A few summers ago, I conducted my graduate-school research at a health clinic in a batey, or rural community, about an hour north of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Punta Cana’s high-end resorts and all-you-can-eat buffets are a stark contrast to the impoverished former sugarcane plantations that make up the bateys in the island’s interior. Electricity is rare and subject to apagaones (blackouts) that can last an entire day, which has serious consequences for rural health clinics trying to operate blood labs and store vaccines—and severely limits the menu dished up for clinic staff.

During my 10-week stay, I slept on the floor of an empty clinic room with a handful of Canadian medical students doing internships. Meals were served family style; food was brought in at the beginning of each week from the capital. Fruit and vegetables were nonexistent, and the “meat” option was an overly processed bologna that was dubious on Monday mornings and scary by Wednesday. Despite being on an island, our fish selection was limited to canned sardines. For breakfast we had white bread dipped in sugary coffee; a typical lunch was fried plantains with spaghetti and rice. Yes, spaghetti and rice. Everything was flavored with Maggi bouillon cubes, which left us parched and thirsty. Dinner was often boiled plantains with hot sauce, or fried eggs and dumplings. (Dumplings were usually served at the end of the week, when pickings were slim. A mixture of water and flour, they were hard to choke down even with copious amounts of rum and Presidente.)

The clinic closed on weekends, so we’d all catch a bus out of town on Fridays toward one of the gorgeous playas lining the island’s north coast. These places were like culinary meccas to us with their beachside shacks serving fresh fish, beans, even the occasional leaf of lettuce. However, nothing hit the spot quite like the piña coladas served at every beach bar. After days of bland starches, something about the sweet richness of the coconut milk and the tangy bite of the prized pineapples was mouthwatering. My friends and I used to suck those babies down like water, stocking up in preparation for another week of tastebud-numbing cuisine.

Flash forward five years: Back in New York City, I’m on maternity leave in the dead of winter. It was a brutal time for me; I felt isolated and lonely, cut off from friends and my usual calendar of travel and fun. In many ways, it wasn’t so different from those long weeks living at the clinic! Back then I couldn’t sleep because of the stifling heat and mosquitoes; now it was because of a colicky baby. Maybe that’s what inspired me to host a piña colada party for the other moms in my son’s playgroup. I remembered how those piña coladas had cheered me up, and, while my fifth-floor walk-up was a far cry from the beaches of my favorite island, I thought a tropical cocktail with other frazzled moms might just do the trick.

And so, on a cold February afternoon, we all gathered in my apartment to sample one of the Caribbean’s most famous exports. I had spent the day searching for cream of coconut only to be shown coconut milk time and time again by the staff of Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and other neighborhood groceries. Don’t make that mistake! I finally found the real stuff in a local bodega. Then I got some ripe pineapples, ice, and the DR’s most famous local rum: El Brugal. Some recipes call for heavy cream or ice cream, but even nursing moms can’t handle that many calories with their booze!

The whirring blender, sticky pineapple, and stories from our pre-baby lives brought us new moms together that day. For a few hours, we escaped from our constant talk of sleep training, nursing, and baby weight to sip our piña coladas and relax. I think the babies felt it too.

The Perfect Piña Colada

Mix 1 cup cream of coconut (like that from Coco Lopez), 1 cup fresh pineapple, and about a half-cup rum. Add them all to a blender with ice. It will be thick, so keep some pineapple juice on hand if you want to thin it out. Serve with a wedge of pineapple.

Around the 15th of each month, we’ll select a new User and Food Memory of the Month. For the former, we’ll look for a user who contributes in both quantity and quality—that is, someone who’s uploaded at least eight regional food/drink photos with intelligent, entertaining descriptions…often the kind that make us want to get on a plane and go find that dish right now. For our Food Memory of the Month, we similarly will choose a story that we particularly loved, whether for being especially vivid, thoughtful, or funny.

Our newest User of the Month is Raluca, who has contributed 14 great photos and descriptions thus far, spanning the globe from her hometown of NYC to Sri Lanka (we especially enjoyed the Polygamy Porter Ale pic she added from Utah).

This month’s Food Memory comes from zboehmova, who made us giggle with her tale of eating her first sandwich in exotic America.   

We hope to see more from both of you soon! And to the rest of our users: Get uploading, and you might be next!

We’d like to introduce a new recurring feature in Eat Your World: trip-recap videos! Every time we travel somewhere for EYW, we’ll create a one-minute video—compiled of photos and video footage we shoot on the road, edit, and set to music—to act as visual sum-up. And, no, it won’t be entirely about food: This is our opportunity to show you other sides of a destination, as well as a little bit of us.

Our first video is from North India, where we spent a few weeks last spring. It was challenging to stick to a minute for this one, to edit the hundreds of photos we took between the two of us in Delhi, Agra, and Udaipur. Ultimately we wanted to capture just a little of the frenetic pace, vibrant street life, and curious locals we encountered at every turn. (OK, and some of the food, too. It was too damn good to ignore.)

“I do what I love to do. I love to cook, I love to make folks happy with my food, I love to deepen my knowledge of cooking, I love going in to work. I love working the line.”
–Pat Martin, owner and pit master, Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint

Tell us about your job.
I’m a pit master. I’m at Martin’s almost every day. We’re open seven days a week. We have no freezers, we have no microwaves. We make everything on our menu from scratch every single day! We cook whole hog, brisket, shoulders, chicken, turkey, wings—we do it all.

What led you to your current position?
I grew up in a family of amazing Southern cooks—men and women! When I got to college at a tiny school named Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tennessee, I found myself hanging around the old BBQ joints all the time. I loved it and wanted to learn it. But I didn’t set out in life to do this: My dad was a government bond trader and I ended up following in his footsteps, in corporate bond sales. I got married, and she was a songwriter in Nashville. So it was either move back to Nashville or go to New York/London, and I just didn’t want to live up there. Well, we worked our tail off to get back to Nashville—and then she divorced me. We were too young and we knew it. I didn’t want to leave Nashville, so I stayed. Started a landscape construction and grade business and remarried. I liked the money, but the work didn’t interest me. One day one of my guys totaled a bunch of our equipment. That was my excuse to finally do what I had dreamed of. So on a small line of credit and a shit ton of hard work, I opened Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint in October 2006. We haven’t looked back since!

What’s your favorite part of your job?
Well, I do what I love to do, first and foremost. I mean, who can actually say that? I love to cook, I love to make folks happy with my food, I love to deepen my knowledge of cooking, I love to meet new people, I love to travel. I love going in to work. I love working the line.

We loved your smoked-overnight ribs, pulled pork, and chicken (above), which we were lucky to eat at an event in Bristol, Virginia. How would you say your food speaks to the culinary landscape of Nashville/Nolensville?
You know, Nashville wasn’t really known for great BBQ, and I hope we’ve helped put Nashville on the map, so to speak. We really have some great spots here in town. I’m just honored to be part of that “conversation,” when folks speak of the restaurants that define Nashville and the surrounding areas.

What’s one iconic dish in Nashville that a visitor cannot miss?
You gotta have a beer at Yazoo Brewing’s tap room. You gotta have a cocktail at Patterson House. You gotta eat a pizza or charcuterie plate at City House. You gotta eat crawfish at 55 South. You gotta see the farm that Capitol Grille has—farm to fork! You gotta take a piss in the men’s bathroom at the Oak Bar in the Hermitage Hotel (I know that’s weird, but trust me!). 

