Hello dear readers and Happy New Years Eve from the Caribbean! To round out 2018, we wanted to share this bold and spicy Haitian Ginger Tea, Te Jenjanm, a distinctive brew from our adopted home in Haiti. Ginger is traditionally known in many places for its curative and restorative powers. Te Jenjanm, has a spicy kick that soothes the throat and warms the body. It’s a favorite drink during the cooler months, and every Haitian household has their own version. This distinctive ginger tea is made more complex with additions of star anise, lemongrass, and cinnamon. During these cold months, share a cup of Haitian Ginger Tea with your friends and family.

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!

My Great Aunt Mary was a meticulous and brilliant woman, who also happened to have a stellar repertoire of holiday baked goods. She passed her recipe for Spiced Pumpkin Bars down to my mother years ago. I returned to Aunt Mary's recipe after a run of failed pumpkin bar experiments. Aunt Mary's Spiced Pumpkin Bars are a homey old-fashioned bar, with a soft texture, warm spices and gooey cream cheese icing. With only a few minor tweaks from the original, I present to you, the best pumpkin bars you will ever eat. 

November means fall back home; the smell of mulled cider, pumpkin picking, and trick-or-treating. Feeling nostalgic for the tastes and colors of fall, while sweating in the 90s here in Haiti, we created a Caribbean-fall dessert, Easy Guava Jam Bars. These easy to make, and addictive bars combine the warm spices of cinnamon and allspice with the tropical sweetness of fresh guava jam. It is a stunning match of tart bright guava enveloped in a warmly spiced buttery crumble.

complex base, potent marinade, or vibrant accent flavor. Mayan Red Spice Paste, Recado Colorado, is popular, both for its beautiful vibrant red hue, and warm tangy flavor. Rich in color, and fall flavors, our non-traditional take on Recado Colorado streamlines the preparation process. Recado Colorado is excellent for making red rice, a great base for barbecue sauces, a go-to rub for meats, on burgers, and a potent flavor boost for chilis and other soups. Stay tuned for two fantastic recipes using our Mayan Red Spice Paste coming up in the weeks ahead.

You may have noticed that we have a fondness for spice pastes here at The Hungry Hounds. If you too have caught the flavor paste obsession, check out our two other potent pastes: Smokey Mexican Chile Paste, Chilmole, and Garlic Ancho Chile Paste. 

Today marks Madeline's first full week outside the womb, and most aspects of our life have irreversibly changed. Cooking and eating together has been the one constant in this topsy turvy new world since we arrived home from the hospital. A food focus persisted during labor as I panted out a list of food requests in between contractions. Paul, both remembered every request and has been cheerfully cooking up a storm this last week. Yesterdays' creation was a yeasty sugar rush of homemade cinnamon rolls, but the vast majority of my requests have been for roasted aromatic meats like this Slow Roasted Mayan Pork with Garlic Salsa. This dish is a Paul invention, which means making use of some extraordinary homemade condiments (Xac spice mix and charred garlic salsa), the end result is transcendent.

Sometimes in the dead of winter, cooking needs a little extra oomph. Yucatán Dry Spice Rub, Xak, fits the bill. With a few minutes of work, your kitchen will soon be filled with warm, sweetly spiced, and earthy flavors. This easy and versatile spice rub stores well and provides a unique flavor boost to pork, poultry, fish, soups, veggies, or even garlic butter. Stay tuned for great new recipes in the next two weeks featuring Yucatán Dry Spice Rub to get you started. This spice rub recipe was inspired by Daniel Hoyer's book of Mayan cuisine. 

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.

As much as we love the tropical fruits and Caribbean flavors of our new home in Haiti, we are nostalgic for the apple and spice combination, so classic to this time of year in North America. We love this old-fashioned Apple Walnut Bundt Cake with Caramel Glaze, pungent with cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg and ginger, glazed with a salty caramel.

Blackstrap Molasses and Fresh Ginger Cake is a dark, moody, and moist dessert masterpiece. Warm spices are on prominent display with fresh ginger, cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, and the rich and smoky tones of blackstrap molasses. This cake is a great foil to a rich frosting (stay tune for Paul's salted maple buttercream next week), but has the verve to stand alone as simple seasonal dessert. Blackstrap Molasses and Fresh Ginger Cake is crowd favorite whenever we make it and is a stunning high holiday treat. We've adapted this recipe from one of our favorite dessert authors, David Lebovitz. Check out our review of his cookbook at our Bookshelf.

Without AC in the summer, our small Pittsburgh kitchen is not a place you want to be cooking with high heat. For us, summer eating often revolves around the grill, where our current go-to protein is North African Grilled Chicken. Inspired by the flavors of the famous North African spice mix known as Ras Al-Hanout (or "best of the shop"), our marinade uses a blend of warming spices, cinnamon, black pepper, turmeric, cumin, nutmeg, and cloves, balanced with punchy lemon. This fragrant combination is intoxicating. North African Grilled Chicken is a crowd pleaser on its own and an excellent light addition to sandwiches, salads, or tacos.

