I travel a lot for work. A favorite ritual after each trip is to try and bring some of the new flavors back to our table in Haiti. In a small way, it makes these long trips and hard-to-imagine places a little more understandable for our two curious toddlers. This Lebanese Inspired Cucumber & Tomato Salad has been an often requested favorite of Rebecca and the kids since my travels to Lebanon in February.

Lebanon is stunning and amazingly complex for such a small country. The cuisine of Lebanon, like the country itself, sits at the intersection of many major cultural currents. This vibrant salad is my take on the refreshing salads I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. The ingredients are simple but the result is surprisingly complex, a bright and versatile salad with tangy herb flavor. This salad can be eaten as a main, as a side, wrapped in fresh warm pita bread, or as an accompaniment to grilled meat or cheese. Note that this recipe uses green zatar spice which can be found online, most Middle Eastern groceries, and surprisingly even in Port-au-Prince, Haiti due the large number of a Lebanese and Syrian diaspora in Haiti.

"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.

Delicious meat cookery doesn't have to be complicated. In fact, with quality ingredients, it can be down-right simple. Our Chimichurri Chicken Kabobs start with moist and flavorful chicken thighs marinated and sauced with a jar of fresh and vibrant Argentinian chimichurri. Making your own chimchurri is easy. Raising your own chickens, on the other hand, and ensuring top flavor, moist meat, and ethical animal husbandry, requires a whole different level of DIY commitment. When sourcing your chicken here are my top 3 tips:

1. Don't compromise freshness. As chicken ages under cellophane, its quality declines and the tender muscle fibers begin to lose both moisture and flavor. Similarly, each time meat is frozen and thawed, its texture and moistness is compromised. Buy the freshest meat you can find that has been stored carefully without freezing.
2. Keep processing to a minimum. Each processing step risks compromising quality and increasing cost at the register. Try to avoid buying meat that has 'stuff' added or injected. As much as you are able, do your own processing (partitioning a whole chicken, deboning thighs, skinning breasts, doing your own grinding, etc.). Not only will this give you more control over your meat, it will give you 'extras' to freeze or use for unrivaled homemade broths and soups.
3. Find a brand or farm you believe in. Animal husbandry is tricky business, and so is finding meat at your local grocery that you can feel good about. Understanding how each company balances issues of animal well-being, human health concerns, taste, texture, environmental impact, and cost, is generally not decipherable from the labels and buzzwords found on packaging. Do your research, it's easier than you think. 

With Rebecca out of town recently, I found myself on a quest to identify the best supermarket chicken.  I'm not even going to share how much chicken I single-handedly cooked and consumed, but a clear winner emerged. In a funny small world kind of way, it's a family business from my hometown: Miller Poultry. From classic roast chicken to smoked wings, from chicken schnitzel to Chimichurri Chicken Kabobs, this is can-do chicken! While Miller's can be found in many Whole Foods, I found that it is also available in our local Shop N'Save.

Last week we got a gorgeous bunch of multicolored carrots in our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) weekly delivery box. We roasted our carrots to beautiful morsels of caramelized goodness, tossed them atop an herb and ricotta smothered puff pastry, and crunched away with taste buds dancing.

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.

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.

Blustering snow and icy rains found us craving a hearty soup this week.   Gazing down the steep cobblestone hills winding down from our house, we opted for caution, and a pantry raid, in favor of driving.  For our winter-storm-fare, we dunked homemade sourdough bread in aromatic bowls of French Cabbage Soup, and dreamed of beaches!   Our recipe for French Cabbage Soup, Garbure Gasconne, is a modified version of this delicious cabbage soup from the French region of Gascony.  This soup smartly employs steaming and simmering techniques to gently extract the delicate flavors from winter root vegetables.  French Cabbage Soup is a warming vegetable soup with a depth of flavor that far exceeds its humble ingredients.

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.

