Walking Calle Ocho with Croquetas and Cafe Cubanos

July 5, 2016 by Kristin Winet 1 Comment

When I think of Miami, I think of mint green and salmon pink. Mint green curved window balconies, mint green golf carts, mint green storefronts and mint green tank tops. Salmon-colored Spanish-style streets, salmon-colored plates, salmon-colored door frames and bike tires. It comes to mind like photographs, a city on the beach gleaned over with a retro Instagram filter.

There is one place, however, that doesn’t fit into the whole mint-and-pink color scheme. It’s a long stretch of street, aptly named Calle Ocho (because it’s on 8^th Street), and is known famously as Little Havana. Calle Ocho isn’t exactly flashy; it doesn’t look a thing like the other Havana; it’s not even pedestrian-friendly, really. Upon first glance, it looks like little more than a regular strip mall, the kind built in the 1960s, without any attention to aesthetic or architectural flair. When I think of Calle Ocho, I don’t think of muted pastels at all—I think, instead, of brilliant turquoise, of canary yellow, of cherry reds and grassy greens. I see murals (in Little Havana, it’s not graffiti), splashed on the walls of the aging American storefronts, murals of women dancing, of Spanish words and phrases, of flowers in bloom and evocative scenes of Havana as it might be, because so many of these artists have not actually been to Cuba in a very long time.

I went to Calle Ocho in June on the heels of my first trip to the Dominican Republic on a new cruise line called Fathom. It wasn’t your typical kind of cruise: over the course of the week, one of my best friends, Alison, and I had planted baby mangrove trees along a swamp to help with pollution, helped build water filters out of clay and silver for needy families, and played with at-risk children at a summer camp in a small mountain town. Now, we were in Miami for two days—and, because I’ve never tried Cuban food before, I’d signed up for a food tour to do just that.

The tour started inside Augustín Gainza’s personal art gallery. After I go in and let him know I speak Spanish, he shows me his paintings, many of which depict food customs in Havana in the 1940s. His Havana—the one he so clearly remembers—is stuck in his childhood, as he was born in Havana in 1943 but escaped to the U.S. as a man in his early twenties. He has lived here, in Little Havana, ever since. We chat in Spanish, my gringa Spanish still a little tongue-tied, his a rapid-fire, consonant-swallowing Cuban Spanish, and I ask him if he paints from photographs like Ryan, my husband, sometimes does. Agustín tells me no, never—he paints only from his memories. His work is evocative, reminiscent of Matisse, rendered like a sophisticated child, with lumpy chairs and off-kilter horizon lines. But it is also elegant, depicting taro root and plantain fields, queens of the water, Chinaman working in the sugarcane fields. I love it.

As we have been talking, the other seven participants have entered, awkwardly, as if on the first day of school, wondering if they’ve gone into the right classroom, unsure how to introduce themselves to everyone else. Jennifer, a Miami local who will be our guide for the next two and a half hours as we walk in and out of Calle Ocho together, walks in the door, and I wonder: Am I going to be tasting Havana as it once was, or will this be Havana as it is? Or, has Little Havana evolved into its own evocation of memory and, in turn, come into its own?

Medianoche:

a pressed sandwich, cousin of the Cuban, with soft challah bread instead of a baguette; eaten at midnight in bars in Havana

We start with picadillo empanadas. Our server brings them out, piled up on a plate, still steaming. Inside is sofrito, a hearty mix of ground beef, peppers, onions, cumin, and oregano, tomato sauce, green olives, and a bay leaf. As we eat, we introduce ourselves—there’s me, travel writer with her notebook out and camera around her neck, a single mom from Miami who just wanted to try some new food, a young recently-graduated couple from Brooklyn who work in international relations, a French couple, who are also journalists, and a couple on vacation with a basically newborn baby. As we eat our empanadas, we talk about what brought us here: wanting to write stories about Cuban food, wanting to try Cuban food, wanting to see a different part of Miami, etc. We all share our favorite foods.

Then comes out the medianoche, a sandwich sliced diagonally on what looks like flatbread. Jennifer tells us it’s called the “midnight sandwich” because it used to be a popular food to serve at midnight in Havana nightclubs. Though it’s not beans (another food I loathe!), I’m a little nervous about this one, because I know what it’s buttered with: yellow mustard. And I hate yellow mustard. From what I’ve read, to make a medianoche, the sweet Challah bread is swabbed in mustard, filled with roast pork, sliced ham, and slices of Swiss cheese, and topped with mini dill pickles. It’s usually served atop a plate of tiny slivered French fries.

So, it’s down to me and mustard. I know I’ve got to hold up my fearless travel writer self, and so, holding my breath, I pick it up and take a big bite. All I taste is mustard—that awful, smelly, freakishly yellow stuff—but I smile, say “mmm” like everyone else, and swallow.

Then I basically run back to my picadillo empanada, my sofrito and puffed pastry respite.

