corn Archives - Hungry Travelers

corn

Green chile chowder an all-season pleaser

Posted on September 21, 2023September 21, 2023 by Pat and David

During our sojourn in Santa Fe last spring, we took ample advantage of green chile — even though the vegetable was out of season. Every supermarket stocked at least a few brands of frozen green chile. The peppers were invariably fire-roasted, peeled, and chopped. While frozen green chile doesn't seem to have made it to our Boston-area markets, seeing local chiles at the farmers markets reminded us of a favorite dish we made in Santa Fe. That would be green chile corn chowder, amped up with diced roasted chicken and simmered with potato cubes. The potato cubes are a New England thing, we suspect. But with corn, potatos, and some green chiles in the local markets, we revived the dish for the sudden chill of...Read More

Putting ‘comfort’ to the test with the last of the harvest

Posted on September 22, 2021September 22, 2021 by Pat and David

The authors of One-Hour Comfort (2021, $29.99), one of a slew of new cookbooks from the Boston culinary juggernaut that is America's Test Kitchen (www.americastestkitchen.com), admit that “comfort food” can be highly personal and idiosyncratic. Some people think of pasta, others of fried chicken, and others of a grilled cheese sandwich. Maybe it's what your parents made when you were sick at home from school. But, as the authors point out, almost everyone can agree that comfort food is “uncomplicated, homey, and totally satisfying.” That can mean anything from ham grits and redeye gravy at breakfast to a big bowl of congee topped with stir-fried pork bits. The “meaty” section has Italian sausage with peppers, onions, tomatoes, and polenta—as well as chicken satay with spicy...Read More

Icelandic sea salt explodes flavors of summer favorites

Posted on August 29, 2021August 29, 2021 by Pat and David

We had planned to be in Iceland about now—until the late summer flareup of the novel coronavirus. We had hoped to go to Reykjanesi way up in the northwest quarter of Iceland called Westfjords. The plan was to visit the Saltverk (saltverk.com) facility there, founded in 2011 by Björn Jónsson and Gísli Grímsson. (If you caught the Iceland segment in season three of Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, it's Gísli who shows the Scottish chef around.) Sea salt harvesting has a long history in the Westfjords, where the king of Denmark established a saltworks in the late 18th century. It used geothermal energy, since Iceland is basically one craggy cap on a rift in the earth that leaks hot water, steam, and sometimes lava. The Danes needed...Read More

Enjoying the sheer immersion of a Mexican food market

Posted on June 9, 2020June 8, 2020 by Pat and David

Diego Rivera (see last post) wasn't the only one obsessed with Mexican food markets. It's funny that Americans think of Mexico as a place where all the meals are based on dried corn made into a bread (tortillas), dried chiles made into sauces, or dried beans made into burrito fillings. Given their druthers, most Mexicans eat fresh fruits and vegetables as their dietary mainstays. True, they do love to grill and deep-fry some foods, but the key to the Mexican table is fresh food. That could include some pretty exotic stuff. The basket of small gray stuff in the left pane above is huitlacoche—fresh corn infected with what American farmers call ‶corn smut.″ It's a fungus that makes the kernels ooze with an inky, musky...Read More

Diego Rivera’s food paintings lay bare Mexico’s soul

Posted on June 1, 2020 by Pat and David

Now that we've run out of other tidying projects, we've been sorting and cleaning up our files of travel photos. We're using Zoner Photo Studio X (zoner.com) for sorting purposes because it lets us tag large groups of photos with key words. Then we can look at related photos together. One thing that jumped out at us was that Diego Rivera obsessed about food almost as much as we do. As we looked at our photos of Rivera murals in Mexico City, we were struck that bread, tortillas, and tropical fruits all turned up even more often than the hammer and sickle of the Communist Party. His sympathies may have been with Marx and Lenin, but his truest devotion was to home cooking. The large...Read More

Summer travel picnic: pesto, chicken & corn

Posted on July 27, 2018July 24, 2018 by Pat and David

For the next couple of posts, we'll been doing the reverse of “bringing the taste of travel back home.” When we're faced with long road trips in the summer, we often resort to dishes that bring the taste of home out on the road. One of our stand-bys for rest-stop picnics or campground suppers is a pasta dish we call “pesto salad.” That's shorthand. The dish evolved pretty much by accident. We grow a lot of basil in our garden. When it flowers madly in hot weather, we keep the growing tips clipped to prolong the season. That means we have a gallon or so of basil sprigs every few days. Since it doesn't refrigerate well, we turn it into pesto, adding a lot of...Read More

Tart, picante, and salty—Tajín hits the Mexican spot

Posted on June 1, 2018June 2, 2018 by Pat and David

A bartender at the Occidental Cozumel resort in Mexico (occidentalgrandcozumel.com) introduced us to Tajín, the blend of lime, chile peppers, and sea salt that seems to be one of the country's favorite seasonings. It's produced in Zapopan from mild chiles grown in the region. The company aims for a mix with a lot of flavor and just enough heat to keep the taste buds alert. Tajín certainly did the trick rimming the glass of a cucumber habañero margarita. The manufacturer suggests sprinkling Tajín on everything from marinated beef and vegetable skewers to chicken salad sandwiches and avocado ice cream. The web site (tajin.com) offers a recipe for the popular street food esquites. The concoction of corn kernels, cheese, chiles, cotija cheese, and mayonnaise is served...Read More

Pueblo re-creation conjures Mayan past

Posted on February 26, 2018February 23, 2018 by Pat

Little remains of the eight villages established by the Mayans on the island of Cozumel. But two years ago, the Pueblo del Maiz (Carretera Transversal, Camino á San Gervasio km 5, Cozumel, Mexico; +1 984-146-5771) opened to show how the ancient Mayans lived. The complex is centered around a series of thatched roof huts called palapas and populated with guides in often rather dramatic traditional dress. From the start, a visit has a great sense of ceremony. After I had been cleansed with fragrant smoke, I made an offering of cacao beans to a goddess and then planted a couple seeds of corn in the dark earth. It quickly became clear that growing, harvesting, and preparing food was a large part of Mayan life. In...Read More

Local color lights up Toronto neighborhoods

Posted on October 27, 2016October 17, 2016 by Pat and David

Toronto's playful side is literally written on its walls. The city is full of murals created with a high degree of artistry and a witty sense of humor. The one above with the car-turned-planter in the foreground embodies the spirit of the Kensington Market neighborhood. Just west of Chinatown, most of its shops and eateries are found along Augusta Avenue and adjacent Nassau Street, Baldwin Street, and Kensington Avenue. The eastern boundary stretches to Spadina Avenue in Chinatown, making a continuous colorful neighborhood of eateries and shops. Once the center of hippie culture in Canada, Kensington Market was where many young American men moved to avoid the military draft during the Vietnam war. The area retains its psychedelic patchouli vibe in the street art and...Read More

Lexington chefs show true grits

Posted on August 9, 2015January 16, 2020 by Pat and David

The fried oysters with cheese-sausage grits at Nick Ryan's (157 Jefferson St., Lexington; 859-233-7900; nickryans.com) were real eye-openers, since both the batter on the bivalves and the grits had striking corn flavor. Then we tried the shrimp and grits at Coles (735 Main St., Lexington, 859-266-9000; coles735main.com), and had the same epiphany. There was really something special about the grits these Lexington, Kentucky chefs were using. Few restaurants have the luxury of using freshly ground, locally grown grains with the germ intact, which gives a much more profound flavor than nationally distributed products where the germ is removed to make them more shelf-stable. The difference is comparable to fresh sweet corn as opposed to corn picked a week earlier and shipped across the country. We...Read More