mmmm, that sounds good...I'll have that.

Not much is new here in Aigle. Not much at all. Still living without TV, internet (at the house), car, cell phone, English speaking friends other than Sam or Ethan, young locals in general, establishments open past 6 pm, and, and, and... That pretty much leaves bike riding, which, when one is sick as I have recently been, isn’t much of an option. We all deal with the overabundance of free time in different ways. Vitamin G has been using his newly acquired French to translate trashy American rap. Here’s his take on “money in da bank, shorty what’s your drank?” with his own personal flourish at the end.


I’ve been reading a lot and putting my passion for cooking to good use. Actually, “passion” and “cooking” might not be the right words to describe my fondness for ogling cooking magazines and napping while watching The Food Network, but nevertheless, I have a few recipes that the world deserves to know. Here are two new chocolaty spreads for when your Nutella runs out:
-Stir a bunch of cocao powder into jam. Simple enough. Saturate the jam with cocao powder (like the straight-up sugar-free kind or else it’ll be too sweet).
- And secondly, stir a bunch of cocao powder into mashed up bananas. The key here is lots and lots and lots of cocao powder. Cocao powder mixed in plain yoghurt on waffles or pancakes isn’t bad either. Or oatmeal with cocao powder. Cocao powder in pretty much anything actually. But I’ll emphasize that the key is a lot of cocao powder.

Another winner is coffee oatmeal. It’s a little tough to cook the oatmeal in coffee without giving the coffee a burnt flavor, but it’s nothing a little milk and sugar (even if you don’t usually take it in your coffee) can’t fix. I know what you’re thinking: “why didn’t I think of that!?” You too could probably be a culinary innovator; you just need to clear your cabinets of all but a few key ingredients (a few starches, coffee, and cocao powder in my case). A little open-mindedness helps too.

I wonder if by periodically highlighting recipes on Racechild I can tap into the growing celebrity chef phenomenon and expand my readership…

We’re not the only ones with free time.
Drinking beer at 11:00 AM? Mandatory military service might not be so bad after all.