Or enjoy a burger at the Anchor Bar in Superior? How about eat a farm-to-fork dinner at L'Etoile? Munch on BBQ at Speedqueen? Have you ever done a side by side taste test in your car of the custards served at Kopp's and Leon's? Have you ever cheered on the Bucks at the Bradley Center? What about cow chip tossing in Prairie du Lac? Or dinner at the legendary Sanford's in Milwaukee? Ever stay in a hotel as regal and as quirky as the dowager Pfister? What about tucking into a meal at Lake Park Bistro or Coquette? Have you ever taken in a game at Lambeau Field and cheered on the Packers? Now how about the Wisconsin State Fair? Or touring Roth Kase, or Carr Valley or any of the other superb cheesemaking houses in the Dairy State? Have you gone to the world class spa and hotel at Kohler? Or taken the family to the Dells for the ultimate kitschy family vacation? Have you eaten at any of ancient German or Eastern European restaurants in Milwaukee like Ratzsch's, Three Brothers, Old Town or Ilija's Place? Or how about Usinger's Sausage factory, ever been there? Eaten Ian's pizza late on a Saturday night?

Well I have ... and none of that (almost) was for this shoot. I did get to showcase a couple of my fave haunts in the show and hang out with friends like Shana Martin, Myron at Chalet Cheese and the D'amatos. Wisconsin is America. Not the America of New York or Los Angeles but the America of Lake Tomahawk, where families gather at night for Legion events, meat raffles, bake sales and yes, snowshoe baseball and everyone knows your business, which is good and bad, but the sense of community and respect runs deeper than anywhere else I have ever spent time ... anywhere. I live in Minnesota, moved here 18 years ago from NYC, and with Wisconsin being our next door neighbor and part of the vibrant upper Midwestern 5 state area, I have had more opportunity than most to explore this amazing region ... let me tell you, Wisconsin is awesome. In our show we explored the Lumberjack Bowl in Hayward, made limburger in Monroe, ate lutefisk brats and played snowshoe baseball in Lake Tomahawk, water-crossed in Wausau on snowmobiles at 80 mph, ate our way through Madison and Milwaukee, tossed poop in Prairie du Lac and lots more but as always it's the awesome people I remember most, the little old ladies selling pies at the ballgame to raise money to support our troops overseas, the hundreds of patrons of The Old Fashioned in Madison stuffing themselves on apple pie and cheese curds, the night at Leon's eating the worlds best custard with Sandy and Angie, the chef at Polonaise ... like the crowds scream every Saturday at Camp Randall, "when you've said Wisconsin, you've said it all."

What's the weirdest thing you ever ate?

What's the worst thing you ever ate?

Does your family eat such an adventurous diet?

Do you ever get sick on the road?

Do you really do all that stuff yourself, jump off mountains, swim with sharks, eat rotted foods, or is it ever faked?

And so on ...But until I flew into Xai Xai, in the Aha Hills of Botswana and was greeted with boundless enthusiasm and grace by Ralph Bousfield, I never had a good answer to the question "what's the greatest trip you have ever taken, the one trip above all others that continues to thrill you just to think back on it?"

I had flown into South Africa and over-nighted at an airport hotel after a grueling 22 hours of flying. The next morning I flew to Maun, Botswana, arguably the busiest hub for small planes in the Southern Hemisphere. It is here that small 4-seaters from all around the Kalahari come to pick up their charges, eager and fresh-faced for the trip of a lifetime. I was greeted by a bush pilot, who threw my bags in the back of his plane, secured them with a seatbelt, threw me into the co-pilot seat and took off across the Okavango Delta for the grass airfield in Xai Xai. We had a flight plan, but were on our own schedule so the pilot obliged me each time I asked him to take it down and circle massive herds of elephants, grazing giraffes, water buffalo splashing in the muddy drinking holes, farm house clusters of grass buildings and so on. The Delta teems with the greatest concentration of wild animals on the continent and I was glued to the window for the 2-hour flight. We landed, greeted by the entire village for whom an airplane is still a rare sight and met Ralph. Ralph's family came to Botswana over 100 years ago and his father was the most famous Great White Hunter of his era, still holding the record for crocodile kills in the Guinness Book of World Records. Ralph's dad, Jack, saw the forest for the trees way before everyone else and hung up his rifle in his prime, deciding that preservation and education was what was needed most in Botswana and devoted the rest of his life to that end, and Ralph has continued the tradition, running a company called Uncharted Africa, the finest outfitter I have ever had the experience of travelling with. Ralph drove us an hour across the desert (hard-pack scrub growth thorns, head-high bush and red clay dirt, no sand in sight) to our base camp and we unpacked in a hurry. I was greeted by all the members of Ralph's team who didn't come out to the airfield to say hi and the rest of our production unit, and we raced off to meet the family group of 22 tribes-people who are San, the legendary bushmen of the Kalahari.

We slept in tents each night, going to sleep to the sounds of leopards and baboons prowling outside our tent (really), the trills of night flying birds and the and singing of the San. We woke each morning before dawn, ate hurriedly and walked the 400 yards to the cluster of grass huts that the San live in. We started our day with them as soon as time allowed and we ended our day at sunset each night by wishing them good evening and they to us, as we headed exhausted back to our campsite to wash up, eat dinner and pass out, rising again to begin fresh the next day.

In this show we were faithful to the documentary process in that we include almost every little taste of our adventure with you, and not only was this the most exciting and revelatory travel experience of my life, I think it is the finest hour of television I have ever been associated with. I don't want to ruin a minute of it for you but suffice to say when you are getting an archery lesson at sunset from an 80-year-old shaman using a bow and arrow set he made for you an hour earlier and a black mamba snake (one of the world's deadliest predators of any species) attacks the camp and you get to bring that kind of action to bear in your show, well, things are looking pretty good from an entertainment standpoint.
You really have to see this program for yourself.

Africa has been my favorite travel destination for the last few years now, the adventures and experiences I have had in Morocco, Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Sudan and Algeria both making our TV shows and as a civilian are among my fondest and most thrilling memories. Botswana now stands atop my list of all-time fave locales to travel to and I cant wait to see my friend Ralph again. I can't say enough about Uncharted Africa and the people of Xai Xai and the tribes of the Aha Hills.

PS. The answers to the first set of Q's is roasted porcupine skin, 14-day-old stinky tofu at Dai's House of Unique Stink in Taipei (the 2-day-old stuff on the street vended from small carts is delicious), no, no and finally ... of course I do it all, if you see it, it's real, and we never ever stage or fake anything.

Gales Point is a village on a narrow peninsula in the lagoon of a mangrove swamp; you only get here by boat. Founded by runaway slaves, this remote town of 400 people drums and dances and eats at a celebration of the full moon, with the added uproar of a Creole Easter celebration. It's called the Sambaii and features a unique style of music and dance, and we got to eat the famous Royal Ray of Belize, the gibnut. Because of its isolation, the West African styles and rhythms are stronger here than most Creole communities. By all account the Sambaii, is a sexualized style of dance -- the word "orgy" is sometimes used -- and the Christian elements of Easter do nothing to tone that down. In fact, the Easter holiday makes things even wilder and crazier. Game on.

