Below follows a little teaser for you from our cookbook that has 50 delectable and easy to make desserts. We hope that this will entice you to make all the recipes from the book and that you will be excited to add it to your cookbook collection. Check back regularly for the grand opening of the bookstore on our new website http://www.atasteofgorgeous.com

This recipe was born because Craig’s dad – my husband – challenged him to take my favorite dessert, run with it and deconstruct it like he did with the traditional s’mores and traditional lemon meringue pie desserts. Craig used the recipe on page 15 to create this, and when I saw what he made with this, it inspired me to design a recipe to go with the gorgeous image. The recipe is extremely easy to execute, no baking necessary and fresh with the flavors of summer. This is made for you to have fun with. Design your own plate and wow your friends.

The Recipe

• Whisk together 1 tin of condensed milk and half a cup of freshly squeezed key lime juice in a large mixing bowl until well blended.
• Place mixture into 4 individual ramekins.
• Place ramekins in the fridge for at least eight hours or overnight.
• While the key lime mixture is setting, crush up 1 1/4 cups graham cracker crumbs in a mixing bowl.
• Mix in 1/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar and 1/3 cup melted butter.
• Place in the fridge until the key lime mixture is ready to use.
• Once the mixture is ready to use, set out 4 individual plates.

To Design Your Plate

• Use a tablespoon to swoop a few lines of pre-made berry puree across the plate. Crumble the graham cracker mixture across each plate in small heaps.
• Place a dollop of unsweetened whipped cream on each plate. I love using coconut cream to give it a true tropical summary feel.
• Spoon the key lime mixture out of each ramekin on top of some of the graham cracker mixture and shape to your liking with a tablespoon.
• Decorate the plate with fresh berries, edible flowers, candied limes (recipe follows below) and white chocolate swirls. You may also use the white chocolate leaves recipe from the white chocolate cake on page 75 instead of the white chocolate swirls.

To Make Candied Limes

Slice limes into thin rounds, blanch in a pot of boiling water for 2 minutes and drain. In the same pot, combine 1 cup water and 1 cup sugar. Bring to a simmer and stir until sugar has melted. Add lime slices. Simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, until white pith looks translucent. Cool in the fridge until ready to use. Cut rounds in half and place on plates.

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SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain. “Oysters and champagne is all you need. The rest is just BS.”

I think we may have found food nirvana. The night before we ate in a quaint hotel restaurant after a long plane ride from the USA and Israel, followed by a long car ride from Madrid. The jet lag weighed heavy, but we only have a few days and have to make the most of it. It is worth it. The following day we start eating at 1pm. There are pinxthos everywhere and we are spoiled for choice. It was wise to start early. We hop from bar to bar to grab a taste here and there and soon we have standing room only. We indulge in acorn fed Iberian ham, sea urchin, calamari, squid and octopus, to name but a few. The smell of seafood wafts from every corner and we feel the need to find the place where the aroma is coming from so we can indulge in the fruits of the ocean. Soon we find our first oysters. They’re enormous and they simply cannot go without a little Moet et Chandon. “Just a small bottle” soon becomes three small bottles and before you know it, we have a heavily oaked, full bodied red to wash down the lobster and langoustine we chose fresh from the tank. The morsels arrive with large wedges of lemon and I look for the various sauces that normally accompany them. None. It’s not necessary. The shellfish is cooked to perfection and sweet and juicy. A squeeze of lemon is all that’s needed.

“Oysters and champagne is all you need. The rest is just BS.” At Bare Bare restaurant, our server Xabi makes sure our evening is one of the most memorable nights of my life and when it comes time to leave, we do so reluctantly. The sun has set. We’ve been eating all afternoon. It’s time for dessert and we walk into a small chocolaterie where we sample creamy assorted hand made chocolates. Nobody’s in the mood to end the day. Cocktail hour has arrived. Thankfully we find somewhere to sit and the tasting begins. The mixologist is an expert and the various cocktails arrive fast and furious, each shared by the three of us. It has become a production line of tasting and soon the evening blurs into a sea of herbaceous cocktails. I have no idea when cocktail hour ended, but I do know that it was the appropriate end to a glorious day in San Sebastian’s Food Nirvana.

 

 

 

I fell in love with the Caribbean long before visiting. In my teens I started dreaming about owning a business in a Caribbean place that was mysterious and unreachable to me. In my 30’s that dream became reality when my husband and I bought a business in Aruba. Aruba didn’t feel like the real Caribbean to me. Since tourism is its main source of income, it caters for tourists and I may as well have been in America.

Then I met the real Caribbean when I set foot on the sleepy island of Antigua. I took a day to sail around it in order to experience its full, unspoiled beauty. Here I was introduced to the ital way of eating. Ital is Caribbean talk for vital and it is indeed a vital part of rastafari cooking. A true rastafarian is pure in his way of life, is vegetarian and implements a peaceful philosophy in every way of life. The first branch was started in Jamaica in 1935 by Leonard P. Howell who preached the divinity of Haile Selassie. He explained that all blacks would eventually gain the superiority over whites that had always been intended for them.

I myself am not a great lover of doctrine, but I certainly love the healthy, pure philosophy behind Jamaican food and last night I decided to bring Jamaica into my Texan kitchen. I did not regret it. We were transported to the island immediately and even though I’ve never been to Jamaica, the wonderful flavors took us there for a few hours and I could have sworn that I heard the ocean and palm trees swaying in the evening breeze.

The dinner was simple. It consisted of rice and peas, ital curry (vegetable only) and jerk chicken. I carefully mixed the spice for the curry myself to ensure that the Caribbean curry taste is authentic. I made the jerk marinade from scratch and marinated the chicken for 24 hours. The recipe that follows calls for the chicken to be cooked on the grill outside, but since it is winter with a rather chilly breeze blowing, I decided to slow roast it in the oven for 3 hours. It was the right decision. I basted it with the left over marinade every 30 minutes and the flavors collided beautifully. The meat was fall of the bone tender and I doubt I will ever cook chicken on the bone any other way. Since I’m slightly wary of the Scotch Bonnet (Habanero) heat, I substituted with jalapeno and the heat level was just perfect.

I hope that you will enjoy the below Jerk Chicken recipe as much as I did.

Jerk Chicken

1 small onion quartered

3 green onions, coarsely chopped

2 garlic cloves

3 small Scotch bonnet peppers (habaneros) coarsely chopped. (I used 1 1/2 jalapenos)

1/3 cup grapeseed oil

3 tbsp white wine vinegar

3 tbsp fresh lime juice

3 tbsp orange juice

3 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp dark brown sugar

1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves (I used lemon thyme)

2 tsp ground allspice

1 tsp salt

3/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

6 chicken drumsticks

Cooking spray

Method

Combine all ingredients except chicken and cooking spray in blender. Process until smooth. Place chicken in a large zip top plastic freezer bag. Pour marinade over chicken and seal bag. Refrigerate for 24 hours, turning occasionally.

Light one side of grill, heating to high heat. Leave other side unlit. Remove chicken from marinade, allowing some of the marinade to remain on the chicken. Discard remaining marinade. Place chicken on grill rack coated with cooking spray over unlit side of grill. Grill 45 minutes or until done, turning after 25 minutes. Let chicken rest 5 minutes. Serve with rice and peas and ital veggie curry. Makes 3 servings.

If you’d like to use my cooking method:

Preheat oven to convection roast 250 degrees F. Place drumsticks on parchment paper on roasting pan. Roast for 3 hours or until fully cooked, turning every 30 minutes, basting every time you turn the chicken with the remainder of the marinade. I checked for doneness every 30 minutes as my oven is very powerful. Cooking times may vary with various oven strengths.

BELWOOD, Ontario. November 2008. It is minus 27 degrees Celsius. There is no power. I feel powerless. Since growing up in the tropics, I had never seen snow in all of my 38 years, let alone an ice storm of such enormous proportions. It started while I was sleeping. The ice had made tree branches heavy, which broke and downed the power lines in our lane. A noise woke me up during the early hours of the morning. The sound of the branches breaking sounded like gunshots and I felt a little panicked. I thought handguns were illegal in Canada. I switch on a light. Nothing. I lie breathless for a few moments and another branch breaks near the bedroom. I look out the window and realization starts to dawn. I am clueless as to how HVAC works, yet I know if I don’t make a plan, I’m going to be in trouble. We’re on a septic and well in rural Ontario and with no power comes no communications, no heat and no running water. An ugly, square black cast iron stove stands in the middle of an equally ugly unfinished basement. Have wood, will make fire. Six hours later the power is still out, the sun is setting and I’m starting to get hungry. My oven is electric and I’m petrified to drive in these conditions since I have no 4×4, have no experience driving in snow and ice and my husband is away for a week with the 4×4. An enormous Canadian salmon has defrosted and it is time for me to do it afraid. I light the fire in the basement monstrosity, load the salmon in a roasting pan and add some water, salt and pepper. I do not think to let the wood burn down to coals and shove the pan straight into the fire. Smoke starts to billow out of the belly of the beast. There is a knock on my door. I look out the window and in the driveway is a man on a tractor with a beard as white as the snow that he’s busy clearing off my driveway. He appears to be about 80 years old. An equally white haired woman stands at the door. She is my new neighbor. “Are you OK? It smells as if your house is on fire.” I explain. She giggles a little and tells me she has gas if I need to come over to cook. The guy on the tractor is her husband and he is as old as I thought. He makes his own wine from the maple syrup he taps from the maple trees in his back yard and I’m welcome to a glass while I cook. I decide to tough it out. Only way to learn. I pull the salmon out of the fire. It tastes delicious! When my husband returns he tells me the wood I used to make that fire was cedar. In my ignorance I home smoked that piece of salmon to perfection.

Locals will later tell me that those type of temperatures are unknown for that time of the year and it is the worst ice storm they’ve experienced in the history of the town. The power was out for two days and I was forced to learn to cope under circumstances that had me completely out of my comfort zone. After this incident I made sure that I understood the workings of the HVAC and learned how to make a proper wood fire. I learned to drive in snow and ice with great care and have since learned to cook a salmon in a more refined manner by glazing it with maple syrup and putting it on a cedar plank on the grill in a more controlled environment. Maybe not as exciting as my first attempt, but no less delicious and I’m still exploring different ways to make salmon taste great.

The recipe for the maple glazed cedar plank salmon can be found in my book Have Food Will Travel, available on Amazon and at:

https://store.bookbaby.com/book/Have-Food-Will-Travel

 

NASSAU, Bahamas. A Bahamian walks into a bar: “Too much Kalik at Junkanoo. Now mi no sleep en da mony, problem!” Barman at the top of his voice: “Drive until you fall asleep en den yo’ no mo’ mony problem.” Bahamian: “Yo ‘tink it says ‘conch’ on dis forheed?!!” The whole bar laughs. I’m enthralled by all this and as I take a sip of my Kalik, I miss my mouth. Perhaps too many Kaliks. It’s time to eat.

We’re staying on Junkanoo Beach, off the beaten track, away from the tourist traps of Atlantis & Cable Beach and sitting at the Bikini Tiki Bar, dining toes in the sand on Bahamian fare. Most everything is fried and there’s conch in every way, shape and form. Cracked conch, conch fritters, conch salad, conch curry, conch stew, (I include a conch fritter recipe below. If conch is unavailable to you, substitute with shrimp). I find delight in the form of blackened grouper bites, not fried. There is Bahamian spiny lobster and Stan eats fall-of-the-bone jerk chicken. We will have to come back to this bar for him to get some more of that.

Tomorrow I will feel the after effects of Bahamian beer. A woman opens a coconut with a machete and with the help of fresh coconut water straight from the coconut, I’m a little more hydrated. I recover and that night we dance under the moonlight outside to the beat of a Bahamian artist. He is no spring chicken, but he strums that guitar like no young man can. Someone at a coconut & conch bar sits with two machetes in his hands. These are not used as weapons. He makes music with them and is so slight of hand that I have trouble capturing on film what he’s doing. The rhythm is out of this world.

We’re only there for 4 days, so we make the most of it. We eat a lot. We drink a lot of beer. Wine lovers, forget about it. Wine is almost non-existent. It is a beer and rum punch world, but be careful of the rum punch or soon you’ll be lying on the beach! We walk 16 hours in two days and see the entire west coasts of New Providence Island and Paradise Island on foot. We experience the extreme cerulean blue of the Bahamian waters and the intense white of the sand. On our way to Paradise Island, we walk past the harbor. A man pulls up with a boat with freshly caught conch. He shucks it and makes conch salad right there to purchase. It does not get any fresher than that. While walking, we realize we made a good choice not staying in the tourist areas. The Bahamian people are happy and friendly and the beauty of the ocean, beaches and tropical plants add to the magic of a laid back culture.

