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. 

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.

We love maple syrup! Possibly my own craving for this iconic sap is the result of my Canadian heritage. But then there’s my American husband, who obsessively drizzles maple syrup over everything in sight, from a sweetener in his tea and coffee, to pork roasts, chili, ice cream, to salmon. Regardless of the origins of our maple passion, the maple-fication of Baklava was really quite inevitable. Maple syrup accompanies us camping and hiking, vacationing and traveling. Little bottles of maple syrup were stowed away in my suitcase headed to Ethiopia by my mother, and were in our packs as we traveled by moto in Vietnam and hitchhiked in Thailand. Maple Walnut baklava is a fantastic dessert, managing to be both light and flaky and also rich and gooey. This dessert features sheets of delicate filo, layered with the toasted flavors of browned butter, roasted walnuts, cinnamon, oranges and clove. Once cooked, the flaky pastry is bathed in a concentrated maple syrup, with a deep caramel flavor and subtle sweet notes.  

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.