My obsession with granola started when I was at school in Durham, North Carolina.  My parents were visiting and we took a drive to Raleigh, where we fell upon a bakery that had the largest slabs of granola in the window we had ever seen.  It stopped us in our tracks, and was simply outrageous.  After graduating, I found out that bakery was Big Sky Bread and convinced them (before they started shipping nationwide) to send a massive box to my parents in New York as a surprise.  A bigger surprise came years later when I could no longer track them down; the bakery closed.  Years went by and my parents and I would say to each other from time to time, “remember that granola in Raleigh…?”  We all did.

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I have to admit, I didn’t mind going to school when I was younger. I even loved taking notes, which I still do.  But I doubt I was asking for homework, like I recently did here in Zürich. What kind of class was this, you wonder… Chocolate, but of course. It was actually a class on chocolate and wine, even if my focus was certainly on the former. Our instructors taught us all about the cacao bean and the grape, what they consider two of the most fascinating products on earth.

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Whenever I visit a new town, I’m not only on a mission to discover the sweet scene, but also to spend time at a local market.  It’s a perfect introduction to the culinary landscape, and always so interesting to observe the exchanges between proud vendors and their loyal customers, and most of all, see what people eat there !  What seems completely normal and mundane in one country (like the Swiss’ multicolored hard-boiled eggs) can be exotic and exciting – or just weird – to another.

Right now at the markets in Zürich, bright red strawberries and stalks of rhubarb are in the spotlight, but fat, white asparagus are taking up a lot of prime real estate too. While the latter has become common for me, living here in the German part of Switzerland and making regular visits to Zürich’s Bürkliplatz and Oerlikon markets, white asparagus were once strange and unfamiliar.  For me, asparagus were green, showing again that one person’s apple is another person’s rambutan.

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