That’s not quite a “dish,” but we agree—it is a must! EYW focuses a lot on a city’s historic, traditional foods. What do you think is the future of food/drink in the Nashville area?
Nashville is a very modern and progressive city, largely thanks to the entertainment industry and its influence throughout the world—and if you are thinking “country music,” then I can tell you there is so much more to learn about the cultural landscape here! Nashville has almost doubled in size since the mid-1980s, when it was a regional Southern city. Thanks to that growth, Nashville’s palate has really grown, really taken off. Ten to 15 years ago we were lagging in terms of restaurants, chefs, etc. Now it’s a completely different landscape, and Nashville is on its way to being recognized as one of the very best Southern cities in terms of food and dining.

On EYW, we ask users to share short food memories related to travel, a favorite meal, growing up--anything. Can you share a brief food memory with our readers?
My mi-mi King’s biscuits and blackberry jam. My dad’s steaks. My mom’s fried chicken. Slugburgers and short Cokes with my pa King. Hot summer nights in Mississippi frying catfish with my pa-pa on the carport. My ma-ma’s coconut cake. BBQ sandwich at Thomas & Webb in Henderson, Tennessee.

Check out Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint, and read more about Nashville-area foods and drinks on EYW here.

I remember the days of always having one camera, two lenses, and a flash with me on my travels. That’s all changed with the iPhone. Last October I (finally) bought one, and happily tossed my old Samsung that could hardly connect to the internet into my ATC (antiquated technology drawer). I quickly fell in love with the portability and playfulness of my new phone’s 8-megapixel camera and actually became stressed about traveling with it. Would I still use my Canon 5D? Would I learn to rotate? Would I have to take pictures of everything with two cameras?

My first trip dealing with this dilemma came a month later, when Eat Your World headed to Amsterdam with some friends. My immediate observation was that I took way more photos than is usual for me. I documented everything with the iPhone, moments for which I would never have used my Canon: at the airport, on the plane, our first night out. I had a ball and spent every free moment uploading the pictures to my Instagram app, choosing an appropriate filter. I was consumed. I was obsessed. Our second day it rained, and my bulky Canon never even made it out of the bag. With ease the iPhone captured countless memories in bars, restaurants, inside our rented apartment.

Day three saw sunshine, and I finally remembered the fine piece of equipment I had ignored for 48 hours. With my 5D, I strolled the canals of Jordaan, framing photos and enjoying every click of the camera. I zoomed in and out, knowing I’d have some nice big files to work with when I got home. Every so often I’d pull the iPhone out of my pocket for a quickie. I’d found my happy medium: Each camera will have its place in my future—at least until the iPhone can take 50-megabyte photos.

Reviewing our food map en route to the airport (iPhone)

Sunny day in the Jordaan (5D)

Colorful bikes by the canal (5D)

Laura & friends at the Seven Bridges (iPhone)

Any other photographers out there have this dilemma?

We are pleased to announce that Eat Your World was featured today in The New York Times’ Diner’s Journal blog.

What a great way to kick off 2012! The response has already been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and we’re thrilled our “ambitious,” “world-roaming” “work in progress” website about “regional foods that visitors shouldn’t miss” is getting such recognition just a few weeks out of the beta-mode gate. (Apologies to Zagat!)

Also glad we managed to post this smoked fish entry before too many New Yorkers came looking for it.

A few hours after the NYT piece, Lifehacker wrote about us, which really pushed our traffic through the roof—and then crashed us for about 20 minutes. We took the opportunity to upgrade our servers, as we can only hope this happens again. 

Huge thanks to all you early adopters out there who have supported us through this adventure. Now to try to focus on finishing up our Prague section…

If you’re still hungry for North Indian food after our post on papri chaat and butter paneer masala, check out this post on Foodists.ca, in which we expound on our discovery of, and love for, chole bhature (curried chickpeas with fried bread). Recipe included, of course.

Related: Recipes From Afar: Papri Chaat & Butter Paneer Masala, North India

“Everyone we hire at ICOB spends time working on the farm so they can truly understand and speak to our culture.
They have a real connection to not only
the farm, but also to all of the people who work so hard growing and harvesting
the oysters.” –Skip Bennett, founder, Island Creek Oysters; co-owner, Island Creek Oyster Bar

What is your role at Island Creek Oyster Bar?
My role is largely one as a link to the farms, the farmers, and many of the seafood products.

What led you to your current job? 
Years ago, I heard about the Hog Island Oyster Bar out in San Francisco. After a trip there, I came back looking for a way to do something here in Boston. It seemed logical for the brand, and the intent of Island Creek Oysters has always been to get as close to the consumer as possible.

What’s your favorite part of your job?
My favorite part is actually knowing the people that work there. Everyone we hire at ICOB spends time working on the farm so they can truly understand and speak to our culture. As a result, they all have a real connection to not only the farm, but also to all of the people who work so hard growing and harvesting the oysters. Our team at ICOB is definitely an extension of the ICO family.

We loved the oysters and baked beans at ICOB. How would you say the restaurant fits into the culinary landscape of Boston?
Our connection to Boston, Duxbury, Maine, and Maryland—[the latter two] where [chef and co-owner] Jeremy Sewall and [co-owner] Garrett Harker are from, respectively—shows through in the menu, design, and character of the restaurant. Beyond that, I think the city was ready for an upscale seafood restaurant/oyster bar that offers the definitive seafood experience for locals and visitors alike. I’d love to think we have the potential to become the iconic seafood restaurant that Bostonians recommend to their out-of-town friends. 

Name one iconic dish in Boston that a visitor cannot miss.
Jeremy’s oyster sliders are quickly becoming just that. People seem to love the lobster roe pasta as well, which is Jeremy’s spin on a surf-and-turf concept. Being a waterfront city, when you think “iconic Boston” it’s hard not to think seafood. Clam chowder would be an obvious one. Some of the newer oyster bars have done great spins on that traditional New England dish. Jeremy uses the littleneck clam, a smaller, more tender quahog—you should always use quahogs!—which gives both great flavor and texture. 

EYW focuses a lot on a city’s historic and traditional foods. What do you think is the future of food/drink in Boston?
I hate to jump on the bandwagon, but the obvious answer is local, sustainably farmed food. The concept can be taken too far, but I really think people feel good about knowing where their food comes from. We serve oysters from both coasts, but we list all of the farmers on the menu and the servers know many of them personally. We can tell you where the oysters come from, how they were raised, and often quite a bit about the guy who’s raising them. This is true of much of our produce as well. Our concept is kind of farm-to-table, and everyone’s committed to staying true to that. Even our beverage program—we recently started carrying a Boston-based spirits line called Bully Boy Distillery, which is two brothers making Boston’s first craft spirits.

On EYW, we ask users to share short food memories related to travel, a favorite meal, family food traditions—anything. Can you share a food memory with our readers?
As an oyster farmer, I never dreamed that my oysters would lead to so many amazing meals. Before we partnered in ICOB, I was fortunate to have Jeremy cook for me in his own restaurant [Lineage, in Brookline, MA] a few times. It was always over-the-top. I’ve had the opportunity to eat at Per Se a couple of times—nothing can really compare to that. Another meal that really sticks out was one prepared for me by my friend Michelle Bernstein, when she worked at Azul in Miami. It was the first time I had eaten food like that—every course was something new and amazing. I can still remember the foie gras with chocolate. Michelle brought out every course herself, even though the place was packed. I remember feeling very special. It felt like a really warm welcome into the food world.

