Ah, Maine, with its mossy forests, its briny cliffs dotted with picturebook fishing villages, its bracing salt air, and its discount-tastic outlet malls! What could be more uplifting to the benighted soul of a grimy city-dweller than an autumnal visit to the cheerful redoubt of the gaily-painted puffin, the marshy lowlands of the lumbering moose, or the azure waters of the delicious lobster? Such was our spirit as we bounded north of the city, clad in windbreakers and LLBean gear two weekends ago. Little did we know that behind the facade of unspoiled nature’s bounty lay an altogether more sinister side to the state known as “Vacationland”.

Our pursuit of Maine’s finest lobster roll led us an hour north of Portland to the clapboard Victorian town of Wiscasset, home of Red’s Eats. Renowned for being the tiny shack that feeds big, Red’s stuffs their lobster roll with the meat of more than an entire lobster, and as a result has been featured in the pages of most food magazines, as well as almost every “big (preferably grotesquely outsized) is better” food show.

Lulled into a contented, almost comatose, state by a pound of their buttery crustacean, we puttered gently around Wiscasset’s myriad antique stores before following a “ye olde” style sign for “The Music Box House Museum” at a fork in the road. After half a mile, and with the shadows lengthening as the light faded towards dusk, we came upon an impressive white Victorian mansion toward which a brick pathway led through a pair of overgrown flower beds.

As we approached, a man and a woman exited the front door, giggling to one another and remarking how extraordinary the museum had been, before hurrying away, their laughter echoing in the gloaming. Encouraged by this show of enthusiasm, we entered. A high-pitched bell sounded and the front door gave onto a deep lobby from which a central, red-carpeted stairway led to the first floor. All was illuminated by a magnificent chandelier. Enchanted for a moment by the tinkling of nursery rhyme tunes from all around, we failed to notice the presence of a grey-haired, shiny-faced Mr. Belvedere look-alike who had appeared before us.

“Good evening.”, he purred, unsmilingly. His voice, like his skin, strangely oily. “You must be here to see the music boxes.” “The full, guided tour costs $20 each and takes at least an hour – longer depending on how excited I get.”

Guessing that he couldn’t get excited without actually killing someone, but still overcome by lobster, I could only gape back at him and grope for my wallet as “a freaking hour of music boxes fer chrissakes?!” flashed across my mind. Fortunately, my wife reacted much more adroitly, lying that “we’re not sure we have that much time – we’re meeting friends for dinner in Portland. Is there anything we can look at unguided?”

“Well, yes, there are a variety of coin-operated music boxes here in the lobby, and, of course, the gift shop at the back too.” He replied, gesturingly towards the dimly lit far end of the room. “So, can we explore the lobby? Great! Do you have any quarters, Jonny?”

Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by a desire to leave this place. The bright light, the uncomfortable atmosphere of the leering attendant, the inane tinkling of music boxes all began to freak me out. Somehow though, my clammy palms still reached into my pockets for some change. I pushed a coin into the polished slot. Three tiny, glossily-enameled characters in Chinese costumes appeared from behind their tiny silver doors and began to beat three tiny drums to the plinkety tune of Auld Lang Syne.
“All machine-operated, no electricity at all.”, murmured our guide admiringly. “Wow, that’s, um, fascinating!” my wife blurted out. Then, feeling like we ought to ask a follow-up question, I blurted “how does it work?”. “You’d find out if you took the tour.” He replied icily.

The music ended abruptly and unsure of whether to make for the exit or check out the other dark wood cabinets lining the lobby, we looked embarrassedly at each other. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the attendant reaching into his shirt-front pocket and loosen the top of a cigar shaped cylinder, briefly withdrawing something sharp-looking before replacing it and patting his pocket. Since he was between us and the door, I backed away towards what turned out to be a giant automatic organ, complete with dancing keyboard, recently acquired from Switzerland.

“Where’s the slot on this one?”, I asked half-jokingly, quarter at the ready. “There isn’t one, and, besides, this magnificent piece is not in working order anyway.” “It requires $20,000 worth of renovation and the person the owner wants for it is stuck in California.” Wondering if he was talking about himself in the third person, or if he was hinting that the restorer had been encased in concrete after failing to negotiate, my wife asked where the owner was. “Oh, he’s two towns away and won’t be back for at least a week”, he smiled creepily back. “Quite long enough for the mortar to dry after you brick us up in the basement walls”, I thought with a shudder.

