Cardamom Cure

There are times when Friday comes and goes and I pay little attention. Other times I want to shout TGIF from the rooftops, exhausted and irritable after a jam-packed week. This week is a TGIF!!! week. So this morning, not one to wallow (recently anyway), I headed off to a 90 minute yoga class. Yoga and I are not in love yet but yoga demands my attention which was then diverted from my crabbiness. I left yoga and headed to one of my new favorite, local vegan restaurants Peacefood Café  for a smoothie. I swayed from my reliable standby the Chocolate Mint and ordered the Bombay Delight: coconut, banana, date, cardamom and nut-milk. It was refreshing and unusual. Many of ingredients were familiar, what I enjoyed so much was the cardamom. I was a little sad with the smoothie was finished.

Surely I have heard about cardamom and maybe even cooked with it. However, I cannot recall having it with sweeter ingredients and definitely hadn’t had it in a smoothie. I poked around a little and found some other ways to cook with cardamom:

• Eating Well had chutney with rhubarb and cardamom
• Epicurious listed a Chai with Cardamom
• Worlds Healthiest Foods (a great resource) suggested mashing an avocado with a little lemon and making a topping with a little kelp powder, garlic salt, cumin, coriander, cardamom, and white pepper.
• I found a similar cardamom smoothie to the one at Peacefood Cafe
• There is also a blog entitled “the cardamom addict” 

 Clearly I am not alone in going cuckoo for cardamom. As you can gather, while the yoga class may have initially distracted me, the Bombay Delight completely changed the tone of the day. It went from TGIF to TGTC or thank god there’s cardamom!
Do you cook with cardamom? Any spices you are wild for? Or what do you do when you’re feeling listless and exhausted?