We dined on Easter Sunday with a Mayan family in the mountains of the central massif of the country where we shared an ancient tradition and a pile of hogs head tamales, we dined at Rojo Lounge on grub butter poached lobster and conch eye ceviche, we got a lesson in jungle pharmacology followed by a cleansing ceremony where once again, yes, I was spat upon, and of course we ate stink-toe bakut, a fruit that everyone needs to try. At least once in their life.

Belize is a wonderful example of a culture that is massive in scope, but most Americans only see a small part of it when they visit. Like other countries, if you only sit on the beach eating burgers and drinking pina coladas at the hotel you might as well be in Florida.

They are legally only allowed to seat 12, but everyone bends the rules. The Havana Journal rates La Guarida as Havana's best known paladar, and the food there is awesome, but most of them are small unknown family places. I ate in some superb restaurants like El Ajibre, the best chicken rosticerria I ever ate in, and Santy's, a rustic fisherman's shack in Havana where they prepare the best fish in town from the fresh caught tuna and other fish in the most unlikely of settings. I stayed at the Hotel Nacional in Old Havana -- THE hotel in 1950s Cuba. Still in operation, stuck in time, it's dusty, fascinating and enormous. I stayed in room 225, the Frank Sinatra room where he honeymooned with Ava Gardner. I taste tested cigars with the catadores of the Partagas factory in the VIP smoke room, strolled the Bay of Pigs, picked tobacco with farmhands, danced with Havana Rakatan, wandered through the mogotes of Vinales and toured the old city of Havana in a horse drawn carriage. What you didn't see was the hassles we went through trying to get into the country, the sweaty nervousness of bringing all our gear through Cuban customs on the way in. The bliss we felt at May Day, the thrill of our boat ride to Cayo Macho, the fun we had watching all the tin pot dictators and their posses who were in Havana for the Non Aligned Nations Conference, throwing baseballs with kids in the streets each day in between takes, making fun of our bus driver who doubled as our government minder and was constantly writing down the names of everyone we talked to in his little book, lobster lunch with our fixer Toby at his house in Miramar and the list goes on and on. But here's the point. I doubt that when it airs, if there will be a more politicized show we have ever done. Cuba is a tough subject to tackle, part paradise, part paradise prison. And the expat community here in the States is very vocal and adamant in their chilling condemnation of all things currently Cuban, and I get it. But the thaw is here, and the palm curtain will fall very soon, and we found an amazing world in Cuba. Their favorite subject is America, they love Americans and frankly, travel is humanity's greatest equalizer. I think that travel allows us to join hands around the table, and we spend time enjoying each other and our commonalities, and we spend less time arguing about our differences. I say the sooner we embrace Cuba the better, because it's a bizarre world, but we all call it home.

Myke Hawke is amazing. This man is the embodiment of the old adage, "never quit." His Special Forces training, medic background and most importantly his ability to instill that kind of motivation in others gave me the confidence to move mountains.

I can now build fires, make shelter and feed myself in the wild, but I also learned that I have been piling up some pretty extensive expertise on my own. Like feeding myself on limpets thanks to my Molokai bothers taking the time to school me on how to find and harvest them.

I now know I can only go 48 hours without breaking down and puddle-ing up into my 21st Century spoiled little kid mode. Here's a behind the scenes glimpse: the show ends with breakfast on the last morning and the idea was that I survived 48 hours, and am being rewarded with "breakfast in bed" courtesy of a lady chef who Hawke knows. Superb chilequiles by the way ... but I digress. So about 6 hours before that, in the earliest blackest hours of the morning, one of my producers sneaks into my camp and hands me 3 mini-Hershey bars, the Halloween kind. I was thrilled. I had been living on sweat, rotten weeds, sea critters and all while wearing one change of clothes. I ate them greedily and went back to bed. Now that was not technically cheating since I had gone 2 "days" without a nosh. But the next morning Hawke chewed my butt like a stripped down private in boot camp! He came into camp and tossed my gear while I was sleeping and found the teensiest little piece of wrapper ... BUSTED!

Anyway, on to Bizarre World ... and to all the fans out there, thanks for all you do ... and remember: if it looks good, eat it!

* You want more Bizarre? Watch Andrew Zimmern explore exciting, new places, people, cultures and food on "Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World," starting Tuesday, Sept. 1, at 10 E/P.

Best Food Eaten on the Go: African slaves first brought the method of deep frying food to the island of Puerto Rico, and it remains a huge part of the Puerto Rican cuisine. Today deep fried food is commonly sold by the side of the road, at the beach, and in little kiosks. In fact, most meals on the island begin with a hot fried appetizer. I drove all around the island with my pal Shorty, especially along Puerto Rico's northern coast to sample some of the food that can be found when you are on the go. Our last stop was in Pinones where dozens of battered shacks line the road and serve up deep fried delights that have been cooked in giant kettles on wood stoves. We saw and ate a lot of treats, including:

- Bacalaito - salt cod fritter
- Octopus cone - paper cone containing fresh octopus salad
- Mofongo - mashed fried green plantains (African)
- Pionono - sweet plantain stuffed with seasoned ground beef (deep fried)
- Mavi - a drink made from the Columbrina tree and sugar
- Alcapurria - fried tube shaped snack made of a mixture of plantains, yautia, and stuffed with meat
- Pasteles - a tamale-like loaf made with plantain and root vegetable paste, stuffed and wrapped in banana leaves
- Tostones - twice fried smashed plantains
- Chicharron -fried pig skin

But the highlights of the day came in the tiny town of Arecibo where we went to sample a traditional fish native to the area called Ceti. No bigger than an inch, the Ceti fish is transparent in color and only fished at night when the moon is waning. The mashed root vegetable tamales the ceti were cooked in were insanely good, and lucky for us we got there early. After stuffing ourselves silly we stopped in the town of Lares, the home of an ice cream Parlor with more than a thousand flavors, including some designed only for the more adventurous palate. Don't skip it on your next visit.

- Garlic ice cream
- Rice and Beans with Chicken ice cream
- Avocado ice cream
- Corn ice cream
- Sesame Seed ice cream

Best Restaurant: Restaurant owner, author and rock solid awesome dude, Chef Wilo Benet, is known for raising the bar on modern culinary trends in Puerto Rican cooking. His flagship restaurant Pikayo has won more culinary awards than any other in Puerto Rico, thanks to the emphasis of traditional Spanish, African, and Taino elements used in his unique recipes. Chef Wilo uses indigenous ingredients and traditions to keep the true flavor of authentic Puerto Rican cuisine alive, while giving it a modern twist. I cooked with Wilo at Pikayo in San Juan, where the team cooked up some of Wilo's specialties using all local ingredients. Alcapurrias, Jueyes and a killer pig foot stew were some of the highlights. Later, Wilo took me out to the yacht of a friend for a get together on the water. It's the best place to see the sunset over Old San Juan. But don't go to San Juan without booking a meal or two at Pikayo, it's the best.