Now, thoroughly freaked out and feeling hemmed in by the attendant who was now occupying a bench between us and the exit and still fiddling with whatever was in his pocket, we backed away further. As we did so, the sound of tinkling music boxes grew louder. Turning a corner, we found ourselves surrounded by what seemed like a thousand enameled music boxes, the cacophony of nursery rhymes was almost overwhelming and we were struck by a nervousness that had us giggling and fidgety.

“You’ll never find a better deal in the whole state of Maine…”, he said having followed us in. His voice trailing off. “… In what little time remains of your life”, I mentally completed his sentence. “I don’t think we’re in the market for a music box”, said my wife. “No, I mean these postcards of the museum. They’re a dime each. You’ll never see value like that again in your life”, the attendant corrected her ominously.

After a couple of moments during which the inane jingly music became so intense that I began to feel like maybe someone had actually flipped open my head inserted a music box mechanism in place of my brain, my wife quickly calculated that a dollars’ worth of postcards might be a good trade for getting out of there alive. Dragging me out of my stupor, she hastily picked a handful of them, tossed a dollar at Mr. Belvedere and hurried to the exit. It was only afterwards that we looked at them did we realize that the phantasmagoric show we had experienced was not a patch on the house tour and that the almost hysterical couple we’d passed on the way in must have taken the whole thing and had likely gone mad as a result.

After hurrying to the safety of our car, we drove back along the street, past the museum. No more than three minutes had elapsed, yet there was not a light on in the whole place nor any sign of occupation, only a peeling sign creaking in the wind and the rustle of dry leaves… We can neither confirm nor deny that a surfeit of lobster can lead to hallucinations, but as a precaution, we steered clear of it for the remainder of our stay in Maine.

The largely unknown city of Compiegne, France, has the distinction of being the site of one of Louis XV’s most extravagant homes away from home. Under him, the Chateau de Compiegne became one of three distinctly opulent seats of government alongside Versailles and Fontainbleau. The latter French monarchs were hardly known for their desire to live simply as visitors to either of those other palaces can attest, and Compiegne is no exception, taking more than 35 years to complete with Louis constantly tinkering at the design to aggrandize it to his tastes. When finished it made the perfect departure point for forays into the nearby Forest of Compiegne, ancestral hunting grounds of French royalty, for some bracing sport. However, Louis was not into taking chances on returning with his game bag empty, and it is said that the forest was so well-stocked that a blind marksman could still expect to feast on wild meats.

Of course, it’s well-known that the rest of the French population were not eating in quite such grand style at that time, and it wasn’t until after the revolution and the rise of the bourgeois class that the French institution with which many of us are most familiar came into being, namely, the restaurant. Happily for us, upon visiting Compiegne in early 2010, we found that these days the city is much more egalitarian in its approach and makes abundant gastronomic accommodation for a range of economic classes. Indeed, the night we arrived, we dined somewhat opulently on escargot ravioli and kir royal before joining the sans culottes at the other end of the social spectrum the following evening with a carafe of vin ordinaire to wash down a marvelously flavorful jarret de porc, poached pig’s hock, a humble dish that was almost certainly never prepared for residents of the Chateau. Served with some whipped potatoes together with its poaching broth that would have been almost as good without the hock itself, le jarret was juicy, incredibly rich and porky, and meltingly tender.

The porcine counterpart to the famed veal osso buco of Milan, the hock is the lower portion of the animal’s shin bone ending just above the trotter, and is consequently tough and full of connective tissues. As with all such parts of the beast, slow cooking is necessary to get the best out of it, and in the case of the hock, poaching tenderizes it perfectly, but ignores the magic of the skin and underlying fat, comparable with the cheeks in terms of porky flavor. To solve this problem, and improve upon the jarret of Compiegne, we roasted it in a hot oven that performed three special functions: 1) it rendered out some of the fat, 2) crisped the skin into some amazing crackling, and 3) transformed the connective tissue into sticky, almost sweet, gelatin. We then deglazed the roasting pan with some of the strained poaching liquid and reduced the mixture into an almost clear gravy, that combined with a squeeze or two of lemon juice to cut the richness, came together on its own with the pig gelatin.

Unfortunately, and this is why we took until the start of fall 2011 to make this dish, unsmoked pork hocks are rather difficult hard to obtain in America even from reputable butchers where their smoked counterparts are ever present, and it was only last week that we managed to get our hands on some, in, of all places, a regular suburban supermarket. Our freezer is now half-filled with pork hocks which will be dropped into Sunday gravy in the near future, and may well also feature in a special attempt at home-making aspic jelly should we run out of inspiration or suffer from pork overload in the interim. We would encourage you to seek out this humble cut of meat too, you won’t be dining royally but it might help you feel wealthy when you check your bank balance.

