Mouthing Off

© Stephanie Meyer

There is no better midnight dinner than this one. Period. End of discussion.

© Stephanie Meyer

Twenty-four years ago I had a meal at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, and met the chef, Jamie Shannon. He was an amazing chef and a brilliant talent. Despite his New Jersey origins, he reinvented himself as a son of the South. His Commander’s Palace cookbook is one of my favorites. Read more >

© Carlos Garcia

Guests can help themselves to a snack, a glass of wine or cocktail fixings from foodie vending machines and minibars in hotel lobbies.

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© Stephanie Meyer

In the Zimmern house, when the weather turns steamy in Minneapolis, we always keep a glass pitcher of cold soup in the fridge. We alternate between my gazpacho recipe and this cucumber yogurt soup of Turkish origin. While everyone thinks of cukes as an American farmhouse staple, Turkey is the third-largest producer of cukes in the world.

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© Stephanie Meyer

In the early days of my travel life, I fell in love with Malay food and with the island of Penang. Pound for pound, this little island may have some of the best food in the world. On Kimberley Street or New Lane in the central city of Georgetown, the hawker stalls come alive at night and they serve some of the best chow in town.

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© Stephanie Meyer

Bo la lot is one of my favorite Vietnamese foods and a global fan favorite as well. Whether you use wild betel leaves, grape leaves (which I think work equally well) or even chard or kale, the authenticity meter won’t redline. This is one of those treats that you can truly make your own way, just like every Vietnamese grandmother does.

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© Stephanie Meyer

As a young boy growing up in New York City, we would spend our summers on the South Fork of Long Island. My dad would take me down to the beach at low tide, we would walk a mile down to the jetties and he would lower me by my ankles into the crevices between the massive boulders to grab at huge ropes of mussels. We would crab on Georgica pond for fun, pull clams out of Gardiners Bay, fish for porgies and snappers and make up any deficits for our Saturday dinners at the local seafood store. I thought we were foraging, but now that I am a dad, I realize this was my pop’s way of staying sane on rainy days with a seven-year-old to look after. We would haul our treasure home and my mother would make a superb summer fish stew out of whatever we brought in the door. My mom was as brilliant a cook as my dad is. She passed away a few months ago, and I am recooking my way through her recipe bin. My mother went to college at Mills, in San Francisco, and she roomed with Trader Vic Bergeron’s daughter. Vic taught them to cook late at night in the kitchen of the original outpost of the international Polynesian restaurant concept that still bears his name. Vic loved to eat, according to my mom, and while pupu platters were more his thing when it came to selling food, he loved the cuisine of northern California and made sure my mom knew how to make a simple cioppino before she graduated.

This easy and simple tomato-and-wine-spiked seafood stew is a Bay Area staple. Cioppino was supposedly created in the late 19th century by Portuguese and Italian fishermen who settled in the region from Genoa, Italy. Like all these types of dishes, it was first made on the boats while the men were out at sea and then found its way into the Italian restaurants that exploded on the scene in San Francisco. The name comes from ciuppin, a Ligurian word meaning “to chop” or “chopped,” which described a fisherman’s chore of chopping up scraps and bits of the day’s catch that weren’t sellable.

This recipe has been in my family since the early ’50s in one way or another and I love it. Serve it with plenty of toasts made from sourdough boule and a large, bracing green salad.

Go to Recipe: Cioppino with Mussels

See More of Andrew Zimmern’s Kitchen Adventures

© Stephanie Meyer

I don’t know about you, but right now, I have way too many farmers’ market strawberries and rhubarb in my freezer and I need to make way for the fruits coming into season this week. Spring and summer came early in Minnesota this year, and the rhubarb was amazing—sweet and long, tart and red.

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© Stephanie Meyer

My buddy Karl Benson has cooked this recipe for 15 years, but it took me 10 years to even taste it. Once I did, I was sold. I hope you don’t wait as long as I did to found out how stubborn and how wrong you can be. I think he got this recipe from his Swedish family, or from cooking one night at home with his friend Marcus Samuelsson, the famous chef, and experimenting a little bit.

Noma's Rene Redzepi is About to Host his 2nd Annual MAD Food Camp.

It's food festival time!! Well, it's always food festival time these days; but some big hitters are coming up, so take note. Next week it's the 30th Anniversary of Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. And just a few weeks later, over in Copenhagen, comes MAD2 from René Redzepi of Noma; it's his second now-annual MAD Food Symposium, aka Food Camp. Plate online said it really well: Redzepi can do pretty much anything he wants these days. He can appear on the cover of Time magazine, he can tweet out moose head photos as potential dinner ingredients. And he can host the MAD Symposium and have it quickly becomes the gold standard of chefs conferences.

If you missed the first MAD Food Camp—and you're in the food world—take note of the festival, taking place July 1 - 2. Some of the A-list chefs who have already RSVP’d yes for MAD2: Ferran Adrià, St. John’s Fergus Henderson, Mission Street Chinese’s Danny Bowein, WD50’s Wylie Dufresne, Pujol’s Enrique Olvera. Here’s what René has to say: “There will be a great collection of people; it's going to be an exciting couple of days. We already have a few new surprises in store for those coming!” Here’s what Momofuku's Dave Chang, who may or may not somehow make an appearance has to say: “At Mad festival you don’t know what’s going to happen. Last year, there was a family meal. René had Michel Bras making vegetables, Magnus Nilsson cooking oysters, Ben Shewry preparing an egg dish. And the food critics were the sous chefs. It was an extraordinary spread.”

For more details, go to: www.madfood.co

Date: July 1 – 2, 2012
Location: Refshaleøen, Copenhagen
Theme: Appetite
Ticket price: Approximately $350 (includes entry on two days plus breakfast, lunch and drinks on both)
How to purchase the few tickets that are left: contact Ali Kurshat Altinsoy at aka@noma.dk

Related: World's 10 Life-Changing Restaurants

The Creative Lives of Chefs René Redzepi and Daniel Patterson

Dave Chang