Best Place to Get Lost: Puerto Ricans have a strong sense of family, and big mealtime gatherings are an important part of the culture. Cooking together is an essential bonding activity, and a wide variety of traditional dishes are always served. I went off the beaten path to get a glimpse into the part of Puerto Rico that many tourists never see. Dinner with a family high up in the Toro Negro National Forest. I took an amazing adventure through the jungle-like vegetation, dove into a hole in the rocks under a waterfall (on air) and we almost died in a rainstorm when our van got swept off the road and we had to bail out of the car and push it back on the mountain top switchback before the car slid away down the peak. So when I tell you I was really grateful for the family meal that day, I wasn't kidding. I also got to eat some great little treats, all fresher than fresh.

- Gandinga - a stew of pig liver, kidneys and heart
- Morcilla - sausage made with blood and rice and the popular culantro herb, similar to cilantro
- Sancocho soup - stew made with pork, pumpkin, plantain, etc
- Guinea Fowl stew

In Managua, the Laguna Tiscapa canopy tour sends you rocketing over the crater on three cable-connected platforms (tel. 505/888-2566, 9-5:30 Tues.-Sun., $15 for foreigners, $10 for Nicas). The broad panoramas are some of the best in the capital. On the northeast side of Laguna Tiscapa is the site of the old U.S. Embassy, leveled during the earthquake that wiped out Managua 3 decades ago.

Head out to Masaya (about a 30-minute drive from Managua) and check out the Tiangue, a unique food collective outside the ancient Cathedral in the center of the town. About 3 dozen stands line the square, there's live music and the food offerings are all prepared by Nica grandmas who are happy to let you taste their fare which ranges from Mocilla to grilled fish, from roasted chicken to roasted iguana.

Get up and have a quick start in the Mayoreo Market (which is about ten minutes from the airport) where there are idling buses that sell popular street foods in greasy plastic baggies. Grab a bus north on the Pan-American Highway, rising with the landscape and get a local bus, preferably one that goes to Matagalpa. At every stop on the 3 hour trip vendors swarm the bus vending common foods with uncommon twists, like cabbage salad with fried pork skin, chilies and lime. Stop at Don Juan Papaya's for soup or Antojitos, a roadside café that serves grilled chicken, pork, armadillo, beef and boa constrictor.

While in the highlands of Matagalpa, tour Selva Negra coffee plantation and have dinner in the ancient dining room. The homemade German sausages and cheeses are top notch. I stayed in the rooms there as well, and it's beautiful. All the rooms are small stone and wood cabins with fireplaces. In the morning I toured Sol Café where the cupping lab is located to see firsthand the buyers and tasters in action. The cupping is often described as a type of wine-tasting experience.

In Granada, you can head to the Gran Francia Arcangel, a colonial boutique hotel, where its restoration is a metaphor for Nicaraguan reinvention as a whole. This is Nicaragua's most storied hotel and one of the oldest European buildings in the Americas. Sit on the veranda and watch the action go down each night in the town square. Granada is a perfectly preserved colonial Spanish city and one of the most beautiful towns in the Americas. You can also visit Casa San Francisco which has a killer bar and restaurant, right out of a movie set. Los Chocoyos and Café Lucas are pretty cool as well. I ate a nice meal at Casa San Francisco that included:

- Mixed local fruits: nispero, pera de agua, green mango, icacos and star fruit from Masaya.

- Chontales cheese ... aged and soft, but the twist is it is served in the Caribbean style, where they allow the cheese to age in the heat for long enough to produce large juicy cheese worms, which are eaten as a delicacy.

- sapote fruit milkshake

- Roasted wild Iguana, marinated in sour orange, cumin, achiote and other local flavors, and then eaten served whole, surrounded with locally grown vegetables in season. The crispy skin on the outside like a duck a lórange.

In Granada I also think you should check out Volcan Mombacho Cutirre Farm (coffee and canopy tour; best views, hardest to get to). Book through Mombotours in Granada (Calle Atravesada, next to BDF, tel. 505/552-4548, www.mombotours.com). The 15-kilometer ride to the Cutirre Farm takes longer than you'd expect (up to 90 minutes each way). The canopy tour, suspended from 14 of the giant shade trees on the coffee farm, is a professional, safe system of 17 platforms, a hanging bridge, and 13 horizontal zip lines, ending with a 23-meter rappel from a massive ceiba tree.

What few people know is that Texans dine out more often than anyone else in the entire country. Texas started out as cow country, but in 1930 C.M. Joiner struck oil 100 miles east of Dallas - the largest oil discovery on earth at that time. Dallas, Houston and San Antonio are among the nation's ten largest cities. The only state with 3 top ten cities within its borders.

Now if there's one food Texans are fiercely proud of it has to be barbecue No, not like that barbecue you think you know from say Memphis or the Carolinas ... Texas barbecue is all about the beef. And the techniques they use were brought to the Lone Star State by German immigrants who blended local Mexican and Caribbean influences that they found in Texas that dealt with the preparation of pork and applied it to beef.

That's why the Mikeska family is as comfy BBQ-ing sweetbreads as they are cooking ribs-dubbed by Texas Monthly magazine as the "First Family of Texas Barbecue", Tim Mikeska is the owner of Mikeska's Bar-B-Q in Taylor and they've been serving barbecue for more than 50 years. This family of settlers of Czech origin came to Texas more than 150 years ago. What did I eat there? Well I piled my plate high with ...

*Smoked Tex-Czech Stewed Sweetbreads- As a 3rd generation Texas Czech Family, the Mikeskas took a traditional homeland Czech dish that was passed down many generations in their family, and "Texa-fied" it by marinating the sweetbreads in brisket seasoning, smoking it over oak wood, and then adding a stew mix of chopped Texas sweet onions and celery.

*Smoked Mutton Ribs - Awarded the "Best Offbeat BBQ" honor by Texas Monthly magazine. Tim marinates and then smokes the breast of lambs. Lamb breast is the thick fatty flank of breast/brisket meat still attached to the upper rib. It's very fatty and can be very chewy but if prepared right, it's superb. It was a very popular item back in the day when Texas was still predominantly using manual labor to pick their cotton. It's still one of the cheapest cuts of meat in existence today.

*Smoked dove hearts with jalapeno peppers and smoked wild dove breast stuffed with jalapenos and wrapped in bacon. Oh my lord it was good.
*smoked liver sausage-another Tex-Czech dish
*smoked head cheese - another very old family recipe

I love state fairs, and they say that everything is bigger in Texas, and the annual State Fair of Texas is no exception. The State Fair of Texas is the largest state fair in the U.S. when measured by annual attendance and its 212-foot Texas Star Ferris wheel is the largest in North America. The foods of the Texas State Fair fall into a few categories: There's the true Texan foods, unusual desserts, most-bizarre creations ... but more than anything else they love to fry food. There's deep fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fried cookie dough, fried peach cobbler on a stick, zesty fried guacamole bites, deep fried lattes, fried chili Frito burrito, fried hot dogs, Chicken Fried Bacon, Fried Banana Split, Fried Grilled Cheese Sandwich, Texas Fried Jelly Belly Beans, Deep Fried S'mores, Fried Chocolate Truffles, Fried Dinner Roll, Fried Cake on a Stick, Texas Barbecue Eggrolls, "Jalapeno" Deep Fried Gorditas, Fried Apple Pie, Fried Snowballs, Fried Honey Bun, Ignited Moon Pie, Beefy Fried Queso Bites,¬ Chick-a-Mole Bites, Crispy Fried Cantaloupe Pie and fried banana pudding. I could list about 100 more but I am getting queasy just writing this down.

