Rebecca loves pickles: pickled onions, pickled vegetables, Haitian style pickled cabbage, sauerkraut with juniper and caraway, red cabbage sauerkraut with apples and cloves, and of course dill pickles. Whether by nature or nurture, our 2-year old Madeline is developing the same taste. Our current strategy of getting her to eat veggies is to make them sour. This weekend, with piles of fresh beets and local eggs from the market, I was remembering an old fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch classic from my grandparents generation -- Pickled Eggs & Beets. I adapted this recipe from a few of our old Pennsylvania Dutch/Amish cookbooks (yes, we brought them with us to Haiti), reducing the sugar significantly and boosting the spices and vinegar. The resulting magenta pickles are sublime, and super easy to make. Our fridge version of Pickled Eggs & Beets will keep for at least two weeks, and works beautifully as a side, a quirky topping to salads, on toast, in a grain bowl, or as a toddler snack (well at least for our funny girl). Happy pink pickling!

It has been a bit of a blur since Gideon's arrival, as we remember what it's like to go weeks without a full nights sleep. Little Gideon and Mom are both doing well, and so we are on track to returning to Haiti in early August. As we wrap up our last weeks here, stateside, we are relishing the tastes of North American summer: impossibly good sweet corn, tart local blueberries with a dash of cream, and fresh peak-of-summer tomatoes and herbs. This Marinated Tomato and Mozzarella Salad has been a frequent highlight on our table these last few weeks. It is ready in minutes, bursting with summer flavor, a balance of bright sweet tomatoes and creamy fresh mozzarella.

"COOK!" "COOK!" .... "Mmmmmm!" Our 16-month-old daughter will proclaim as she urgently points to the stove around meal times. Our Madeline is both patient and persistent in her quest for food, and will next proceed to helpfully list all her favorite foods for us to cook, meat...blueberries...strawberries, with the ever present refrain; "COOK!" Yes, our daughter is a voracious carnivore who swings her little legs and claps her hands in delight when she gets meat for her meals. These Mediterranean Beef Kebabs are one in a long-line of meat dishes Paul has concocted for Madeline, and they are as delicious as they are simple to make! And if you give them a try, you might just find your guests swinging their legs in delight too.

When the winter chills set in, this colorful tangerine hued salad, with its bright splashes of pomegranate, feta, and cilantro is a full flavored pick you up. This is a long-standing recipe in our repertoire, with a captivating citrus and spice vinaigrette. 

Hurricane Matthew is churning through the southern Caribbean this weekend, and we can already feel the winds picking up and the temperature falling here in Port-au-Prince. Currently, it looks like the eye-of-the-storm is likely to pass just off the southwestern tip of Haiti, but the damage may be significant. People are bracing for the storm; battening down the hatches and stocking up the larders as they are able. Keep Haiti in your prayers. 

One of the new additions to our pantry stock, in addition to some pickled red onions and granola, is Fresh Guava Jam, courtesy of jam making with our staff this week. Rather than traditional Cuban-style guava jam, which relies on long cooking to create a darker caramelized flavor, our Fresh Guava Jam has a bright fresh fruit flavor. It is not too sweet and has a tart bite from fresh squeezed key limes, which balance the warm tropical sweetness of the aromatic guavas.

Craving something fresh, Paul picked up a basket of summer squash at the market on the way home from work yesterday. Marinated Herbed Zucchini is a beautiful and flavorful summer starter that transforms summer's bounteous zucchini and squash into something unexpected and delicious. Whether you're looking for a creative new salad...or just searching for something other than zucchini bread to make with the summer squashes piling up in your kitchen, this is a winner!

We are both great lovers of butter in all its forms. Since butter is a luxury product in Haiti running around $12 a pound, we feel like it deserves special treatment and the addition of roasted garlic and the warm, sweetly spiced, and earthy flavors Yucatán Spice Rub, Xac, takes things to a whole different level. In this flavorful butter, a base of roasted garlic is mixed with the pungent flavors of Mexican cinnamon, oregano, allspice, pepper, cloves, bay and cumin. Slather this on garlic bread, meat, fish, roasted vegetables...we haven't found a medium yet that doesn't benefit from this punchy butter.

Thanks for following along with our new adventures! We recently moved from Pittsburgh to Haiti where we are starting a 5 year volunteer assignment with a non-profit relief and development organization. We will be in transition for the next few months as we complete our in-country orientation, language study, spend time living with host families in both the countryside and capital... and lest we forget, have our first baby somewhere in there as well! Please bear with us as we will not have ready access to internet or a kitchen throughout this time. We will continue to share new recipes that we've prepared in advance, and updates on our new life in Haiti as often as we are able.

Even before I became pregnant, I was no stranger to food cravings, but looking back, pregnancy has taken me down some odd paths. There was the stage at the beginning, when in between bouts of vomiting, I madly craved salty, tangy and pickled foods. For a while I ate lentil salad with tangy vinaigrette and feta for breakfast every morning. Luckily, the intensity of my craving passed before I fully pickled our baby. In the second trimester, my cravings swung towards tex-mex, and sour-cream became the condiment of choice on everything. Mid pregnancy was notable for my lack of interest in dessert, with an occasional craving for canned peaches. Thankfully for my health, this third trimester has brought a renewed love of fresh fruits and veggies. So while I recognize that this Spinach, Strawberry & Avocado Salad is in no way seasonal, I have happily scarfed it for lunch and sometimes dinner for the month leading up to our departure to Haiti. I like the contrast of crisp spinach, sweet strawberries, creamy avocado nestled beside tangy goat cheese, toasted pecans, and topped with a balsamic vinaigrette.

It's moving day for us at The Hungry Hounds. Fueled by donuts, coffee and tons of moving help from family and friends, we are on our way from Pennsylvania to Indiana for our final goodbyes with Paul's family before we leave for Haiti. Cooking and eating in our kitchen for the past few weeks has been a bit of an awkward experience with many frustrated sighs and the frequent realization, '...oh right, we packed that already, didn't we!?' One of the last dishes we made when our kitchen was still in full swing was this tasty Flammkuchen, a comfort pizza-like-classic from the Alsatian and South German regions, with many variations and names. We modeled ours after the classic version, a thin crusted flatbread pizza with a creamy, slightly tangy sauce, smoky bacon, a smattering of cheese, and the succulent sweetness of caramelized onions.

Rebecca has always had strong food cravings; from adventures across the city to find the most mouth puckering sour candy, to a months long quest to reproduce a Vietnamese street food from our travels. While spousal cravings can get a bad rap, I'm personally a big fan. Spur-of-the moment homemade rice crispy treats, check. Ten versions of fried potatoes in a week, twist my arm. Or, most recently, a grilled cheese to beat all other grilled cheese sandwiches: perfectly crisped bread, an extra creamy cheese mix (including cream cheese), and smokey bacon. Not an everyday meal, but a craving induced celebratory treat. In addition to our upcoming move to Haiti, Rebecca and I are celebrating another exciting life change. Rebecca is just entering her third trimester of pregnancy, and we couldn't be happier! We're expecting our little son or daughter to make an appearance in early February, with a planned delivery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. And if they come out craving ooey gooey cheese...we'll know why!

To celebrate the garlic season, we've been eating batch after batch of this sweet, smokey, and nutty Charred Garlic Salsa. It's easy to slip into thinking of garlic as a year-round kitchen workhorse, rather than as a seasonal specialty worth savoring in its own right. If you've never paused to taste the difference between early summer's stale grocery garlic and the in-season local variety, this is the perfect vehicle to indulge. Charred Garlic Salsa is inspired by the flavors and techniques of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, and is delicious with chips, on bread, with grilled meats, tacos, or as an amazing condiment for sandwiches.

Normally tomatoes and I aren't close. I am that annoying person who picks them out of my salad and fishes tomatoes out of my sandwich, it's an embarrassing trait. This tomato avoidance changes each summer with the arrival of beautiful, sweet, summer tomatoes. This week we got two colorful striped heirloom tomatoes from our CSA and my tomato appetite returned with a vengeance. Paul had just pulled a grainy loaf of sourdough bread out of the oven, our basil plants were looking lush and prime for the picking, and so decided on bruschetta for dinner. We gobbled up a platter for an al fresco summer dinner.

May is cooperating rather well, and we are eating our way into spring with Asparagus. We threw a crisp bunch on a hot grill this week, along with cherry tomatoes and local halloumi cheese, and drizzled the chunky spears with a fresh and summer inspired tomato and basil vinaigrette. To a lovely weekend of eating!

We woke up this April fools morning to a fine dusting of frost covering our spring crocuses. The joke, it appears, was on spring. It is a fickle time of year for food, we crave the soft colors and zippy flavors of spring, but still desire the hearty textures of winter. We bridge the seasons with our Lime Edamame Dip, a bold, herby dip with a buttery hazelnut taste and hearty texture. Edamame beans are green soybeans removed from their pods and eaten prior to ripening.  Edamame is typically found in Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Indonesian cooking. This dip is a fantastic crowd pleaser, and well worth sourcing edamame.

Hello Spring, let’s milkshake! We’re feeling pretty chipper this week with balmy breezes and glimpses of sun, and we thought we'd celebrate the changing of the seasons with Roasted Strawberry Buttermilk Milkshakes. To make these ridiculously good milkshakes, we roasted strawberries to concentrate their rich sweetness, and boosted the flavor with tangy buttermilk. Feeling like spring cooking?  Try our Roasted Asparagus with Lemon, our decadent Hazelnut Tart with Fresh Strawberries, a light Herb Potato Salad or make-ahead Strawberry Rhubarb Baked Oatmeal.

Our Roasted Strawberry Buttermilk Milkshakes recipe is also featured this week by our friends at The Food Tasters!

In our experience, snacking is the natural accompaniment to binge TV watching. With new seasons of Game of Thrones and House of Cards out this month, we are in prime snacking mode. This weekend, we made a homemade version of the addictive (but expensive) Boursin cheese we sometimes buy at the grocery. Boursin was created by Francois Boursin in Normandy, and is a soft fresh Garnay cheese with flavorful additions. Our version uses a combination of goat cheese and cream cheese to achieve a creamy, tangy texture, and is liberally studded with fresh herbs, garlic and lemon zest. We devoured our Homemade Garlic & Herb Boursin on sourdough bread with crunchy watermelon radishes from our CSA, and when we ran out of bread, made up a batch of crackers so we could keep snacking.

Its Superbowl Sunday, which means snack day! These Smokey Sweet Potato Oven Fries are crispy, smokey, spicy, and sweet: a perfect game day (or any day) snack. We eat them year round, but always appreciate the excuse for a heaping plate. 

Following Rebecca's family tradition, our Christmas festivities spilled into the early morning hours. Friends and family filled the house with the hum of conversation, laughing, singing, and of course eating. These occasions are primetime snacking. Inspired by our winter CSA's bounty, we created a new favorite snack. Sunchoke Spinach Dip is bright, savory, creamy, with a sweet, almost nutty flavor from the sunchokes. Sunchokes are a funky little root vegetable. Also known as Jerusalem artichoke, they are neither from Jerusalem, nor related to the artichoke. This North American native vegetable has an artichoke-like nuttiness. If you've never cooked with sunchokes before, this dip is an excellent introduction.

With holiday parties and family gatherings, snack foods pretty much become their own seasonal food group this time of year. As an avid snacker, this naturally delights me.  Somewhere between a flatbread and a cracker, Lavash is a snacking dream. Originating in the Caucasus, this quick, unleavened dough has both chew and crunch, a fantastic cracker to eat plain, or to use as a vehicle for all other manner of dips and spreads. We particularly love Lavash Crackers with beet horseradish hummus.

I am partial to old and eccentric recipes. When my grandparents moved a few years ago, I jumped at the chance to dig through my grandma's old cookbooks. My favorite recipe from the collection is titled 'Potato Soup for a Barn-Raising,' and it begins (I kid you not) with "1/2 ton potatoes, peeled and diced." Now that's a recipe! Buried in the pages of these Mennonite and Amish community cookbooks from the 1940s, I found multiple recipes for popcorn cookies with a meringue base. Intrigued, I started experimenting. I knew I had a winner when Rebecca kept polishing off the still warm cookies before they were cool enough to photograph. These Old-Fashioned Popcorn Coconut Meringue Cookies are a snap to whip up, they are chewy, nutty, not too sweet, and amazingly addictive. And as a bonus, these flourless meringues are gluten free.  

This week I took a stand against the breakfast industrial complex. Sunday for breakfast, I thought I’d go carnivorous, and ate a plate heaped high with Amish summer sausage. In honor of meatless Monday, I thought I’d swing vegetarian, and polished off a bowl of leftover garlicky lentil salad with goat cheese. Tuesday at 6am, I started to worry that I might not be getting my daily serving of fruits and vegetables, and munched away on snow peas, carrots, and bell peppers while I was getting ready for work. Don’t worry, I also ate string cheese for protein! This morning I was out of time and thinking that I might want to dip towards the sweet side, unfortunately things got a bit sticky when I tried to juggle spoonful’s of Nutella while driving. Paul, no stranger to my breakfast rebellions, calmly continued eating his grape nuts. Now that I’ve gotten that all out of system, I am ready for a spiffed-up breakfast classic. So when I got home from work today, I made a big batch of Chocolate Maple Granola with Quinoa and Cranberries. This chocolaty, crunchy granola is somewhere between breakfast and dessert, a good place to be in my mind, and with the combination of nuts, oats, and quinoa, provides a complete protein rich meal that keeps me energized through the whole day.