The Anna Articles

This summer when we were hosting friends from out of town I got the idea to make a fruit tart and could. not. let. it. go. In my head it had to be a rectangular tart - something about the presentation of the shape speaks to me. So I scoured the MSP area for a store with one in stock and trekked all the way to Uptown to a fancy kitchen store for one. Turns out round tart pans - and recipes for them - are much more common. With a new tart pan, tarts became my go-to for the holidays. Thanksgiving featured a couple cranberry tarts that were fantastic and Christmas had this lovely chocolate ganache tart.  I used this recipe as my base, but found this magic French buttery crust  instead of the cookie crust. The crust recipe is my absolute favorite because it really does feel like a trick in how it comes together and yet it's so tasty and easy to work with. Because the recipe is meant for a round tart, there's a bit more chocolate ganache than needed for the tart. The extra g...

With just a few weeks of vacation, it's hard to narrow down where to go for our bigger trips. I've started to keep a Google doc to reference the many destinations I have in mind. For this trip, we went with two friends who we had traveled to Dubai with last year and narrowed down the list of places with them. Our criteria was roughly 1. warm in February and 2. somewhat adventurous, not just beach but also have the option for a beach. It got down to Argentina and Vietnam, landing on Vietnam because our friends had heard great things and, while we had never been to SE Asia, they had been to Bali and loved it. At first I wanted to combine Vietnam and Cambodia as I so wanted to see Siem Reap, but quickly discovered how much more I wanted to see in Vietnam than we could possibly fit in and settled on 2 weeks fully in Vietnam. Based on the above criteria of being warm, we stayed largely in the south and central regions starting in Saigon/HCMC, then Hue, Phong Nha and ending in Phu ...