Croquetas and café Cubano:

where you eat small fried croquettes out of a window and drink small, thumb-sized coffee that has more caffeine in it than a large cup of American drip coffee

Our next stop is a window, literally. Here, though, it’s called a ventanilla (“little window”) and the idea is easy: since there are no food trucks here, people pop by little ventanillas to grab easy-to-eat bites like croquettes, coffee, empanadas, and other finger foods. Jennifer takes a large round tray filled with little fried ovals and tiny plastic cups from the woman behind the window and passes them around. We much on the croquetas de jamón first, little fried bits made of a kind of “ham paste.”

“These are pretty classic snack foods,” Jennifer says, “but this is my favorite thing in the whole world.” She nods at the row of dark-colored drink in the little glasses. “It’s café Cubano.” Café Cubano, apparently, is a type of thick espresso that originated on the streets in Cuba after espresso machines were first imported there from Italian immigrants. What makes it unique, though, is the stream of sugar the Cubans pour into it as its being brewed.

“You can have it with a little bit of steamed milk,” Jennifer tells us as we all tip our cups and take the shot of espresso in one sip. “That’s called a cortadito.” The ratio is either 50/50 or 75/25 espresso to milk, and it always comes pre-sweetened with sugar.

When you taste café Cubano, you’ll see exactly what I mean. It’s candy disguised as coffee.

Mojito:

a mint-infused cocktail that reminds me of my first travels and of tropical islands

Normally, I wouldn’t swing from super-strong espresso to an alcoholic beverage in the time it takes me to cross the street, but today, that’s exactly what we do. We go from the ventanilla to a well-established bar across the street called Ball & Chain—a place that, in its heyday, featured such national acts as Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, and Chet Baker. Its storied past, too, evokes the same kind of odd nostalgia that this whole area has: during its first 25-year run (after it opened in 1935), the place was often filled with bootleggers, gamblers, felons, and artists, meaning that its music acts—mostly jazz and blues musicians—filled the clubs every night. It reopened in 2014, with new owners committed to restoring the glory of the early Little Havana nights.

Inside, there is a live drum band and a Cuban man in a hat shaking maracas and dancing in a circle. He’s also wearing his sunglasses, but I can’t figure out why—not only is he inside, but he’s inside a dark bar.

We order a round of mojitos, drink them quickly, and imagine what it would be like to be here at night, amidst both criminality and greatness.

Pastelito guayabo:

sweet guava-filled puffed pastry, served in workplaces on Fridays to celebrate the start to the weekend

Our next stop is to an unassuming bakery, where we munch on fresh guava pastries.

The walls are bare and the Challah bread is wrapped up in paper with Cuban flags printed on them. Jennifer tells us that people often serve pastries like this on Friday afternoons. I stuff an extra pastelito in my purse for Alison, who’s back at our hotel working on her novel. I know she’s going to love it.

Sugarcane juice:

in which you drink the world’s natural sweetener, all on its own

From our brief stop at the ventanilla, I knew Cubans liked sugar, but I did not know they liked it so much that they drink pure glasses of it. Here, in a frutería filled to the brim with boxes of plantains, guavas, mangoes, papayas, pineapples, mamey, and sugarcane stalks, we watch as the man behind the counter pushes the long grassy stalks through a machine and turns them into sugar water.

He fills each glass with ice and pours the sweet liquid into each one. The drink, called guayapo frío, is a pineapple-yellow color, foamy on top. Its sweet (no surprises there) but not in the way I imagined: it’s sweet in a generous, natural way, like water that has been tinged with a light agave syrup might.

As we sit outside in the shade and sip our drinks, I think about how strange it is that I’m exploring Calle Ocho with seven people I’ve never met. We’re sharing this intimate experience of eating new foods together—one of the true joys of life—and yet, I don’t really know anything about any of them.. We’ve all fractured back into our original partnerships (if we had them) and those of us who are here by ourselves talk about our travels, our favorite foods, and where we want to visit next.

Abuela María ice cream:

to cleanse the palate, a guava, cream cheese, and cookie ice cream does just the trick

We come to the end of our time together at an ice cream shop. Jennifer mentions we might want to try the Abuela María, a Cuban ice cream flavor made from vanilla, guava chunks, cream cheese, and galletas María, crunchy sweet butter crackers. The line is literally out the door, so as we wait, I watch the people around me: young Cuban families, young American families, foreign students all wearing backpacks with their school’s logo on it, college-aged students, and couples. They are all here, like me, for the very same reason.

Because we all love ice cream.

There’s something magical that happens around food—no doubt about that—and even more when you experience it like window-shopping, trying individually-sized samples along a historic street that runs for 12 city blocks in Miami.

I get back to my hotel and give Alison her pastry. As I suspected, the restaurants, cafés, and window shops in Little Havana are not just a piece of history. They are continuing to make their mark, every time one of us takes a bite.

Yours in travel,

Kristin

—

In case you’re interested, we visited the following restaurants in Calle Ocho during our 2.5 hour food tour: El Pub Restaurant, Exquisito Restaurant, Ball and Chain Restaurant, Yisell Bakery, Los Pinarenos Fruteria, and Azucar Ice Cream. All are on SW 8^th Street in Little Havana in Miami, Florida. The Miami Culinary Tour – Little Havana Food Tour is $59/person and includes all food and drinks.

