For today’s Front Burner column, I wrote about the websites I usually visit in order to find great restaurant recommendations before I travel. The column was inspired by our recent vacation, which was a cruise out of Ft. Lauderdale with stops in the Bahamas, St. Maarten, St. Thomas and Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos.

The very day we returned, the Carnival cruise ship Triumph suffered the engine room fire that stranded it in the Gulf of Mexico. The miserable conditions on board were all over the news, but that won’t stop me from taking another cruise. In fact, this was my second cruise and I can’t wait to take another.

I understand that cruises are not for everybody. I fell in love with this travel method because it’s a very affordable way to visit several different countries in one vacation. I don’t know that I could ever book travel to and between all those places, along with accommodations every night and food every day, for less money than a cruise. Even if I could, it would be a lot more work.

I still love traveling directly to one location and spending as much time as I want there, and I have stopped at ports where I wished I had several more days to explore (Dublin!). But getting a short peek at a destination helps me to determine whether I’d like to spend more time there in the future (Dublin!).

Before we get to the food, which is, after all, what this blog is all about, I want to address the comments I’ve heard from folks who say they’d never cruise now after what they saw happen to the Carnival Triumph and the Costa Concordia. My response is that there is risk inherent in any type of travel, whether it be in a car, a plane, on a train or on a ship. If you don’t want to take the risk, you don’t travel. I’d rather be on a cruise trip that’s in trouble than on an airplane that’s going down, but that’s just me.

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My brother-in-law, Jeff, had to be in Germany before Christmas for his job, so he and my sister, Kim, decided she would fly over and meet him and they’d experience Christmas in Germany.

Kim took a lot of food pictures to show me and she went through them this weekend and sent a bunch over. I was amazed by the gorgeous gingerbread displays, the brats and Wienerschnitzel and pastries. At Christmastime in Germany, they have lots of big outdoor markets where they sell food and other goods. As you will see, Kim and Jeff spent some time at these markets.

I put the photos in a slideshow so we can take a pretend trip to Germany on this dreary Monday. Thanks for sharing the pictures, Sis!

To experience this slideshow properly, click play and then immediately click the bottom right button with the four arrows to expand it to fill your screen, then click “Show info” at the top right of your screen to see the captions describing the photos.

Have any of you been to Germany before? What’s your favorite German dish?

Smith Mountain Lake

Our week of fun and relaxation has come to an end, leaving great memories, some post-vacation blues and a couple of unwanted pounds in its wake. We enjoyed a lot of time on the rivers and lakes of southwest Virginia, which allowed us to pack in a great deal of activity without a lot of driving.

We also packed a lot of food into our gullets, but it wouldn’t be vacation if we didn’t, would it? Pizza, steak, ribs, kabobs, fresh salads, grilled asparagus, banana pudding and lots of other treats made up our vacation menu. We even bought a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, which is about as sinful as it gets for me. Howard made his vacation staple, “cheesy chicken and mushrooms,” a copy of a dish that used to be on Shaker’s menu when he worked there years ago. I discovered a brand new recipe and found an old one I used to love but hadn’t had in about 15 years.

I’d like to share these recipes for corn salad with jalapeno-lime dressing, cheesy chicken and mushrooms, and cherries in the snow with you, kind readers, in the hopes that you will enjoy them as much as we did. They are not all healthy. No harping, please. I have my gym bag packed in the car right now.

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Fish and chips in Lerwick, Shetland Islands. Photo by Lindsey Nair l The Roanoke Times

In today’s Front Burner column, I write about some of my favorite vacation food memories, as well as some of my experiences during a recent trip to the British Isles and Iceland. As I wrote in the column, it isn’t all about the quality of the foods. It’s about the experience, and how food ties into the culture and identity of a particular place and time. To read the column, click here.

When I came in this morning, I had a couple of great emails from readers. One woman wrote to tell me she was on the same boat as me! It is indeed a small world. Another woman wrote to tell me that the article brought back fond memories of her time living in Scotland years ago. I’d like to share an excerpt from her note:

“We spent 4 days on the Shetland Islands and I have only wonderful memories of the food and the lambs being herded through the middle of the street in front of our hotel early one morning.  In Edinburgh I remember so well the birth of Prince William (his birthday was just a few days ago) as a friend visiting from New Orleans and I were on walking down Princess Street about 2PM when  one of the Queen’s BEEFEATERS with a LARGE brass bell ringing and shouting out “A PRINCE HAS BEEN BORN” over and over again.