Regular readers will most likely know a handful of factoids about us WANF-ers and our proclivities, among them: one of us is English, the other Italian-American; we enjoy making a wide variety of dishes, many of which we’ve sampled on our travels; and we have a young child. The more perspicacious among you will notice one or more incompatibilities in the above, especially with regard to the child and love of travel. Upon our recent visit with our English family, these came home to roost and were amplified by an exquisitely-timed bout of gastrointestinal trauma. Not that this made for a disastrous visit – far from it, in fact – but it certainly hampered our ability to sample local specialties and, after having looked forward to the prospect of an honest pub lunch for around 18 months, it made such sampling as we were able to undertake an exercise in sweet frustration.

Perhaps ironically for someone from such a small country, my knowledge of its regions is slight. I blame this on the bourgeois attitudes of my parents as much as on two back-to-back dreadful, cold, wet and windy family vacations to Wales at the age of five and six which persuaded us to forsake the British Isles henceforth for the balmier climes of continental Europe. However, I credit these early trips to Europe with my passion for good food, having been introduced to Breton buckwheat gallettes stuffed with local wild asparagus and grey shrimp in cream sauce when, through the owner of the gite and local parish priest, Monsieur Fleury, we acquired a pile of them, freshly prepared by the gnarled mitts of one of his flock, an ancient black-garbed widow named Madame LaPorte. That I was immediately and completely terrified by the sight of this one-toothed old crone lest she put me in her cauldron yet volunteered to visit her again the next evening to collect some more (my first halting words of French having been “encore des gallettes, s’il vous plait!) speaks volumes about the transformative effect of good food.

So it was that when we joined my family – sister, her husband and kids, plus my Dad and my step-mother – in an old sandstone farmhouse in the Cotswolds this past week, my expectations for what would ensue were mixed at best, chiefly featuring chaos of screaming children chasing chickens interspersed with light showers worsening to daylong downpours and limited access to anything worth eating. I am pleased to report that I was simultaneously almost completely right and completely wrong.

If there is a golden triangle for food in the UK, it’s arguably centered on the Cotswolds – a region of bucolic rolling hills made up of portions of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and Somerset and bordered by some of the prettiest villages in neighboring Hereford & Worcestershire. For in these yellowish dry stone-walled fields are produced world-famous cheeses (single and double Gloucester, the original Cheddar, and Oxford Blue), some fine regional ales (Donnington’s, Flowers’), scrumptious ciders and perries, some of the UK’s best heritage breed pork (Gloucester Old Spot) and, believe it or not, a significant proportion of England’s “best” wines (a term I use advisedly, but in the knowledge that some 700 years ago, during the late Medieval warm period, English wines from this region were considered superior to their French counterparts. Thanks to my father for that priceless historical gem.)

Where we stayed, in the tiny hamlet of Hampen, one would have found it almost impossible to go hungry especially at this time of the year when nature is in a riot of growth provoked by 18 hours of daylight and regular gentle showers, and still-warm organic eggs, with yolks so rich they were almost red, showed up on our doorstep every morning. It was, therefore, a major disappointment when, laid low by a virulent stomach bug acquired somehow on the plane over, I was forced to do just that to avoid regurgitating these delicious vittles. Happily, in spite of my weakened condition, the spirit of those long ago days in Brittany prevailed and consecutive lunchtime visits to two of the Cotswolds’ finest pubs were enjoyed, if approached rather warily.

The Mount Inn overlooking the picturesque village of Stanton in Gloucestershire possesses one of the finest views of any pub in England. Taking in this charming vista over a pair of Donnington’s Ales and hearty servings of old spot sausages with cheddar mash and Hereford beef and suet pudding was a lunch to soothe the soul and calm the guts of even the most jaded traveler. Similarly, the Ebrington Arms in the eponymous Worcestershire hamlet lying just outside the county’s perennially best-kept village of Chipping Campden and adjacent to the fabulous gardens at Hidcote Manor, was a sight for sore eyes after half a week living on water and dry toast. Microbrews from nearby Stow-on-the-Wold helped down a wonderfully gamey pan-fried Gloucester old spot pork chop and a Ploughman’s platter featuring local ham, farmhouse cheddar and chicken liver terrine with a selection of house-made pickles.