Special thanks to Fathom Cruises and to Miami Culinary Food Tours for sponsoring my trip to the Dominican Republic and, respectively, the aforementioned food tour. All opinions are, of course, the author’s own.

Why I’m Spending Two Weeks in Eastern Europe

May 23, 2016 by Kristin Winet 4 Comments

Try it: Tell the next five people you meet that you’re going to be spending two weeks in Eastern Europe this summer and see what they say.

You’ll probably hear that Budapest is supposed to be nice. Or that coastal Croatia is just as beautiful as its other Mediterranean neighborhoods and still super cheap. You’ll probably hear some jokes about goulash.

Yeah…that’s exactly why I’m going to Eastern Europe.

Last year, I whetted my appetite for the post-Soviet world, spending two wonderful weeks exploring Russia with my mom and getting to know a part of the world that, for a long time, had been completely shrouded in mystery to me. It was exhilarating. During those two weeks, my mom and I discovered how onion domes are made, how devoted to the arts and literature Russians really are, and how complicated the everyday lives are for people who live, day in and day out, under Vladimir Putin’s rule. We saw the commingling of Communist-era blocs—homes still owned and lived in by the families who were given free housing back in the 70s—and we saw the intense contrast between that world and the elaborate palaces, cathedrals, and summer homes of the Romanovs. We visited the island of Kizhi and witnessed a cathedral that was built in the 1700s completely out of interlocking wood pieces –no nails or glue of any kind. We sat outside at midnight under the large, low sun and imagined what it must be like to try and sleep during Russia’s white nights if you don’t have pitch-black curtains. We took a little boat down the canals of St. Petersburg, and we wandered the cosmopolitan streets of Moscow.

More than anything else, our trip broke, reinforced, and fractured every stereotype I had about Russia (except the whole “polar bears on the streets of Moscow” thing …sadly it was 70 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny). Just like the United States, Russians, too, find themselves in a globally powerful country that politically doesn’t always jive with their interests, and most of them want to be heard, understood, and respected.

I’ve been thinking about it all year. With every article I wrote about my trip, I realized that I wanted to know more—I wanted to learn more about what life was (and is) like in the countries and societies that were also affected by Russia and by Communist rule. I wanted to meet more people, hear their stories, and better understand a part of history that is still so elusive to me.

Basically, I wanted to see more of Eastern Europe.

And what better way than to sail with Viking again? One of the best parts about taking trips with Viking is that you really can cover a good bit of ground—and you’re surrounded by experts who live and work in the countries you’re visiting. After Russia, I felt like I had such a deeper and more profound understanding of the culture there because I could ask questions and talk to our tour guides about their own experiences. Plus, they held a few “round-table” sessions where we could come and ask questions about education, housing, politics, and anything else that was on our minds. People did come, and they asked hard questions. The tour guides were ready for all of them and answered each query honestly and openly.

Plus, Viking’s philosophy is centered around three different kinds of immersion experiences:

Culture & leisure (such as attending Swan Lake at the Hermitage Theatre in St. Petersburg)
Work & everyday life (such as attending a cooking class or visiting the home of someone who lives in the community)
Access to points of cultural or historical interest (such as a privately-curated tour of the Peterof Palace)

I looked through the itineraries online and quickly decided on the one that would be most beneficial to me:

Passage to Eastern Europe

The 11-day cruise covers 5 countries, including Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, and Hungary. It offers a number of offshore excursions, too, that sound like they would really give me a diversity of perspectives on life in both the city and countryside. I signed up right away.

Then, I went to the store, bought a card, scribbled a note to my husband about how much I wanted to celebrate the beginning of our new chapter together (more on our spectacularly crappy professional year later), and I invited him to join me. He opened the card and looked at me in the way he always looks at me when I’ve concocted up a new way for us to travel together. He could see that my eyes were sparkling in a mix of anticipation and excitement.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

So here we are. We leave tomorrow morning for our long voyage to Hungary. Once we’re there, we’ll spend a few days at the Radisson Blu Hotel Bucharest (sounds swanky…I hope they have those fluffy terrycloth bathrobes and slippers!), and then we’ll hit the Danube for our cruise.

In case you’re considering a trip to Eastern Europe, here’s the scoop on where we’ll be headed and what my plans are while I’m there. Keep in mind that I’ve crammed in a couple of side trips/journo stuff for my own writing (you wouldn’t necessarily be interviewing a Magyar horseman, investigating the history of paprika as a colonial food, or visiting Memento Park to see gigantic Soviet-Era statues….well, you might be, in which case, let me know!).

Here’s the lowdown on where we’re headed.

ROMANIA (Days 1-2)

The first leg of our journey will be two days in Bucharest, Romania’s cultural capital. From what I can tell, Bucharest seems to be relatively underrated as a tourist destination, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In our first two days, we’re going to check out the French-style boulevards, public gardens (I have heard marvelous things about the Bucharest Botanical Gardens), and visit a few of the city’s palaces. We’ll be spending an afternoon in the historic Lipscani district, which, from what I can tell, is a European beauty—full of cobblestone streets, boutique inns, art galleries, and shops and restaurants.

We’ll also be checking out a few of Bucharest’s tourist “hot spots:” the monastery where Prince Vlad is rumored to have been buried, and the Palace of the Parliament, which is said to contain over 3,000 rooms. Now that’s a house.

BULGARIA (Day 3-4)

Our first stop will be the town of Russe, Bulgaria, otherwise known as Eastern Europe’s “Little Vienna” for its historically critical port, mash-up of neo-baroque, neo-rococo, and Renaissance architecture, and its relaxed, European waterfront lifestyle.

We’ve signed up for a day trip to Veliko Tarnovo and Arbanasi, two medieval towns renowned for their handicrafts and local artist colonies. We’ll have coffee at a rooftop café in Veliko Tarnovo, overlooking the Old Town, explore Samovodska Charshia (one of the art districts) and visit castle ruins. Then, we’ll head to Arbanasi, where we’ll have lunch and meet with a merchant who makes products out of the essence of roses.

I’m not sure we’ll have time for the Russe City Walking Tour, but if we do, it will take us to the old city center and to a couple of museums, including the Museum of History (which houses over 140,000 artifacts—I can’t to dig into the archives on some of these objects!) and the Ethnographic Museum, which houses objects and artifacts related to people’s everyday lives in historical Bulgaria.

The next day, we’re planning on heading to the Belogradchik Rocks, a trip which will no doubt inspire the archaelogist inside me. The Rocks are not only a geological wonder, the result of millennia of erosion, freezing, and weathering, but they are also home to the Ottoman-built Belogradchik Fortress—a maze of rooms built into the cliffs.

IRON GATE (Day 5)

Today, I think we’re just sailing through the Iron Gate, an area renowned as one of Europe’s most stunning natural gorges. We’ll see the Carpathian Mountains on one side and the Balkan Mountains on the other.

SERBIA (Day 6)

Today will be devoted to exploring Belgrade, described by Lonely Planet as “outspoken, adventurous, proud, and audacious” (sounds a lot like the kind of person I’d want to hang out with) with a “gritty exuberance” (where do they find these adjectives?!). We’re planning on taking a city tour and then hopefully catching at least a happy hour. I mean, if we’re going to be in one of the world’s hottest places for nightlife, we have to at least have a Serbian cocktail, right?

CROATIA (Day 7)

Now, it’s really too bad that I can’t skip away for a day or two and head to the Mediterranean coast of Croatia, but I’m actually kind of excited about where we are going: Osijek. I don’t know exactly what this excursion will entail, but we’re planning on visiting a family and then walking along the promenade on the Drava River. I’m imagining a relatively relaxing day in this small Croatian village—which is perfectly fine with me.

HUNGARY (Days 8-11)

To be honest, Hungary is one of those countries I’ve wanted to visit since I was a little girl, and I don’t know exactly why. Maybe because I always laughed about the name—how could a country share a name with my language’s word for wanting to eat?!—but also because I’ve always heard such magnificent things about Budapest, the country’s capital. Our journey will end here, in Hungary, a place I am so excited to meet.

We’ll begin our three days in Kalocsa, a place I’ve learned is not only where the majority of the world’s paprika is harvested, but also where the Hungarian Puszta, a community devoted to preserving a non-motorized world and who get around on horseback, live, work, and play. I’m hoping to interview one of the horsemen before or after their show (which is rumored to be both acrobatic, artful, and death-defying) but I’m not sure we’ll be able to communicate with each other. I’ll have my Google Translate app with me, but it’s not always so easy to do an interview when you’re both typing into a smartphone what you’d really like to say. But we’ll see—I really want to learn more about their attitudes against motorized transport and modernity.

Our last two days will be in the lovely city of Budapest. We’ll hop on a city tour one day and head to a Roman thermal bath, but the rest of our time in Hungary will be spent running around trying to fit in all the places I’m writing about. Though I don’t know exactly how I’ll get there yet, I’m planning on finding Memento Park, where, according to their delightful website, the “ghosts of Communist Dictatorship” live. The park is basically an open-air museum where, after the fall of Communism, people dumped a whole bunch of gigantic Communist statues. I can’t wait to see this place.

I’m also interested in visiting the Central Hall Market, which I’ve heard from some other travel writing friends is a photographer’s dream. Because of my nerdy interest in public spaces and rhetoric in the world, I’m also trying to fit in a trip to the For Sale Pub, a bar that encourages drinkers to leave their words on the walls, floors, chairs, and ceilings. They can leave their “personal advertisements” anywhere they like. It sounds magical, and weird, and the perfect place for me.

With that, then, I’m going to start packing. Typing these words has started making my heart flutter just a little bit faster…oh, travel, how you ignite my soul, time and time again.

If you’ve been to Eastern Europe and have any tips for me, please leave a note for me here or get in touch with me on social media! I can’t wait to share this journey.

Yours in travel,

Kristin

—

All photographs from Flickr’s Creative Commons. I thank them for their generosity and I hope my photos turn out just as beautifully!

