Nigella Lawson's Hot Alfajores

 1.

Hasn't happened. We checked. So far as we can tell, Nigella Lawson has never baked alfajores, at least not that she's chosen to share with her public. And that's probably a pity, because we bet Nigella Lawson's hot alfajores would be, well...HOT!

 2.

"Nigella slowly raised the biscuit to her full glistening lips, a light dusting of icing sugar wafting downward, alighting ever so gently on her cashmere-clad bosom. As she took her first bite she turned slightly to face us and looked directly into our eyes, holding our mesmerized gaze. Her lips curled into a wicked smile, her eyes spoke to us, whispering "naughty, naughty boy", and she gave forth that familiar moan of pleasure, the one she always utters when her own culinary prowess pleases her.

In a second it was over; she was straight back to business. "Right..." she said as she started to tidy the kitchen. We didn't hear the rest, but of course we noticed that little lashing of dulce de leche that hung delicately on the edge of her mouth. We swore momentarily that it was animate, regarding us smugly as if it was an ex lover's new boyfriend. For a flash of  a second we hated all the men of Argentina."

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Occasionally we have a look at the statistics on how people find us here at Bobo Feed. Regularly vying for top "search key words"- and this has been consistent ever since we first blogged them- are *Nigella Lawson*, *Alfajores*, and *Nigella Lawson Hot*. (We hasten to add that the word "hot" has been added by those doing the internet searching, not by us.) We're a class act...until now.

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Ah, yes...food and sex. Both, of course are embodied in that Temptress of London. And the act of eating an alfajor immediately forces upon one a choice- look like an idiot as you try to avoid the mess it is about to make of your shirt and face, or become a hedonist so intent on the pleasure of consumption that you have them swooning at your feet while you lick the golden cream from your lips. You may as well make it work for you! Dulce de Leche = La Dolce Vita, we say.

So here we are, shamelessly repeating the words that will bring us traffic, using a little titillation to help us shill the brand. Hmmm, that dish tastes a little familiar ;-)

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Well, you've read this far so we'd better reward you with more than a tease for your time. Here's a nice recipe (untested) for alfajores. Remember to channel your best kitchen goddess or god as you take your first bite!

http://www.ediblesociety.com/2010/11/global-desserts-alfajores-from-argentina.html

Previous Nigella Lawson Posts:

 http://bobofeed.blogspot.ca/2010/05/wouldnt-you-love-to-be-best-friends.html

 http://bobofeed.blogspot.ca/2011/09/nigella-lawson-earth-berm-markets.html

Previous Alfajore Posts:

 http://bobofeed.blogspot.ca/2010/02/saturday-lunch-at-jumbo-empanadas.html

 http://bobofeed.blogspot.ca/2011/07/la-merceria-we-had-notion-to-go-for.html

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Photo Credits

1.deep-camboya.tumblr.com

2.bigmoth.tumblr.com

3.natgeo-covergirl.tumblr.com

4.elorablue.tumblr.com

5.gallifreyanhousepet.tumblr.com

6.mventola.tumblr.com

7.sugarysweetdeath.tumblr.com

8.sleepingseasickness.tumblr.com

9.kickitlikebrucelee.tumblr.com

10. todoporquesi.tumblr.com

tumblr. feed...October 6, 2012

Dark Blue Relief by Ellsworth Kelly

via Godfreyyouth on tumblr.

Hey, Bobo Feed now has a tumblr. blog, too! Check out some of this weekend's images here:

http://bobofeed.tumblr.com/day/2012/10/06

Follow us on tumblr. here:

Home: http://bobofeed.tumblr.com/

Urban Spoon- Toronto Restaurant Advice gets the Bobo Treatment!

If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed the appearance of this little box on the right hand side of the blog. And if you haven't been paying attention, which we're pretty sure is the case for most of you, don't feel bad: we're about to explain. This badge means that Bobo Feed has joined the ranks of the official food bloggers who hang out on the restaurant review pages of Urban Spoon dispensing our wisdom.