Seizing the opportunity to be sweet and let my sick husband sleep in, I decided to get up early and make one of his favorite breakfast treats, cinnamon buns. Despite the best of intentions, I slept in, shoot! A little frantic, I needed a quick turn-around recipe if I was going to deliver. Rather than the traditional yeast variety, I opted for my tried and true 40 Minute Cinnamon Buns. I discovered this recipe a few years ago while surreptitiously reading a magazine article over someone’s shoulder on a plane. They turned the page before I could finish reading the intriguing looking quick cinnamon bun recipe, so I looked the recipe up when I got home, and here they are, delicious, moist and tangy cinnamon buns, ready in 40 minutes or less, no kneading required!

In a holiday season notorious for sweet potato casseroles topped with marshmallows and candied nuts, we play it unconventional. We love the warm spices and fresh herbs of this Moroccan Roasted Sweet Potato Salad. A fragrant dish with a nod towards North African seasonings, the sweet potatoes are roasted until they are lightly crisped, flavored with an aromatic, garlic, and lemon infused Charmoula vinaigrette, and topped with feta, cilantro and pomegranate. Charmoula is a traditional Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian marinade that  is traditionally used in fish and vegetable dishes. Moroccan Roasted Sweet Potato Salad is a winner with guests and an unusual twist on the seasonal sweet potato.

My sister is a cookie making virtuoso and when it's her turn to host family dinner, Paul and I start perseverating about her dessert days in advance!  While my sister is a cookie genius, I am the cookie klutz in the family. The problem with my often laissez-faire attitude to cookie making is that baking depends on science and precision. In a spurt of baking abandonment this past weekend, I guesstimated the amount of baking soda and "tweaked" a recipe in a few too many places...the result was a cookie-bomb that covered the baking sheet and my oven. My kitchen filled with smoke and feeling my baking-esteem slipping, I ditched the improvised-cookie plan and soothed myself with a batch of one of our foolproof favorites: Blackstrap Molasses Cookies.

There are many things to recommend these Blackstrap Molasses Cookies. They have a complex, caramel taste with a warm spiciness and satisfying soft texture. Molasses is the mineral and flavor-rich by-product spun off of sugar during processing. "Blackstrap" is the darkest most intensely flavored version of molasses, so rich in minerals and vitamins that some people take it as a dietary supplement. These cookies are a favorite in our household: soft, rich, and deeply spiced. 

Food has the power to connect us to people and places around the world. In 2007, Rebecca and I spent three months traveling through South East Asia together. Leaving Cambodia on the back of moto-bikes, we arrived for the night, hot and dusty, in a small village in rural Vietnam. After dropping off our packs, we sat down on the rickety plastic stools of the town's only food stand, famished. Without asking what we wanted, two pungent bowls of Phở Gà, Vietnam's famous chicken noodle soup, were plunked down in front of us. We were hooked! As we made our way north over the next several weeks, we enjoyed many local variations of Phở: from the dark, rich, and beefy to bright and spicy with shrimp. Our favorite Phở, on which our recipe is based, was eaten from steaming bowls one early morning overlooking Hạ Long Bay. This version used chicken that had been marinated and grilled, rather than boiled in the soup, giving it a crispy texture and sweet charred flavor. 

Each sip of flavorful broth reminds us also of the people and culture that created it. Phở is an aromatic and visual dish, one that we like to serve in our  Vietnamese blue petal bowls made in the Kinh family workshop in the famous pottery village of Bat Trang, Vietnam. By partnering with a local non-profit and Ten Thousand Villages, women potters are able to make a living for their families, continue a rich cultural tradition, and gain access to tools, education, training, interest-free loans, and literacy classes. We buy many of our dishes and gifts from Ten Thousand Villages each year, and appreciate their commitment to ethical partnerships with local artisans around the world. 

Mornings around our house typically involve a lot of bleary-eyed animal wrangling with infrequent interludes of serene calm involving both breakfast and the news.  Last week, Paul upped the ante when he started classes for his second Masters degree, this one in Public Health.  Between full time work, a 2 hour commute each day and now evening classes, we needed a new weekday breakfast strategy.  Enter Strawberry Rhubarb Baked Oatmeal in jars. In this smartly conceived dish, Strawberry Rhubarb Baked Oatmeal is cleverly baked up in small canning jars, which, when cooled, can be lidded and refrigerated for up to a week for later reheating.  This is a winner breakfast that we warm-up in the morning with a dash of milk, perfect for eating on the go.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with baked oatmeal, it is somewhere between a less sweet fruit crisp and porridge (oatmeal) and thanks to being chock full of whole grains and nuts, it makes for a substantial breakfast.  We found the addition of strawberry and rhubarb at the bottom of the jar to be a good incentive to keep digging into our baked oatmeal.  Warmly spiced with cinnamon and orange, Strawberry Rhubarb Baked Oatmeal is a filling, healthy, and make-ahead way to tackle morning meals for busy week-days.