Pat and David, Author at Hungry Travelers

Pat and David

Vaxholm summer Sunday feels like a garden party

Posted on July 6, 2024July 3, 2024 by Pat and David

We chose a sunny Sunday morning for our next excursion into the Stockholm archipelago. We were hardly the only ones with that idea. The ferry from Strömkajen was full of folks out for a day on the water or decamping to their summer homes for a month or more. On the 90-minute trip to Vaxholm, the ferry stopped about a dozen times to let people off. For us it was a great way to get a better sense of the physical layout of the archipelago itself. We also got a peek into the way of life for people who live in the midst of this floating garden. The water was very placid. David observed that compared to his days on the Maine coast, the tidal...Read More

Summer idylls in Stockholm’s archipelago

Posted on July 2, 2024July 2, 2024 by Pat and David

Talk about a civilized country. The U.S. could do worse than to emulate Sweden's vacation practices. The Annual Leave Act guarantees workers 25 paid vacation days every year. It also permits them to take four consecutive weeks off between June and August. No wonder every third Swede seems to have a country home! Mind you, that home could be a mansion on a lake or it could be a cabin in the woods with primitive plumbing. In either case, it's an excuse to get out of town.. But even Stockholm dwellers without their own (or their family's) country home can make quick getaways by hopping one of the many commuter ferries to the islands in the Stockholm archipelago. When we followed suit, we learned that...Read More

In the land of great meatballs

Posted on June 28, 2024June 25, 2024 by Pat and David

As anyone who's ever eaten at the cafe in an Ikea store knows, meatballs are a cornerstone of modern Swedish cuisine. Once we arrived in Stockholm and started paying attention, we realized that köttbuller are ubiquitous. Most restaurants serve them. Huge bags of meatballs filled the ready-to-heat coolers in the supermarkets, and if that weren't enough, they were also sold frozen. Not reading Swedish, we were never sure what form of meat was involved, though Google Translate did suggest any or all of the favorite Swedish meats: beef, pork, lamb, elk, moose. Sometimes even chicken. What we did understand was that meatballs in gravy is the Swedish equivalent of American mac 'n' cheese — the ultimate national comfort food. Airbnb has changed the way we...Read More

Kebab pizza — it’s a Swedish thing

Posted on June 25, 2024June 25, 2024 by Pat and David

Despite our diligent gastronomic research before heading to Stockholm, we had never heard of the kebab pizza. That's quite a surprise, really, since it turns out to be one of the most popular pizza choices in Sweden. Unlike other seminal food inventions (the hamburger comes to mind), no one has come forward to claim authorship. Apparently, the kebab pizza just sort of happened. Chalk one up for open borders and a national policy of welcoming immigrants. When new Swedes from the Middle East and the Balkans began to flood into the country in the 1980s, many of them followed the time-tested immigrant entrepreneurial path of opening up fast food joints. Many of those spots served both kebabs and pizza. It was only a matter of...Read More

Launching a Stockholm stay at the farmers market

Posted on June 9, 2024June 9, 2024 by Pat and David

When we travel for extended periods, we like to rent an Airbnb that gives us a taste of what it's like to live someplace, rather than just visiting. For a couple of weeks in Stockholm, we found a one-bedroom flat in the Kungsholmen neighborhood close to public transit. It's in a circa-1900 building with some Art Nouveau (Jugenstil) touches. Our apartment occupies the attic level — 5th floor by European reckoning, 6th by American. (A vintage open-cage elevator takes us most of the way up.) Whoever renovated did a great job coping with the angles and niches beneath the roof, giving the whole flat a bright, contemporary Scandinavian look. Even more fortunately, we have an outdoor patio with an electric grill and a thoroughly modern...Read More

Dining in the Dior fashion in Paris

Posted on May 1, 2024May 1, 2024 by Pat and David

We'll never rise to the style of Mathilde Favier, the focus of the lovely new book Living Beautifully in Paris (Flammarion, $75). It's really no surprise that Favier, PR manager for Dior Couture, has cultivated a unique sense of style in her wardrobe and home and surrounded herself with talented, chic friends. The book is filled with photos that capture the grace and allure of the City of Light. It's all we can do not to book two tickets for the next available flight. And it's encouraging to know that whatever our sartorial deficiencies, we could eat like Favier in Paris. At least some of the time. Her friends may include Michelin-starred chefs (below, at left), but she's also fond of simple, honest bourgeois French...Read More

‘Italian Coastal’ conjures tasty memories of land and sea

Posted on April 16, 2024April 16, 2024 by Pat and David

Every so often a cookbook comes our way that plucks the heartstrings of memory. Having eated most of the way down the Tyrrhenian coast from Tuscany to Sicily, recipe after recipe reminds us of some sunny day at a long table in the open air. The book's subtitle says it well ‶Recipes and stories from where the land meets the sea.″ This isn't author Amber Guinness's first rodeo. Her initial book, A House Party in Tuscany, featured stories and recipes from the family's Arniano Painting School, a residential program that features, among other attractions, Amber's cooking. Born in London and educated in England, Guinness had the great fortune of growing up in Arniano in Tuscany. She has broadened her horizons, gleaning tastes and traditions from...Read More

Beer with us #4: Stout Gingerbread

Posted on March 18, 2024March 18, 2024 by Pat and David

We're figuring that the gentlemen at the top of this post must have lost a bet. We spotted them in Dublin on one of Ireland's drinking holidays. Perhaps we should have spent St. Patrick's Day this year in a similar vein, but instead we turned some of our extra Guinness into a powerful gingerbread. We got the recipe from David Leibovitz, the Parisian blogger and all-around great pastry chef. In turn, he got it from Claudia Fleming, formerly of Gramercy Tavern in New York. It's also in her classic cookbook, The Last Course. This might be one of the stickiest, most effusive cake batters we've ever worked with. It has a tendency to climb the sides of the pan and collapse in the middle. (Be...Read More

Beer with us #3: Swiss fondue

Posted on March 7, 2024March 1, 2024 by Pat and David

We've hiked the Bernese Oberland region of the Swiss Alps in the winter when the mountains are covered with snow and in the spring, when waterfalls cascade off cliffs and meadows are full of wildflowers. On a spring hike in the Lauterbrunnen Valley (above), the grass was so green that it looked almost as tasty to us as it obviously did to the herds of Swiss milk cattle. Either season, we had worked up an appetite and often ended the day with a satisfying pot of cheese fondue. When we decided to use a can of Lamplighter ‶Giants Under the Sun″ as the base for a fondue, we set aside lightly steamed pieces of vegetables and slices of sausage to dip into the cheese along...Read More

Beer with us #2: Beer bread

Posted on February 29, 2024February 29, 2024 by Pat and David

When we went through our store of beer bottles and cans, we discovered that we still had some Moosehead Grapefruit Radler from a visit to that Canadian's stalwart's brewery in Saint John, New Brunswick (89 Main Street West, Saint John, NB; 506-635-7000, ext. 5568, moosehead.ca). That's the brewery taproom at the top of the post. We remember the radler as a powerful warm-weather thirst quencher, but old beer is usually stale beer, so we decided to cook with it. Moosehead is known in the U.S. mainly for its export lager, a nicely balanced but hardly surprising beer for all-day drinking. The grapefruit radler was an anomaly. Even in Canada, the most popular Moosehead fruit-infused beer is the Blueberry Radler. But the grapefruit tang and slight...Read More