Jet lag brings out the worst in me, and after 36 hours of travel to reach Paul in Cambodia, I was tipsy with sleep deprivation and drooping with hunger. Ignoring my desperate mutterings about going to sleep, Paul grabbed a moto driver and whisked us across town to Friends, a non-profit restaurant and job training center for at risk youth. I ordered half the menu in my hunger, and recall finding it all delicious with one exception...the pumpkin soup was outstanding! The flavor was deep with a warming blend of spices set off by a rich coconut and pumpkin base. I begged the cooks for the recipe, and they rattled off a long list of spices. I have been obsessively trying to recreate that soup for many years. This Cambodian Spiced Pumpkin Soup is a Westernized version that brings me back.

Today we are sharing a gluten free and vegetarian main that we absolutely love. Omit the fried egg, and you've got yourselves a vegan classic. Exclusionary food labels aside, this a lovely, simple, seasonal dish that is ready in 15 minutes. The trick to a great soba noodle dish is going big on flavor, so we heaped on the pungent tastes of garlic, ginger, and soy. Seasonal variants of soba noodles with a pungent vinaigrette and veggie noodles is a frequent favorite in our household. Our summer version of this dish includes zucchini noodles and grilled squash.

We made this Pumpkin Praline Waffle recipe for our good friends from Philadelphia who are visiting this weekend. These waffles are not your classic crisp crusted Belgian waffle. Pumpkin Praline Waffles bring both fall flavor and color to the brunch table, and have a soft and custardy texture that tastes like pumpkin pie. A quick homemade riff on pecan praline puts these waffles over the top. Check out our Overnight Sourdough Waffles for a classic Belgian style waffle. And stay tuned for a savory cornmeal waffle recipe coming up soon! 

Some recipes have a timeless appeal, and are reinvented over decades, even centuries. Pears poached in sweetened wine are one of the oldest confectionery treats. Dating back to Medieval Europe, pears were looked on more favorably than apples and often cooked in honeyed red wine with spices. Our version of Red Wine Poached Pears is a simple and easily adaptable dessert redolent with rich warming spices, evoking the vibrant hues of autumn. Poached Pears make a unique topping to an ice cream Sunday, and we like to serve them with red wine sauce and homemade caramel. If you have pears leftover, try our Salted Caramel & Pear Bread Pudding.

Research shows that taste and smell work together to help guide our perception of the flavor of food. Food without scent, is a large part of why I find the flu season so gastronomically depressing. Anytime you need to blow your nose to taste your steak, you know things are getting desperate. In this light, the old school slow cooker becomes a brilliant device: an aromatizer and purveyor of olfactory delight.  Because who doesn't love the smell of cooking food when you come home from work starving? This fall, I found a clever slow cooker technique for French lentil salad.  Our Slow Cooker Lentil Salad with Roasted Squash has a traditional French Dijon style vinaigrette, is garnished with a flurry of cheese, herbs and nuts, and with a nod towards fall, accompanied by caramelized roasted Delicata Squash. Do not hesitate to use bold flavors in this salad, a lentil under seasoned is a truly woeful thing. 

When having someone over, we often find ourselves perseverating on the perfect dish. Our brother-in-law-to-be has a birthday coming up, and we've been obsessing on rib recipes in preparation. After many delicious test batches (it's a hard life), Paul emerged this week from his smoker, charred ribs in hand, triumphant! We devoured these Spicy Maple Glazed Baby Back Ribs with long satisfied silences interspersed with occasional groans of delight. These foolproof sweet and spicy ribs work equally well in the smoker or oven. For other meaty inspiration, check out our Slow Roasted Pork Ribs.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some eat greatness in an apple tart. We count ourselves in the third category. Our Apple Almond Tart is a trifecta of dessert greatness.  A crisp and flaky butter pastry base, creamy almond cheese filling, and delicately cooked apples for tart contrast. We recommend that you go ahead and double this recipe the first time, as we we polished off an entire tart ourselves in record speed.

I find that I often prefer the idea of retro foods much more than the actual foods themselves. This vintage salad is a mustardy crisp exception. Celery Root Remoulade is a traditional raw bistro salad, well loved in French cuisine. Just leave it to the French to transform a hairy, knobby, alien-like root vegetable into a delicate salad. If you've never cooked with celery root before, don’t let external appearances fool you, while this root crop may look like a deformed, sprouted potato, celery root adds a nutty, nuanced celery-like flavor to raw, salads, soups and is fantastic in mashed in potatoes. We serve Celery Root Remoulade as a pungent fall coleslaw and find it pairs particularly well with meat and seafood dishes. 

Carrot Coconut Soup is made in under 30 minutes and uses a genius recipe from James Peterson. We love Peterson's cookbooks so much that we originally named our rescue greyhound ‘James Peterson’ in his honor. To our chagrin, we quickly discovered two names and multiple syllables to be far too overwhelming for a greyhound with limited life skills. Now, he just answers to Leo. Carrot Coconut Soup builds flavor from a sauté of carrots in butter, with an unusual thickener of rice, finished with coconut milk and curry  to round out this delicious soup . Easy pantry ingredients, foolproof technique, and lovely bold flavors!

