I find that whenever I make a smoothie or a shake, I gulp it down uber-fast and hardly savor it. This is usually because the smoothie is a quick on-the-go breakfast and there’s no time to take it sip by sip. Not that gulping a smoothie is a tragedy--not much effort goes into the preparation, so I don’t feel like any hard work is being under-appreciated. But the recipe today isn’t created by just tossing some stuff in a blender. This one requires more work, like pre-soaking figs and processing some Brazil nut milk. Therefore, I think it deserves more appreciation on the tasting end. Today I invite you to invest some energy in building a delicious mocha smoothie - and then doing yourself another favor by taking some quality time to enjoy it.

At culinary school the 2nd class in the curriculum was "food science".  The wonders of this worldly culinary creation (emulsions) can be explained down to straight science without the usual northern california slang & no Frenchy fancy words.

Every cook's gotta know their emulsions. From Harold Mcgee's On Food & Cooking, the bible of foodies, an emulsion is defined as "Such a mixture of two incompatible liquids, with droplets of one liquid dispersed in a continuous phase of the other. The term comes from the Latin word for 'milk', which is just such a mixture"