Souvenir Recipes

One of the best things about vacations is the slew of souvenirs we take home. They can be tee shirts or shells, maybe even jewelry or salt and pepper shakers. Yet the best ones are the food memories, souvenirs perfect for our kitchens. No matter where we go, there's a recipe we're bound to recreate.

Foreign vacations mean foreign foods. It's easy nowadays to recreate dishes from across the globe. Recipes can be easily gotten and translated, thanks to the Web.If you were lucky enough to lounge on Mediterranean beaches, you probably got to lunch on pissaladiere slices or a bowl of pasta vongole .Pissaladiere is relatively easy to make.It's a short crust base topped with a yummy mixture of anchovies , olives and onions spiced with thyme sprigs. Pasta vongole is simply linguini with clams. Again homemade is an easy make. Use fresh clams (none of the canned stuff) and boil them. reserve the juice or broth.It's then cooking chopped clams in them with a little white wine, red pepper flakes and garlic. If you spent July sunning on Mikonis or Karpathos and Kos, then you may be hankering for stuffed grape leaves or dolmades. Fill grape leaves (which can be easily bought at Trader Joe's) with a tasty marriage of arborio rice and pine nuts along with raisins, chopped onions, and mint. You can  add meat, usually ground lamb.

You can still bring back recipes even if you stuck close to home. South Jersey has a variety of fun dishes and boardwalk snacks. Taylor ham, a Boardwalk specialty can be recreated in a variety of dishes.It is good on a soft roll, Atlantic City style, especially when the bread sops up all that melted butter, yet you can also have it as a side with scrambled or sunny side up eggs. Seafood is big  along both of New Jersey and New York coasts. Go to your local fish monger for fresh seafood. You can make an easy dipping sauce using just ketchup and horseradish that's perfect for everything from clams to shrimp. Boardwalk fare can be easily copied. Frozen custard is a treat and can be created on any stove top. It's an egg rich custard that's then poured into an ice cream maker. A fun, spin, popular at many shore ice cream parlors is frozen custard served in a hot waffle boat. The last requires a special machine but you can make fresh  ones with a regular waffle maker.Homemade fudge is a Jersey classic and must have.It's super simple to make, both over a stove top and microwave.Use semisweet chocolate and condensed milk for a Boardwalk must have.

A summer traveled is a summer full of souvenirs. Recreate your tastiest ones in your kitchen. It' s a way of still having the best time all year round.