Our guide through this culinary maze of western culture was Abel Gonzalez a famous fixture at the massive fair. This Texas sized character is the guru of the most unusual fare at the fair. Abel is a computer analyst most of the year, and the son of a restaurant owner, and he works at his family-run stand. In 2005, judges and fairgoers picked Gonzales' fried PBJ and Banana Sandwich as the tastiest new food item at the fair. He sold about 25,000 during the 24-day fair. In 2006, he came up with a new artery-clogging concoction, fried Coke. Gonzales deep-fries Coca-Cola-flavored batter. He then drizzles Coke fountain syrup on it. The fried Coke is topped with whipped Coke flavored cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry. Gonzales' diet-buster won the creativity honor at the Big Tex Choice Awards Contest. This last year his new creation was called Fire & Ice. Fire & Ice is a pineapple ring that is battered and deep-fried, then topped with banana-flavored whipped cream that's been frozen in liquid nitrogen. The smoking concoction is ladled with strawberries and syrup. Fire & Ice was a finalist in last year's Big Tex Choice Awards competition. If you hit the Fair next year, tell him I sent you and say hi ... and bring the Pepto!

Nowhere will you find that cowboy spirit stronger ... nor the scenery quite so stunning as in the Texas Hill Country. It is literally deep in the heart of Texas ... these rolling hills and wide open spaces west of San Antonio and south of Austin are what the New York Times labeled this year as its #1 tourist destination. German and Czech pioneers settled in these hills and today they're still welcoming new immigrants. I spent a day with Paula Disbrowe, the author of Cowgirl Cuisine, co-author of several other cook books and a freelance writer whose work appears regularly in The New York Times. We explored the unique foods of the Texas Hill Country-which is the area between Austin and San Antonio and west of those two cities riding shotgun style in an old pick-up. The first stop was the Mi Tierra café in San Antonio for a morning cafe con leche and plates of huevos rancheros. We stopped in at Dziuk's Meat Market in Castroville to sample a local cuisine called Parissa -- which is a steak tartare flavored with Tex-Mex seasonings, cheap cheddar cheese and lime juice. It's a popular appetizer in bars and for some strange reason fans of the dish would rather see it come from a nasty roadside stand than from any other type of establishment. Odd. Next stop was a local institution called Mac and Ernie's, which is known in the region for its goat burgers, but also offered the best chicken fried steak I ever ate, and the worlds best chocolate pie. We stopped for sweetbread gorditas at Live Oak Gorditas in Uvalde and made our final stop at Tommy Lee Jones' fave bar, the Liberty Bar in San Antonio. This place is nearly as old as the State of Texas and is still packing in cowboys and city folks alike with pure Southern Texas cooking.

Paula is without a doubt the most well informed, gracious and adventurous guide we have ever had on the show. And the fact that she is 6 feet tall, has super model hotness and long red hair, wears little short frocks with cowboy boots and drives a 50 year old truck has nothing to do with that assessment.

For unusual, bizarre and alien food that was quite literally out of this world, we headed to the Johnson Space Center outside Houston. It's the home of NASA, the nation's space program-mission control for all space shuttle flights, and mission control for the U.S. portion of the International Space Station. And since NASA hasn't been recruiting any chefs for missions into space ... all the food cooked for space travel is made right in Texas. Makes sense, after all an astronaut is little more than a cowboy in a space suit. When you think of space food, you're thinking Tang ... or one of those 'meals in a pill' type of scenarios, right? Not at all. In fact the NASA Space Food Systems Laboratory is really just a big kitchen ... but at the helm aren't chefs, they're "food scientists." A lot has changed since we first sent men to the moon in the Apollo missions 40 years ago. What NASA has learned from putting men and women in space, especially on longer Shuttle missions and even longer missions on board the Space Station is that food is THE most important component to maintaining the mental health of its astronauts. In an environment where so much is out of the control of the astronauts, having meals that appear to be home-cooked is now deemed critical to mission success. Sorry, Tang, you've been grounded. Interestingly astronaut ice cream is not served on missions, it gums up machinery, the Russians supply half the food for the International Space Station, the garbage is jettisoned during return to earth and burns up in the atmosphere, the mylar in common potato chip bags was developed by NASA and since space food goes non-nutritive after 18 months, the challenge facing scientists in 2015 with manned Mars missions is feeding our space cowboys on the 3 year roundtrip mission.

While Dallas was built with the wealth of oil, its sister city Fort Worth was and is a cow-town-- built on the fortunes of cattle ranchers ... fiercely proud ... a city where it's not about the size of your wallet-it's your belt buckle that matters. And the size of your appetite. And I didn't come here looking for a simple steak. Where does a Dallas billionaire or an east Texas cowboy go for a little rattlesnake, antelope, rabbit, deer, elk and the like? At my pal Tim Love's Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in Fort Worth. Fancy yes, but in a down home Texas way since Tim is a born and bred Texan with a personality as big as the Lone Star State. As the foremost pioneer of urban Western cuisine, Love wears his signature cowboy hat in place of a toque. The innovative menu at his critically acclaimed Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards is influenced by all of the ingredients and cultures that have been a part of the West since the first adventure began on the Goodnight-Loving and Chisholm Trails-with an added level of modern sophistication. Don't miss the buffalo rib eye or wild boar when he offers it as a special.

I love to hunt and hunting is an important part of the Texas economy and plays an integral role in the management of Texas wildlife populations. With more than 913,000 hunters, Texas ranks second in the nation for number of people engaged in hunting. Many Texans will tell you, if you want something to eat ... go shoot it yourself and I went to the Laguna ranch just north of the Rio Grande outside Laredo. This 12-thousand acre cattle ranch is a hunter's paradise. My guide was master outdoorsman Jerry Gonzalez of Pedernal Bowhunts, a company that outfits hunts on several ranches here in Deep South Texas. The critter I went on the prowl for was the javelina, a strange-looking critter sometimes referred to as Ranch Rats or Skunk Pigs. Though some people think javelinas are a type of wild pig, they are actually members of the peccary family, a group of hoofed mammals originating from South America. Many people refuse to eat Javelina because they have a musk gland that smells terrible, like rotting garbage, and one butchering or shooting misstep can make the meat taste bad. But if skinned properly, you can remove the gland without ever squeezing or puncturing it and your meat will taste pretty darn good. After the hunt we enjoyed a traditional barbacoa breakfast, a whole cow's head cooked overnight in a pit in the ground. The head was better than the javelina, but it was a great way to end our Texas sized adventure.

Tian Jin Hai seafood restaurant is a new restaurant but the food is oddly no newcomer to the local scene here. In fact, the chef had quite a following during his 10-year tenure at the Kopitiam MacPherson hawker stall that he ran at Jackson Centre. When the hawker centre was closed in September last year, owner-chef Francis Yeo, 51, went on a month-long holiday in China and the plan was to reopen in the Rochor area after that. But when he returned, he found that the shop space would not be ready for another four months. Not willing to sit idle, he went hunting for another location. Chance took him to the Marina Country Club in Punggol where a restaurant space had been left vacant for more than a year and the rest is history. I devoured his signature steamed sharks head with soy and ginger but really went nuts for his trio of mud crab dishes that I sampled. This was the dish that made Yeo famous for years at his hawker stall and in a country where chili crab is the national dish, his is the best one I have ever eaten.

