What happens when its dinner time in Thailand and the power goes out?  Well, you just have to get creative.  Jean Pierre certainly has one solution…

Episode One of Jet Set Zero Italy captured just a small piece of the massive chow-downs we experienced nearly every day. Check out this video for some of my favorite food moments from this summer’s adventure! It was so nom-worthy that I’m bringing all my recipes from the road home for a new cooking show, Really Easy Italian.  Good luck and hearty appetites to the Thailand cast.  Enjoy!

What could be even better than traveling with your best friend?

EATING (and then trying to cook) while traveling with your best friend.

When Amy Cao visited me in Quito and brought our replacement video camera after the first one became a casualty of bus robbery, it was a bit of a working holiday for her. Amy’s a non-cooking food-writer-turned-food-show-host who produces charmingly comedic Stupidly Simple Snacks videos for the many of us who, like her, are handicapped in the kitchen.

Since Amy’s life and profession revolve around food (as have many of our best conversations in the eight years we’ve been friends), we spent a lot of time eating.

Eating our way through Ecuador

We toured Quito by day, ducking into tiny mom-and-pop restaurants for set lunches that cost $2. If we were feeling really good about ourselves, we’d splurge on $5 ceviche. At night she’d visit me at work at Uncle Ho’s to dine on fresh shrimp rolls and Vietnamese coffee as she kept up with her website via MacBook.

The professional version

We wandered through local markets drinking exotic fresh fruit juices like taxo, naranjilla and tomate de arbol. We devoured regional dishes like shredded pork with buttery mashed potato cakes topped with a fried egg, not caring that our lunch’s source (a giant fried pig’s body) was staring us in the face. We ate 50 cent cheese empanadas on the bus and sampled $20 guinea pig at a 5-star hotel. In short, we did what we do best: talked at length about the world and the lives we spend traversing it over a long, lovely meal.

It wasn’t all mangos and banana smoothies though. On Amy’s last night in Quito, we decided to roll up our sleeves and take over the kitchen in my apartment in Quito (although, good roommate that I am, decided not to “borrow” Freddie’s orange for our recipe). We filmed the debacle – ahem, culinary success – and Amy created a video so you can laugh along as we endeavor to make Ecuadorian ceviche. And yes, we’re in our pajamas at the end of the video (and yes, we have matching shirts that say Up with Life/Down with Oil in reference to Ecuador’s endangered Yasuni rainforest) because we went out for a celebratory dinner at a hillside hacienda for Amy’s last meal…and then she dragged me out of bed at 5am so we could taste our masterpiece and film ourselves eating raw fish at dawn before she flew back to NYC.

Armed with our ingredients

See what we concoct in an unexpected culinary comedy when this Jet Set Zero cast member stirs the pot with Amy Blogs Chow.

In our first short from Season 7: Italy, enjoy a brief peak into the cooking of an idyllic Italian family dinner.

Who said “Cooking can’t be fun”?! Well, whoever that is, it is not true. Here’s the proof…

Qui a dit “Cuisiner, c’est ennuyeux à mourir”?! Eh bien il n’y a rien de plus faux. En voici la preuve…

(Version française plus bas)

Have you ever noticed that sugar doesn’t have a smell?

Well, Ecuadorian sugar has one. Ecuadorian sugar, or rather, panela. Panela is solidified sugar cane juice. Ecuadorians use it as a sweetener for a lot of things and, let me tell you, it tastes (and smells) like heaven.

On my very first trip to the grocery store I bought a huge round chunk of panela. “If I’m going to cook here,” I thought, “I’m going to do it the Ecuadorian way!”

Panela: solidified sugar cane juice Ecuadorians use as a sweetener.

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