"darfur" news and stories

Los Angeles gourmet chocolatier Compartes has created the perfect combination of style, charity, and deliciousness.

Chocolates for a Cause (5 piece box for $20, 10 piece box for $30) brings you five explosive chocolate flavors decorated with little colored Africas in a box with a Relief Beads bracelet, all to benefit Darfur.

Funds raised from this collaboration [with RELIEF INTERNATIONAL] go directly to funding the only women's center in Darfur!

The five flavors are made with the finest African ingredients - some of them hard to find, like carmelized plantains and grains of paradise.

You can order the packages here (in plenty of time for the holidays!) or click here for more info on the Relief Beads bracelets.

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Of all the households in the US, 99.5% have refrigerators. About the same percentage have some way of heating food. We've seen some great gadgets for keeping things hot and cold here on Slashfood, but I want to show you an ancient technique for keeping food cool. It's called a zeer pot. The vessel itself may be third world, but it's playing a timely role in the continuing recovery of northern Darfur and other African nations. Science in Africa magazine states that a zeer can keep tomatoes edible for 20 days, as opposed to two, and meat two weeks, as opposed to a few hours.

A zeer pot is quite simple. It's basically two large earthen pots, one nested in the other. The space is filled with sand and water is added. A damp cloth covers the top. As the water evaporates, the inner pot containing the perishables is kept cool in the same manner that a mechanical refrigerator operates -- water evaporation draws heat from the inner vessel. Water is added twice a day.

Muhammed Bah Abba is credited with reviving (some say inventing) use of the zeer and has his own instructions on theory, application and making one. I am going to make one of these myself and see how long basic vegetables will keep at room temp. You can see from the picture how easy it would be to improvise a zeer with regular flower pots. I will then give it a taste test after one week.

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New York City food writer and blogger Andrea Strong is in the beginning of putting together an event scheduled for April 30th to benefit the war-besieged area of Darfur in southwestern Sudan. In conjunction with a rally in Washington DC, Dining for Darfur will be a city-wide dining out event in which participating restaurants make a pledge, and diners participate by dining at those restaurants. Currently, there are five restaurants in New York listed (Avenue X, Lassi, Naidre's Carroll Gardens, Naidre's Park Slope, and The Stanton Social) but the event is not for another few weeks.