Indian food is very popular in Singapore and Banana Leaf Apollo is the best restaurant to sample another staple of Singaporean food, fish head curry. Anita Kapoor took me there and when she gives you a recommendation you can take it to the bank.

We tried local Peranaken treats:
o Otak otak: sausage-like blend of fish, coconut milk, chili paste, galangal and herbs, wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf
o Shui kueh: steamed radish cakes with fried preserved radish topping
o Tulang: meaty bones in tomato-red gravy (slurp out the marrow)
o Che tow kway: omelette-like dish made from radishes, egg, garlic, and chili
o Beng Hiang Restaurant: fish maw soup with sea cucumber

I hit the hawker stalls at Zion Riverside Food Centre for some awesome clay pot porridges made with rice, loaded up at the Adam Road Food Centre: Bahrakath Mutton Soup King (soup with brains/ribs/tongues), Zaiton's Satay (tripe satay), Yummy Rojak (mango, cuttlefish, cucumber salad) for halal snack food and stuffed my face at Peoples Park hawker center, although I am still pulling duck feathers out of my teeth months later.

Traditional Chinese Medicine is still a large part of daily Singaporean life and there is a restaurant called the Imperial Herbal restaurant at VivoCity mall where they provide convenient access to a Chinese physician to give consultations to diners. He can dispense herbal remedies if necessary. But more importantly he gives recommendations on the types of dishes you could have for the night - which ones would tone down your yang or replenish your ying forces.

The food is done pretty much in classical Chinese style, with a few fusion type innovations.

One of Imperial Herbal restaurant's trademark dishes is the quick-fried egg white with dried scallop ($4), with polygonatum and ladybell root ground together to make a crunchy nest-like biscuit. I loved this dish and later found out it is good for the spleen and improves complexion.

Peranakan cuisine is the melding of the Malay and Chinese food traditions that date back thousands of years on the island. And while my Peranakan meals in Singapore were outstanding, especially the meals I ate both on and off camera at Big D's Grill and at True Blue restaurant, where chef Ben Seck and his Mom cook with a skill set that is beyond fantastic, the best dish I ate all week in Singapore was at Mary's Laksa stall. According to the 'research' the term laksa is used to describe two different types of noodle soup dishes: curry laksa and assam laksa. Curry laksa refers to noodles served in coconut curry soup, while assam laksa refers to noodles served in sour fish soup. Usually, thick rice noodles also known as laksa noodles are preferred, although thin rice vermicelli (bee hoon or mee hoon) is also common.

Curry laksa is a coconut-based curry soup that Mary makes in a style more reminiscent of shellfish bisque than of coconut milk. The main ingredients for most versions of curry laksa are shrimp, noodles, tofu, dried shallots, bean sprouts, blanchan, ground candlenuts and anything else the chef cares to throw in. Saying that Mary makes the best laksa in Singapore is akin to declaring that Paradise Pup and Hot Dougs make the best hotdogs in Chicago, but both are true I think. Let the arguments begin.

Neil led me on a tour through the Sydney Fish Market to find the best seafood that Neil could use for his innovative and rockstar tasty menu. He cooked for me at Rockpool, one of his many restaurants. The market which has been around since 1945 is the largest market of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere and is the world's second largest seafood market in terms of variety outside of Japan (Tsukiji Market). It is located in Blackwattle Bay on the foreshore of Sydney Harbor, where there is a real working fishing port, a wholesale fish market, a fresh food retail market, food and beverage outlets, and a seafood cooking school. Everyday this particular fish market auctions off over 100 species of fish, and annually, the market trades tens of thousands of tons of seafood. Neil grabbed a basket and filled it with:

- Morton Bay Bugs (the animal resembles the back half of a lobster. Essentially it is a walking lobster tail with eyes. It is sweet and succulent and found along the entire coast of the northern half of Australia.)
- Balmain Bug (A type of slipper lobster found in all warm oceans and seas. They are closely related to spiny lobsters and furry lobsters.)
- Barramundi
- Flatheads (an incredible mild firm white fleshed fish that Neil used in his amazing Firewater signature dish)
- Mud Crabs

You can take all your bushtucker (country food) and all your Mod Oz (contemporary innovative big city food that over uses bushtucker in the extreme) and wrap it in a ball and toss it in the Harbour. I could eat Neil's food at Rockpool all day long.

Now, while Sydney offers some exceptional establishments for fine dining I ate at Tetsuya Wakuda's on an off night and had the meal of my life! Food freaks s can also sink their teeth into basic, inexpensive Aussie treats. Drunk tourists all head to the gates of the Woolloomooloo Naval Yard where they can visit Harry's Café de Wheels that was established during the depression selling sausages, floaters and other traditional street fare. I went during the day and stuffed myself silly. I also went out to Bondi Beach and went on a surfing lesson with Big Wave Dave, the king of the Aussie surf hounds. He is also an expert bikini chaser and even clued me in on the way surfers signal to each other that there are hotties on the shoreline so they show off appropriately. After exhausting myself in the ocean, we headed to a local snack bar for :

- Fish and Chips
- Chiko Roll (an Australian snack inspired by the Chinese egg roll and spring rolls designed to be eaten with one hand. Consists of boned mutton, celery, cabbage, barley, rice, carrot, and spices in a tube of egg, flour, and dough, which is then deep-fried.)

Everything tastes better after you crawl out of the ocean.

A word about Australia's national food and cultural icon-vegemite. Located in the Fisherman's Bend, between Sydney and Melbourne sits the Vegemite Factory. Everyone Down Under wishes they lived next door. It's a dark brown, savory food paste made from yeast extract, and is used mainly as a spread on sandwiches, toast and crackers, as well as a filling in local pastries like "cheesymite scroll." It's made from brewers' yeast extract, a by-product of the beer making. The taste may be described as salty, slightly bitter, malty, beef bouillon-ish or rotted vegetable barf. But even though it is a fairly simple food, Australians all have their own way of spreading vegemite. I love the stuff. It's fantastic spread thick on crusty buttered bread with sliced tomatoes.

OK, so we saw a lot of moonshine too, but that was about it. The cities and the towns along the Appalachian Trail charmed me in a way that I didn't think possible for a born and bred NY-er. I ate fresh squirrel in West Virginia with the chef-owner of Ember, a cool dude named Brian Ball. We packed away chicken fried squirrel platters and plenty of other hill country treats but the best thing I ate the whole trip was a tomato and dumpling dish that was a recipe from his grandmother that he served as a side dish to our meal. He stews tomatoes and onions for his garden, then puts them up, and in the cool weather months brings a quart or so of this heavenly stuff to a boil, makes a quick dumpling mixture (think elegant Bisquik style stuff) and drops handfuls on top of the tomatoes, covers it and turns the heat down. 30 minutes later he dumps the whole thing into a bowl and serves it. It has to be tried to be believed.

