Honest Cooking and Travel

Tacos al pastor is one of the great collision stories in food history. Lebanese immigrants brought the vertical spit-roasting technique of shawarma to Mexico. Within a generation it had been completely transformed: lamb became pork, tahini became salsa, and a slice of pineapple on top of the spit became the signature move. The result is a taco with smoky, chile-stained pork, ...

I ate a version of this at a Korean restaurant in Koreatown where the steak arrived sizzling on a hot stone bowl with a raw egg yolk sitting on top. You break the yolk and stir it into the rice. This recipe does the same: hangar steak marinated in soy sauce, gochujang, sesame oil, garlic, brown sugar, and sake, seared and sliced over rice with a raw egg yolk, kimchi, and saut...

I brought this to a dinner party once and the host asked which bakery it came from. It is a graham cracker crust with cream cheese filling, six cups of strawberries split between the glaze and the topping, and toasted almonds along the edges. It looks professional because the strawberries are arranged in a circular pattern and the glaze fills in around them.

The cream ...

Have you eaten eucheuma seaweed? It is a coral seaweed, chewy and slightly crunchy, common in Malaysian cooking but almost unknown outside Southeast Asia. In this kerabu, dried coral seaweed is soaked, drained, snipped short, and tossed with calamansi juice, sugar, and a paste of red chili and belacan pounded together in a mortar.

The belacan is fermented shrimp paste....

What makes a good fish taco? The fish, obviously, but also what goes around it. One pound of Mahi Mahi marinated in lime juice, olive oil, cumin, smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and pepper. Grilled three to four minutes per side. Placed in warm corn tortillas and topped with shredded cabbage, cilantro, diced red onion, sliced avocado, and a lime crema made ...