While we know that you unwaveringly trust our sophisticated palates and our culinary knowledge, we appreciate that from time to time, for the same reasons that people like to watch reality TV, you may wish to read what others have to say about a place. Going forward we will be including the cute little Urban Spoon button at the bottom of our restaurant reviews so you can directly link to their page for the featured restaurant.

Happy Birthday to Bobo Feed!!

This past Tuesday was our second birthday- woo-hoo!!!

And as with most mid-week birthdays, it was a low key affair. An excuse, though, to look back a little bit, to reflect on the past year of posts, and to make some plans for the future.

During this past year we started our "friday frequencies" feature. While it was by no means an original idea- in fact many of you regularly post music clips yourselves- it is mostly drawn from our own collection which probably makes it a bit unique. We hope you're enjoying our eclectic selections!

We were also pleased to come across a couple of articles leading up to birthday #2 dealing with topics we'd already covered. 

Toronto Standard featured a piece last month by none other than John Szabo entitled "Bring Your Own Wine Glasses? How the Glass Can Alter Your Enjoyment of Wine". The concept of the glass influencing one's perception of the wine is a dear one to our hearts after having conducted a simplistic test ourselves using new Riedel glasses. We reported on that experience in our post "Cheap Trick: Add $5 to the value of your pizza wine". Are we going to bring our glasses to dinner with us like Madonna did? No. But here at home, we'll always try to choose the right shape for the right wine.

We were also really pleased to read in blogTO in January of the amazing shop Tosho Knife Arts. We've yet to visit this Mirvish Village newcomer, but it is a "must see" for us after having had a fantastic experience with one of the shop's owners, Ivan Fonseca.

 photos courtesy blogTO

Ivan sharpened our knives for us, which we reported on in "The Knife: FYI Part 2" and it was a fantastic experience. In fact we're well overdue to take them in again, and at $5 for a hand sharpening, we really shouldn't be strangers to this place. The only problem might be resisting the urge to pick up another new blade every time we visit!

As for new features, we're planning on introducing Tuesday Travels in the near future, which as the name suggests will focus on places other than here. We certainly have gone down a few roads in our time, and we plan to share some details of those with you. But we also know that many of you have had your own excellent adventures and we hope (indeed we will be prodding and cajoling you) that you'll choose to share some of them with the rest of us. Stay tuned for details on how to participate.

You may have noticed that Google launched its Google+ service last year, and although it is by no means yet an active part of our social networking lives, we felt the need to be present. We sense that over time more and more of us will migrate there, especially those who feel that their personal privacy is compromised on Facebook (although Google's recently announced privacy policy effective this coming March may give some pause). So if any of you have signed up for Google+, we hope you'll add our page to your circles. You can find us here.

Lastly, it wouldn't be a Bobo Feed Public Service Announcement without our requisite call for new followers, would it?! If you haven't already done so, we encourage you to like our page on Facebook- just go to the "Find us on Facebook" box to the right, click on "bobofeed", then like us at the top of the landing page. One bonus of Facebook liking is that we often share links there that don't make it onto the main blog, like this recent one.

OR, if you have a Google account (gmail, etc) you can have Bobo Feed come straight to your inbox by clicking the "Join This Site" button to the right.

As always, we'd like to end by thanking each and every one of you who take the time to read our posts for your loyalty. It's hard to explain the need we feel to share the things we do, but it's really rewarding to know that we find an audience. We would love to hear from you if you have any ideas for subject matter that you think we should cover, and PLEASE comment on the posts- it really makes our day!

Enough about us!! There's a design show to be covered....stay tuned!!

Seen...Kensington Commentary

 Art and graffiti on Baldwin Avenue

The Prologue to 11ElevenLive

Good morning! Today is Friday, November 11, 2011. 

Or put another way, it's 11.11.11. 

