Shrimp Cocktail

Crown of Roast Pork

Smashed Minty Peas

Parker House Rolls

Tipsy Squire
 

>>See the making of a dinner scene on the Downton Abbey set.

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Richard Garcia is the Executive Chef of Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel (606 Congress). Not only did he demonstrate his Trash Fish recipe at the Taste of WGBH Food and Wine Festival, he also talked about his work to support practices for a more sustainable seafood market.
 

Eventually Steltzner gives up on sleep and heads into his garden where, just as first light reveals the sky, all that thinking can turn into doing. And finally, a little peace.

These are tense times for Steltzner as he and everyone else at NASA's jet propulsion lab in Pasadena wait for the rover Curiosity to land on Mars early Monday morning. But Steltzner is especially tense because he led the team that designed the system that's supposed to land the craft safely and gently on the surface. If all goes as planned, champagne corks will fly. If it fails, well, the rover could end up as a piece of expensive trash on the Red Planet.

A lot could go wrong, and it's now out of his hands, but here in the garden, Steltzner takes charge. Surrounded by morning glory and fish peppers, kafir lime bushes and zinfandel grapes, he weeds and snips. Soon, instead of worrying about the rover, he's wondering what would happen if he mixed lavender in with his apricot jam.

Welcome to Adam Steltzner's mind — a place in which problems are but precursors to solutions. OK, that sounds like big stuff, but really I'm just talking about Steltzner's marmalade. And, his system to bring the rover, which is hurdling through space at 13,000 mph, to a dead stop on Mars. (Now I can't sleep at night, either.)

Ever since childhood, Steltzner says he's wanted to do things with a real and measurable outcome. He started with rock and roll, and moved on to science. "It just feels good to make, to create, to improve — to imagine the world as I think it should be and then to try and make it that way," he says.

In his garden you can see those imaginings at work. He bought his small bungalow in Pasadena, Calif., precisely because it had a mature apricot in the garden — hence the apricot and lime jam with a hint of ginger he's working on now.

When he wanted a steel pergola out back for his zinfandel and pinot grapes to grow on, he first built a life-sized wooden model so he could study how the structure would affect the flow of light. Then he took a welding course and put the steel structure together himself.

And that bush of Meyer lemons in his front yard? They're for one of his long lasting passions: homemade limoncello, that refreshing lemon Italian liqueur. Like a true scientist, he's experimenting with different kinds of lemons from his garden to see which ones taste the best.

It all sounds very boutique, doesn't it? And yet Steltzner says he's really just like the American pioneers who engineered their way into a new life. They imagined what they wanted and they set out to create it.

"Food still has this creating thing," Steltzner says. "Engineering is a creating thing. That's what I love most about it — a making of more, of better — that the world later on has got something that exists because of my effort."

An effort which could lead to a graceful landing on Mars or a homemade limoncello — served, as he says, "in chilled shot glasses, after dinner, on a warm Indian summer night."

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

3/4 oz Dry Yeast
1/2 cup whole milk
2 cups warm filtered water
2 oz unsalted butter (melted)
1 tsp Granulated sugar
2 TB squid ink
2 lbs AP Flour
2 tsp kosher salt

3 tbsp EVOO
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 red onion, finely chopped
1 lb cleaned fresh squid tubes & tentacles
1 TB chopped FRESH oregano
1 TB chopped flat leaf parsley
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 cup finely ground panko bread crumbs
AP Flour for coating  meatballs
Red Sauce of Your choice (see below)

1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
10 lb of your farmers over ripe tomatoes, halved lengthwise, cored, and coarsely chopped
10 garlic cloves, peeled and lightly smashed
1 red onion sliced thinly
1 cup SPANISH extra-virgin olive oil (sorry I can never resist saying that)
1 cup loosely packed fresh basil leaves

---

Richard Garcia is the Executive Chef of the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. He is one of the many chefs who will be at the Taste of WGBH Food and Wine Festival on September 13-15, 2012. Be sure to check out his Chef Demo on Saturday.
 