Fish cookery and smoked foods don't have to be labor intensive and intimidating. Our recipe for Maple Juniper Smoked Salmon uses a simple Native American technique to easily bring lightly smoked, delicately cooked, flavorful salmon to your table (and impress your wife with your pioneering skills)! For those of you with maples growing in your backyards, its time to break out the clippers! The fish is grilled on a bed of freshly cut maple twigs and leaves, which allows the fish to gently cook while wrapping it in aromatic smoke. The glaze uses juniper and maple syrup to produce a subtle sweet and piney flavor. When buying fish, we try to make sure it is sustainably harvested (or farmed). Ask at your local seafood store, they are usually very knowledgeable. This recipe is based on one of my favorite cookbooks: Food of the Americas: Native Recipes and Traditions by Fernando and Marlene Divina. If you are interested, check out some of our other seafood recipes.

This week I took a stand against the breakfast industrial complex. Sunday for breakfast, I thought I’d go carnivorous, and ate a plate heaped high with Amish summer sausage. In honor of meatless Monday, I thought I’d swing vegetarian, and polished off a bowl of leftover garlicky lentil salad with goat cheese. Tuesday at 6am, I started to worry that I might not be getting my daily serving of fruits and vegetables, and munched away on snow peas, carrots, and bell peppers while I was getting ready for work. Don’t worry, I also ate string cheese for protein! This morning I was out of time and thinking that I might want to dip towards the sweet side, unfortunately things got a bit sticky when I tried to juggle spoonful’s of Nutella while driving. Paul, no stranger to my breakfast rebellions, calmly continued eating his grape nuts. Now that I’ve gotten that all out of system, I am ready for a spiffed-up breakfast classic. So when I got home from work today, I made a big batch of Chocolate Maple Granola with Quinoa and Cranberries. This chocolaty, crunchy granola is somewhere between breakfast and dessert, a good place to be in my mind, and with the combination of nuts, oats, and quinoa, provides a complete protein rich meal that keeps me energized through the whole day.

We find ourselves making quite a few sorbets around the holidays, when heavy meals are inevitable and dessert has the potential to push us into button busting gluttony. This potent fall Concord Grape Sorbet is a refreshing and aromatic end to a meal, and will usually garner a grateful nod from our overstuffed guests (I'm looking at you potato gratin). Concord grapes are a bluish black variety, native to the North-Eastern region of North America. Concords ripen in early fall are are the variety behind the iconic color and flavoring of grape juice and jelly.

For a time, my family lived on a farm in rural southwest Colorado. My brother was in charge of raising the chickens and ducks, my mom managed the greenhouse and gardens, my dad ran the fields, and I raised the pigs, usually about 3-4 at a time. Seeing the process through, from raising the animals to butchering and packaging the meat, made me passionate about nose-to-tail cooking: minimizing waste and maximizing flavor and value. Sausage is quintessential nose-to-tail cooking, using meat not suitable for the more expensive steaks, roasts, and specialty cuts.

This quick and easy Apple Sage Breakfast Sausage is my take on a classic fall breakfast sausage. It rich and unctuous without being greasy, is packed with apple and sage, and highlighted with generous freshly ground black pepper. If you've never made your own sausage, this is the place to start. The sausage is ready in minutes, and uses free formed patties to avoid the extra complexity of casing your own sausage.

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.

Dessert descriptions are thorny things. When it comes to sweet things I find that eloquence often fails me, and unhelpfully divide desserts into two camps, delicious… or, not. While clear cut, these categories do not offer the reader much to recommend this decadent Salted Caramel & Pear Bread Pudding. Besides the obvious “delicious, ”a brief description is in order. Salted Caramel & Pear Bread Pudding has some great things going for it. The bread is toasted to maximize its ability to absorb all the decadent custard, the custard is silky and aromatic with a whopping ¼ cup of vanilla, and is further treated to a topping of caramelized pears with accompanying pan sauce of pear infused salted caramel.  For all its flavor and texture complexity, this dessert is also subtle and balanced. This recipe is adapted from one of our favorite cookbooks: Rustic Fruit Desserts. The gorgeous pears for this dish come from our Penn's Corner CSA. 

Sautéed Red Cabbage with Bacon showcases our only edible crop this year, Paul's guerrilla red cabbages. While we do enjoy a good cabbage slaw in the summer months,  fall has us yearning for our classic Sautéed Red Cabbage with Bacon, a dish which balances the sweetness of caramelized onions and cabbage with tart vinegar and salty bacon. This spring, Paul surreptitiously planted a mini colony of red cabbages in our front flower garden, nestled between daylilies and daisies. With sunny spots in scarce supply, Paul was adamant that winter was coming...and we needed to ensure an ample supply of sauerkraut and cabbages for the lean months!