I am a sucker for a colorful veggie, and when I saw these vibrant purple string beans at a farm stand on the way home from work, I was smitten!  With a wacky color-scheme in mind, I paired the quickly steamed beans with dollops of lime-hued green goddess dressing, made creamier and healthier by the addition of avocado instead of mayonnaise. Avocado Green Goddess Dressing is my take on the retro 70's classic. This cheerful side dish is ready in 10 minutes, and adaptable to whatever produce you have on hand. 

Check out our Grilled Spelt Flatbread with Tapenade & Tomato featured in Pittsburgh Magazine this week! We just love Brazen Kitchen's Leah Lizarondo and her irreverent take on seasonal vegetarian cooking. 

This tender and chewy flatbread uses local spelt to up the nutty whole grain flavor. We are addicted to this no-knead spelt flatbread, and find it has a taste and texture reminiscent of Indian naan and whole wheat pita. On a warm summers evening, we like to throw this easy flatbread on the grill, spread generously with briny tapenade, and top with juicy ripe tomatoes. This spunky tapenade, packed with garlic, tarragon, and green olives, pairs beautifully with the sweetness of August tomatoes. For us, this dish epitomizes summer: fresh produce, bright flavors, and smoky char.    

Yesterday was our 6th Wedding Anniversary: a day of serious highs, and gastronomical lows. After a wonderful weekend spent at a family reunion in gorgeous Colorado, our luck ran out on our return journey home. Mechanical failure on our plane resulted in a "temporary" hold on the tarmac, which turned into an overnight wait in the Denver airport. In the wee hours of the morning, huddled by the gate and desperate for good news, hunger pangs finally overtook us. Some scrounging in our bags resulted in a disappointing assortment of stale lifesavers, minty gum, complimentary water and unsatisfying little packets of peanuts.  By the time we made it back to Pittsburgh, we were hallucinating food, specifically steak.   We satiated our droopy and famished selves with a belated (and large) anniversary grilled steak with chimichurri sauce. What a revival!  

Chimichurri sauce, if you are not familiar with it, is a powerhouse parsley and garlic studded condiment of Argentine origins typically served as an accompaniment to steak.  We were originally introduced to Chimichurri sauce by my sisters' fiance, who makes a mean Chimichurri. Whenever he serves it to us we generally douse everything in sight with the flavorful sauce.  We are pretty sure our version is not authentic (garlic scapes, really?), but we do assure you it is addictive.  The sauce is both versatile and forgiving.  Our recipe is adapted from Serious Eats. 

Louisiana is the home of many excellent things; delicious foods, our good friend Jeff, and the inventor of these exquisite Cajun Crab Cakes with Jalapeno Remoulade.  Whenever we travel to a coastal area, Paul starts researching regional takes on crab cakes, a particular favorite of his.   Our time in New Orleans last year was a definite button busting success of a food vacation, with one exception, Paul did not find the one perfect crab cake.  We returned home and proceeded to immerse ourselves (read: obsess) with Cajun and Creole cooking,  It was through a Louisiana native chef and cookbook author, Donald Link, that we found this dynamic crab cake recipe.  Cajun Crab Cakes with Jalapeno Remoulade feature some of the classic Cajun flavors with an incredible punchy hit of flavor.  These crab cakes are unique in their minimal use of filler and binding ingredients, making for a very loose cake and which allows the sweetness of the crab to shine.  These crab cakes do rely heavily on the quality of your crab meat, so make sure to get the best quality you can find.   

I am mad for potatoes and have found myself, on more than one occasion, defensively sputtering to Paul that 'of course I absolutely NEED to bring back that bag of potatoes in my suitcase!'  In contrast to my gung-ho consumption of potatoes, I would consider Paul to be more of a casual appreciator of the humble spud, but we both love this Herb Potato Salad.  It is a light and vivacious, mayonnaise-free potato salad, with a snappy garlic-mustard vinaigrette lavished with herbs. Think of this recipe as an an outline that will easily adjust to different amounts and types of herbs and alternative vinegars and oils. 

