We cook the way we travel, reading everything we can find about a dish or a style, then tossing aside guides and books and simply wading in. We have to cook that way, because nearly all of our favorites have come from stumbling onto a treasure in a tiny restaurant in some lost town or village and then attempting to recreate it at home.
Needless to say, a high tolerance for failure helps, but eventually, we always get there. And just as we’ve never found ourselves forced by a lack of reservations to sleep in a car or on a sidewalk, we’ve never gone particularly hungry (and have the waistlines to prove it!).
So… For good or ill, you won’t find a lot of detailed recipes here. What you might find instead is an approach to food—and travel—that emphasizes fun over propriety, spontaneity over detailed planning, and preparation over lockstep organization. If that works for you, it works for us!
And now, our weekly round-up of daily bits and pieces from our much-too-cluttered travel bin. Click on any title for a deeper dive.
1. Deutscher Sauerbraten
As served in our favorite German and Austrian restaurants, the marinated and braised whole rump roast known as Sauerbraten is nearly always too dry and sour for our tastes. So when we cook it at home, we make two (probably sacrilegious) adjustments.
2. Tacos al Anyhoo
Our biggest sin—overloading the taco. This is very small-scale work. No matter how hard you try, you'll probably use a fraction of the ingredients you prepared. So just add rice the next day and call it intentional.
3. Boston Baked Beans
This is one of the few dishes where we occasionally consult a recipe, if only for the quantity of molasses. We've tried adding and subtracting ingredients with our usual recklessness, and even though they might have wowed an occasional audience, they just weren't Boston Baked Beans.
4. Designer Pizza
If we didn't have the evidence of our own eyes, we'd start ruminating on parallel universes and anti-worlds like the Bizarro version of that famous, pizza-loving Italian Superuomo, Clark Kent.
5. Kowloon Fried Rice
The name of this dish comes not from a cookbook, but from the chef who showed us how to prepare it. She was born and raised in Kowloon and at the time spoke almost no English. So our education meant keeping up with her lightning-quick movements, while scribbling the details for a feature in a local newspaper.
6. Belgian Bolo Crème
Belgian cuisine is sometimes described as French food with larger quantities. But the foods that are truly Belgian reflect the country's exotic blending of their Walloon French, Flemish Dutch, and Ardennes German cultures.
7. Kashmiri Rogan Josh
Nothing honors and eulogizes the places we'll never see again quite like the aromas, tastes, and textures of superbly prepared food from home.
And lest we forget, there’s this week’s Travel Newsletter:
Speaking of French…
How Language Shapes a Culture