Because of its numeric uniqueness (at least for another 100 years) a young lady in Australia has started the 11Eleven Project to capture and document the activities of the world on a single day. Here's a link to the about page for the organization. Participants- and it's not too late for any of you to hop on board if you're reading this on 11.11.11- will submit their photos, videos, sounds, blog entries, etc. for compilation into a world music collection (curated by Imogen Heap, no less), a photo book and a 2 hour documentary. While we harbour no illusions that Bobofeed will have any place in the final product, the thought of participating was really appealing, so here goes!

Of 11 (naturally) suggested topics around which to organize our material we've decided to try to fuse "beauty" to "routine". Routine is obviously the most accessible way to blog our way through the day, but what good is it, really, other than being a piece of mostly boring archival material? So we thought it would do us good to stop at least once during each of our waking hours to appreciate beauty in some form in what we're doing or in our surroundings, and to share that with the world.

We'd LOVE for YOU to participate with us! Please comment on any and every post-- for instance, just tell us what you're up to, or what beauty you noticed in that hour-- or e-mail us any of your own photos & we'll re-post them here on the blog.

So here goes! This initial post is programmed to launch at 1:11, 11, 11, 11, and we'll catch up with it again when we arise on Friday morning. Hope to see you then!

Happy eleven eleven eleven!

Vacation Time!!

So, it's time for our annual autumnal getaway! Our plans had originally been to visit that little flat land of exquisite modern design and impossibly chic cycling (Denmark, if you need to ask), but life got in the way, plans deferred till next year. Ever the lemonade aficionadi, though, we squeezed the sour little fruit till it gasped repentance, and have managed to find a great renovated farm house for a couple of weeks only a hundred miles or so out of town.

Heard of the "slow" movement? Well, we're opting in! We've committed ourselves to a quiet time away so as to fully recharge the batteries. So...you probably won't hear too much from us until after October 21st.

We've pre-programmed a few posts, and if the mood strikes we may journey into the nearest burg to access the internet, but no promises!

In the meantime, have a wonderful Thanksgiving full of love and abundance, and enjoy the beautiful days of Indian Summer for as long as they may last!

Bee and Jay

Nigella Lawson, Earth Berm Markets, Jackie Kennedy Pillbox Hat, Tickling

Know what a keyword is? Every time you type a series of words into a search engine window, you've given that engine the key words you want it to use in its search. How the search engine goes about sifting through the billions of words out there on the net is best left to others to explain. Suffice it to say that some search engines are better than others, and even the best, despite their successes, will still tend to present you with a lot of content that's irrelevant to your search.

On the other side of the equation, if you're a blogger your interests are served by frequently using words that are searched most often by folks who are interested in what you write about. To be honest, we're pretty bad at this. There are those that would tell us that our post titles widely miss the mark when it comes to being obvious hits for search engines. We prefer to use titles that are pretty relevant to the post, or are hopefully going to catch your eye, as opposed to those of all the web crawlers.

We have a feature installed on Bobofeed called Google Analytics. It provides us with data on the number of visits to the blog, the countries of origin of that traffic, whether our visitors were referrals (ie from our Facebook page), direct links such as those of you who look us up by yourselves, and traffic driven to the site by key words.

It's fascinating stuff. Rest assured, your visits are private- we have no way of knowing exactly who stopped by, but we do know that in the past 30 days we've had over 240 visits from 25 different cities within Canada, amongst Americans we're most popular in California, and that our #4 and #5 countries for visitors are Brazil and Argentina. Visitors have come from more than 50 countries across the globe.

And if we start looking at the key words that brought people to Bobofeed, (often to end only in disappointment, we presume, based on some of the words searched!) the results can be hilarious. We've had several searches looking for content about earth berms and earth berm markets. (What the heck is an earth berm market? Maybe we should Google it!) OK, Bobo Areas of Paris is pretty on the mark, even Hot Boots if you consider that we've posted about sexy footware. Jackie Kennedy Pillbox Hat Inauguration, and a half dozen variations on that theme, seems to also be popular.