A half-year after returning home from a few weeks in North India, I thought it would be a good idea to cook some Indian dishes for friends. Twelve friends, to be exact.

It wasn’t long after I emailed said friends that I began questioning the wisdom of this decision.

Indian food is notoriously difficult for a non-Indian to pull off. Sure, having access to the right spices is half the battle, but in past experiments with an Indian cookbook, I’ve found that the spice ratio often seems off. For all the toasting and grinding of seeds called for, there’s never anywhere near the amount of flavor one expects, certainly nothing like the richness radiating from most Indian-restaurant dishes. (Of course, that might be the excess ghee speaking.) Or else, between the red chile powder and garam masala, I somehow wind up with so much heat that the dish is nearly inedible, even for a spice lover like me.

So why did I think I could have an Indian-food dinner party? While in Udaipur, Scott and I stayed at the friendly Hotel Krishna Niwas, where one of the owners, Sushma Khatri, runs cooking classes on pretty much anything you’d like to learn in Indian cuisine. At our request, she made us one of Rajasthan’s classic dishes, dal baati chorma; we ate it with relish and promptly signed up for a formal class. We wanted to cook some of our favorite dishes from North India: chole bhature, butter chicken, paratha. We ended up making all of those plus dal, chapati, and masala chai. In Sushma’s open kitchen, filled with easy-to-access spice bins and pre-pureed tomatoes, it all seemed so easy—and everything we made together was delicious, especially when eaten on the hotel’s roof, gazing out over Lake Pichola.

Fast-forward six months to our comparatively cramped kitchen in Queens, plastic spice bags scattered across the counter, pounds of onions and tomatoes sitting on the floor, one burner short of what we really needed—and the two of us, frantically chopping and measuring and hoping everyone would be at least 30 minutes late. The shopping part was easy, at least: We are fortunate to live two blocks from a terrific South Asian grocery store, stocked with all the mango powder and paneer we could ever want, and have a bunch of Indian sweets shops from which to buy dessert (and papri chips, it turned out).

Our menu was sourced directly from our own experiences in India. As appetizers, we chose two of our favorite chaats, or savory street-style snacks, and for the three main courses, we went with curried chickpeas (the chole minus the bhature, or fried bread that usually goes with it), butter paneer masala (like butter chicken, but with paneer, a soft Indian cheese), and baingan ka bharta (mashed eggplant, tomato, and onion). The first two main courses were recipes from Sushma in Udaipur (and dishes we’d eaten all over North India); the third dish I chose because I’d particularly liked the version of it we’d had in Agra. On the side were roti and naan—store- and restaurant-bought, admittedly—and although North India is all about mopping up curries with bread, we thought that fluffy basmati rice should be on the table too. I was tempted to make lassis and chapatis, and maybe some rasmalai for dessert, but thankfully my husband knows when to tell me I’m going too far.

Another thing to be thankful for: Nearly everyone was a bit late (and the two who showed up early were put straight to work), so I had time to finish the main dishes while Scott shook up Kashmir cocktails (see recipe). Then we remembered the appetizers and quickly put out the ingredients for papri chaat (pictured above)—our favorite chaat of them all, a crunchy, spicy, sweet, tangy party in your mouth—as well as a huge bowl of fruit chaat, essentially a fruit salad with an Indian dressing (I based ours on this recipe from Manjula’s Kitchen, using banana, apple, mango, cucumber, grapes, and pomegranate seeds—and, yes, you really do need the black salt).

Ultimately, I was astonished: Our friends seemed to like the food! It had flavor and depth without burning anyone’s insides. And though I’d made the chickpea dish before with excellent results (I’ll give that recipe in a future post), I wasn’t too surprised that the two biggest hits of the night were the papri chaat and the butter paneer masala. Once you manage to track down their myriad ingredients, these are two dishes you really can’t go wrong with—even if you’re not plying your guests with mango cocktails and IPAs.

PAPRI CHAAT

(adapted from The ABCD’s of Cooking)

Serves 12

4 cups papri chips

1 12 oz. can chickpeas

2 large potatoes, boiled and chopped

1 32 oz. container yogurt (preferably Indian style, like Desi Natural Dahi)

1 bottle tamarind chutney

1 bottle coriander chutney (we used Swad brand)

1 package sev (fried gram-flour noodles)

1 package chaat masala

1 white or yellow onion, chopped

1 tomato, chopped

Lime juice

Cilantro

Green chilies, minced

We emulated our local chaat shops and made these to order in a stainless-steel bowl, which meant setting all these ingredients out and, working in batches to make two or three servings at a time, mixing them together. Measurements per bowl were pretty inexact, but you can start with a handful of chips and about a tablespoon of everything else (less of the chaat masala and chilies). It’s the kind of dish you make to taste, depending on whether you prefer your chaat dry or wet (use more yogurt), spicy or mild. Rest assured that any way you mix these things together, it’s going to taste good.

 BUTTER PANEER MASALA

(adapted from Sushma Khatri’s cooking class at the Hotel Krishna Niwas, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India)

Serves 12 (we doubled the original recipe, more or less)

6 onions, chopped

2 tsp green chile, chopped

1 tsp. ginger

6 Tbsp. butter

1 tsp. turmeric powder

1 tsp. red chile powder

1 tsp. garam masala

Salt to taste

7 tomatoes, blanched, peeled, and pureed

3 Tbsp. double cream

12 almonds, ground

12 cashews, ground

4 Tbsp. coconut powder

1 lb. paneer, cut into 1-inch slabs (or large cubes)

2 cups milk (we did not double this from original recipe, as 2 cups seemed plenty)

Pinch fenugreek leaves, garam masala

Using a food processor, grind the onion, ginger, and green chile together, and then, in a large pan, cook in butter till light brown. Add turmeric, chile powder, garam masala, and salt; then slowly add tomato puree, a little at a time. Next, stir in cream, ground nuts, and coconut powder; continue to cook over high heat for a few minutes until oil pools around pan edges. Add paneer and milk, lower heat, and add fenugreek leaves and garam masala. Without mixing the last two spices in, cover the pan and simmer for five minutes. At that point, taste the dish—we found we had to add a bit more butter, salt, and fenugreek before it was perfect.

Have you met Eat Your World? Allow us to introduce ourselves in this one-minute video—and then scroll down the home page to see our newest content.

If you clicked through from the home page, see the column at left for the latest EYW Blog posts.

For those of you who came to know us during our beta phase, here’s the new stuff we launched in mid-December! Please let us know your feedback, including any bugs or issues you encounter, in the comment fields below.

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR

A Single Destinations Map: We’ve integrated the main EYW content map with the user maps, so we now have just one Destinations map. Not only is a single map more user-friendly than multiple maps, but this new system also allows us to better incorporate the helpful contributions of our talented users into the very same framework we utilize for EYW staff content. Therefore, if you’ve uploaded a food photo or written a Food Memory for us in the past, it is now attached by its location to this map. What does it mean for the site? One look at the map says it all: more content from around the world that’s easier to find.

User Profile Pages: You’ll also find your previous (and future) contributions on your user profile page. That’s right, when you sign up as an EYW user, you now have your own profile page, complete with avatar, all of your photos and stories to date, and easy-share social-media buttons. If you’re already a user, log in and you’ll be automatically directed to your page. Add your profile picture today!

New Content: The EYW team has been busy traveling and working on new content to guide you to the most typical regional foods and drinks around the world. We now have more than 425 entries representing local foods and drinks from 28 cities in 10 countries! Be sure to check out our newest sections on Delhi and London, and stay tuned for more coverage on the Florida Keys, Amsterdam, Prague, and Asheville, North Carolina. EYW’s exceptionally well-traveled users, meanwhile, have supplemented our featured content with descriptive regional-food photos and stories from some 15 additional U.S. states and 35 countries, from Missouri to Brazil to Sri Lanka. Our coverage grows daily!

Smaller, No-Less-Exciting Changes

• Every month, we’re choosing an EYW User of the Month—to highlight prolific users with quality contributions—as well as one Food Memory of the Month that we particularly enjoyed.

• Improvements to user experience: Users can now add multiple food photos from the same location with ease, and, from their profile pages, can edit their own food memories once they’ve been approved and are live on the site. When users contribute, they’ll receive an email notifying them when their content has been approved and is live on the site. And it’s now easy for users to share their site contributions on Facebook and Twitter.

• More videos! You’ve seen our short What is EYW? video in this post; stay tuned for lots more city-specific videos to appear on these pages.

• We’ve improved the EYW Blog, with the following new regular columns: Trips (travel-related stories), Recipes from Afar (recipes of foods we’ve encountered while traveling), Q&As (short interviews with local food producers around the world), Origins (explorations of where certain foods come from), and Photos (photo-related food or travel stories). Pitches are accepted at laura@eatyourworld. 

It was 1997 the last time I was on the Charles Bridge in Prague. I was a college student backpacking through Europe, and this moment of Dixieland jazz in the heart of Europe, pictured above, hit me strongly. I wasn't much of a photographer back then, but this is one of the few photos during that trip that actually told a good story and made me proud. When I started shooting professionally, I took the photo out, scanned it, and had the smudged, fingerprinted, black-and-white 4x6 sitting on my desk for years. When we started a Prague section on this site, I knew I wanted it to be a header.

Fast forward to October of this year: I'm back on the Charles Bridge. The same Dixieland jazz band was rocking, as the rain that had settled over the city finally let up. I took some more photos and enjoyed the beats, as I did when I was 21. When we got home we took a look at the two photos and realized the banjo player was the same—a bit older, but showing the same energy and love for his music, 14 years later. To think of how many times this man has been photographed playing these same songs amazes me. His smile tells the whole story.

Also, check out the video!

“I like to irrigate and cultivate. I like to farm. It’s like painting a picture: With a swipe of a brush you change the whole picture.” –Shane Milberger, owner of Milberger Farms, a chile pepper and vegetable farm with a roadside deli and produce stand

Tell us about your job.
I have 300 acres; of that, 40 acres are chile. We grow mild Anaheim, hot Anaheim, extra hot, Fresno, and the Mira Sol, also known as the Pueblo chile pepper.

This time of year [September] we’re packing chile, we’re harvesting. So I start the mornings off by going out to the shed and making sure everything’s ready to go, the guys are ready to pack, we go over what we’re packing and check what supplies they need. The chile roaster guys are out there roasting, I’m taking orders so I can call the field guys and tell them what they can go harvest, calling my buyers to see what I can sell today, taking care of all the issues on the farm and on my [roadside] stand, among several other things. It’s a very big managerial job right now.

What led you to your current position?
My dad sort of pushed me into it. It was my sophomore year in high school, and he didn’t want me out running around with my friends, so he got me into farming. My grandfather farmed for several people out here, and we had a large garden and animals, so I’d been around agriculture since I was three. 

Three years ago my son and wife wanted to do a roadside stand, so we took over this building here. The first year it was only produce, then last year my sister got involved. She wanted to do the deli and food service. We don’t do a lot of advertising, but we’re doing well.

What’s your favorite part of the job?
My favorite part is when I can go out and get a little solitude. I like to irrigate and cultivate. I like to farm. Whatever you do to the ground when you till it, it refreshes it. It’s like painting a picture. With a swipe of a brush you change the whole picture. You drag a disc over the ground; it stirs the ground up and brings up fresh soil and changes it. It gives you a little self-pride when you can look at a field and plow it, and you smell the fresh soil—that’s why we do it.

How do chiles fit into the culinary landscape of Pueblo?
Everything in Pueblo has something to do with chile. You can go to the knickknack shops down on Union Street, and every one of them will have something to do with chile, be it a chile apron, a chile shirt, a chile necklace, chile pens. Every restaurant in town serves chile in some way.

In our store here we make goat cheese with chiles; we have breads—more than half of our sandwiches in the deli have chile on them. Chile is a very large part of Pueblo. And of course, there’s the annual Chile & Frijoles Festival.

We had some delicious chile dishes there—ice cream with pepper fudge sauce, a pepper wrap with the Pueblo chile. What’s your favorite way to eat chiles?
With olive oil and garlic, a little salt and pepper, and a fresh piece of bread.

Is there any other food you’d recommend a visitor try while in Pueblo?
Another Pueblo food is the slopper [a burger covered with chili verde, a green chile stew], but of course that’s made with green chile. There’s also the grinder, an Italian sausage sandwich.

What do you think is the future of food and drink for Pueblo?
More chile! I do some processing and sell to restaurants, and my business is growing. They’re putting the chile in salsas and ketchups, and they’re becoming more popular versus the more well-known Hatch chiles from New Mexico.

What’s the difference between your chiles and New Mexico’s Hatch chiles?
It’s like night and day. They have a lot of hot days down there. The peppers don’t beef up as much as they do here, because we have the cool nights. Hatch is well known for what they do because they are so big down there. The average Hatch farmer has probably 400 acres of just chile. The average farmer up here doesn’t have 400 acres.

On EYW, we ask members to share short food memories related to travel, a favorite meal, growing up--anything. Can you share a brief food memory with our readers?
My favorite food memory is something simple that I grew up with: fried potato, pinto beans, and chili [verde]. In fact, we had it two nights ago for supper. We throw it all together: the beans on top of the potatoes, then the chili on top of that—and maybe a little cheese.

For more on these distinct Colorado chiles, see Origins: Pueblo Chile.

It’s hard to find a restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado, that doesn’t serve green chiles. This is prime pepper country, a smaller—and, some would argue, tastier—alternative to Hatch, New Mexico.

In autumn, at harvest time, the scent of roasting chiles wafts from roadside stands, supermarkets, and the annual Loaf ’N Jug Chile and Frijole Festival, which I was lucky enough to catch this September. (Among pepper enthusiasts, the preferred spelling of the capsicum fruit is chile. The dish containing meat, chile, and vegetables, like the one we tried in Denver, is chili.)

The chiles are roasted over an open flame in rotating black-wire drums, and then hosed down in a cloud of steam. It’s hypnotizing to watch, but will sear your eyes if you get too close.

At the festival, I ask a farmer what made this area so special for pepper growing. “The cool nights are what create the thickness and that meat in our chiles,” says Shane Milberger, the owner of Milberger Farms, one of the establishments that lie just east of Pueblo on the St. Charles Mesa, a 17-mile stretch along the Arkansas River Valley. [See EYW’s Q&A with Shane here.]

Like many farmers here, Milberger grows a variety of peppers: mild and hot Anaheim, Fresno, and extra hot. But he’s most proud of the Pueblo chile, also known as the Mira Sol (“looking at the sun” in Spanish) because it grows upward. “It has the most flavor,” he says.

The pepper packs a fair punch—between 5,000 and 20,000 Scoville Heat Units, the measurement method used to rank chile heat. That’s comparable to a moderate jalapeño pepper. At the festival, I try a chile wrap, a tortilla layered with roasted Pueblo chile, cheese, and beans. It’s hot enough to make my nose run, but that didn’t keep me from polishing the whole thing off.

After all, it’s not every day I get to eat a Pueblo chile. The pepper is unique to the Mesa. No one quite knows where the first plant came from, but around 1912 an Italian immigrant was the first farmer to grow the chile. It remained largely confined to ethnic communities until the 1970s, when Mexican food became a mainstream hit.

In the 1980s and ’90s, as Pueblo’s steel industry collapsed, the community redefined itself through the Pueblo chile. In 1995, the chamber of commerce held the first Chile and Frijole Festival. Pete Giadone was the only farmer who brought chiles that year, and he sold out to the 5,000 attendees. Other growers liked what they saw and began converting their fields to chiles. But most of them lacked a key marketing item: a roaster. Chiles need to be roasted before they can be frozen, an essential process for extending the lifetime of the product beyond a few days.  

Giadone began making and selling roasters for $1,000 a piece to area farmers, and by 1999 a dozen farmers were roasting chiles from sunup to sundown for three days before the festival. Some 25,000 people showed up that year.

Aficionados use Pueblo chiles in salsa and chili verde (green chile stew), on nachos and pizza, in pasta, and for the most classic Pueblo dish: the slopper, a hamburger swimming in chili verde and topped with chopped onions (pictured above). I even try some goat cheese studded with Pueblo chiles from Milberger Farms.

Farmers in other areas have tried to grow the Pueblo chile, but nowhere else has the same combination of hot days, cool nights, sandy loam soil, and abundant irrigation water. These days the festival draws 100,000 people from all over the U.S. to a rejuvenated historical district and river walk. The transformation of Pueblo’s identity from gritty steel town to heritage tourist destination is complete. To which I say: Keep the antacid handy. I’ll be back.

You can visit Milberger Farms and other farms on Highway 50 East, heading out of Pueblo. Or check out the next annual Chile and Frijole Festival, which is always held the last weekend in September.

In this new EYW Blog series, our writers will feature recipes of dishes they’ve encountered while away and re-created at home. 

A few gluttonous days in New Orleans are hard to beat, but while you can’t bring home the city’s soulful live music or lighthearted survivor spirit, you can at least attempt to make some of its classic foods in the daiquiri-free confines of your own kitchen. After my last trip to NOLA, I spent a week back in New York dreaming about beignets and BBQ shrimp before my husband and I got our acts together, invited some friends over, and set up a Sazerac bar. We were having a NOLA dinner party, damn it!

My mind wandered to what’s quick and delicious, and landed on the simple yet memorable crawfish étouffée—the version we ate at dive bar Coop’s Place [pictured below] on our last day in New Orleans was one of our favorite meals of the trip. For this traditional Cajun dish, crawfish tail meat is “smothered” in a rich, spicy brown stew of vegetables, butter, and Cajun spices, then served over rice. It struck us as the perfect main course for a party of 10—more unusual than other New Orleans classics, like gumbo or jambalaya, but still relatively easy to make.

Inside Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, I tracked down some crawfish as well as two Louisiana sausages, smoky andouille and earthy boudin blanc (pork with liver and often heart, plus rice). Unfortunately, the crawfish was frozen and from Spain, but it’d do the trick (shrimp can also be substituted).

I used an étouffée recipe from famed New Orleans chef, Emeril Lagasse. Specifically, it was the recipe Emeril demonstrated on The Martha Stewart Show—and I must admit, the visual (video) aid actually came in handy. I’ve edited the recipe below just slightly to better reflect what is shown in the video. Note that while it is traditionally Cajun, crawfish étouffée is popular in Creole cooking as well; the inclusion of tomatoes in the recipe I used makes it more a Creole version.

Because we had a large group—and everyone likes to eat a lot—we doubled this recipe with no problems (two pounds of crawfish still sufficed). It turned out so delicious we had very little left over.

During the party, we served the grilled andouille and boudin sausages—you steam the latter for about 10-15 minutes, then remove the thin casing and squeeze some lemon on it—with spicy Creole mustard and French bread as scene-setting appetizers, alongside a centerpiece fashioned from Mardi Gras beads and a souvenir voodoo doll (couldn’t resist). And to drink? It can only be Sazeracs—a little Herbsaint or absinthe to coat the glass, Peychaud’s bitters, rye whiskey, simple syrup, lemon peel (recipe). Our group found them exceedingly easy to drink.

Serves 8

6 Tbsp. unsalted butter

4 Tbsp. all-purpose flour

2 cups chopped onions

1/2 cup chopped celery

1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper

2 bay leaves

2 sprigs fresh thyme

6 cloves garlic, minced

2 1/2 cups shrimp stock

1 cup peeled, seeded and diced tomatoes

1 tsp coarse salt

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

Hot sauce, like Tabasco, to taste

2 lbs crawfish tails, with the fat (or substitute shrimp, if you must)

2 tsp Emeril’s Original Essence (or make your own)

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1 cup chopped scallions

1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

Hot cooked white rice, for serving

Directions

1. In a large, heavy saucepan, melt 4 Tbsp of butter over medium heat. Make a roux by adding the flour slowly and whisking to combine. Continue to cook, stirring constantly, until roux is the color of peanut butter. (Do this for a good couple of minutes, being careful not to burn the butter.)

2. Add onions, celery, bell pepper, bay leaves, and thyme. Cook, stirring occasionally, until vegetables have softened, 6-8 minutes. (They will appear dry—that’s okay.) Stir in garlic; let cook for a minute. Add stock, tomatoes, salt, cayenne, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco; bring to a boil. Skim surface, reduce heat, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes.

3. In a medium bowl, toss together crawfish tails (and any crawfish fat) and the Essence, and add to the simmering sauce along with the lemon juice, scallions, and parsley. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes. Add remaining 2 Tbsp butter; stir to combine. Serve over rice.

A version of this article originally appeared on Foodists.ca.

“Detroit, being the great melting pot that it is, will continue to shine in its diverse food offerings.” –Sy Ginsberg, co-owner, United Meat & Deli
 

Tell us about your job.
I oversee the processing of our products at United Meat & Deli; I handle the development of new products; I’m in charge of procuring raw materials and ingredients; and I handle much of our national sales.

Another one of my jobs is “deli consultant.” This is my favorite: Since I’ve been involved in the Jewish-style deli business for more than 50 years, I offer assistance to future [deli owners], helping them set up their deli, plan the menu, train, and generally get it off the ground. I do not charge for my time—I love doing this, and it usually helps to establish long-term friendships and business relationships.

What led you to your current position?
I started working at age 15 in a neighborhood deli in Detroit. At age 23, instead of finishing school, I became an entrepreneur, owning my own little deli. After a few years, I wanted something bigger and better, so I built a new deli with 150 seats: The Pickle Barrel Deli, in Southfield, Michigan. We did very well there, but it burned me out. I sold my interest five years later and got involved in the wholesale and distribution side of the business. This evolved into the creation of my own brand of products, which I still process and sell all around the country.

We loved the sandwich [pictured above], made with Sy Ginsberg corned beef, that we had at Russell Street Deli. How would you say your product (corned beef in particular) fits into the culinary landscape of Detroit?
Corned beef is, of course, very popular in the Jewish-style delis, and has been for as long as I can remember.  Now it’s become a very popular item in the inner city. Corned beef is a favorite food of the African-American trade in Detroit and Cleveland. Almost every diner, tavern, or family-style restaurant in the nation will have a Reuben sandwich on the menu.

How does Detroit’s corned beef compare to New York’s?
I think the Midwest flavor profile is far superior. While New York-style pastrami is great (we also produce this), I feel its corned beef is mostly very bland.

Them’s fighting words! Name one iconic food in Detroit that a visitor cannot miss.
A sandwich of corned beef, coleslaw, and Russian dressing on double-baked rye tops my list, followed closely by the Detroit-version Coney dog with our Detroit-style chili, yellow mustard, and chopped onion. And you can’t leave out Faygo Red Pop and Vernor’s ginger ale.

Eat Your World focuses a lot on a city’s historic and traditional foods. What do you think is the future of food/drink in Detroit?
It’s hard to talk about the future of food, since people are so transient. Mobility is a great thing. With metro Detroit’s burgeoning Middle Eastern population, I’ve become a huge fan of Arabic food. The same thing happened 15 or 20 years ago, when I was introduced to Greek food here. Fifty years ago you had to drive around to find a pizzeria; now there are two or three at every intersection—especially since Little Caesars and Dominos were founded in the Detroit area. Detroit, being the great melting pot that it is, will continue to shine in its diverse food offerings.

On EYW, we ask users to share short food memories related to travel, a favorite meal, growing up—anything. Can you share a brief food memory with our readers?
I feel especially fortunate that I’ve been able to travel and experience so many different cultures, and their food. I love going to the appetizing shops in New York: Zabar’s, Dean & DeLuca, and Russ & Daughters are great places. Places like Yonah Schimmel’s knish factory and the sidewalk pickle vendors are so fascinating. Farmers markets are great.  The seafood markets in Seattle are fun. Visiting market places in Italy or Russia or Turkey or anyplace else, where people go shopping daily and bargain with the vendors for their dinner ingredients, is so cool to experience. Our world is so diverse and it is wonderful to be able to experience its diversity.

We often feel like we’re on a scavenger hunt when we travel for EYW. Sometimes we have just three days in a city to find all the foods we’ve researched, come up with good alternatives, entertain new ideas suggested by locals we meet, identify suitable “burn it off” locations. Despite the inevitable last-day dash around said city to tie up loose ends, we’ve become super efficient at these tasks. But doing it in, say, Boston and doing it in Agra, a garbage-strewn Indian city congested with all manner of human and animal traffic, are two very different things.

Last weekend, we arrived in Agra around 4:45pm after the 4.5-hour ride from Delhi, tired but hungry and eager to get started on our to-do list. We’d already encountered a few obstacles—the honking fiend of a driver arranged for us by Scott’s company couldn’t speak English and didn’t know his way around Agra at all. I’d assumed we’d use tuk-tuks to get around in town, but it didn’t make sense to pay a series of drivers when we were already paying for one for the weekend. One who came with some air-conditioned respite from the 105-degree heat. So despite being generally anti-guide, we had to hire one in Agra. As a bonus, he’d take us around the Taj Mahal in the morning. (That is, of course, why anyone ever comes to Agra in the first place.)

The guide, Danish, sat up front with our driver, Brijesh, and did a double take at the Google map I’d passed him. “Bhagat Halwai? You want to go to Bhagat Halwai?” he asked, incredulous. Indeed we did; I’d heard that was the best place for chaat around here. “Never in my six years of guiding has anyone asked to go there,” he told us. He turned to the task of directing Brijesh through the unruly streets of Agra. After a while we left the main highway for a dense interior lane that Danish introduced as a “short route.” We were promptly stuck behind a line of giant water buffalo.

The area, called Belanganj, was teeming with people on bikes, on foot, in tuk-tuks and bicycle rickshaws, on motorbikes and donkey-pulled wagons. Typical of what we’d seen of India thus far, the street was a free-for-all, traffic-wise: No unspoken “drive on the left” rule was in effect; swerving and plentiful honking were all but encouraged. One of the few dummies taking an automobile down this road, we might as well have had “wide load” plastered on our small sedan. We inched forward, past the rooftop monkeys and wandering goats and open-air food stalls, all the while doubting that any of our potential future readers would actually retrace these steps. (Dear potential future readers: Take a tuk-tuk! With an English-speaking driver! It will be easier.)

Finally, we hit the main M.G. Road and arrived at the chaat shop. We entered the air-conditioned confectioners half of Bhagat Halwai first, where our inquiries for chaat were met with totally blank faces and smiles. Danish to the rescue. The staff pointed us across the street, to the outdoor “food court.” So much for the cool air.

We scanned the menu and settled on bhalla, as the potato-and-chickpea patties were being freshly fried at that very moment. Rule no. 1 of street-eating in India: Make sure it’s fresh. Rule no. 2: Avoid raw unpeeled vegetables, of which this dish had none. What it did have was grated ginger and a spicy-sweet brown sauce that made us instantly happy and forgetful of the day’s headaches.

We had more to do, so settled on the one chaat (plus, the samosa guy was still forming the samosas, so no luck on that front). Back in the car, the discussion turned to parathas, North India’s beloved fried and usually stuffed breads. Agra has a famous vendor, Rambabu. Of course Danish knew it. But he said the original was back in “dangerous,” crowded Belanganj, and suggested we go to the branch near the Agra-Delhi highway, perhaps on our way home the next day. Nice try, Danish: We wanted the real-deal original. Back into the fray we went.

Rambabu’s parathas were greasy but good, and we assured our weary companions we had just one more quick stop—for Agra’s famed petha and dalmoth, both available from a sweets shop—before they were done for the night. Of course nothing is really “quick” in a city like this, so it was another hour-plus before we’d actually made it to the shop, attempted (unsuccessfully, for once) to haggle on prices, and walked out with two boxes of goods, to be photographed later. In truth, we were eager to cut them loose so we could go to Taj Ganj—the bustling area around the Taj Mahal, known for its rooftop hotels and restaurants, shops and touts—and get a beer and a quick glimpse of the Taj before the sun went down. We made it there, sans our crew, just before the sky went dark. Finally relaxing with Kingfishers and a sweet view, we decided to walk a bit, which is when we met a local jeweler named Arif. Arif sold me a pretty purple ring and gave us an enthusiastic recommendation for Mughlai food—the traditional cuisine of Agra, courtesy of the Islamic Mughal empire that ruled North India between the 16th and 19th centuries—the following day, for a restaurant I hadn’t encountered in my research. It sounded perfect.

Next day we had a late start (the driver overslept), but still arrived early enough to the Taj Mahal to beat the crowds and enjoy a semi-cool breeze. Danish got to exercise his passion for actual tourist-guiding between Agra’s two stunning Mughal monuments that morning: the Taj and the Agra Fort. In between, around 9am, we set off on another wild goose chase for the typical Agra breakfast: bedai and jalebi, a spicy potato-curry-and-fried bread affair followed up by a sugary, sticky-sweet dessert (the latter is pictured below). All for breakfast! It’s the kind of oddball, delicious pairing—sold on a busy street corner thronged by hungry locals—that makes me love this country.

Everyone satiated, we piled back into the car and over to Agra Fort for a few more hours of sightseeing. We asked Danish if he enjoyed the “tour” he’d been giving us, and he said yes. “I don’t think I’ll ever guide anybody again like you two,” he told us. Probably safe to assume, yes.

When the heat became unbearable we left, bidding farewell to Danish only after he gave Brijesh explicit directions on where to drive next: Sadar Bazaar, home to several Mughlai restaurants, including the one Arif had suggested. We had one meal to go, a proper North Indian curry and bread kind of meal. We were back in the car to Delhi by 12:45pm, our tummies full and eyes wide at all we’d seen and done—and we were stuck in traffic.

Our London EYW section—some 40-plus traditional foods and drinks in England’s fabulous capital—is under construction while we travel to India, but you can read about our absolute favorite Brit dining experience, at the new, historic-food-focused Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, over at Foodists.ca. (Pictured is the clever meat fruit, a dreamy, mousse-like chicken-liver parfait dipped in mandarin gelatin, inspired by the cheeky medieval English tradition of serving “illusion fruit” at dinner parties.) Stay tuned this summer for both London and New Delhi coverage!

When I was asked to meet up with some clients in Detroit, I had a feeling a weekend of EYW coverage would lead to some very good things. It was just a few years ago that I had quickly visited Greektown and experienced the famous "flaming cheese." I knew there had to be much more than that, and was determined to convince Laura to make it a serious destination for us. With some trepidation, she began to research Detroit's foods, and slowly a list of musts became apparent that sold us both to the idea.

When you mention Detroit to anyone, you get a "why would you want to go there?" look immediately. The city has clearly lost its luster over the last god-knows-how-many years, and has earned a reputation as a desolate urban graveyard. And yes, when you travel throughout the city, it is just that: Boarded-up factories are abundant; once-glorious run-down houses and buildings (like the iconic Michigan Central Station, above) are ubiquitous on almost every stretch of the city proper. I couldn't help but think of New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward around every corner. It is visually horrific and photographically brilliant in a sick and twisted way.

But what makes our job so incredible is that we put together itineraries that focus on the best of what a city like Detroit has to offer. Because of this, we're able to unravel the heart and soul of a place, even when it's hard to see on the surface. Detroit has this heart and soul. Born-and-bred locals can drive down any street and remember details of the Motown era's storefronts, and happily dine at old-school institutions like Buddy's and Bates, relishing in their personal historical significance. The ethnic groups of Poland, Greece, and the Middle East (among others) still have their pockets, and the food and traditions that go with them. On a cold winter's day, we were shocked to see Detroit's enormous Eastern Market, demonstrating the freshness of vegetables, eggs, breads, and sausages that are not only sold to shoppers, but are also used in restaurant kitchens across the city. (It seems Detroit has had a locavore movement for years, but doesn't feel the need to hit you over the head with it.)

What makes Detroit special to me, however, are the people we met during our eating and drinking journey. The locals who haven't fled despite the economic hardships; people who are warm and friendly, realistic and proud; bar companions who've suffered and have seen suffering, yet over a delicious local beer will laugh and tell you about neighborhoods showing new signs of life. In a city where you light cheese on fire with a jubulant "OPA!" it's not hard to push through and continue to feel its strong beating heart.

Last weekend I finally attended one of Jeff Orlick’s (a.k.a. Jeffrey Tastes’s) Ambassador Program events, in which one person acts as expert of a cuisine (and, often, culture) and leads a meal for a small group in a NYC restaurant of their choice. Held at Tori Shin uptown and led by Japanese native Yasushi Sasaki, this event revolved around yakitori, or grilled chicken skewers—a more upscale take on the popular street snack than what I’d previously been exposed to along St. Marks Place, this time involving organic birds from Pennsylvania—and I hastened to participate, as Scott and I were feverishly researching our own trip to Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto next month. This was one day after the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, before the nuclear fears reached their apex.

The meal included a demonstration by Tori Shin’s affable chefs, who skillfully sliced the chickens and formed the skewers, each of which highlights a particular part of the bird: the breast, thigh, neck, wing, skin, liver, heart, gizzard, knee cartilage—nothing goes to waste here. It turns out there are some 40 different varieties of yakitori possible, including vegetable options (like the skewered salty shishitou peppers we tasted). Watching the butchers’ precise and practiced cuts called to mind the expert skills of a sushi chef.

Between sips of Sakura Emaki, a sweet springtime sake, my fellow diners and I were treated to eight different yakitori, most of which were basted with a seaweed-infused sake before getting charcoal-grilled. While I enjoyed the moist shisomaki (breast with shiso) and the popular kashiwa (breast and thigh meat mix), those were quickly overshadowed by the more interesting tsukune (chicken meatballs), juicy bonjiri (chicken tail/butt), and crispy-fatty kawa (skin), which I ordered separately. What a joy, though, to be served with such pride, to receive one skewer every eight minutes or so and savor each bite as it comes. As a bonus, I was learning so much about yakitori—just one of the many foods we intend to cover for EYW in Japan next month, but an important one. I left with the name of a recommended yakitori restaurant in Tokyo scrawled on the back of a Tori Shin card, a gift from a waiter.

Except a few days later, after much thought, we decided we had to postpone our trip. The radiation fears, the supply shortages, the potential food contamination— although each of my Tokyo contacts has assured me via email that Japan will bounce back quickly, it’s simply not a good time to embark on a self-styled culinary tour of the country. The Japanese are strong, but badly scarred; they are rightfully proud of their gastronomy and traditions, but how can we ask them to embrace us and our mission at this time? It’s too soon, too uncertain.

So we are setting aside our airline vouchers to fly to Japan in the fall—ideally in October, when the country’s maple trees are aglow and nuclear fears surely a thing of the past. As the Japanese say, nanakorobi yaoki: Fall down seven times, stand up eight. The rising sun will always rise again. Until then, our thoughts are with Japan for a speedy recovery. 

The New York City craft beer scene has exploded in recent years, but with a grand total of five breweries/brewpubs within city limits, we’re still a bit behind on the production front when compared to other U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Portland, Denver, and Austin, where it seems a new brewery opens every other week. (Fortunately, NYC fares better with craft beer bars.) But I have new hope for the future of New York beers after attending Brooklyn Wort, a biannual home-brew competition that packed 30 local brewers into the Gowanus Studio Space yesterday.

Scott and I were there primarily to support friends and event sponsors Valley Malt, a small Massachusetts-based start-up changing brewing in the Northeast for the better with its artisanal malt made from locally grown grains. We’re huge supporters of American craft beer as well, of course, but having found the beer in more than a few one-off brewpubs around the country just so-so, we had admittedly lowered expectations for a room full of home-brewed beer. Apologies, New York brewers: We seriously underestimated you.  

Among the complexly flavored offerings on hand were a terrific golden hibiscus ale (from brewer Christopher Lehault), a Belgian strong chocolate ale (Carlos Varas), an American barley wine (Simon Tepas), a few good American IPAs. Most unexpected, perhaps, was Andrew Maiorana’s black pepper brown ale, which tasted pleasingly like what it sounds like. Many of the brewers were from Brooklyn—especially from Park Slope, which makes sense given its glorious trifecta of Brooklyn Homebrew, Bierkraft, and Beer Table, among other great area bars—but I also met some promising Staten Island brewers, a guy from my own borough of Queens, a brewer working to open a new microbrewery near the Jersey Shore.