With spring slowly turning towards summer, farmer's markets and CSA's across the country are filling up with a riot of unique seasonal produce. Spring Buckwheat Grouts Salad is a fresh and easy way to feature whatever is local and in season. Freely swap out the vegetables, herbs, and garnish to fit what looks best at your market. Using buckwheat gives a hearty, nutty, and gluten-free base on which to build a delicious salad. Follow the link over to Bob's Red Mill where we wrote a guest post this week: Spring Buckwheat Salad at Bob's Red Mill.

Portobello Burgers With Green Olive Tapenade are funky and slightly off the beaten veggie burger path with a briny sauce that will send your taste buds into cartwheels of happiness.  All modesty aside, we are were feeling pretty chuffed with ourselves when we first bit into these burgers, creamy mozarella melts into smokey portobellos with a full meaty texture.  Green olive tapenade brings a mysterious licorice and sea salty flavor, respectfully sandwiched between rolls liberally smeared by basil mayonnaise. High-fives and groans of delight were followed by a respectful 5 minutes of silent appreciation (read: scarfing) of these Portobello Burgers With Green Olive Tapenade.

Weekday evenings in the hungry hounds household can be a bit of a slapdash operation.  Take tonight for example.  After hosting an overnight guest for a 6:30am pre-work breakfast, a long day at work, and errands on the way home, we approached the stove with voracious appetites and waning energy.  Chorizo and Feta Pasta is beautiful dish for this situation, it takes 8 minutes to prepare, and hits the spot with the delicious combination of spicy chorizo and briny feta.  We happened to have some of Paul's delicious homemade chorizo on hand, but you can easily use store-bought.  The feta and chorizo not only provide big flavor, but also simplify the dish by eliminating the need for sauce or additional seasonings.  

In these chilly first days of spring, Red Cabbage Slaw bridges the divide between the hearty stewed dishes of winter and the fresh colors of spring.  Red cabbage is the perfect cross-over vegetable for this task, with its' sturdy wholesomeness standing up beautifully to a winter filled with pickling, braising and roasting.  Red cabbage effortlessly adapts to its new role, partnering with picnics and barbecues in this savory slaw.   

Buckwheat Tabbouleh with Goat Cheese is a light and zippy salad, flush with fiber and herbs. It is quick and easy to make, healthy, filling, and is a great alternative to traditional Bulgar wheat tabbouleh if you're gluten-free. This salad allows the nutty flavor of buckwheat to come through. If you've never tried buckwheat groats before, this is a great place to start.  A word about buckwheat grouts for those unfamiliar with this lovely little grain.  Buckwheat is in fact not related to its' namesake, wheat, and comes from the triangular seed of an herb.  Toasted buckwheat groats are called Kasha; Buckwheat grouts are the raw version.   These little kernels taste nutty and have a firm texture when cooked, they stand up well to lemon vinaigrette and meld deliciously together for a final product that is refreshing and filling. This recipe is adapted from America's Test Kitchen's How Can it be Gluten Free Cookbook. We (but mostly me) at the Hungry Hounds are always searching for an opportunity to add goat cheese to dishes, and this was a perfect opportunity. The goat cheese stepped up the flavor contrast, added richness, and  blended with the other ingredients to make for an earthy, herbaceous mouthful!  

A pastel-hued Cuban diner in Philadelphia was the site of my last fragrant bowl of Ropa Vieja, and I have been plotting to recreate this succulent dish ever since.  For me, nothing compares to a slow braised, big flavored, meat dish swimming in a pungent, aromatic sauce. This is my protein paradise! 

As the weather warms up we are putting the grill back to use and bringing back color to our diet.  We opted for a lighter dinner of grilled chicken with lettuce, cucumber, and stunning watermelon radishes from our CSA. The dressing was a creamy herb buttermilk ranch.