But our all time favourites are:

• foot tickling fetish provider brooklyn (bravo!- very focused search, although we're not sure how we ended up a hit!)
• tickling newark (OK, this searcher was obviously willing to travel around greater New York to scratch that itch)

• Nigella Lawson
• Nigella Lawson Cardigan
• Nigella Lawson Sweater
• Nigella Lawson Hips,    and of course, the inevitable after that foreplay,
• Nigella Lawson Sex

Of course there is good reason that Ms. Lawson garnered hits at Bobofeed- you may recall that we cooked up a batch of her Butternut Squash Curry last year. And so to please her many fans, and hopefully to make a few new friends here at the blog, especially those searching the net for, uhmm, "culinary indulgence", we present a little more Nigella:

 Happy Googling!

Welcome/ Bienvenue!

A big welcome to our new followers here on the blog's main site and to our new Facebook Likers!! It's comforting to know that something about Bobo Feed struck a chord and that you've chosen to invite us into your lives on a regular basis. We appreciate your commitment and hope that you'll feel free to participate by leaving comments whenever you see fit.

For those of you who haven't yet signed-on, remember that it's super easy to bring a little Bobo into your world using one of two ways:

Follower: Click on the Google "Join This Site" button midway down the right side column here on the blog page. It will prompt you to use a particular service to sign in- it's super easy if you have a g-mail or twitter account!

Facebook Liker: You can Like Bobo Feed by finding the Facebook box to the right and clicking on the blue word bobofeed. Or you can go straight there with this link: bobofeed on Facebook Or if you are a friend of Jay or Bee on Facebook you can Like the page next time you check out one of our shared links.

Thanks again, and have yourself a beautiful bourgeois bohemian day!

Jay + Bee

(image courtesy The Zieglers Blog)

Woo Hoo!! We Made it to One Year!!

Bobo Feed has just had its first birthday and we're thrilled! It's amazing how quickly a year has passed. And we're kind of surprised by how easy it's been to stay continuously inspired for that next post and then the one after that, and the one after that. But then again, that's the very nature of Bobo Feed- always on to the next thing that catches our eyes or ears...and with a broad enough net that there are endless possibilities for things to talk about.

That broad net had actually caused us some concern at one point. We were feeling that the blog lacked focus. But after a little bit of tweaking last August to help us categorize our main areas of interest (Architecture and Design; Fashion and Styling; Food and Drink; Travel; and Urban Living), along with the evolution of a few common themes such as "Seen...",  "Sorry, We're Closed", and "Looking Up" we managed to relax into what we think is a faily consistent groove. We hope you agree. And as always, we encourage you to comment on each post directly below the post, and to contact us (bobofeed [at] gmail [dot] com) with any ideas or suggestions. You can also comment at our Facebook page.

Speaking of Facebook, we unfortunately took many of you on a little ride down  a dead-end street by asking you to "friend" Bobo Feed on Facebook. Unbeknownst to us at the time, however, Bobo Feed was really only ever supposed to have a Facebook PAGE, not an account that people "friended". Ah, the mis-steps of the novice!

Fear not, though! Bobo Feed DOES have a Facebook PAGE and we'd love it if you would head on over there and LIKE us if you haven't already! You can go there straight from here or you can click on the like button in the Facebook box on the right of this page. One benefit of liking the Facebook page is that we often link to other cool  Bobo- friendly things we've seen on Facebook or elsewhere on the web without doing a full blog post on the subject. So by "liking" Bobo Feed on facebook you get some bonus content!

In the coming days we will have lots of great new info to share! On Friday of this week we're off to IDS11, the annual Interior Design show, where we will be hearing three dynamic speakers and reviewing all the sexy new product offerings on display. In addition, we'll soon be kicking off a new guest posting feature that we hope will be a fairly regular one: "Postcard From..." We know so many people  (so many of you!) scattered across the globe that it just seemed like a no brainer to find out  about some of the cool things happening in those corners we're not so familiar with. Hopefully some will become regular correspondants.