As I made the rounds with tulip glass in hand, I couldn’t help but wonder which of these home-brewing guys/gals might be the next distributing brewery to join Eat Your World’s NYC roundup. But while some of the brewers I spoke to had professional aspirations—here’s hoping for a future Squirrel Tail brewpub in Brooklyn—others simply do it out of passion and fun. Nearly all of them lamented the difficulty of going pro in New York, citing astronomical costs and lack of space, which would certainly help explain New York’s slower brewery growth compared to smaller, cheaper cities.

They may not have the space or funds just yet, but maybe, just maybe, one of these talented home brewers will find a way to break into our city’s brewing scene and give Garrett Oliver a run for his money (might we suggest a “Queens Brewery”?). In the meantime, a Saturday spent tasting fresh handcrafted beer is never a bad thing. And when it’s really good beer? Now that’s a great Saturday.

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a year since Scott and I first hatched the Eat Your World idea, while traveling around Colombia. Since then there’s been a lot of blood, sweat, and tears—and unexpected delays—but we’re proud to be where we are now. This week we soft-launched to a large group of friends and family, our public soft launch is just around the corner, and, with editorial food-and-drink coverage for 19 cities from 13 different states/provinces/countries, the site is really coming along. Slow and steady wins the race, right?

Of course, there’s much more on the way: We’ve done a lot of domestic traveling this year, and I’m still playing catch-up on the writing front. Soon we’ll have sections for Austin, Los Angeles, Denver, and Boston, with lots more EYW snapshots coming too. In early 2011 we’re planning to expand our international coverage, with extended trips to either India or parts of Europe—or hopefully both!

The year has been challenging yet exhilarating, and we are super excited for what’s to come. We hope you too are greeting 2011 with a positive, enthusiastic outlook. From the small EYW staff in New York: Happy holidays, and may your new year be filled with delicious exploration.

Cranberries. I don’t think of them too often, unless I’m throwing a handful of dried ones into my salad. Or, you know, it’s this time of year, when cranberry sauce makes its annual appearance in the Thanksgiving spread. But cranberries are an important fruit to the U.S., not only because of their more recently publicized “superfruit” antioxidant qualities, but because they’re one of the few fruits that originated on North American soil. They were a staple in the diets of Native Americans, who passed along the wild fruit’s benefits to the Pilgrims when they arrived in the early 1600s. Cultivation of the berries began on Cape Cod in 1816; commercial harvesting followed in 1847. Today, southeastern Massachusetts has more than 14,000 acres of cranberry bogs—some 900 bogs—and trails only Wisconsin in production of the fruit in the U.S. (New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington also produce cranberries, though in much smaller numbers.)

A few weeks ago in Cape Cod, we had the good fortune to witness a cranberry harvest, which happens every fall when the fruits reach their peak flavor and crimson color. We’d been in town for a mid-October wedding and had no idea it was harvest season until a local friend mentioned it. Scott and I are frequent visitors to the Cape and are familiar with the area’s many cranberry bogs, but we usually visit in summer, when they look like nothing more than dry, low-lying, shrub-covered fields. For the harvest, however, the soft, marshy bogs are flooded with up to 18 inches of water; water-reel harvesters are used to loosen the berries from their vines; and—the cool part—the berries, which contain pockets of air, float to the surface, where they’re corralled and loaded onto trucks.  

You can often observe a cranberry harvest from the road, as was the case at the Coonamessett bog—a bog first developed in 1890—we passed off of John Parker Road in Falmouth. Driving around a bend, we suddenly glimpsed a scarlet carpet of cranberries floating atop an ephemeral lake, glistening in the sun—a glorious vision only seen a handful of days a year. That this harvest coincides yearly with the multicolored fall foliage typical of the Northeast is almost unfair to the rest of the country.

We pulled over, walked around, picked up some floating berries at the bog’s perimeter, even ate a few—not really recommended, as they’re bitingly tart. The guys in waders and on machines waved and went about their business, oblivious (or accustomed) to our picture-taking, surrounded by the berries that would perhaps soon meet their fate in Ocean Spray packaging around the world—or on my own dinner table at Thanksgiving. Here, it all begins.

It was such a relief last week to find out the local Queens farmers market has been changed to year round. With only a week left to Thanksgiving, we usually are stocking up on the turkey meat and sausage that we will freeze and use throughout the winter. We have previously made good use of that system, but not getting seasonal vegetables has been the hard part. “Do we really have to go to Trade Fair [our overcrowded supermarket] for produce?” This is a common question we repeat throughout the cold months. “I miss the farmers market,” with a sad face, is another generic overused statement during the dark days of January and February.

We have become so accustomed to our Sunday walk around the block, into the heart of the Jackson Heights historical district. It is nice to walk in the opposite direction from our usual path to the train and remember this is our neighborhood too. It’s the part that feels more like a neighborhood: manicured landscaping, endless rows of trees, families coming and going. There are no stores, no subways, and hardly a spatter of garbage. As we approach the market from across the street, we start planning how we are going to tackle the vendors in the most efficient manner. “Should we start from the near side, or work our way back from the mushroom guy?” “Are we actually going to spend all that money on mushrooms?” These questions have become such a part of our weekly routine. And they are some of my favorite questions to ask. Then there’s the inevitable, “What are we going to have for dinner tonight, and tomorrow?” “Do we want fish?” “What would make good sides?” And you can’t forget, “What can we make that will last two days?”

As we go through the stands, we carefully choose our vegetables and purchase whatever fruit is available for our morning bowls of cereal. If we see eggs, we will pick those up, and of course the juice guys are a weekly pilgrimage. No more Tropicana for us! This year there are some newbies: grass-fed beef and local cheese, even Long Island wine. We pass those stands quickly, knowing we must budget and spend wisely.

As December approaches, we are anticipating less of our favorite vendors to show up. And through January there may be just a few who will brave the cold. But we will be there to support the farmers and fill up our kitchen with all the local produce and meats and eggs we can. And if no one shows up, we know we can at least walk in the other direction and get a cheap taco or tamal on Roosevelt Avenue.

It’s dangerous to write about food on an empty stomach.

This past week, as we scramble to get more content up on the site in anticipation of a soft launch, I find myself craving foods I ate last weekend or even several months ago: a fried whole Caribbean fish, a particular hot dog, a pasta dish. How can I not when rereading notes and calling to mind said hot dog’s crisp snap and tangy onion sauce? How can I possibly research the history of local NYC breweries and not want a cold beer? At 3pm, no less.

Today was the most torturous, though, as I revisited the buttery, cheesy, meaty egg pastas of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, the northern region considered by many to be Italy’s culinary capital. Just the thought of the butter-and-sage-soaked tortelloni of Bologna had me cursing my healthy veggie burger lunch and searching for the best Italian restaurant in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, my corner of Queens—just about equally dominated by South and Southeast Asians and South Americans—is not exactly celebrated for its regional Italian food, and though I knew the restaurant a block away makes a decent tortellini en brodo, I also knew the tortellini were not homemade a la Italia. And while the wine shop down the street carries a good Lambrusco, ideally I’d drink it while snacking on a plate of creamy prosciutto di Parma…which I was unlikely to find around here.

Why couldn’t I be writing about something my ’hood has in spades, like Colombian arepas or South Indian dosas, this week? 

As I saw it, my options were to ride the subway to Soho to try Michael White’s new Emilia-Romagna-inspired Osteria Morini, or else suck it up and pair my fizzy, Queens-bought Lambrusco with…super spicy Thai food. A sommelier probably wouldn’t approve, but at least one of my Italian cravings was satisfied—for now.