Schoenbrunn, the Hapsburg’s Summer PlaceAnd I thought houses in the Hamptons were getting too big.             The first of 29 locks the Tor willpass through en route to Nuremberg As night fell, Viking River Tor passed through the first of a series of locks…

The Royal Palace on the Buda side of Budapest Despite having not slept since Wednesday, the city of Budapest beckoned and won over the comforts of the Tor, one of 29 Viking River longships that ply the Danube in both directions.  I finally arrived in…

Air France Flight 7 380 Airbus New York to Paris At least, there was wine. I think of myself as one of those travelers whose attention to detail leads to flawlessly executed travel plans.  But yesterday,  I forgot one very important detail.  I spent most…

The Daily Meal, that great food resource whose banner heads up every page of Chewing the Fat, is sending me on a great adventure.   I’m off today for Budapest, flying through Paris on Air France to arrive there in the early morning Friday. There, I will board…

         I could eat our local asparagus until it was coming out of my ears.  Thanks to growers in Mexico and Peru,  asparagus is now a 12 month a year vegetable in New York and almost everywhere else. However, nothing but nothing comes close…

Our New York City kitchen is only slightly larger than a bread box but certainly not large enough to store a slow cooker.  So I keep ours in Bridgehampton. Not that I am a particular fan of the slow cooker.  The idea of having to…

Gyros, ubiquitous in NYC A Gyro is a Greek dish of meat that’s been roasted on a vertical spit, folded into pita bread and then served with tomato, onion and tzatsiki sauce.  Gyros, pronounced “Heros”, are everywhere in New York City.  The website Yelp has…

Claire Saffitz The bones of this great recipe are from a Bon Appetit writer named Claire Saffitz.  Ms Saffitz has an intriguing background.  She is a graduate of both Harvard and McGill Universities.  At both places she studied History but by the time she got…

Florence Fabricant Is the asparagus better than ever this year?  Or is it just more welcome than ever?  How did it manage to poke its heads through ground that remained frozen far later this year than last?  And, once thawed, how did those same shoots survive…

Melissa Clark, Author of 29 Cookbooks Mother’s Day is upon us.  It’s this Sunday, May 10th. It’s time for good children (and their fathers) to treat Mom to a day completely devoid of cooking.  Although you can go the restaurant route and take Mom out…

Get your party clothes on! It’s Cinco de Mayo! I’ve written at length previously about Cinco de Mayo, the May 5th salute to Mexico that’s more American than it is Mexican.  There it is celebrated in the province of Puebla and almost nowhere else.  So…

Central Market, Budapest Paprika for Tourists Early to rise and to pack in as much Budapest as time would allow.  First stop, the Central Market, just as it opened at 6:00 am.  Time changes do wonders for sightseeing.  Since I am writing a piece on…

Marcus Porcius Cato 234-149 BC If New York has a cake, it is most certainly our richly indulgent and sumptuously creamy cheesecake.  There is a lot of culinary history to support this claim.  And then there’s Junior’s, a Brooklyn Temple to Cheesecake which made history…

Last week, I went all the way back into the archives for Chewing the Fat.  I was astonished to see that an Orecchiette recipe that I posted very early on in the life of the blog has had precisely 40 visits. That is about 1/10th…