One of my life goals is to become a good cook. I know having a kitchen is a prerequisite for that, but in the meantime I just talk about it lot and hope by some sort of osmosis I’ll get better just by eating other peoples’ good food.
Check the Video HERE! if you haven’t seen it yet!
Daila Ojeda & Olivia Hsu: Girls Trip Brazil from Prana Living on Vimeo.
In Brazil I became a little obsessed with the perfect rice. I get it. Rice is easy. People always tell me this and then divulge their recipe with a sigh followed by an eye roll. But to me the perfect rice has a very intricate timing system that obviously comes innate to some, and well, not to others. Everyone has their different specs from rinsing the rice before, to boiling the water with the rice, to their radical ratios that seem to work for them every time. What I eventually picked up from these folks about making rice, and probably most cooking in general, is you can’t over think it.
For me it seemed the perfect batch of rice would always come after we had started cooking, grabbed a glass of wine, got to talking and nearly forgot about the while damn thing completely. It’s almost like the act of forgetting let nature take its course, and walking away is exactly the ingredient it takes to make it right every time. No doubt I’ll time my boiling and measure my cups of water perfectly in the future, but I’m definitely trying to live my life with less recipes and more natural timing. Turns out you can have all the right ingredients follow the recipe exactly and still get a bad batch. Sometimes you just have to walk away, forget about something, wing it and everything might turn out just right.
I’ve been back from Brazil for almost a month, but I’m still drinking my coffee black with too much sugar, can’t appreciate a piece of fruit and get Acai cravings on the regular. I have been really excited to share the short video I made for Prana featuring their two badass athletes Daila and Olivia, that I shot while we were there this fall. Below is a link to that video along with some photos from my last month in the country, where I had the chance to explore a lot of Brazil by car, still one of my favorite ways to travel. The vehicle does a place justice and after logging a few days worth of driving the last weeks I was there, I was astonished to see I had still only conquered the tiniest squiggle of surface area on the map. This place is just huge and tremendously gorgeous to match that trait. Sometimes I feel like my photos and videos are such a feeble attempt to capture just an ounce of the beauty that exist overwhelming place like this. Enjoy!
