I realize as I look back over this past year that food has played a role in my family’s most memorable experiences. Here are five stand-out food memories for 2018:
Fall, of course, is harvest season around the country and there are many festivals to celebrate the bounty, including those that include showing off your prowess in the kitchen and the garden
The 16 kids aboard Uniworld River Cruise’s special Family Christmas Market sailing in Germany are all members of the clean plate club by the time they are done cooking with Chef Peter Tarnok and Senior Pastry Chef Ciprian Ghiluescu. In fact, most of them have seconds… Lorelei George, 8, licks her plate.
There’s shop after shop of kitchen wares—ceramic sake cups, wooden bowls for miso soup, colorful bowls for rice, all varieties of chop sticks and of course hand-made Japanese knives that will be engraved on the spot with your name in Japanese. And everything is a bargain!
We’re fans of including cooking classes in our travels, learning to make mole with our kids in Oaxaca, Mexico and pasta with other young travelers in Lucca, Italy. We learned to make crab cakes on a Windstar cruise ship, after following the chef to a local market in Croatia. Wherever we go, at the very least we make sure to visit local food markets.
We’re seven strangers ranging from 22 to 60-something standing in a Paris afternoon outdoor market trying to decide. We’ve signed on for a cooking class with La Cuisine Paris, one of just a handful here that offers classes in English.
I spent all day in the kitchen—on vacation. But maybe because it was my choice and maybe because it’s a spectacular kitchen at a Portico Club house overlooking the mountains in Snowmass, CO, I didn’t mind a bit. In fact, because the kitchen was so well equipped—and the house so spacious—we decided to host a barbeque for folks we know who live here and who always are hosting us when we visit.