I’m excited to be traveling to Eastern Europe with Viking River Cruises on their 2016 Passage to Eastern Europe cruise from Bucharest to Budapest.

From Roots to Soup: A Night with Chef Moshe Basson

April 14, 2016 by Kristin Winet Leave a Comment

For those who know Moshe Basson, they’ve probably heard how his story begins. They might know, for instance, that the man now called “Israel’s Biblical Chef” arrived in Jerusalem as a nine-month-old Iraqi refugee and that his first memories of Israeli are of living huddled in a tiny aluminum shed with his family in the outskirts of Jerusalem. They might know that he planted a very sacred eucalyptus tree in his front yard when he was only six years old, and that, 25 years later, after growing up in his father’s bakery, his mother’s kitchen, and the fragrant Jerusalem hillsides, he would christen his first restaurant and call it Eucalyptus.

These key facts about one of the most innovative, praised, and renowned chefs in Jerusalem are well-known and documented.

But what those who know Moshe Basson might not know is that he credits his unique cooking method, one grounded in ancient cooking techniques and centering dishes around what is known to some as simply “the accoutrements,” to the women in his young life—and, perhaps even more surprisingly—to a couple of humdrum weeds and roots.

Moshe Basson is not a shy man, either: ask him about his weed-foraging days in the glowing Jerusalem afternoons and he will regale you for hours (he did with us!). When he talks about the ingredients he’s rescued from nearly being forgotten, he seems to glow–it’s clearly his most favorite thing in the entire world.

His menu is full of wild-growing herbs, “sidewalk weeds,” and herbaceous plants and shrubs with names I’ve never heard of, like malva and purslane and hyssop.

If you ask him, Basson will gladly pull up a chair at his elegant al fresco restaurant in the Artist’s Colony near Old Jerusalem—which, though it’s gone through many iterations and locations over the years, still faithfully sticks to the name Eucalyptus—and will tell you all about the Arabic, Iraqi, and Syrian women in his neighborhood who taught him about the beauty of the earth’s overlooked horticulture. As a little boy, he followed these women, fellow refugees from war-torn countries themselves, around the hillsides and abandoned gardens between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and he helped them forage, sort, and cook with the new foods of his new land.

Because his family was nearly penniless when they arrived in Israel, they experimented—a lot—with the foods they could find in the wild. In the kitchen, Basson watched his Iraqi mother play with foods completely out of her cultural repertoire, foods like the herbaceous plants he was bringing home and homemade olive oil, neither of which were popular at all in the Iraqi kitchen. His mother, he says, only knew of hyssop as being a medicine and preferred oils made from sesame seeds. While his dad faithfully whipped up the same menu of Middle Eastern pastries and cakes at the bakery each morning, every meal at home was an experiment.

Though he is often called Israel’s Biblical Chef for his devotion to using local ingredients and excavating old cooking techniques and recipes, Basson will confess that it was never his intention to be connected with Biblical cooking. “So I was just cooking the food of my mom and her mom and others from the region,” he says, gesturing widely at the tables and tables of patrons around him, and, though he has always known that “a big part of the food [at Eucalyptus] is poor people’s food,” he didn’t know that he and his mother were making nearly identical recipes to what was described in the Bible and other ancient texts until years after he opened his first restaurant.

Basson knows, though, that there are certain and unavoidable difficulties with popularizing food that has complicated histories, foods such as the Jerusalem artichoke, a root vegetable (with no relation to the green globe-like artichoke that shares its name) that he uses to make one of his celebrated soups. He tells the story of a time when a French family came to dine and he horrified the grandma at the table when he told them their next course would be a soup made of something many Westerners call a sunchoke. “She shouted and said, ‘No!’ and everybody—I mean, this is a small restaurant under a tree—looked up and she said, ‘No! This was the food in the war. I cannot eat it.’ So everybody was saying OK, they don’t want it, they don’t want it. She said “No, no, no, no, you eat it. It’s wonderful. I cannot.” Then, he laughs. “And then she ate it.” He did not know, he confesses, that Jerusalem artichoke soup—the topinambour in French—was many peoples’ daily rationed food when the Nazis occupied France in World War I. Now, he tells all his French patrons what they’ve eaten only after they’ve eaten it.

Dinner at Eucalyptus is a many-course event, prominently placing roots, stems, spices, and homegrown leafy greens like purslane, chubeza, olesh, and malva at the center of the table. The night begins with freshly-baked focaccia bread and five delectable spreads: aioli, pesto with hyssop, red pepper, sumac-dusted tahini, and garlic mayonnaise.

From there, a soup trio, complete with the infamous Jerusalem artichoke soup as well as lentil and tomato-mint, comes out, and after that, his elegant signature dishes: gnocchi with fresh chubeza, a wild herb slightly reminiscent of spinach, mixed into the potato dough; figs stuffed with roasted chicken and drizzled in in a sweet tamarind sauce; maqluba, the upside-down casserole of rice, chicken, and vegetables, seasoned with fresh saffron and topped with yogurt; fire-roasted eggplant served with tehina and pomegranate seeds; grilled duck breast with mashed potatoes, carrot coulis and berry relish; and thinly-sliced steak served with a mix of ancient greens from his garden.

