The Recipe Box: Travel the World From Your Own Kitchen

The Recipe for Travel is for people who love food and travel. When I travel, exploring the cuisine of the place holds as much appeal to me as the highlighted tourist attractions.

I spend inordinate amounts of time strolling through fresh produce markets, sampling street food, and studying restaurant menus before settling on the tastiest-looking meal I can afford on my traveller’s budget. I want to try everything, at least once, and I watch the cooking as much as possible so that I can recreate the dishes whenever I next have access to a kitchen.

You’ll find both useful and fun information about my adventures sampling food around the world in the World Food Companion section of The Recipe for Travel. Recipes for some of my discoveries can be found in the Recipes Index.

In Britain, Italy, Greece, Australia, New Zealand and Mexico, I shopped and cooked for myself and others often, as much for the pleasure of cooking and sharing a meal as out of economic necessity. Throughout Southeast Asia I found the street food and restaurants more than affordable and irresistable, and guest cooking facilities pretty much unheard of, so I settled for watching other chefs at work.

At home, I stock my kitchen with all of the fresh spices and key ingredients I can find at my local markets, improvise for the rest, and often make unusual substitutions just for the fun of it. I study dozens of recipes online and in my favourite cookbooks, handpicking ideas, ‘switching up’ the main ingredients and experimenting to create unique adaptations that satisfy my cravings for the traditional foods I’ve tasted around the world.

The Recipe Box is a collection of cooking tips I’ve picked up along the way and the extensive Recipes Index has some of the dishes that have made me popular at friends’ tables around the world. Some of them are Asian variations of standard western fare. Some are western variations of traditional Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and other Asian dishes. And some are just great ideas for the summer barbecue or the winter crockpot!