recipe Archives - Hungry Travelers

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Pining away for spicy autumn soup with piñons

Posted on December 13, 2024December 13, 2024 by Pat and David

Driving up a remote single lane road north of Taos, headed to the D.H. Lawrence Ranch, we had to weave around cars and pickup trucks parked on the roadside every 50 yards or so. We saw people of all ages crouched on the ground, picking away at the dirt or picking over something on blankets they'd spread under the bristly branches of roadside pine trees. It finally dawned on us that they were collecting piñons, aka pine nuts. Piñons are one of the great delicacies of New Mexico, and one of the region's most ancient foods. The trees grow wild and the nuts are apparently free for the taking on public land — including the roadside rights of way. Once we started paying attention, we...Read More

Home might have tasted like this, if only…

Posted on May 18, 2024May 18, 2024 by Pat

When I learned that baker Cherie Denham grew up in Northern Ireland watching her grandmothers and great aunts baking, I knew that I had to have a copy of the cookbook, The Irish Bakery. My own grandparents emigrated from County Armagh in Northern Ireland to work in the silk mills in Manchester, Connecticut. My mother had fond memories of her mother, Rebecca, standing at the stove cooking triangular soda bread farls on a cast iron skillet. But that was one of her few home cooking memories. Rebecca died young and was never able to teach her three daughters to cook. Whenever I visited Northern Ireland, I had strict instructions from my mother to bring soda bread farls home in my suitcase so that she and...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

Beer with us #1: Onion soup

Posted on February 15, 2024February 15, 2024 by Pat and David

Now that was fun, wasn't it? We're talking about Super Bowl LVIII (or Super Bowl 58, for readers who don't do Roman numerals), in which the Kansas City Taylor Swifts beat the San Francisco Forty-Niners by a score of 25-23. Once the cheering subsided, we managed to convince our friends to eat the last deviled eggs and take home the remaining dip, chips, and chili. But they left behind a bucket of miscellaneous bottles of beer. Rather than hoard them to drink in warm weather, we decided to have more fun now and cook with the beer. It so happened that we also scored a terrific bag of yellow onions at the winter farmers market here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Grown at Busa Farms in nearby...Read More

Bourbon House knows the season’s spirits

Posted on December 22, 2023December 20, 2023 by Pat

I didn't make it to Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House (144 Bourbon St., New Orleans, La.; 504-522-0111; bourbonhouse.com) for a Reveillon dinner. But there was always lunch. I didn't want to leave New Orleans without enjoying a plate of shrimp and grits. One of New Orleans top seafood restaurants seemed like just the right place. With plump shrimp, spicy sausage, and creamy grits, the dish (at right) hit all the right flavor notes. I'd always assumed that the restaurant took its name from its location on the French Quarter's fabled Bourbon Street. But it turns out that proprietor Dickie Brennan, scion of a celebrated family of New Orleans restaurateurs, is a Bourbon connoisseur. The bar stocks about 250 American whiskeys. It's said to be the most...Read More

Delving into Revillon’s historic connections

Posted on December 20, 2023December 20, 2023 by Pat

New Orleans' Reveillon dinners are a link to the city's past. Tradition holds that during the mid-19th century, well-to-do families would feast on an elaborate meal after Mass on Christmas Eve and again on New Year's Eve. The practice had all but disappeared until the city's restaurants revived it with special Reveillon menus. The four-course meals range from $40 to $150, putting them in reach of many pocketbooks. I like a taste of history with my meal, so one afternoon, I visited the Gallier House museum (1132 Royal St., New Orleans, La.; 504-274-0748; hgghh.org) to see how a French Quarter family would have lived more than 150 years ago. The townhome with elaborate wrought iron balcony was designed by noted architect James Gallier, Jr. and...Read More

At the source for true New York cheesecake

Posted on November 30, 2023November 24, 2023 by Pat and David

We grew up in the era of quickie “cheesecake” made with Philadelphia cream cheese, tons of sugar, and an egg. The mixture was deposited into a graham cracker crust and topped with canned pie filling. We both loved it. But we always knew that there was something else called “New York cheesecake” that was presumably more complex and therefore superior. When we spotted a location of Junior's amid the neon clutter surrounding Times Square, we thought we might have located the cheesecake grail. After all, Junior's holds a registered trademark on The World's Most Fabulous Cheesecake®. We soon learned that the restaurant chain has been making it since the original Junior's opened in Brooklyn in 1950. Times Square locations were merely Junior's-come-latelies. So we made...Read More