recipe Archives - Hungry Travelers

recipe

‘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

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

Summer bounty summons taste memories

Posted on August 16, 2023August 16, 2023 by Pat and David

Unlike many Americans, we decided to stay home this summer rather than crowd the plazas of Europe. We've been enjoying the farmers market and garden bounty of a warm and wet stateside year. The rolling harvest reminds us of some of our favorite dishes we ate overseas. They taste as good at home, even if the ambiance is different. Cherries from the Pacific Northwest have been incredible. They are sweet, large, firm, and more inexpensive than we've seen in years. When we have a lot of cherries, we can't help but think of making clafoutis, a rustic dish we associate with French country inns (like the one above). Most of the recipes we've encountered were geared to rather large baking dishes and made enough clafoutis...Read More