Of course, these were just short breaks from the general pandemonium at the farmhouse where terrified chickens scattered in a harrumph of feathers at the gleeful charge of my three year old nephew and excited screams of “poo! Poo!” filled the air almost constantly. And sure, there were a good couple of days of cold and blustery rain that kept us frustratingly confined to quarters and encouraged breeching of the wine by late morning, but this was nothing to bear compared with the loss of appetite and downright fear of eating during those hellish first several days. If Beethoven’s personal purgatory was going deaf while conceiving his most brillaint compositions, then mine is almost certainly being physically unable to enjoy eating when surrounded by a veritable bounty.

The hardworking folks behind this non-award winning blog are enjoying a deserved warm weather break on Florida’s Gulf Coast right now. No offense to the locals, but we did not pick this particular destination for its well-known and highly prized food culture. Instead, it was selected as a fitting location for our first post-baby trip that would be easy to get to, easy to negotiate in situ and with guaranteed good weather, something we’ve been craving after a hard winter made tougher by a sleepless infant.

However, we are happy to discover that we didn’t touch down in a food desert at all, and we could have posted about the delicious and moist blackened mahi-mahi sandwiches we had yesterday at Randy’s Fish Market, but after a preparatory month of near-total meat deprivation that helped us fit into our bathing suits with less embarrassment, we were feeling decidedly carnivorous. So, here are some grilled cross-cut beef short ribs, leftover from the tablita parrillada we gorged on during last night’s visit to Martin Fierro, an Argentine-run parrilla hidden away in a strip-mall on the other side of town. Named for the central character of Argentina’s famous epic poem by Jose Hernandez, it’s a faithful recreation of the parrillas we so enjoyed almost exactly two years ago during our visit to Argentina and Uruguay, in every respect but the strip-mall.

Joining them were a quick salsa criolla and some rounds of fried yucca. Sure, it’s not exactly beach food, and we stripped off at the pool with noticeably less enthusiasm today, but it was delicious and exactly the kind of indulgence we had been looking forward to for weeks. And, as every Englishman knows, a little of what you fancy does you good.

Emerging from the cool interior, the scent of carved stone and beeswax mingles briefly before being overwhelmed by the perfume of orange trees, and the holy silence is punctured by the mossy gurgle of a tiny fountain. Large white geese peck assertively at the ragged hands of ferns that decorate this cloister and I am reminded that oranges were brought here by the Moors and that geese make more effective security systems than dogs and fences. Incongruous? Perhaps. But not nearly so peculiar given the context in which I was reminded of this memory of Barcelona: an article announcing that Jennifer Aniston’s favorite country is Spain and Barcelona her favorite city. All of which would be of no interest whatsoever if she made better movies.

I arrived at this location having played that day of nearly six years ago backward in my mind until I arrived at the Cathedral of Santa Eulalia, a short walk from where we were staying in the El Born district. Playing it forward I recalled eating a surprisingly good chorizo and canned tuna sandwich with a beer to calm my vertigo after scaling one of the narrow spires of La Sagrada Familia. Venturing onto consecrated ground typically has a tranquilizing effect – especially twice in one day – as if merely stepping over the good Lord’s threshold is enough to encourage contemplation and peace even in a cynic like me, but the views over the city were worth the trauma.

This “surf and turf” sandwich, a somewhat curious mix for us this side of the Atlantic, was the inspiration for the meal pictured at top. Catalan culinary tradition pairs mar y muntanya often in the chicken and shrimp stews of the region of Girona, and baby octopus with fried eggs loosely follows the same line of thinking, just focusing unapologetically on the infantile and gestational end of the spectrum of life.

Crunchy, with the toothsomeness one finds in octopi, dipped into runny yolks and eaten with crusty bread, this is as incongruous a dish as one may find. Texturally and flavor-wise it was a success, if not exactly a symphony. Eaten off Hefty(R) Basics(TM) Tableware biodegradable paper plates – another departure from convention – fitting given the inherent greasiness of the two components, it felt rather like a the kind of thing one might enjoy at a casual beachfront tasca, along with pink Cava and sunburn. Happily, the plates withstood the grease and sharp knives admirably, a stern challenge indeed.

Towards the end of what is, in my opinion, his finest work, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell tells of the bitter street fighting he witnessed in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War when the delicate alliance between communist, socialist, and anarchist factions of the Republican army finally collapsed. While certainly not the bloodiest scene in a war that cost around a million lives, it was one of the most significant, sounding, as it did, the death knell for the Republican cause against Franco’s Fascists. Never after this internicene strife were the respective Republican parties able to trust one another enough to wage a successful war.

