Live Healthy Abroad: Epicurious

Who am I?

Throughout my life I have traveled with family, volunteered abroad, studied abroad, worked abroad and lived abroad for varying amounts of time. Throughout my various adventures abroad I have struggled to maintain physical and emotional well being while away from home. At times I have felt so emotionally and physically depleted that I no longer wished to travel. Rather than letting my struggle to maintain health abroad stop me from living the life I desire, I have decided to dedicate more time and energy to finding strategies to alleviate the struggle.

In this blog I will share my experience finding strategies to create and/or maintain health while abroad. Not every tip will work for everyone or in every context. Always bear in mind that I am writing from the perspective of a vegan living in Santo Domingo. However, it is my hope that anyone who reads this will be able to take away bits and pieces to implement in their own unique context. If you find one piece of advice in my blog that increases your quality of life while abroad, then I have accomplished my mission!

This blog is a journal of my efforts to learn more and, as such, I welcome and encourage comments and suggestions and for you to share your own experiences.

In health,

Katie

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Epicurious

If you haven't discovered Epicurious yet, now is the time. This is the #1 online recipe resource. You can search for recipes by season/occasion, type of dish, dietary consideration, cuisine, main ingredient, meal/course, source and preparation method. It's pretty self-explanatory.

The main point here is how useful epicurious is as a cooking tool while you are abroad. For those with the will to cook (which is a challenge in and of itself), the main challenge is working with the ingredients available to you. Sometimes it is challenging to find the ingredients you need to make meals you are accustomed to. With epicurious you can search out what is available locally and then use this information to search using these products as the primary ingredient. For example, if eggplants are abundant, search epicurious with eggplant as the main ingredient to see all of the recipes that focus on eggplants! From there you can sift through recipes to see what is doable with the rest of the ingredients available to you in that location.

Yes, you have to decide: "I want to cook with what's available". Beyond that, it's pretty simple!

Enjoy exploring this amazing resource!