 When Paul asked what I wanted for my birthday meal this week, I immediately blurted out 'lots of potatoes!' Paul smirked, ok, so nothing new here. Upon further consideration, I requested a potato dish that was both creamy and crispy, pungent with garlic and goat cheese. This aromatic Potato Goat Cheese Gratin was the magnificent result, which I ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This recipe is adapted from one of our favorite cookbook authors, James Peterson. It forgoes a bechamel or cream sauce since the high starch content of the potatoes eliminates the need for additional thickeners. For a crisp fall day, nothing beats the smell of slow roasting garlic, goat cheese, and potatoes! 

For me, fall is the season for rustic fruit desserts.  Crisps, cobblers, grunts, crumbles, slumps, pandowdys and brown bettys; all homey variations on the classic fruit-sugar-butter combination.  Raspberries come into their prime in early fall, so this past weekend, my sister and I did some fall raspberry picking. After gorging ourselves on as many of the berries as we could eat raw, I was ready to bake. I wanted to make an unembellished dessert that would highlight the raspberries, while gently blanketing them in a snug bed of crisped almonds, butter and sugar.  Crisps have a lot going for them, they are reliable, take well to innovation and substitutions and can be easily whipped up with whatever ingredients you have on hand. This Raspberry Almond Crisp smells amazing, and makes a perfect early autumn treat. 

I have been on a quest for the perfect Reuben sandwich for 3 years, ever since tasting the amazing version at Lucky's Cafe in Cleveland. The basic elements of the Reuben may seem pedestrian: rye bread, corned beef, sauerkraut, thousand island dressing, and cheese. However, each element, when done right brings complex flavors and loads of unctuous umami. This Reuben is the product of my DIY quest: built from scratch from sourdough rye through home cured corned beef and everything in between. If you want to go whole-hog DIY, follow the links in the ingredients section back to the recipes to make your own scratch made versions. Any element you make from scratch is going to make a big difference in your final product. This Oktoberfest, celebrate with an old classic, done right.  

I always associate beets with the Borscht Soup that my Oma used to make in the fall and winter months.  At the time, I don't recall being all that enamored with either the soup, or beets. But now I love them both. We have found that beets are not a vegetable that generates a mild response.  Whenever we plan to serve them, we like to first test out the waters to see if our guests are beet-friend or -foe.  Beets have a strong earthy flavor that needs some assistance. In their unvarnished form, they are a dusty and lumpy root vegetable, with little to commend by their exterior. But peel a beet and you will find a vibrant, sweet and minerally vegetable, happy to lend color and flavor to drab dishes.   Beets and their greens are chock full of vitamins, among them A, B1, B2, B6 and C and are high in calcium, iron and magnesium. Beets respond well to many cooking applications and are delicious in everything from hummus to pickles to juice.  I first made these roasted beet chips when I was hankering for some root chips (those incredibly overpriced bags of beet and sweet potato chips at the grocery). It occurred to me that I could make them on my own and instead of deep frying, I thought I’d give beet chips in the oven a go. While Paul was skeptical of my oven technique, it worked beautifully and he sneakily polished off the first batch before our guests arrived!

This French Vegetable Soup, Ratatouille, is as rustic and delicious as it is healthy and easy to make. Its flavor is built subtly from vegetables at the peak of their freshness. The dish involves no meat, no stock, no complex seasonings, and no challenging techniques. Don't be intimidated by its French origins, Ratatouille is foolproof, flexible, and amazingly, even better as a leftover. Our recipe is inspired by Anne Willan's extraordinary The Country Cooking of France. 

Ratatouille is a traditional country stew which takes advantage of the late summer bounty of fresh tomatoes, eggplants, onions, zucchini, garlic, and peppers. This type of seasonally-driven, vegetable-based cooking has increasingly become a luxury of the well-to-do. A lack of access to fresh, healthy, home-cooked food, contributes to the poorer health and shorter life expectancy of low-income Americans.

One organization working to make fresh seasonal produce accessible is Just Harvest. Their Fresh Access program allows food stamp (SNAP) recipients to use their benefits to shop at local farmers markets -- gaining access to the fresh, affordable, and seasonal bounty of local farms. SNAP benefits help 47 million Americans (and 1 in 8 people in the Pittsburgh region) put food on the table for their families. Organizations like Just Harvest, are helping to make healthy food more accessible. Just Harvest's research has shown that 80% of SNAP shoppers increased their consumption of fresh produce when given the opportunity to shop at farmers markets. Fresh Access Coordinator Emily Schmidlapp puts it succinctly: "We believe that access to fresh, healthy, affordable food is a right and not a privilege." At the Hungry Hounds, we couldn't agree more. Bon appétit! 

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. 

Rebecca's all-time favorite sandwich is the Vietnamese Bánh Mì. Our take on this Vietnamese-French fusion classic uses unctuous grilled chicken, tangy pickled vegetables, heaps of cilantro and jalapeno, and a robust mayo sauce. Despite the long ingredient list and exotic heritage, Grilled Chicken Bánh Mì Sandwiches are straightforward to make and can win over even the pickiest of eaters.  

Sorry that our comments have been unavailable. We've resolved the technical glitch and switched to a new service. Thank you for all the wonderful emails! We'd love to keep hearing from you.

What is your favorite sandwich? Where did you eat your favorite Bánh Mì sandwich? 

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.