Salmon-Eggplant-Cardamom cakes and a French prize

After a long week of holidays of sort, nothing better than a blog post to put the schedule back on tracks.
Almost 10 days ago I started my trip to France to present (and defend) my creations (#1 and #2) at the 2012 Science et Cuisine competition.
This being my main goal, I headed directly to Nantes where the competition final was held. The trip was uneventful, but not much so were the few days that preceded it. Stressed out for the presentation I had to hold, I spent the 3 days preceding the departure in a sleepless walking coma. I did manage to test my speech though, being it in French I couldn't just rely on my admirable qualities of orator, could I? I was rather happy to notice that despite all the "Ahem...", the "Mmmm...", the "Alors..." the speech was still within the 10 minutes I had at my disposal.

Sweet, Sweet Awards

Sugar; we all know this fella, don't we?
A mysterious substance able to give us pleasure; not guilt free unfortunately.
Coming in all the shades of brown, tawny to sparkling white we are used to sprinkle it on many of our food items to enhance their flavors. Present in many natural products it represents the way nature is able to store easily accessible energies; it won't come to any surprise then that it is made of just about the most abundant chemical elements present on Earth: Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen.
Since few years we have been coming accustomed to choose among different varieties of sugars. Being them of natural origins or artificial, the main reason driving research in this field is the delivery of guilt-free low caloric substitutes for saccharose.

If from one side we restrict our kids' sugar intake, we as society have been over-exposed to sweetness for the last century or so; the result is a sort of dependency on this chemical.
"A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down!" sang Mary Poppins to the whining kids and that's what we tell to ourselves often and again.

Prices & Awards

It was almost 2 weeks ago when, come back from my coffee hopping afternoon dedicated to menu developing, I found this tweet from my friend Jamie (lifesafeast): “@mowielicious @RecipeTaster @sippitysup @glamah @DailySpud @MeetaWFLH Hop over to my blog to collect your awards!”.
On doing as directed, I found this.
She has been awarded with the “Over the Top Award” ribbon by Connie at W Va Fur and Root and Simone of Junglefrog Cooking and she decided to pass it down to some friends:
• Mowie of Mowielicious
• Meeta of What’s For Lunch Honey?
• Her Royal Spudness of The Daily Spud
• Greg of Sippity Sup
• Courtney aka Glamah of Coco Cooks
• and me
I was pretty excited at the news, it is the first award my blog receives and coming from a competent friend like Jamie feels like receiving a gold medal with the national anthem playing in the background!