Even prior to the Spanish Civil War, anarchist and regional-nationalist groups in Catalonia were making trouble for the shaky Spanish state (then under Republican rule). Indeed, it was during this period of the early 20th century that Barcelona became known as la rosa del fuego, the rose of fire. Modeling their destabilizing tactics on the exploits of Italian anarchists and revolutionaries under Giuseppe Garibaldi, the weapon of choice for Catalan anarchists came to be a round iron ball stuffed with explosives ignited with a string fuse. [Anyone who has ever seen a Tin-Tin or Felix the Cat cartoon will immediately recognize what I'm describing.] In Barcelona, anarchist activity centered around the-then hard-scrabble, now beautifully redeveloped waterfront, neighborhood of Barceloneta, where the mazy streets and crumbling slums provided ample cover for clandestine activity and proximity to the port offered easy access to contraband goods and shady characters.

It was during these unsettled years of the 1920s and ’30s that a Barceloneta bar owner by the name of Maria Pla, during a moment of whimsy with mashed potatoes to hand, created what is now the signature tapas dish of Barcelona, la bomba, the bomb. Potato croquettes with aiolli or a spicy dipping sauce is about as common a tapa as you can name, but Pla’s genius was to shape the croquette and plate it with these two sauces in a way that resembled the anarchists’ favorite weapon.

Today, la bomba can be found in tapas bars and tascas throughout Barcelona and beyond, and its origins in that murky political underworld are mostly forgotten. In fact, we ate it first at Tapa, Tapa a rather touristy tapas bar on the Paseig de Gracia in Barcelona knowing nothing of its fascinating history.

More than its political significance, la bomba is remarkable both as a relic of a turbulent time in the city’s history, and as a statement of the enduring gastronomic playfulness of Catalan chefs. Where today their creations run to rather more extravagant creations — like Ferran Adria’s trick olives (in which olive oil is sealed inside green agar-agar shells, set using a chemical reagent, and served in a ramekin looking for all the world like a simple tapa of olives) — Pla’s invention was just as, if not more so, adventurous, because it was poking fun at the potentially hazardous world of political terrorism.

Perhaps this quality of not taking life too seriously and finding time to play with ones food even in periods when one might be blown-up at any minute speaks to the broader philosophy in the Iberian peoples that George Orwell found both frustrating and alluring in equal measure — and this is not to reduce Spaniards of any stripe to the caricature of gluttonous Sancho Panzas, but rather to celebrate that such is possible even under the greatest duress — that, though they may cling tenaciously to opposing political viewpoints, which in that era, they fought tooth and nail for, nothing is taken quite so seriously as eating and drinking.

As you may have inferred, I am not overly impressed by this show or others like Man vs. Food that marvel at just how gluttonous and boorish the host can be. Perhaps it’s because I frequently over-eat and then avoid looking at myself in the mirror, but in the same way as I don’t favor shows featuring close-ups of young fools guzzling booze, like, say, The Real World, I also don’t enjoy watching some fat guy shoving 4 pounds of pancakes down his pie-hole surrounded by the cheering obese. I find it all, shall we say, sorta gross.

On a more serious note though, if such shows are truly representative of the best road-food in this country, and were I an American truck-driver, I would fear for my health. I know from personal experience that driving isn’t one of the more healthful occupations given the innumerable sedentary hours in the cab, but when the majority of truck-stops offer only greasy fast food, you can be pretty sure that expecting to to enjoy a long and healthy retirement after 40 years in the game may be optimistic.

We mentioned our appreciation for the fare offered at Italian truck-stops a couple of years ago — noting with joy and surprise in equal measure that one can get beer or wine to accompany, amongst other things, fantastically fresh panini — but our recent trip to France has re-opened the debate over which country we’d prefer to be a trucker in.

Known as routiers, French truck-drivers have a reputation for gruffness and industrial action. Rarely a year passes in which they do not blockade the Channel Tunnel or the autoroutes around Paris with blazing oil drums to protest rising fuel prices, increased tolls, or out of sympathy with the similarly militant French farmer. Having driven in France, one sympathizes with their complaints over the miserable state of fuel and tolls, but if there is one facet of Gallic truck-driving life about which they cannot complain, it’s road food.

Perhaps to compensate the routier for his hard life behind the wheel, the weeks away from his family (and it almost always is a him), and the hours of solitude, in true French style, there has grown up a nationwide network of restaurants that principally cater to him: the Relais Routiers. The French trucker network makes sure that wherever he may find himself, from the city to the countryside, from Flanders to Gascony, the hard-working driver can get a three-course meal with wine and a shower without having to resort to such desperate measures as his American (or British) counterpart and settle for fast-food. In fact, a handy pocket-guide is published annually to help them find these often out-of-the-way places.