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Haggis in Lerwick, Shetland Islands. Photo by Lindsey Nair l The Roanoke Times.

I was blessed to have two weeks away from work, away from Virginia and, for the first time in my life, across the pond from the United States.

During my vacation cruise to Scotland, the Shetland Islands, Iceland and Ireland, I forgot completely about email, telephones (my cell wouldn’t even work over there – oh well!), household chores, yard work and all of the other obligations that make us pop antacids and grind our teeth at night. It was fabulous.

But I did not forget about food. How could I? I live for food, and one of the most exciting parts of traveling for me is finding foodstuffs I cannot have at home. This meant that I did a lot of observing other cruise ship passengers who hailed from other countries and had their own favorite foods and eating styles.

It also meant that when I was ashore, I did my best to find eats that showcased that particular country’s best. There was fantastic fish and chips in Scotland, amazing salmon in Iceland, delicious toasties with Guinness in Ireland and, yes, even an encounter with haggis.

I was joking a little bit with my comment on Friday about the food I didn’t want to eat. Those who are familiar with haggis know that it’s like a sausage made up of pieces and parts from sheep, such as heart, liver and lungs. It is often bound with suet and oatmeal, then cooked inside a sheep’s stomach. We looked all over Edinburgh and the Inverness/Invergordon areas of Scotland for a sample of haggis, but timing and luck did not put us into contact with it until we reached Lerwick, the capital of the Shetland Islands.

The little shop where we found haggis in Lerwick, Shetland Islands. Photo by Lindsey Nair

I’m still not convinced that what we ate was authentic haggis. I have read that a lot of haggis these days is made in casings, as are hot dogs and sausages of other kinds. Our haggis certainly looked like a sausage, with a thin layer of batter on the outside. You can see from the photo above what it looked like when we broke it open.

The flavor of haggis is nothing horrible; nothing that would cause a reasonable person to want to gag or spit it out. To me, it tasted like a heavily seasoned, very rich sausage. I detected a considerable amount of black pepper in our piece. By rich, I do mean that it had a fairly strong, gamey flavor and was clearly made up of some intensely unusual cuts of meat. To me, kidneys and liver in particular tend to have a very strong flavor.

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Lindsey Nair / The Roanoke Times

My dear blog readers, I am back stateside and am so happy to be a part of the Fridge Magnet community again. I see that some good discussion took place while I was away.

I had a wonderful two weeks on my first overseas vacation ever (unless you can count Cancun as an overseas vacation; that was our honeymoon). I took a cruise out of London to Scotland, Iceland and Ireland and experienced breathtaking scenery, fascinating culture and some great cuisine. And also one very traditional dish that I tasted but had no desire to finish (I’ll bet some of you can guess what that was!)

I’m still jetlagged and have 700 pictures to sort through, but I will be back at full force on Monday with some food stories about the trip, then we’ll get back into the swing of things regarding the Southwest Virginia food and dining scene. I want to thank my friends and colleagues, Nona Nelson, Kathy Lu, Rebecca Holland and Amanda Codispoti (sorry if I am forgetting someone- as I said, I’m not quite right yet) for keeping the Fridge Magnet lively while I was gone. And thanks to all my blog readers for helping to keep the conversation going.

See you Monday. Have a great weekend!

Photo courtesy Stephen Edgar-Netweb/Flickr

I can’t believe it was already 80 degrees before 9 a.m. this morning. I mean, I’ve lived in Virginia for decades, so it shouldn’t surprise me, but the first heat wave of the summer always does.

This kind of weather makes me want to let my wet hair air dry, to put on sleeveless shirts and press my face into the air conditioner. It also makes me dream of the beach, but since I’m the type who has to sit under 70 SPF, a wide hat and an umbrella at the beach, I spend a lot of time dreaming about my next meal.

I’ll bet we all associate certain foods with fun beach vacations of the past. Seafood, certainly, but families all seem to have their own little food rituals when they go on vacation.

From my childhood vacations in Myrtle Beach with my best pal, Samantha, I remember the Pop-Tarts we got to eat for breakfast and the clam chowder I had to order at every restaurant, just to see if it was better than the last cup or bowl. Clam chowder is my favorite soup of all time, and it’s interesting to see how much it varies in consistency and flavor. I have never quite made up my mind whether I like bacon in clam chowder because it kind of takes away from the clam flavor, but I do know I prefer clam chowder at a medium thickness – not too watery or too thick.

