Loquat Cobbler-Cake

Part of my job here in Spain is basically chit-chat with grammatical correction.  I have developed little hand cues that mean invert order of noun and adjective that are…more or less understood.  One of the upsides of this is that I’ve wandered through quite a few different topics of conversation and I’m always picking up fun little bits of information. Last week one of the more offbeat topics was tropical fruit.  Mariano, one of the professors I work with, is from an area of Granada called Almuñecar that has a unique climate that makes it a cornucopia of tropical fruit you cannot find in any other part of Spain.  Pomegranates, peaches, custard apples, and one of his family’s favorites, the níspero or loquat.

Seattle Edible Book Festival – Not so pretty, but pretty tasty!

Thanks to a tiny thumbnail sized ad in The Stranger, the free weekly newspaper in Seattle, my friend Michelle and I stumbled onto a festival seemingly made for us: the Seattle Edible Book Festival.  For the subset of us who are both bookfiends and foodies, there is a festival where you bring a scene of a book to live or something nice and punny – as long as it’s all edible.

We were in.  After flipping through our bookshelves, we settled on Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel for the sheer sensuality of its food-related writing and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri because it’s one of Michelle’s favorite books.  In the first case, we wanted to bring to light the subject of the second chapter, where the protagonist weeps into the cake for the wedding of her lover…to her sister.  We went for puns in the second case, making Jhumpa Lumpias with a Namé Sake Cocktail (revised to a mocktail for the family friendliness of the festival).  You can find us on their Flickr stream here.

Edible Book Artists!

Feeling pretty cocky, we began to plot and to cook.