And therein lies the rub: rather like the average Frenchman who will happily spend an hour of his precious Sunday driving out to a tiny auberge hidden in the hills to support the cooking of a particular chef, the French truck driver will always go out of his way to arrive at a Relais Routiers around noon. And why not? They serve excellent, often regional, food at the correct price that has him returning every time he’s passing by.

But to many throughout the provinces of France, the Relais Routiers are more than just a truck-stop. They are the local restaurant, watering-hole, social club and informal town hall — the locus for ties that bind the community together. And like local businesses everywhere, owners of Relais Routiers know their clientele well enough to understand that their customer’s loyalty to a restaurant is only as strong as its loyalty is to their stomachs and pocket-books. Consequently, they offer reliably good, honest food. Indeed, in these thin times, and with the advent of so many pretentious, expensive eateries causing the collapse of local bistrots across France, some commentators have called Relais Routiers the guardians of the nation’s cuisine. This might be slightly unfair to the Paul Bocuses and Daniel Bouluds of this world, but like a good pub in Britain or quality diner in America, you simply know where you are with a Routiers. You know what to expect and while your expectations might rarely be exceeded, they are always met, and familiarity and comfort are what most people seek most of the time.

Until comparatively recently, the laws governing alcohol consumption and driving in France were less than strict, and it was perfectly normal for a routier to wash his three course meal down with an aperitif, half a bottle of wine and a digestif (all except the digestif being included in the price) before breezily climbing back into the cab of his 10 ton machine and trundling off. These days the carte routiers still includes three (sometimes four!) generous courses, but with the booze sensibly capped at a 1/3 bottle, often served in a small jug that looks touchingly dainty in the nicotine-stained hands of blue-chinned trucker.

When we visited Auberge St. Martin — a Relais Routiers on the RN31 in Pontarcher, Ambleny, between Compiègne and Soissons in the Oise department of France between Christmas and New Years — our delicious three course lunch and half-carafe of house red plus coffee set us back an astonishing 22 euros ($29) for the two of us. The charge of one euro above that levied on many of our fellow diners was due to our inability to flash our routiers membership card.

The Carte Routiers had its customary three options that day, a choice of two starters, two mains and two desserts: a charcuterie plate (containing slices of the local specialty, andouillette, or tripe sausage) or pork rillettes, followed by poulet Basquaise (Basque-style chicken with peppers and onions in a spicy sauce) or biftek (rump steak with french fries), and fromage blanc (a delicious thick natural yogurt) or assiette de fromage (cheese plate) for dessert.

The food was simple and delicious, and the service prompt and informal. The sole problem we encountered was in following directions to the bathroom which appeared to lead to the bar, but in fact directed you outside to a separate door where the shower was located. The most enlightening aspect of the whole experience — quite apart from note penned on the menu listing a shower for 2 euro or 3 euro with a towel — was that this place really did a lot of its business with truck drivers. Outside, packed tightly together on the muddy verges of a country road were 10 or more giant trucks, and glancing around us more than half the diners were sitting quietly by themselves, sleeves rolled up to reveal a bevy of tattoos, breaking their midday bread in companionable silence. We looked at each other and both said, almost simultaneously, “this would never happen in America.” It was a moment of sincere cultural recognition on our behalf, and we raised our glasses to toast these heroes of haulage and their continuing role as custodians of the nation’s table.

Made during the horrid, self-reflective, and, frequently, gassy hours aboard a trans-Atlantic flight this past weekend, our New Year’s resolutions swore us to no less than three weeks of Spartan, monkish grazing on whole grains, green vegetables and lean protein in order to trim ourselves of burgeoning, lumpy mid-sections brought on by the combined Holiday calories of three Thanksgiving dinners, two Christmas roasts and a New Year’s trip to France.

However, we have since surprised, or dismayed, even ourselves with the deplorable level of willpower demonstrated in abandoning our resolutions after just three days. Only slightly less amazing is that three days of salads could drive us to such an extreme. Perhaps the only positive we can draw is that at least we’re starting 2010 with a gastronomic bang instead of whimpering abstemiousness.

The chivito is, informally, the national dish of Uruguay and legend has it that it came about when an Argentine tourist from the city of Cordoba, visited the establishment of restaurateur Antonio Carbonara in the beautiful beach resort of Punta del Este, and asked for a sandwich of roasted young goat meat (a specialty of her native province), known as chivito*. Having no goat, Senor Carbonara proceeded to prepare a steak sandwich for his Argentine guest, topping it with just about everything he had to hand in his kitchen. The resulting sandwich was such a great success that it became a permanent item on Carbonara’s menu, and its fame spread across the country like wildfire, becoming known in the process as the chivito.