We want to thank each and every one of you for your interest and support. We promise to try to keep it relevant, informative and fun. And we wish you all good fortune in 2011!!

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(Postcard image above courtesy Toronto Life)

Nuts and Bolts and a Few Words on Bourgeois Bohemianism...

We've done a little tinkering lately here at the blog.

One of the things that always bugged us about our site was that our scope, being very broad, may have prevented readers from understanding what we are really about. In the blogosphere, you are nowhere without your niche.

To help reign things into a tighter focus we've defined five categories of Bobo interest under which all posts will fall. In alphabetical order they are: Architecture and Design, Fashion and Styling, Food and Drink, Travel, and Urban Living. We've reorganized our post labels to match those five general CATEGORIES (depicted in upper case and with a number in front- ie 04-TRAVEL) while still maintaining tags, which are shown in lower case and are much more specific in nature than a general category.

More significantly, we think, is the addition of the "PAGES" sidebar. Located at the top of the right hand column, it allows the user to go to a separate page for each category where all past posts in that category are stored in aggregate. By way of introduction, we say a few words about the appeal and the relevance of the category, then provide a link to see all the posts. We hope this will make browsing the site more pleasant and efficient.

The PAGES sidebar has also given us the opportunity to define the raison-d'être of Bobofeed. It's entitled "What the Heck is Bobo?" and if you'll indulge us, we'll share it with you now:

What the Heck is Bobo?

A brief manifesto (because who has time for long diatribes?)

If you've dug this far into our blog, you've probably read somewhere along the way that Bobo is a French term that is short-form for the expression Bourgeois- Bohème, one who is a Bourgeois Bohemian. It tends to be a somewhat derogatory term, a smirking put-down, akin to the word "yuppy". It is generally used to describe a person who at heart has middle class values and living standards, who works hard at being "in the know" and ahead of the curve, yet wishes to appear to the world as being deeply committed to egalitarianism and social consciousness and all those other good "starving artist" things.

Well, just as we long ago embraced all the derogatory terms out there to describe us as homosexuals and now use them ironically on ourselves, we are hereby appropriating the term Bobo on behalf of all of us out there who feel the same as we do!

We DO have middle class values and living standards, and we don't think that's a bad thing! We were well raised and we are law abiding and industrious contributors to our society. We truly value all that our life affords us,

...We DO work hard at staying ahead of the curve, in fact we are employed (quite happily-so) in industries that help set the trends. We believe that the world needs bread AND circuses. Embedded within our souls there is a deep lust for new and different ways of looking at the world,

...and we ARE deeply committed to improving the world we live in. We like beauty and feel it nurtures the human spirit, we support open thinking rather than reactivist entrenchment and action over complacency, we believe the planet needs us to stop abusing her, and we think that everybody has a right to be respected by their fellow man, to be able to put food in their bellies, and to have the opportunity to learn, and to participate in sharing the vast accumulated knowledge of our species.

So we urge you to rise up, Bobos of the world! Be proud of your station! Show the cynics that it is THEY who are leading hollow lives, lives without optimism or vision!

And while you're at it, go ahead, feel free to point out to them where to get the best organic free-trade shade-grown espresso, brewed by a hemp-wearing benefit-earning art student.

The name Bobo Feed was carefully chosen to represent our blog, this vehicle for sharing the things that tickle our fancies and feed our spirits, as well as to evoke the constantly changing, up to the minute nature of both blogging and the Bobo lifestyle- a continuous feed of information.

While we will not shy away from providing critical comment when merited, Bobofeed will endeavour to remain an instrument of positive force- we will not use this platform to indulge in negative rants.

Remember that we value your thoughts and opinions- we encourage you to comment on any or all of our posts.

Sorry, that ran a little longer than expected! Thanks for dropping by- we hope you enjoy your visit and that you'll find reason to return often.

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Thanks for coming along with us on this journey. We appreciate the interest you've all shown, and hope you'll choose to come back again and again.

Bee and Jay