to live in Istanbul with an amazing food culture heavy on roasted meats and grilled fish, fragrant spices, and fresh produce. Some foreign foods like pizza and sushi have been embraced in Istanbul, but Turkish food has remained largely uncompromised by outside influences and passing trends. Convenience foods are still a new concept in Turkey but you can always grab a quick doner kebab or fish sandwich on the street if you aren’t up to cooking.
In my own kitchen, I’m learning to work with Turkish ingredients and dishes and mix in some favorites from home, creating some “expat fusion” cuisine. Meat-filled manti ravioli gets an extra zing with some Louisiana hot sauce. In the hottest days of my pregnancy this summer, I craved pudding pops from my childhood, making them more adult with some tangy Turkish yogurt. One ingredient I miss here is maple syrup, which is generally only produced in North America, and hard to find and expensive in the rest of the world (a small bottle in Turkey costs about $20!). One of my American friends brought me a bottle this summer and I poured it over pancakes (surprisingly easy to make from scratch when you can’t get a mix) and my favorite Turkish treat, kaymak. Kaymak is a clotted cream popular on the breakfast table, served with a crusty loaf of bread and honey, available in most local supermarkets but best eaten fresh in a cafe like Pando’s Kaymakci in Istanbul’s Besiktas neighborhood. I draw a lot of inspiration from my friend and fellow expat Joy, who was a professional pastry chef back in Baltimore and now chronicles her mouth-watering cooking in her Istanbul kitchen on her blog, My Turkish Joys. She posts beautiful food photos and recipes with both American and European measurements to help US and Turkish readers recreate her dishes such as sour cherry pie. Afiyet Olsun (that’s Turkish for bon appetit)!

Gadling readers, have you created any expat fusion foods with ingredients from your travels? Make us hungry and leave us a comment below!

Interview with a Forager

by David Farley on

Meet Johanna Kolodny. She’s a forager. Which is something like a hunter-gatherer, minus the grunts, fear of fire, loin cloth, and cave paintings. I met Johanna in the Press Lounge, which sits atop the Ink 48 Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Johanna spends her days finding ingredients for the lounge as well as for the ground floor Print Restaurant.

It’s not every day you ask someone what they do they can say with a straight face: I’m a forager. Then again, these are heady times for the dining landscape in the United States (and elsewhere in the world). As competition grows to be the most locavore friendly and use sustainable farm-to-table ingredients, some restaurants are stepping it up by having on-staff foragers in the house.

Over a cocktail (made with some ingredients that she foraged) in the Press Lounge, as the lights of Manhattan twinkled below us, I asked Johanna more about her intriguing food-industry job.

Gadling: So, you’re a forager. What’s the biggest misconception about your job?
Johanna Kolodny: People don’t believe it’s my day job. Also, I’m not combing the beaches for seaweed and the forest floor for nuts and mushrooms.

Gadling: So then what exactly do you do?
JK: I scour the farmers markets as well as farm and food producers for the best possible ingredients for the restaurant here. I’m really more of a “gatherer” than a forager–but that’s the title they gave me here. I’m at the Union Square farmers market every day it’s open, for example.

Gadling: I see. So do other foragers–those people who really do comb the beaches and forests–resent that your title is “forager”?
JK: [Laughs] Not yet. There’s a certain set of foragers who prefer what they do to be called “wild crafting.”

Gadling: That sounds like a way of describing getting risqué on Etsy. As a forager, what is your biggest challenge?
JK: Getting people to eat some of the less-common things that I find. Like certain types of fish you don’t see on menus everyday. A while back I found great golden tilefish and amberjack but, sadly, they didn’t sell when we put them on the menu. The other challenge is getting the chef to consider some of these “new” ingredients as well.

Gadling: What did you want to be when you grew up (And don’t even say “forager”)?
JK: I was always interested in food, travel and culture, but I didn’t know how to parlay that into a career. Then, in my last year of college, I took a class called “Russian Food & Culture” I realized I could study food and follow my interests.

Gadling: What do foragers talk about when they get together?
JK: Like a lot of people in the same field, we bitch together a lot. And, of course, we talk about things that we find.

Gadling: Is there a Michael Jordan of the foraging world?
KB: There’s a woman in California named Kerry Clasby is who great. She travels up and down the state and hits as many as 300 farms. She finds amazing stuff.

Man sets out on 5,000 mile hike throughout Asia to raise money for charity

by Jessica Festa on

Winston Fiore, a 26 year old Marine from Bloomington, Indiana, has set out on a 5,000 mile journey, by foot, throughout Southeast Asia and China. Fiore arrived in Southeast Asia on September 25, 2011, for what is called “Smile Trek”, and is projecting it will take him a year to walk the entire route, which begins and ends in Singapore.

The goal of the journey is to raise $50,000 or more for the International Children’s Surgery Foundation, a not-for-profit that provides children in developing countries with free corrective surgery. Through fundraising efforts, such as giving presentations at rotary clubs across the United States as well as having help from the CouchSurfing community who have helped organize benefit dinners, charity walks, and media interviews, Fiore has been able to raise over $28,000 for the cause.

Fiore’s inspiration for Smile Trek stems from an experience he had when training for the Marines in a very poor region of Lingure, Senegal. When he returned home, he read a newspaper article about a successful plastic surgeon in the United States who gave up his career to perform free surgeries in developing nations for children with cleft palates and lips. From there, the idea began to grow.

To follow Fiore’s Smile Trek or donate to his cause, visit his blog here.

Wildlife refuge on island of Sanibel, Florida, introduces iNature Trail for smartphone users

by Jessica Festa on

The J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge has introduced a new interactive smartphone capability for visitors. Called iNature Trail, the program utilizes QR (Quick Response) codes that are located around the refuge, which can be scanned by your smartphone using free downloadable applications like Neoscan and QR Scan. Once scanned, the codes will bring up YouTube videos and other informative resources for an enhanced experience in nature. For example, scanning a particular code could bring up a video of the refuge manager welcoming guests to the area, while another might teach users how to plant a mangrove tree.

According to Supervisory Refuge Ranger Toni Westland, out of the more than 550 national wildlife refuges, J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge is the first to put in place an interactive trail program like this one.

To get a better idea of how the app works, check out this video: