Pat and David

Six things to bring home from New Hampshire

Posted on by Pat and David
In our last post, we mentioned six items we like to bring home from trips to Vermont. Since Food Lovers' Guide to Vermont & New Hampshire has about the same number of entries from each state, it seems only fair to mention some of our favorite foods to bring back from the Granite State. Flag Hill Winery & Distillery (297 North River Rd., Lee, N.H.; 603-659-2949; flaghill.com) doesn't need our imprimatur to sell their immensely popular, often sweet wines made from berries and apples as well as first-generation French-American hybrid grapes. Our preference goes to products from the artisanal distillery. The barrel-aged apple brandy is a classic American applejack, and the neutral spirit, a vodka triple-distilled from apples, is smooth and sultry. It's named for...Read More

Six things to bring home from Vermont

Posted on by Pat and David
It's official. The Food Lovers' Guide to Vermont & New Hampshire has shipped to stores and is available online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Thanks to our efficient editors, we beat the technical publication date of July 3. In addition to restaurants, the book highlights great shops and local food producers. Vermont may be best known for maple syrup and cheddar cheese, but there's a whole lot more. Here are some of our favorite things to bring home from the Green Mountain State. The Red Bar from Middlebury Chocolates (2377 Route 7 South, Middlebury, VT; 802-989-1610; www.middleburychocolates.com) is the hardcore chocolate lovers' chocolate. Stephanie and Andy Jackson make all their chocolates straight from the bean. The Red Bar, says Andy, is “a throwback to...Read More

Recapturing a great flavor of New Hampshire

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Our latest book, Food Lovers' Guide to Vermont & New Hampshire (Globe Pequot Press), just arrived two days ago and it brought back fond memories of the research. One of our favorite meals was at the Bedford Village Inn, when Benjamin Knack, fresh from a season on Hell's Kitchen, had just take over the dining program for this romantic destination property. It so happens that Ben makes a killer gnocchi, which he claimed was so simple that even his then 4-year-old daughter could do it. There are a couple of secrets to getting just the right texture. The potatoes should be cooked so they “squeak like Styrofoam when you squeeze them,” he says. And they should be pushed quickly through the sieve so the potato...Read More

Beyond chile peppers: the nuanced Santa Fe cooking of Estevan García at the Tabla de los Santos

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We had the pleasure of spending Spanish Market in Santa Fe last July at the Hotel St. Francis, a luxury hotel that strongly resembles a monastery. And while we were there, we enjoyed the cooking of Estevan García, one of the pioneers of refined Southwestern cooking from his days in Los Angeles. A one-time monk himself, he seems right at home at the St. Francis. His cooking is as straightforward and unpretentious as it is subtle and delicious. We wrote about him for the Boston Globe's food section. The piece appeared on May 9. You can find it online here. The article also included García's recipe for this incredibly rich goat's milk flan: GOAT'S MILK FLAN Serves 6 The goat's milk adds a slight tang...Read More

What to Eat at the Airport: ATL (Atlanta Hartsfield International)

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Back in November, we described how the fantastic tamales at Pappasito's Cantina had helped to salvage an otherwise tedious delay at the Dallas Fort Worth airport. Since then, we've been keeping an eye out for local food specialties to break the monotony of the fairly generic airport experience and at least glean a little flavor of a place that we're only passing through. We had practically written off Atlanta airport where the nice little food court in Terminal B had a fairly predictable line-up of Sbarro pizza, Popeye's Fried Chicken & Biscuits, Seattle's Best Coffee, and even sandwiches from Boston-based Au Bon Pain. But, it pays not to give up too quickly. Away from the food court area, we discovered Café Intermezzo, a coffee shop...Read More

Chocolate: Going to the source

Posted on by Pat and David
Ecuador has been famous since at least the 19th century for its “fine aroma” cacao from the Arriba strain of beans. Only about 5 percent of the world's cacao production meets the “fine aroma” standards as an enhancer of more plebian beans in fine chocolates. Nearly two-thirds of those “fine aroma” beans come from Ecuador. The 8-year-old República de Cacao company aims to highlight the qualities of the Arriba bean with a line of single-origin dark chocolates from different growing areas within the country. The bars are available in Ecuador and are beginning to show up in the U.S. (We discovered them in the Guayaquil airport when we were en route to a Galápagos Islands cruise, but more about that later....) It was enlightening to...Read More

Everyday squid in Basque country

Posted on by Pat and David
Those of us who aren't Basque have a hard time imagining just how well they eat. Good food and a love of cooking seem to be central to the culture. When we sat down with Elena and Juan Marí Arzak for the Robb Report story about the seasonal special dish of angulas (see the Dec. 21, 2011 post), they emphasized that love of good food was a Basque birthright that extends to every meal--not just special occasions. That certainly seems to be true. When we later met professional guide Ana Intxausti Gardeki, she took us to the San Sebastian market and told us all about the various kinds of fish available. (She had worked for a seafood broker before changing careers.) She even gave us...Read More

Basque treats: angulas for Christmas

Posted on by Pat and David
Nothing says Christmas in Basque country like a nice plate of angulas, i.e., baby eels, also known as elvers, glass eels, or ''spaghetti with eyes.'' Threatened by overfishing and by Asian buyers who purchase the live elvers to raise on fish farms, angulas nonetheless remain a touchstone of Basque traditional cuisine. They are, however, expensive. We have a piece in the December 2011 Robb Report about fishing for and preparing angulas. We should note that we had a lot of help to research this story, especially from chef Fernando Canales of Etxanobe in Bilbao, eel fisherman and all-around outdoorsman and gourmand Txetxu Oliver, and chefs Juan Marí and Elena Arzak, who were good enough to sit down and talk with us at Restaurante Arzak about...Read More

Montreal bargain lunches

Posted on by Pat and David
Of all the guidebook series we work on, the research for the Food Lovers' series may be the most fun. Our most recent published volume was on Montreal, but we didn't spend all our time eating foie gras or dining at innovative contemporary restaurants. We're always on the lookout for good values, and we found 10 great lunches for about $10 where we could tap into various strains of Montreal culture. We recently published that roundup in the Boston Globe. You'll find the results as a pair of PDFs on our Sample Articles page. We are just about finished writing our next volume, Food Lovers' Guide to Vermont & New Hampshire, and have a refrigerator full of artisanal cheese, cured pork products, and storage vegetables...Read More

What to Eat at the Airport: DFW

Posted on by Pat and David
When we started this blog about two years ago, we never dreamed that we would be singing the praises of airport food. But that was before Pappasito's Cantina became the only bright spot in a very trying day at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport. We were en route from Boston to Albuquerque when our early morning connecting flight in Dallas was canceled without explanation. The next flight wasn't until late in the day and we were resigned to a long, boring wait and generic fast food. We were debating the merits of pre-made sandwiches, bagels, yogurt smoothies, and McBurger when we stumbled on Pappasito's in Terminal A. The long bar looked so inviting that we grabbed a couple of stools, perused the Tex-Mex menu and...Read More