CONCH FRITTERS

1 quart oil (for frying)
3⁄4 cup all-purpose flour
1 egg
1⁄2 cup milk
ground cayenne pepper, to taste
red pepper flakes, to taste
seasoning salt, to taste
salt, to taste (optional, the conch is naturally salty)
ground coarse black pepper, to taste
1 cup chopped conch
1⁄2onion, chopped
1⁄4green bell pepper, chopped fine
1⁄4yellow bell pepper, chopped fine
1⁄4red bell pepper, chopped fine
2 stalks celery, chopped fine
2 garlic cloves, chopped fine
DIPPING SAUCE
2 tablespoons ketchup
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice, no subs
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
1 teaspoon Pickapeppa Sauce
DIRECTIONS
Heat the oil in large pot or deep fryer to 365F. In a bowl, mix the flour, egg and milk. Season with cayenne pepper, seasoning salt, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes.
Mix in the conch meat, onion, red & yellow & green pepper, celery and garlic. Drop the batter by rounded tablespoons into the hot oil and fry until golden brown.
Remove the basket or with slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. In a bowl, mix the ketchup, lime juice, mayonnaise, hot sauce, salt & pepper.
Serve dipping sauce on the side with the fritters.

For more Bahamian recipes, see my book Have Food Will Travel by clicking on https://store.bookbaby.com/book/Have-Food-Will-Travel

 

CHRISTMAS morning of 2017 started out rotten. Literally. I had visions of braising lamb shank in pomegranate juice. The shanks would naturally make stock in this process and later I would make a rich roux to thicken the stock for a savory pomegranate gravy to serve. Normally I cook the shanks in the slow cooker until the meat falls off the bone, but this time, I wanted to serve it on the bone for our friends Marlee & Bryan and for the sake of presentation, so a braise would be better. I did a three day mise en place and was very excited about my dish. The Dutch oven with the shanks had to go into the oven on a low temperature at 8 am in order to be ready for serving at noon. I cut open the shank wrapping and the stench of rotting meat nearly knocked me onto my butt. I felt about ready to burst into tears. My gorgeous dish and three days’s mise en place down the toilet. It’s not unusual for me to be faced with such a situation. While living in third world Africa, blue bread and green meat was almost a daily occurrence and not a day went by where I didn’t have to be resourceful in what I made to eat, so I packed my knives, went for a shower and came out with a plan. The whole Christmas menu had changed. Not as rich, hearty & home style as I would’ve hoped for, but not too bad either.

The whole situation took me back to the time we lived in Botswana. We were bikers and each of us had a Yamaha FZ6, a light monster of a super bike that got you places in a jiffy. On weekends, we often used to go riding to interesting spots and one Saturday morning early we were sitting on our farm house veranda, overlooking the African bush, having coffee, when I said, “I’m bored. I feel like doing something exciting.”

Husband: “Let’s hop on the bikes and ride to Vergelegen for lamb shank.” Now, Vergelegen is a boutique guest house in Kakamas near the Augrabies Falls on the brink of the sublime South African wine route. The guest house has an amazing restaurant that makes the best lamb shank I’ve ever eaten. (It was the memory of these shanks that inspired the Christmas shanks.) This means a seven hundred kilometer iron butt bike ride, crossing the Botswana border into South Africa to eat the lamb, spend the night and ride 700 kilometers back on Sunday morning so Stan can make it back in time for work. “Let’s do it!” I said excitedly.

This is Africa and good ideas can quickly become nightmarish. Suddenly, we’re lost. It’s almost 700 kilometers later and we’re in a town we do not recognize and nowhere near our destination. It was the days before GPS and we were struggling to find our bearings on a map, because of roadworks everywhere and the sign posts for detours were non-existent. “Do you want to turn back?” asks husband. “No, I don’t like going back,” I say, so we pull into a gas station to ask for directions. “You have to do another 300 kilometer loop to get to where you want to be,” says the attendant. Oh well. 300 kilometers forward is better than 700 kilometers backward, so back on the bikes we go and as the sun starts to set, we arrive, just in time for our shanks and a great bottle of red. We parked our weary thousand kilometer iron butts in our dining chairs, ate and drank with great gusto, fell into bed, woke up early and back onto the bikes we went for the 700 kilometer ride back to Botswana.

Thousand Seven Hundred Kilometer Bike Ride in Two Days Completed for Lamb Shank? Check. My Instagram profile says I will travel for food. I mean it! Happy 2018.