Dessert is no less extraordinary and no less attentive, with dishes like semolina cake served with wine-soaked pears and jelly or pate-stuffed macaroons drizzled with sweet raspberry sauce.

Though Eucalyptus has been in its current home—a collection of wooden tables, hanging pots, and old-fashioned lamps on the terraced steps of Hutzot Hayotzer, just west of the Old City—for six years now, Basson hasn’t forgotten his long journey to find home. In 1962, he planted a tree he hoped would bear fruit to feed his family. Twenty-five years later, in 1987, he opened the first Eucalyptus restaurant near the eponymous plant he raised as a child. Today, after three additional moves, the walls around which his restaurant now sits, made from the same stone as his home in Iraq, nurture his business, his family, and his future.

A future, he tells me, as we clean up after making maqluba together, that includes his young grandchildren, his family of chickens, and a garden made of beloved, complicated vegetables.

Yours in travel and good eats,

Kristin

Most gracious thanks to Weill and the Israel Ministry of Tourism for hosting our stay in Israel and for introducing me to some of the world’s most incredible places. If you’re interested in visiting Israel, they are a fantastic resource!

Oh, Switzerland: A Night with Cheese Fondue

August 9, 2014 by Kristin Winet 2 Comments

The first question that goes around the table as the seven of us sit down to eat is whether or not I am lactose-intolerant. This is a question that the Swiss always ask their foreign friends when they come to try fondue, they tell me, because we’re about to collectively consume and then digest two very large ceramic bowls of thick, creamy cheese and four loaves of freshly baked French bread. Basically, the question is a challenge: Can I handle it?

For someone like me, who probably could not live without her weekly dose of gooey four-cheese quesadillas back home in Tucson, I accept the challenge with pleasure. “Let’s do this,” I say, picking up my thin long-stemmed, two-prong fork.

My friend Valentine, who has generously welcomed us into her adorable downtown Neuchatel apartment, agrees. “Good,” she says, “because fondue doesn’t wait for anybody.”

Now, before we get started, I need to set the record straight: there is only one kind of Swiss cheese that actually has holes in it, and none of the cheese in the concoction in front of us has any. Most of the 450 kinds of cheese specialties here are decidedly hole-less, creamy-colored, and regional. In our pot tonight, my friends have mixed shredded piles of Gruyére, Emmental, and Fribourg cheeses, all white, pungent, hole-less cheeses from in and around the Neuchatel region where they live. (Neuchatel is about an hour from Geneva in the French-speaking part of Switzerland). To the cheese, they’ve added nearly a whole bottle of white wine, garlic, and cornstarch (which helps prevent separation).

As a culinary concept, fondue was first promoted as a Swiss national dish by the Swiss Cheese Union (yes, there really is an entire union devoted exclusively to Swiss cheese) in the 1930s and then popularized in North America in the 1960s. Since then, the notion of fondue has broadened to include plenty of other dishes in which a food is dipped into a communal pot of some kind of hot liquid. Two popular forms, my friends tell me, are, of course, chocolate fondue with fruit (which, by the way, sounds absolutely divine and which I will not leave Switzerland without trying) and fondue chinoise, which is essentially a nod to the Chinese hot pot, where eaters dip raw meat into hot bouillon broth, let it cook until the desired consistency is reached, and then pull it out and eat it with sauce.

We’re starting tonight, they tell me, with the original.

My friend Johanne, who I’ve known for ten years and with whom I’ve traveled now to four different countries—pours small glasses of black bergamot tea into several small tea cups and passes them around the table. “We normally like to eat our fondue with Earl Grey tea,” she says, “although we will have wine, too.” They have bought several bottles of local Swiss wine, something that—as I would learn—is very difficult to get abroad since most Swiss wine is not exported but typically only sold locally. The wine we’re having tonight is a dry, crisp sauvignon blanc, perfect for sipping with piping hot cheese and freshly baked bread from the market.

Jo’s friend Olivier, a French teacher who teaches recently arrived immigrants and refugees at the university, pipes up. “Not just tea and wine!” he says. “You forgot about the kirsch.” He passes me a shot glass filled with a clear liquid that smells distinctly like cherries and tells me to dunk an entire hunk of bread into the liquor, dip the dripping wet bread into the caquelon of steaming cheese, swirl it around, pull it out and place it back on my plate, let it cool for a few seconds, and then eat the entire thing in one bite. I’m wondering why anyone would want to dunk a soggy piece of liquor-drenched bread into this delicately prepared cheese, but, well, I’m here and this is what everyone is doing, so I go ahead and saturate the piece of bread on my fork into the liquor, swirl it around in the cheese, and stuff it in my mouth. It tastes, unsurprisingly, like I just dunked my meal into my beverage and ate the entire thing all at once.

It’s strong, cheese mixed with the scent of cherries and clear liquor, but I love it.