Appalachia was settled by many different ethnic groups and there are still some places today where the people carry on the culture and traditions of their forefathers as they have for centuries. The tiny picturesque town of Helvetia, West Virginia, population 194, was founded by the Swiss and the ways of the old world are still a strong influence in the culture. I spent a night at The Hutte Restaurant operated by longtime local Eleanor F. Mailloux, where traditional Swiss food is still served and where all the local characters can be found dining and catching up on the local happenings. Eleanor says she is in her late 80's but her nieces and grandsons say she is over 100. We even met an 80 year old who told us Eleanor was his teacher in junior high school...She has her roots deeply planted in the Helvetia community. She is the owner/operator of the Beekeeper Inn and at times was a teacher, Director of the Helvetia Folk Dancers, President of the Alpen Rose Garden Club, Secretary of the Helvetia Restoration Club, and member of the Centennial History Committee, her role in keeping the community alive is substantial. I can also tell you she makes an amazing dance partner. The cuisine at the Hutte House is heavily influenced by the local Swiss/German culture and nobody understands this better than Eleanor who had her great grand kids shoot a deer and cook it in a pit, country style. The deer is buried with hot coals and cooked overnight. Eaten with plenty of homemade cheese, home brewed beer, and lots of boiled onion pie.

In Shelby NC, I attended the Livermush Festival with Ted Alexander, the Mayor of Shelby as my dining companion. Freckle faced kids in the parade, bottles of locally brewed Sundrop on ice, fried wedges of livermush on white bread with grape jelly and mustard smeared on all over it. Amazing. But not as awesome as spending a day on a trout stream with the lads from the local fly fishing school and then taking our catch up the hill to Johnny Sue Meyer's house for a real Cherokee feast with roasted bear, sumac tossed sautéed trout and chestnut bread. Listening to Johnny Sue's cousin say a Cherokee prayer in her native tongue, well I guess it's our native tongue actually, and enjoying traditional recipes that are as old as the Cherokee Nation was a special experience. These are the dying breed stories that we try to capture whenever we are on the road with our cameras.

I got to forage for wild mushrooms with Alan Muskat and then we were off to Tennessee where we ended our trip with a true mountain top cookout of possum and raccoon, serenaded by a local bluegrass group, at a 100 year old cabin in the hills. One guest was a storyteller by trade and another a weaver. Only in Tennessee. One of the guests at the dinner was a woman who was real 'hill people' as the uber locals are referred to. She had been rescued by a local university professor who heard of a woman loving with her children in a cave in the hills, a woman who had run away from her abusive husband to whom she had been 'sold' to satisfy her families debts many years earlier. This woman, who had experienced such tragedy in her life, was the kindest soul I had ever met. She coached me through my meal, doused corn bread in the pot liquor for me and cracked open the raccoon head so I could spread the brains on the hardtack they had cooked for our party. She gave me a wild chestnut that she had dried and polished to keen shine, telling me to keep the charm in my pocket to help me calm the worldly clamors that she felt were causing me great anxiety. I haven't taken it out of my pocket since that day.

If you think you know the Appalachians, guess again.

But one little tale paints the whole picture, more so than the Mindil Beach Market, the Toad mustering, the amazing meal that Ungun and her friends made me on the shores of the billabong, more than the amazing Steve Sunk, the Walkabout Chef, more than Sean and I driving across The Track ...

We spent a night at the Noonamah Tavern, and in the show we arrive, we eat, we leave ... and if you are observant you see the sort of depraved hellhole this place really is. But lemme digress ...

We arrive at the Noonamah Tavern, which is a bar, a restaurant, a gas station, a liquor store and a motel for truckers, roustabouts and bar customers. It rents rooms hourly. Enough said.

The drunk topless customers sitting outside by the gas pumps, skirts and pants hanging so low you could see their nasty tramp stamp tattoos in all their glory, insisted we come back the next night for the Prawns and Porn night where they serve steamed shrimp baskets, and the bartenders go topless. For an extra 50 cents a draft they dip a boob into the glass after they pour it. I kid you not. Look, I have been in some sordid places in my day, have been on Patpong Road after dark, cruised the Red Light zone in Amsterdam, and grew up in NYC ... I have seen it all. Until I feared for my life at the Noonamah Tavern.

We arrived and the local customers did not want us there, let alone wanted to see us point a camera in their direction. The sadness and depravity, the lost lives that all the lonely drunkenness represented, the anger that finally could find a target, it was all a little overwhelming. We got the finger, a moon, a frontal moon, and threats of an ass kicking ... and that was from the first 60 year old lady we encountered. I am serious as a heart attack.

Anyway, the Outback was an experience like no other. Wild, untamed and thrilling to eat my way across. You won't be disappointed.

Seoul's largest market is Noryangjin Fish Market, a 700,000 square foot facility that houses over 700 shops selling the most insanely diverse product from 15 fishing ports around Korea. The complex includes numerous restaurants, an auction floor, and an adjacent produce market but everyone comes for the fish. Octopus is a popular delicacy here and is eaten cooked or raw. If eaten raw, it is either eaten whole (and very much alive) or it is sliced up, its tentacles still wriggling as it goes into your mouth. You'll also find local flower crabs, prawns, abalone, clams, oysters, sea snails, sea cucumber, sea slugs, and sea squirts. And of course, live fish can be seen swimming in tanks all over the complex. You point at the fish of your choice and the seller weighs it and informs you of the price. You can take the fish home with you whole or have it gutted and cleaned. On the floor above the Fish Market, you'll find several seafood restaurants. You can buy your seafood from the market and bring it upstairs or have it delivered upstairs for your dining pleasure. Awesome. The restaurants will provide the side dishes, liquor and prepare hot soup from the carcass of the recently deboned fish. Of course, if you don't want the hassle of doing it yourself, you can just order at the restaurants and the ladies will yell your order downstairs and it'll be on your table in a couple of minutes. I love this place.

Koreans love spoiled and fermented foods, and have developed fermented food recipes in order to preserve foods that would provide essential nutrients throughout the lean winter months. Fermented foods are healthy (think sauerkraut!) and they show the wisdom of ancestors who sought the secret of longevity. Fermented sauces made of soybeans were created, kimchi was made and stored for winter when it was hard to grow vegetables, and fermented seafood was developed as a way to deal with the all the food that comes from the sea and couldn't' be consumed immediately. Now hong uh wae is fermented skate, left to rot at room temperature for several days before being eaten raw. Skate spoils faster than almost any other seafood and because the animal is loaded with uremic acid and pees through its skin the flavor the rotted skate flesh makes other rotted seafare taste like cotton candy. Yummy. But I loved the kimchi in Korea and got to eat plenty of it with every meal, as well as big piles of all my other fave fermented foods.

o Jangajjis - A dish of dried or salted vegetables and herbs pickled in bean sauce or bean paste or peppered bean paste.
o Ganjang - Korean soy sauce.
o Doenjang - Fermented soybean paste. Doenjang is made from the solids left over after Gangjang is drained from its fermentation vessel.
o Gochujang - a hot paste made from soybean powder fermented with boiled rice, flour, and sticky rice powder and seasoned with salt and spicy peppers.
o Cheonggukjang - a fermented soybean paste that contains whole as well as ground soy beans.