 

 31 DECEMBER 1998 – 6 Months earlier. “NEVER!!” “No man will tell me what to do!” He accepted this and said to me he loves me enough to be willing to be my best friend until death. Over the next few months, I started to re-think my belief slightly. I looked how he was with his son Craig. So tremendously tender and loving. He was always hugging him and always had him on his lap and the love just shone out of him. I looked at how he treated me with love, kindness, tenderness and respect and how he tolerated all my imperfections, mistakes and anger. Then weird things started to happen. We would be on a pathway walking next to the beach late at night, streetlights off and as we pass each light it would switch on. At first I – ever the cynic – thought it to be coincidence. Then we would stop and walk no further and wait, carry on walking to the next one and the light would switch on. We would walk separately to the next one and it won’t switch on. We would come back together, hold hands, walk and the one who won’t switch on would switch on as we walked by. Then we would wait longer/shorter for the next one and it would once again switch on when we walk by together. We walked like this for the entire pathway and together, we switched on all those lights without touching a single one. We looked back and the whole pathway was illuminated. It was amazing.

Then the engagement ring in my dive bag appeared. No one knew how it got there. To this day, we still don’t know how that ring got into my bag. This was the time when I felt strongest about not getting married and it was on this day that I realized there are so many signs along the way that I better open my eyes and take what is given as a gift to me. Still I did nothing, until that one morning I woke up with a bang and knew. This is the guy I should marry, but I feared that I had already ruined it for us and this is why I figured it is time for me to step up and ask him to marry me. Another weird thing happened. I didn’t tell him that this was my intent. I just gave him a call and asked him to come over, as there is something I would like to discuss with him. He said nothing (as is his way), but he came to my apartment early from work. In his hands he held a little cooler with bottle of champagne. I’ll never forget that the cooler was red. I didn’t have the courage to outright ask him, so I had written him a letter. I thought nothing of the champagne in his hands, but after he read the letter, he handed the little cooler with champagne over to me and said, “I knew that this was going to happen today and I took the liberty to bring the champagne.” “How did you know?” I asked him and he said, “I just knew.” He went immediately to buy my ring. He asked me to come with him to choose it, but I said no. I want to accept what he would like to give me. Then the next weird thing happened. He came back with my wedding ring and we took the ring that we found in the dive bag and had it fused with the wedding ring, because I said I want the dive bag ring attached to my wedding ring as an engagement ring, because I never want to forget how we became one. The jeweler then said: “I don’t really want to do this. This procedure is going to break the bands on the rings and even if I do manage to get them together, the rings will break within a month, if not sooner, because the heat of the fusion would’ve weakened the metal.” It is 19 years later and those rings are still holding together without any sign of wear and tear, not even the normal sign of rings rubbing on fingers and becoming thinner as the years go by. I’m so grateful that I didn’t ignore the signs because of fear. This has been a miraculous journey for me. One that I didn’t think was a journey that I would ever walk.

The greatest miracle of all is that I inherited my three children from my husband. They accepted me unconditionally from the first moment and have always treated me with nothing other than love and respect. I am grateful. I love you.

 

GABORONE, Botswana. “Craig, what would you like to eat?” “The Bomb.”

We’re in an Italian restaurant in Gaborone, Botswana. It is the best restaurant in town and they make phenomenal pizza and pasta. I’m not sure why they called this pizza “The Bomb,” but every time we asked our son what he wanted to eat, he asked for this pizza, loaded with smoked salmon and sour cream.

Today I was plagued by this food memory from the time that we lived in Gaborone, so decided to throw it on a plate for lunch. It is so simple that it took me about 15 minutes to put together, exactly how I like lunch prep to go down as life is busy. Instead of using a pizza base, I used hand-sized naan breads. I was only supposed to eat one, but ended up eating two. It is delicious. Here’s how simple it is:

Place a pizza stone in the oven and pre-heat oven with the stone inside the oven to 400 degrees F. It is important to heat the pizza stone with the oven, or the stone will crack when exposed to sudden heat. Make sure your pizza base, or naan bread in this instance, is at room temperature, so that a sudden chilled element doesn’t crack the stone. Brush the naan with some good extra virgin olive oil and crushed garlic. Grind some fresh black pepper and pink Himalayan see salt all over and place on top of the stone with a pizza paddle. Switch the oven off immediately and let it stand in the oven while you prepare the topping. Slice the salmon into thin pieces. Drain some capers & thinly slice a sweet, white onion (Vidalia) until you have enough slices for your taste. I like a lot of slices. Remove pizza stone from the hot oven, using oven mitts. Leave the naan on the stone to retain heat while you place the topping. First place the salmon, then squeeze the juice of a quarter of a lemon all over the salmon. This acidity helps cut through the richness of the oil and cream. Place dollops of sour cream all over the salmon and top with capers and sliced onion. Add freshly ground pepper and salt to taste. Drizzle a little white truffle oil over the top. Remove naan from hot stone with pizza paddle and place on a warm plate. Enjoy every bite.