As we prepare for the 2011 Mongol Rally this summer, we’re finding it hard to keep up with our Confined Nomad adventures.  So we just want to let our readers know that while we haven’t abandoned the project, we are putting it on hold until the fall.  Our goal is to finish off the “C” countries by end of the year!

In the meantime, you can follow our great adventure from Europe to Mongolia a few ways!  We’ll be working on a project along the way called The Silk Road in Stereo, which you can read more about on our Kickstarter project fundraiser page (website coming soon).  You can also follow our general progress – border problems, flat tires, sweltering days in a small car with no AC, amazing views, and awesome FOOD – at our official Mongol Rally team website, theunConfinedNomads.com.  Oh, and we’ll also be posting updates to our regular twitter feed: @confinednomad.

Here is our announcement video for the Silk Road in Stereo.  Enjoy!

We know, we’ve been bad alphabetical eaters lately. We have lots of excuses: work, travel, Mongol Rally planning… But we can, we must, do better. And we will! A post about our quest to find food from the tiny island nation of Comoros is forthcoming, and we believe we have found a restaurant that serves food from the Congo. So stay tuned, more exciting food from countries beginning with the letter C await!

In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that we’ve been invited to speak on April 5, 2011 at the Adult Education Useless Lecture Series at Union Hall in Park Slope. The theme of the evening is “Cuisines of the World.” Hope you can join us for some beer, powerpoint, and lots of talk about our favorite topic!

And to tide you over, here are a few shots of things I ate on a trip to Vilnius, Lithuania last week.  Enjoy! read more »

Thats right folks, in 2011 the Confined Nomad team will be unleashed to drive, eat, and generally battle our way from Europe to Mongolia in a highly unsuitable vehicle, and it’s all for charity!

The Mongol Rally is a grand adventure of 10,000 km of bad roads, worse roads, and no roads through cities, mountains, deserts, seas and steppe.  This coming July, a couple hundred teams will embark on this harebrained journey, taking whatever route they choose, in cars with engines of less than 1.2 litres (1200 cc).  They will each raise at least £1000 for charity, and upon arrival in Ulaan Batar, their cars will be donated.  And we’ll be one of them.

The Rally is the opposite of a guided tour.  Teams are left to their own devices to deal with Russian police asking for bribes, breakdowns in remote deserts, and days of waiting at border crossings.  It’s all about adventure!  And saving the world, of course!

But we need your help!  Donations to our charities, sponsorship of our journey, and general advice about the best and worst border crossings in Central Asia are much appreciated. Please visit the 2011 Mongol Rally (un)Confined Nomads team website to find out more about supporting our adventure.

Here’s a little about how you can help:

• We are raising funds for two amazing charities: The Christina Noble Childrens’ Foundation and the Southern NY chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.  Your donation to these important organizations goes a long way. Please visit our team website to make a donation today!
• We need sponsors!  This is not exactly going to be cheap.  We need a car, camping gear, tires, jerry cans, a satellite phone, gifts for small children, bribes for border guards, among many other things.  If you or your company would like to sponsor our journey, we’ll place your logo right along the side of the car, and prominently display it on our team website.  If you are trying to reach markets anywhere from London to Mongolia, this is a great advertising opportunity!
• The Confined Nomad crew will be bringing you updates of delicious, atrocious, and unfathomable things we eat along the way.  We’d love to hear suggestions of foodstuffs we should not miss, items you’d like to dare us to eat, and meals we should avoid at all costs.  We’ll do the food blogging on this site, so let us know if you have any particular requests or suggestions.

Follow us as we document our preparations and eventually our trip across the world’s largest land area next summer!  www.theunconfinednomads.com.

Oh, and watch our short announcement video:

Reading through the April 19, 2010 issue of the New Yorker, I finished an article about a man’s experience moving back to the US after 15 years abroad, turned the page, and found myself looking at a large photo of a familiar restaurant’s open kitchen.  I quickly recognized it as Çiya Sofrasi, a very popular establishment on the Asian side of Istanbul, where we enjoyed a memorable meal back in September 2009.  We actually wrote a bit about it here after we returned from that trip.  Happy food memories came rushing back. read more »

Didn’t think we’d find authentic Cape Verdean food in NYC, did you? You figured that even though there are more Cape Verdeans in the US than there are in Cape Verde, but that most of them live in New England and the only Cape Verdean restaurants in this part of the country are in Boston, that we didn’t stand a chance. Well, consider yourselves wrong, because not only did we get incredible authentic Cape Verdean food prepared by an authentic Cape Verdean chef, we got authentic Cape Verdean food prepared by the chef of the Cape Verdean Ambassador to the UN! read more »

Once again, Team Confined Nomad’s progress has been delayed due to overseas travel.  This time, I was in India for a month, teaching in the international course SOIMA: Safeguarding Sound and Image Collections, organized by ICCROM.  This was my second time in India, and I’m happy to report that I experienced none of the gut-wrenching encounters with parasites and other food-born bugs that I did last time I was there.  In fact, nearly every meal I had was splendid.  Although in the end I was getting a little tired of paneer and naan, after a week back in NYC I’m really missing it. Well, I guess that gives us a good excuse to go out to Jackson Heights, or perhaps pay a visit to the Lexington Ave location of South Indian chain Saravanaa Bhavan that happened to have a location two blocks from my hotel, whose thali‘s I’m dreaming about even now.  My only regret is that I spent too much time enjoying my food, and not enough time taking pictures of it.  Or writing down the names of the things i was eating.

Here are just a few culinary shots of my trip. read more »

Not much progress was made in our alphabetical eating during September, but there’s good reason.  Supereg was in Las Vegas and then England for a couple weeks, while Noquar and I spent three weeks in the Netherlands, Istanbul and Greece.  As one might expect foodies like us, we spent a lot of time eating and drinking.  Every place we went offered fantastic new tastes and textures.  We snapped a few photos to savor the moments, and share with our dear readers. read more »

As I was skimming through blog headlines on my Google Reader, trying to digest the absurd events of the week in 5 minutes or less, a Boing Boing post called “TIME on unsustainable farming practices,” caught my eye.  After reading their quick excerpt of the article, I was motivated enough to head over to the TIME website and read the entire article, “Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food,” by Bryan Walsh.  My interest was partly because I was surprised to see this story in TIME, and partly because I’m actually very interested in this topic. read more »

Apologies for the delay in posts recently.  I’ve been away for the past three weeks, enjoying fufu and groundnut soup in Ghana.  The others kindly refrained from continuing on the alphabetical journey during my absence, so we’ll be picking back up again shortly.  We’re also waiting for a write up of our Bolivian adventure from a guest blogger, so be on the look out for that very soon.

To keep your mouths watering, here’s a picture of some okra soup and banku that I thoroughly enjoyed in the city of Ho, in the eastern Volta region of Ghana, close to the Togo border.

New York plans to raise taxes on people making more than $250,000.  Bernie Madoff’s Mets tickets are going to be auctioned by the trustee of his securities firm.  Vice President Joe Biden’s daughter videotaped snorting coke.  Exhortations against corrupt politicians in Albany.  Brooklyn trio sampling food from 192 nations without leaving the city.

The clock started ticking on our 15 minutes yesterday as we were interviewed and photographed by the New York Daily News for a story that ended up on page 3 of their Sunday paper.  We’re right next to Cameron Diaz and only seven pages away from the Queen of England. read more »