Everyone in Korea dines out and it is a common habit for people in Seoul, so there are thousands of restaurants scattered throughout every neighborhood. Unlike restaurants in the US where you pick a meal off a large menu with endless choices, restaurants in Seoul tend to specialize in one or two certain foods. Eating out is a group activity and you don't see many people dining alone. You want soup? Go to a soup restaurant. Want BBQ? Hit a BBQ joint, and Korean BBQ is superb.

I made sure to check out a Sutcama, a sauna emporium where you bake in a hut heated by hundreds of pounds of wood and charcoal. Friends go here together for a sweat and then a shower. Afterwards, you eat the house specialty: 3-second pork belly. The pork is placed on a grate and put in the coals and cooks in seconds.
I also went to a BBQ restaurant in Seoul for intestine, ox-liver and omasum (pork stomach). All these extremely popular restaurants have grills set into the table and each specializes in a certain kind of meat. Typical choices are beef (bulgogi), beef ribs (galbi), pork (samgyeopsal), or chicken (dak) but there is a type of BBQ joint to suit every taste.

There are many unusual soups and stew eateries in Seoul. Since soups and stews are such a big part of everyday eating, and the majority of restaurants in Seoul specialize in amazing meals in a bowl. I even got to try a soup called Dead Body Soup ... dont ask!
I made sure to try as many other soups as I could and here is the list:

o Loach soup
o Sunji Haejangguk (clotted-blood soup)
o Potato with pig backbone stew
o Knuckle bone soup
o Ox tail soup
o Tripe soup
o Sea mustard soup
o Doganitang - soup made with jellified cow's knee cartilage
o Haejangguk -- a favorite hangover cure consisting usually of meaty pork spine, dried cabbage, coagulated ox blood, and vegetables in a hearty beef broth
o Seolleongtang -- ox leg bone soup simmered for more than 10 hours until the soup is milky-white. Usually served in a bowl containing glass noodles and pieces of beef.
o Maeuntang -- a refreshing, hot and spicy fish soup
o Gamjatang ("pork spine stew") -- a spicy soup made with pork spine, vegetables (especially potatoes) and hot peppers. The vertebrae are usually separated. This is often served as a late-night snack but may also be served for a lunch or dinner.

o Cheonggukjang jjigae: a soup made from strong-smelling thick soybean paste containing whole beans

o Samgyetang: a soup made with Cornish game hens that are stuffed with ginseng, a hedysarum, sweet rice, jujubes, garlic, and chestnuts

But here is the best advice I can give you. Head to Seoul, and see for yourself. You will love it. Especially the food.

We landed in Tanzania after a crazy airplane journey from halfway around the world that had me sitting on the tarmac for 6 hours in Khartoum in the Sudan. "Please stay away from the windows at all times," said the voice of the flight attendant over the loudspeaker, a chilling reminder that air carriers based in the USA are not welcome sights on some tarmacs, especially in Northeastern Africa. Anyway, I ended up not getting shot at and spent the rest of the day flying into Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, shooting there for a week, flying to Kampala, Uganda, shooting there for a week and then moving on to Tanzania. We were tired, and we all missed home, and 3-week, 3-show shoots in third world countries are the hardest trips imaginable. There are no days off, no time off and endless days of shooting and living in some very harsh conditions. I love it.

But boy was I psyched to land in the relative peace and quiet of Arusha, and overnight in an actual hotel after crawling out of the Uganda jungle on fumes. There was a lot of great storytelling to be had in Tanzania but we eschewed all of them in favor of spending the majority of our time living in a tent city on the rim of the Ngorogoro Crater, living and hanging with the Massai and watching the great migrations of exotic African animals parade along the crater floor.

The crater itself is steep and impenetrable except for several cut outs through which the animals migrate. The hills around the crater are thousands of feet high, cold and damp and windy up top, warm and humid on the crater floor. Savannah below, forested temperate jungle above. We spent our first few days in the crater, standing next to an endless parade of zebra, warthog, wildebeest, lion, hippo, elephant, orangutan, assorted monkeys, birds, snakes, lizards and every other animal you can imagine.

The rest of the time we spent chilling with Edward Ngobi and his tribe. These are not the Disney version of the Massai, this was the real thing. Up early in the morning, tend the herds, release the herd from the corrals, repair the things in the village that need fixing, hunt, collect wood, corral the animals and eat dinner. We beaded with the womenfolk, weaned goats with the men and got plenty of warrior training in on the side. Remember these are the guys who kill lions with spears and their bare hands and are ritually circumcised at an age when you remember it for the rest of your life. Ouch.

Breakfast was fresh cow's blood, hot millet porridge and 2-week-old sour milk, curdled. Lunch was a reprise of breakfast and dinner was arguably the best BBQ I have ever taken part in or eaten. You see for as unimaginative as a Massai breakfast cook is, the guys who cook dinner really know how to bring it in the kitchen. The recipe? Butcher one goat, one lamb and one cow. Save the skin for tanning into leather and making their world-famous beds. Save the blood, bones and tendons for other uses. Eat the liver and kidneys raw. Skewer all the primal cuts on green sticks and grill it all over a white hot bed of mountain hardwood coals, squat, slice and serve, charred rare.

So I have spent the last 6 months trying to pitch the idea of an all-you-can-eat, kill your own, Massai-style whole animal BBQ chain. Anyone else but me think this is an idea long overdue? A carnivore's IHOP for the 21st Century? You betcha!

If there is a greater pleasure than spending a week shooting a TV show of your own in your Dad's adopted hometown, a place you visit all the time, have friends living there that you have known for 30 years (Samantha and Don Lindgren, the owner of Rabelais book store, the best cookbook store in New England), eating your way through a few acts with your son, and visiting some of the best restaurants in the country ... well, I don't know what that would be. I love Maine. And we got to shoot there last summer and make a great show.Sadly my fave moments of the show wound up on the cutting room floor, like my dinner at Fore St, one of my fave eateries on any continent, and the only place I eat at EVERY time I am in Portland. Sam Hayward is a god. Anyway, from chowder at the Porthole to the glassed-in fridge and live fire kitchen at Fore, from Rob Evans inspired cooking at Hugos to Rabelais' books, from Duckfat to the lobster rolls at Five Islands Lobster Company to the fried clams at Day's, food in Maine is as complex and locally inspired as any food in the country. I also love eating at 555 and Back Bay Grill when I hit Portland, and Big Fish in Kennebunkport is a place we always stop in on the way up to visit Dad, ditto the Clam Box, both of which make the drive from Boston to Maine more enjoyable.

So I thought maybe I should let you know about some restaurants closer to home that you should check out. This list is not a complete one, just the last few months I have gotten around a lot locally and wanted to clue you all in to some slick places in your neck of the woods.
Palm Beach: Café Boloud at the Brazilian Court ... maybe the best restaurant in Southern Florida, the food is amazing, the service and the setting (the gardens of the Brazilian Court Hotel) are second to none. Too Jays Deli has the best Pastrami sandwich in town, and it saved me from fine-dining overload.

Chicago: Paradise Pup and Hot Dougs for amazing burgers and sausages, second to none. Blackbird and Avec are superb restaurants, and I have been going to them for years, but last week I had a meal at Blackbird that was one of the best in recent memory. At over a decade old, this restaurant is still supremely relevant, and that is saying a lot. The sepia noodles with snail caviar and the braised pork belly rocked me. As did the $150 cup of rare Pu Er tea I snarfed down as a digestive.