As with nearly every “national” dish, there are a few variations on the theme, but the chivito is basically a sandwich made of a thin piece of beef, often skirt steak (churrasco) topped with melted mozzarella cheese, grilled or pan fried red pepper, bacon, ham, egg (either boiled or fried), lettuce, tomato, sliced onions, mayonnaise, sliced pickles and olives on a bread roll. The two principal variants on this theme are the Chivito Canadiense (Canadian chivito) which substitutes Canadian-style bacon for the crispier kind, and the chivito al plato, a deliciously messy platter of all the typical ingredients served without a bun on a plate and often with fries, or, maybe even more commonly, with ensalada rusa (Russian salad – potatoes, mayonnaise, carrots, peas, tuna, onion, parsley, and, occasionally, boiled egg and sliced beets). Note: Chivitos may also substitute chicken or veal escallopes for the steak.

On our final night in Montevideo last spring, instead of our usual giant steak dinner at one of that city’s wonderful parrillas, we tasted our first chivito at a small sidewalk cafe in the quiet neighborhood of Pocitos. Until that moment, we had been led to believe that the United States was the home of the world’s most ambitious and artery-busting sandwiches — indeed, it is home to most of them — but we now know that the Uruguayans, in their charmingly understated and apparently ego-less manner, have created something which can challenge for that title.

Whether you choose to make yourself a chivito now or later, as a reward for an extended period of fasting, is entirely up to you, but since last night’s regimenal aberration we have remade our vows to gastronomic penitence. How long we keep them this time is, as yet, unknown, but the mere sight of a chivito tends to focus your mind on, ahem, one’s weighty personal issues.

*The word chivito refers, specifically, to a young goat that has been weaned and fed on solid food. It, therefore, differs from the cabrito, or baby goat – an unweaned animal – by being some months older.

On our honeymoon, almost exactly two years ago today, we arrived in the fair city of Verona thoroughly pissed off. And then things got worse. It wasn’t as if the day had started badly either: waking in Bologna; leisurely sipping a doppio espresso; before strolling along Via Pescherie Vecchie to buy a small, crusty loaf, a giant, but sweet tomato, an immoderately-sized leaf-wrapped burrata, and a serrated knife; then, wandering into the Piazza Cavour to make ourselves nearly sick with buttery cream cheese curds washed down with a half-bottle of bardolino. All in all, a pretty reasonable opening gambit.

I don’t even recall at what point things began to go west, but the supposed simple hour and a half drive between the two cities took us more like four. So, in late afternoon, we lurched into Verona hot, tired, stiff, and needing to pee. And then we couldn’t find our hotel. Another hour of angrily trawling the Veronese streets in our banana-hued rental car, grinding gears, and now with excrutiating pee pains, we finally found it – closed. No amount of banging on the door, honking of the horn or screaming at the windows produced a response. Despairing, I relieved myself copiously in the hotel’s flower bed and, looking up with an air of contentment, spied a large pink elephant beaming at me from across a field. Salvation arrives in many guises, and drawn towards it, things immediately improved.

With a free bottle of valpolicella, a purring welcome from a friendly ginger tom, a pair of iridescent peacocks puttering outside, and a room for the night with breakfast, Hotel Elefante saved us from sleeping in our car and, perhaps, from premature marital counselling. Having regained at least partial equilibrium, we made for the city center dressed for the theatre.

Skirting the wholly-invented balcony of the wholly-invented Capulet family, we ducked down Via Portici and into a restaurant filled with lovers pawing each other under the table and, like cartoon dogs, sucking-up the same strand of spaghetti. Still too flustered to entertain any romantic notions, we ordered what turned out to be a vast portion of fegato di vitello alla Veneziana or Venetian-style calves’ liver, which, with its heady richness of garlic, sage and cream, would have rendered senseless even the most amorous couple. Things continued to improve after dinner as we shuffled onwards to the arena di Verona and, cooling our tails on its ancient bleached limestone blocks, watched an epic performance of Puccini’s La Bôheme that somehow provided much-needed perspective on the day’s minor tragedies.