We spend the next hour and a half eating fondue and talking about politics, language, literature, history, architecture, and art—all of the topics I come to Europe to talk about and all of the topics I yearn for when I’m at home in a world where not all of these subjects are privileged, at least not in ways so effortless like this around the dinner table. While we’re sitting at the table and talking, a huge summer storm gathers outside in the streets. Rain starts pummeling the roof and blowing windy, rainy air through the open windows—and the warm tea and fondue become even more of a comfort food.

And even though I’ve never been here before, and even though I’ve never had fondue like this before, and even though I’ve never met five of the seven people sitting around the table, and even though I miss Ryan and our life together, I feel like I’ve come home.

Articles and photographs by Kristin Winet.

Bringing the Sampran Riverside Cooking Class Home

February 19, 2013 by Kristin Winet 7 Comments

Every time I travel somewhere, I make a promise to myself that I nearly always break: that I am going to attempt and prepare the delicious cuisine from the country I traveled to for my friends and family so that they, too, can share in all the delicious tastes of our world. After all, I’ve always believed that there is nothing more intimate and touching than having the chance to feel the smells, tastes, textures, and delights of a place than through its cooking. When I returned home from Colombia, for instance, I brought maracuya juice concentrate in a plastic bag (hidden between my underwear and socks in my suitcase, of course), all the ingredients I’d need for coconut rice, recipes for patacones (fried green plantains), and a whole lot of chewy, sugary candies I’d bought at a market. Other than the candies–which were always prepared and already edible–I confess that I never made the time to try and recreate the sweet, decadent flavors of the Caribbean for my family. Instead, I took my fiancee to a Caribbean restaurant and we ate a fried fish with its head still on and felt adventurous.

This is almost always the routine.

But when I came home from Thailand recently, my tastebuds already yearning for papaya salad and Thai chilis from the moment I had my last bite, I declared that this time would be different. With an Asian supermarket just steps away from my home, I would continue the journey I had started that week at the Sampran Riverside Resort, a gorgeous eco-cultural resort just a day’s drive from Bangkok. I would make everything out of the little paperback cookbook we were given that day, the day our small press group took a cooking class under a veranda in the pouring rain during a Thai monsoon. The smells–tangy lemongrass and kaffir lime, sweet palm sugar, spicy Thai chili, the I-can’t-quite-place-it (sort of like ginger?) galanga root–all part of the same week I spent falling in love with fruit. Like most places, neither words nor photography can fully capture the smell of a boiling soup or a sour fruit, and nothing can truly take you back to a place like the taste and texture of a food that defines a place. And because I haven’t been able to take my fiancee on my travels to Asia with me, this time, I swore I’d bring it to him.

I decided to start with the items we made during our cooking class: the infamous papaya salad and the spicy and sweet lemongrass soup with shrimp. I fished out the paperback cookbook from Sampran and we drove down the street to the Asian market near our house. Now, this shopping experience was a little more difficult than I’d anticipated, particularly because we were trying to buy products I’ve only ever seen once (and in a completely different cultural setting), and we couldn’t read the majority of the labels (because, of course, everything was in Vietnamese, Korean, Mandarin, or Thai….). But, with a little shameless asking and a lot of gracious smiling, we were able to locate such items as the green papaya, dried shrimp, black chili paste, kaffir lime leaves, chunk of palm sugar, and straw mushrooms. I was also giddy to find rambutan, longon, and mangosteen, and I made Ryan listen to a brief history and explanation of every one of them. I am sure he has heard more than his fair share of information about fruit.

At home, I laid out everything on the counter. This is what we bought:

Ingredients from the Grant/Stone Supermarket

Payaya salad, our first project, is a spicy salad prepared cold and made with unripe green papaya, garlic, chili peppers, lime juice, fish sauce, palm sugar, long beans, small tomatoes, and crushed peanuts. It’s taste comes from a combination of sour, spicy, salty, and fishy–four staple flavors of Thai cuisine. Papaya salad–or som tam in Thailand–is served everywhere, as an appetizer, a side to soup, or just as a snack. Similarly, the shrimp and lemongrass soup (which is called tom yum goong in Thailand), is also something you’ll see almost everywhere. How hard could these two ubiquitous dishes be?

First, as we went through the recipe and realized that after mixing the chili peppers and garlic we had absolutely no idea how to chop up that enormous green papaya teetering on its edge behind the peeled garlic cloves, we realized this wasn’t going to be as easy without a chef behind us. After some Google searching, it was clear to me that I did not have the equipment needed to peel the thing into strips, so we improvised: we used a potato peeler. This was the messiest, sloppiest, most inefficient way I’ve ever seen anybody try to peel a vegetable, but, well, hunger prevailed over waiting until we could buy the proper peeler (apparently a kiwi peeler is the way to go?), so we went ahead with it. We didn’t have a mortar and pestle either, so we used a bowl and a rock from outside. Our cat, who is obsessed with food, actually ate the shavings that fell on the floor. (Embarrassingly, you can see him lapping up something in the bottom right-hand corner of this picture, which I didn’t notice until I downloaded it!).