Phoenix: Pizzeria Bianco, worth the three-hour wait, go sit next door in his wine bar and relax. The pizzeria might be the best VPN style pie shop in North America. Seriously that good, and Chris is always behind the counter, slinging dough. The tomato-garlic-oregano pie was about as good as pizza gets.

Seattle: Serious Pie, which is Tom Douglas' newest eatery, is just a few years old. He cooks his pies 200 degrees colder than most VPN joints, but his duck pate, ribbolitta, calamari salad and pizzas are out of this world, a top-10 coast-to-coast pie house for sure. Douglas owns Etta's Palace Kitchen, Lola etc and is one of the best chefs in the country, but this little pizza joint of his is my current fave.

Los Angeles: In Los Angeles the hottest eateries are humble little joints that forego napery, fine silver or tasting menus. Palate, Osteria Mozza and Gjelina embrace communal dining, wood-fired farm-to-table peasant cookery and humble ingredients.

Montreal: The hottest trend here is in postage-stamp-sized chef-driven cafes that take more pride in a well-turned-out sandwich than in a five-course meal. Martin Pird's Au Pied du Cochon on Duluth Street is my fave, but McKiernan's (lunch counter in the daytime/wine bar as the sun sets), Buvette Chez Simone and a half dozen others all follow the same playbook.

Minneapolis: the best new restaurant in town is Barrio, a small tequila bar serving upscale Mexican cuisine at bargain-basement prices; don't miss it next time you roll into my city.

The cuisine of Sicily is uniquely different from any other Italian region, strongly influenced by the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the French and the Spanish, each conqueror and wayfarer have strongly left their influence on the foods of Sicily. These foreign civilizations converged on Sicily throughout it's history and brought with them new ingredients, customs and food traditions that remained long after they left. Blend these foreign techniques with simple ingredients and the traditional respect for seasonal eating and you know all you need to about Sicilian cuisine.

We hit the Vucciria and Ballaro Markets first, food freak heaven. Bottarga, babbaluci,stigghiole (braided grilled innards of all kinds, mostly intestine), caldume, and cento pelli, all the the little offal treats that the Sicilians cant get enough of are on display. But form an eaters standpoitn the fresh lemons, the tomatoes the tuna, the grilled baby pigs, the artichokes, the bread.....can you feel me? How a bout the scincifone, a thick, spongy Sicilian pizza topped with tomato sauce, onions, salted sardines and caciocavallo cheese, baked in large rectangular tins and sold by the piece in the streets. Or the smell of grilled fennel sausage on every corner...wow.

Later in the afternoon we checked out some some traditional Sicilian fried foods from a Friggitoria: everyone loves aracine, those little rice balls, but the frittola is what I remember most. Sometimes these are the scraps from the butcher, the cartilage and the calluses, the fat trimmings, but from good stuff, veal or pork, boiled in rendered fat at a very high temperature. Then they open a tap with a sieve in it, and all the fat is drawn off and all the little pieces of meat that remain get pressed into large, round cakes. The vendor then slices these cakes and heats them up in a frying pan. Another version is simply to fry all the scraps and throw a blanket over them so no one can see what you are eating. They even spoon it into your hand, which is great for the napkin haters out there. I love it.

We ate lunch at Ferro di Cavallo Restaurant for some typical Sicilian cuisine. Spaghetti with Squid Ink, Sardine Balls, and La Golla Della Mucca (throat of the cow) a dish that is made of poached neck parts with loads of wild celery. This restaurant is packed all the time, the food is exquisite in the most rustic sense and I could eat there every night of the week.

We had dinner in an ancient building housing a killer eatery that is a serious food lovers Valhallah. Osteria Dei Vespri is located in the old historical center of Palermo near Piazza Rivoluzione. The chef-owner served up a degustation of nerves of cow mouth with veal tongue, dome of egg fondue with prawns from Mazzara, smoked pork jowl in a prawn bisque, hot cakes of mushrooms & Nebrodi cheese with candy lemon chips and ravioli neri filled with mussels and potatoes, seared refdish with sea urchin and tomato sauce...somedays my job is better than others.

We journeyed the next day to check out Cerda's most famous vegetable and a staple in Sicilian cuisine, the artichoke. This thistle is celebrated every year with a festival that mixes art exhibits and other artichoke-themed entertainment with live traditional bands and parades through the town. More than 10 percent of the world's artichokes are grown in Sicily, and during the festival, artichokes are used in every course of a meal. They are fried, sautéed, grilled, marinated, pickled, fresh, and creamed in soup. My favorites from the festival: Torta di Carciofi (Artichoke pie), and Carciofi Alla Giudea (Deep Fried Artichokes with baby squid) , but the topper was the artichoke gelato with lemon. Addictive.

The next day, in the remote fishing village of Marzanemi, I got a once in a lifetime opportunity to go night fishing with local fishermen. In Sicily, most fishing happens at night with lanterns in hand made boats, a tradition that has occurred for several generations. We went out again at dawn and caught a little bit of everything from 3 miles of nets we laid out.

On the way back to the fishermans house we stopped off at a bottarga processors. Bottarga is known to locals as "poor man's caviar" and its the salted and dried roe of tuna or grey mullet, or sometimes swordfish. Bottarga is massaged by hand to eliminate air pockets, salted for weeks and then dried for up to 2 months The result is a dry hard slab, which is often coated in beeswax for keeping. In Salvatore's shop I got a chance to eat La Lattume (the sperm sac of the tuna which is considered a delicacy in this part of Sicily). Salvatore's family has been making products like these since 1854, for five generations....so when he says the sperm is good, who am I to argue.
We drove on to Salvatore's home for lunch and his wife and cousins made us

Bottarga Antipasti, Tuna Sperm Linguine, Pachino Tomato and Squid Ink Sauce, a delicious sauce made with squid ink, local Sicilian tomatoes, herbs and extra virgin olive oil served over pasta. Sicilian Pachino tomato sauce is the best in the world and eating all the local pickled peppers, olives and cured lemons from Sal's wife's garden was the icing on the cake.

On our last day we cooked and ate lunch with Eleonora Consoli, the Julia Child of Sicilian cuisine, who teaches courses in her huge Mediterranean kitchen in her home on the slopes of Mount Etna. She is a former food journalist and she teaches in her home, a typical Sicilian house of the 18Th century. The house is set in a yard filled with orange and lemon groves, just down the mountain from vineyards producing DOC wine (the red, rosé and white wines of Etna), fanmous since Roman times. Having her walk me through the preparation of Rane a Brodetto (frogs soup) and Coniglio al Cioccolato (rabbit with vegetables and chocolate) and to see her make cured anchovies from scratch is something I will never forget. We hit it off, and the bloopers on the web site prove it.

I know that Florence, Venice, Milan and Rome are awesome. I have spent a lot of time there. I know how hip Capri and Ischia are these days, I love those islands, but Sicily is special. It feels like another world, which may be why every Sicilian always reminds you, "eet eeze not eetal-ee, eeze Sicily!"