Periodically, we’ll laugh (or grimace) at our haplessness that day, but as time passes, we’re more apt to remember the liver than the liverishness. During a recent lunch at the very respectable Aperitivo here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, we ate a delicious adaptation of that dish over linguine with a nice dry Valpolicella that was reminiscent of our pre-opera meal in Verona. Here it is, recreated for your visual pleasure. Feel free to eat it on a balcony or at a banquet for quarreling clans, just don’t expect to be feeling frisky afterwards.

Virtually everywhere they make sausages, and in a lot of places they don’t, some form of sausage in bread combination is sold by street vendors, often to the inebriated, and, in many cases, the consumer is best advised to be under the influence before taking their life in their hands with one of these mystery bag sandwiches. The night I met my wife, for example, I remember being horrified that her sister (who had introduced us earlier in the evening) was reckless enough — even after 50 drinks — to buy an insanitary-looking sausage in a roll from a street vendor in London’s Piccadilly Circus.

Where sanitation isn’t the biggest issue, a sense of disappointment often is, with the boring and insipid offerings available at any of the myriad hot dog stands lining almost every Manhattan street exemplifying this. Do not get me wrong, a New York hot dog — pulled from the disquietingly opaque water, slapped into a curiously spongy potato roll, and painted with mustard and an unidentifiable relish – is certainly a real taste of NYC street life, and when you’ve been pounding the city streets for an afternoon, almost enjoyable, but it is not great street food, regardless of what Adam Platt at NYMag says. (feel free to post your own disagreements with me below)

However, the more I travel, the more I realize that these sausage and bread combos can actually be both safe for human consumption and, in some cases, a delicacy. You may remember our merguez frites sandwich of last year, which was not just the best street food we’d ever had, but right up there with the finest sandwiches too. Even the overtly filthy nature of that vendor in Carcassonne failed to put us off. Indeed, it’s probably true that we would risk a searing bout of intestinal drainage on a weekly basis if only merguez frites were readily available.

So, during our recent trip to Argentina we were intrigued by rusty little cabins that we passed throughout Buenos Aires, either parked-up or slumping shack-ily on the sidewalk, emitting wonderfully aromatic smoke and advertizing choripán and morcipán on gaily painted signs. After one particularly lengthy trek across the city from Palermo to Recoleta to the edge of Balvanera, we were ravenous and mentally-prepared for something of questionable hygiene wrapped in a roll and doused with condiments.

Following a tip we had picked up online, we headed to the corner of Avenida Juan B. Justo and Avenida Santa Fe in Palermo [right next to the Palermo Subte stop (D line)], to a very sweaty looking snack bar for a pre-dinner choripán — a chori(zo) on bread (pan). Smaller than our pitifully-sized Brooklyn apartment and decorated with aging posters of scantily-clad beer models, our senses immediately told us that this cafe was exactly the kind of place that would deliver the equal measures of delicious, greasy victuals and stinging doses of the raging squitters we were looking for. [Happily, only the former arrived.]

Your typical sausage and roll combination features a roll that follows the dimensions of the sausage: long and narrow. However, one of the many things I immediately liked about choripáns and morcipáns is that they invert this absolutist relationship on its head. The sausage is split down the center, seared on both “faces” a la plancha and, dripping with bright orange fat, is placed inside a rectangular hunk of French-style bread. Not only is it texturally superior to its flimsy American counterpart, but its increased surface area and the greater density of the bread, make it a far better designed sandwich than the hot dog. As, enclosed in a larger roll, your choice of condiments — in this case, mayonnaise, “golf sauce” (not unlike Russian/Thousand Island dressing), ketchup, mustard, and chimichurri — are less able to escape and damage shirt or shoes, as frequently happens when biting down on the open-topped frankfurter.

Unfortunately, once you go choripán, you can never go back, and their absence from my everyday street food scene has become a source of extreme frustration now that I’m back in New York. Passing-by vendors of the humble hot dog several times a day, I can’t help sneer a little at their meagre offerings of limp weiner and rubbery potato roll, and I mutter to myself that the magnificent, spicy, chewy choripán is a shining light compared to their ghostly reflections.

Happily, choripáns and morcipáns are easy and fun to make in the comfort of your own home and make a great alternative to the unimaginative backyard barbecue staples of weiners and burgers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we couldn’t find Argentine-style chorizo in Brooklyn, but the easy to find, and similarly fresh and soft Colombian and Mexican varieties make worthy replacements, even if they are longer and slimmer than their Argentina counterparts. This past weekend, humming “the choripán man, the choripán man’s really got it going on…” inanely to ourselves, we mixed-up a tangy chimichurri, grilled ourselves some chorizo, and enjoyed a taste of Buenos Aires with a cold beer, even if we had to imagine the warm weather and palm trees.