Using a potato peeler to shed the papaya of its rubbery green skin

After peeling and stripping the papaya as best we could, I next realized that I had literally no idea whatsoever what to do with the palm sugar. I’d remembered that our chef told us that we must, must, must have palm sugar or papaya salad wouldn’t be payaya salad, so I made sure to get a lump of it. After peeling it out of the packaging, though, I stared back at this hard, solid lump and didn’t remember exactly how to make it into a paste (I think our chef gave it to us already in paste form…?), so we chopped it into littler pieces and crushed it with wax paper and the sideways blade of a knife. It was, like the activity above, sloppy, messy, and kind of inefficient. I wished, desperately, that our chef from Sampran was with us–she was extraordinary with her mixing and so efficient with the swirls she made with the pestle. Why wasn’t there some sort of hotline for first-timers?

At this point, with all the unpredictably difficult parts out of the way, we added a mix of palm sugar paste, lime juice, fish sauce, dried shrimp, long beans, and tomatoes to the bowl of papaya shavings, garlic, and chili pepper. We rolled everything around until it looked just about right, sprinkled in some chopped-up peanuts, and let it sit so that the flavors could mingle and get soaked up by the moist papapa shavings.

The soup, I admit, was a bit easier. To make tom yum goong, all you need to do is dump some chicken stock, peeled shrimp, lemongrass, kaffir lime, and galanga strips into a big pot. We let it boil and then threw in the shrimp and straw mushrooms. At the very end, after the shrimp are pink, we mixed up a small bowl of black chili paste, fish sauce, soy sauce, and lime juice and added it to the soup. The soup became cloudy (which I remembered is a good thing!) and brown (also a good thing), so we let it cook for a few minutes and then scooped the soup into our bowls.

The end result?

Well…let’s put it this way. We loved the soup. It was, as it should be, a potent mixture of both fishy and lemony. The broth was cloudy and clear, and the black chili paste flavored the chicken stock beautifully. The shrimp were plump, pink, and chewy and had the faintest aftertaste of ginger (which I assume is due to the addition of the galanga root). And the level of spice was just right. Watching Ryan scoop up the soup spoonful after spoonful, I think our chef at the Sampran Riverside would have been proud of me.

Now, the papaya salad?

In a word? Disgusting. (Trust me–looks can be deceiving here).

Frankly, it was completely inedible. Totally gross. For one, it smelled like rotting fish. The papaya was soggy from sitting too long and the whole bottom of the bowl in which the salad sat was watery. The fish sauce and dried shrimp (which are more potent than I realized) completely overpowered the spice and the saltiness, and the peanuts did absolutely nothing to cut the fishiness. I tried adding some extra lime juice in last ditch effort, but, alas, my efforts were futile. Our papaya salad was a mushy pile of fish. Together, Ryan and I looked at each other, said a tiny goodbye, opened the lid to the trashcan, and dumped everything into it.

Lesson learned? Well, since I’ve got half a green papaya still sitting in the refrigerator and leftovers of all the other ingredients all over my kitchen, I might muster up the courage to try again, but for now, my palette for papaya salad needs a bit of a breather. My lesson learned, then, comes from the famous Van Gogh about a painting of his that turned out looking like a big blob on the canvas: “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

At least, for the time being, I’ve got an amazing new soup recipe!

One flop, one masterpiece – the lessons we learn in the kitchen 🙂

If you’re interested in either of these recipes from the Sampran Riverside cooking class, send me an email and I’ll be happy to send them over to you.

A special thanks to Thai Airways and the Tourism Authority of Thailand for graciously sponsoring my trip to the Sampran Riverside.

Walking Calle Ocho with Croquetas and Cafe Cubanos

Medianoche:

Croquetas and café Cubano:

Mojito:

Pastelito guayabo:

Sugarcane juice:

Abuela María ice cream:

Why I’m Spending Two Weeks in Eastern Europe

Passage to Eastern Europe

ROMANIA (Days 1-2)

BULGARIA (Day 3-4)

IRON GATE (Day 5)

SERBIA (Day 6)

CROATIA (Day 7)

HUNGARY (Days 8-11)

From Roots to Soup: A Night with Chef Moshe Basson

His menu is full of wild-growing herbs, “sidewalk weeds,” and herbaceous plants and shrubs with names I’ve never heard of, like malva and purslane and hyssop.

Oh, Switzerland: A Night with Cheese Fondue

Bringing the Sampran Riverside Cooking Class Home

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Medianoche:

Croquetas and café Cubano:

Mojito:

Pastelito guayabo:

Sugarcane juice:

Abuela María ice cream:

Passage to Eastern Europe

ROMANIA (Days 1-2)

BULGARIA (Day 3-4)

IRON GATE (Day 5)

SERBIA (Day 6)

CROATIA (Day 7)

HUNGARY (Days 8-11)

His menu is full of wild-growing herbs, “sidewalk weeds,” and herbaceous plants and shrubs with names I’ve never heard of, like malva and purslane and hyssop.

Welcome to bon touriste

Inquiries

As Seen In…

In Partnership With…

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