From my childhood vacations to Chincoteague with my family, I have fond memories of all-you-can-eat steamed shrimp (a boy I dated had never had it before, and he ate the first one shell, legs and all). And then we used to sit out on the pier behind the hotel, at a picnic table covered with newspaper, and pick our way through a passel of steamed blue crabs, throwing the shells in the water for the seagulls.

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I’m suffering from that dazed feeling one has after being away from work for more than a week at a stretch. It is a good feeling to return renewed and ready for a fresh year. However, I feel I have missed out on sharing all the tasty things I’ve cooked and/or eaten over the past week and a half!

It would be impossible to name them all (and I dug into some of the grub so fast I didn’t even get pictures) but here are a few highlights:

On Christmas Eve, I made yet another batch of those wonderful Fine Living Orange Butter Cookies with Grand Marnier Glaze, because my father loves anything citrus-flavored and I wanted to take some fresh cookies to his house.

I also made up this easy candy tin to haul around from one house to the next over the holidays. In the bottom right corner are Oreo truffles (similar to these) I made with my mom. Beside them are pretzel sticks dipped in white candy coating and sprinkled with crushed candy cane. The chocolate bark was an incredibly easy, spur-of-the-moment invention. I simply melted an entire package of chocolate candy coating, then stirred in 1/4 cup of peanut butter, about 1 cup of toasted pecan pieces and maybe 1/2 cup dried cherries. I spread that in a 13×9-inch casserole dish and let it harden completely before cutting into pieces. It was candy for dummies!

On Christmas Eve, my husband and I traditionally have a quiet dinner at home before the craziness and the hectic travel of Christmas day begins. This time, we decided on venison tenderloin. My brother-in-law’s friend killed this deer on Nair property this fall and butchered it at my request.

It just so happens that Matt has experience processing meat and was able to extract the prettiest whole tenderloin I’ve ever seen from a deer. This photo shows the tenderloin doubled over and wrapped in bacon. I learned the bacon trick from U.S. Foodservice Chef Jeff Bland, who noted that venison is very lean and the bacon can help to baste it as it cooks and keep it moist. Boy, was he correct. I roasted this to about 135 degrees and served it with a horseradish sauce from Joy of Cooking.

The sauce calls for a basic bechamel (butter and flour to make a roux, then stir in milk and simmer until thickened) with 3 Tbsp. of horseradish added, along with a little dry mustard, a little vinegar, a pinch of sugar, salt and pepper. It was delicious.

On Christmas Day, my father fried oysters and his wife, Mary Beth, made delicious macaroni and cheese and cole slaw. I was so tired by that point in the evening that I didn’t even get a picture. The main attraction occurred the next day anyway. Check out this huge, honkin’ prime rib roast my sister and her husband bought at Leach’s Meats and Sweets in Norton, Ohio. This monster weighed in at about 14 pounds.

In this first picture, you can see that my father has already prepared it for roasting by rubbing it down with spices and trussing it. He placed it fat side up on a roasting rack and roasted it in the oven until it reached an internal temperature of 130 degrees. Considering that some of the family likes their beef gray and dead (Kim) and others like it still mooing (aunts), that turned out pretty well. Kim got the end piece and the aunts got the ruby-red center pieces. I got my nice, medium-rare slab. We ate until we busted!

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Hi, this is features editor Kathy Lu, filling in for Lindsey while she’s away.

I thought of this post while I was on a business trip to St. Petersburg, Fla., last week.

When a group of us were trying to decide where to dine one night, I realized that though this one restaurant many in the group wanted to try had gotten rave reviews, I was totally turned off by its looks. It was a very nice restaurant inside and the menu looked great, but it had almost no outdoor seating and was housed in a corner of what looked like a bank building.

And on that beautiful Floridian night, I wanted to eat al fresco.

So the group split up, and a small contingent ended up at The Garden. We were attracted by the cozy outdoor patio shaded by a large banyan tree and — bonus! — a jazz trio that was starting to set up.

In truth, while the dinner was fine and affordable, it played second fiddle to the setting (I can’t remember the name of the fish of the day that I had, but I learned that the jazz trombonist was Buster Cooper!). Also, it turns out, the restaurant is the oldest in St. Petersburg.

We found it not by getting on our smartphones and using UrbanSpoon nor by following the recommendations in our program guide. We were simply walking by the place and were drawn in by its mojo.

It made me realize that a restaurant’s presence can be just as important as its food — at least for this traveler who prefers to let her eyes lead her stomach.