They won't be hard to find. Originally just a convenient boxed lunch for Japanese field workers, bentos today can be high art, with flower-petal carrots, hard-boiled eggs shaped into bunnies, broccoli sculpted into trees. The moms who make them — because they're mostly moms, and not necessarily Japanese — are eager to share their edible masterpieces.

Confession: I have a problem with food that is cute. I even pick the buttons off gingerbread men. I'm also against expending that much effort just to coax my kid to eat. (Yes, my daughter thinks I'm "mean.") That said, I truly believe that we eat first with our eyes. And because of that, there is much to learn from the art of the bento.

Bento boxes go back to at least the 5th century A.D., when Japanese field workers, hunters and fishermen would pack dried rice into boxes. Somewhere around the 19th century, makunouchi, or "intermission," bentos emerged, packed with side dishes and treats for theatergoers to munch between acts. When the railroads arrived, ekiben — station boxes — filled with local specialties became popular. Today, many Japanese men and women carry bentos to work, and schoolchildren tote colorful arrangements of checkerboard-carved apples and rice balls shaped like Hello Kitty.

Of course, these Japanese lunches will have Japanese food: rice balls (onigiri) stuffed with pickled apricot or baked cod roe, deep-fried pork cutlets, vegetables simmered in sweet soy sauce. But you don't have to cook Japanese food — or make cute cutouts — to reap the benefits of the bento.

Cookbook author and Japan expert Debra Samuels says the five main elements of a bento are color, texture, seasonality, presentation and nutrition (and let's not forget portion control — how much can you cram into those little compartments?). She says many Japanese believe that including five colors on your plate — red, yellow, green, white and black — means you have a balanced meal.

Many cultures — including our own — carry lunch in a box. In India, children and workers take tiffins — stacked stainless steel boxes filled with rice or bread, curry and vegetables. Korean dosirak offer jubilant heaps of bibimbap or perhaps sushi-like rolls called kimbap. Many American parents pack those Buzz Lightyear lunchboxes with organic, whole grain, gluten-, antibiotic- or trans fat-free foods. But all of these lack what are perhaps the most distinctive features of the bento: organization and an appetizing aesthetic.

Face it, PB&J wrapped in plastic — whether it's organic or not — just isn't that appealing. Maybe that's why my kid-size containers — bought especially for school lunches — still come back half-full of the snap peas, blueberries or tabbouleh I put in them. What if you could make that food fun and appetizing, though? Even without the hearts and flowers?

It doesn't have to be complicated. Just think of naturally hand-held foods. A wrap filled with meat and crunchy, colorful vegetables becomes a lunch cone. Slice it sideways, and it's pinwheels. Farmers markets, supermarkets and even some big-box stores are filled with gorgeous and delicious kid-size vegetables like mini zucchini and summer squash, fingerling potatoes, clementines, bell-shaped yellow and red cherry tomatoes, slender Persian cucumbers, tiny sweet peppers, and yellow, orange and purple baby carrots (real ones — not the ones lathed into bullets at the factory). Eggs provide easy, affordable, colorful protein — "cheap and cheerful," as a British friend says. You can boil them, turn them into an omelet or an herb-stuffed patty, all of which are delicious cold. Cheese comes in single-serving sticks and rounds, with varieties from mozzarella to cheddar and even chevre.

And then there's the box itself. Like the food, the boxes in Japan can be works of art. Delicate cedar vessels and boxes of wicker and willow evolved from the simple wrapping of bamboo leaves and falconers' feed bags that are thought to be among the original bento boxes. The boxes can be slickly lacquered and painted with scenes. But today, a Japanese office worker is more likely to carry a sleek aluminum container with built-in gel packs or vacuum-insulated boxes. For children, there are boxes in the shape of frogs and pandas, boxes decorated with their favorite cartoon figures, even boxes that look like stacked Legos.

Through the miracle of the Internet, many of these items are available online. One company even makes a bento — and that's what they call it — with colorful insert containers. Sleek, clean, the ultimate green lunch.

A little color. Some crisp, beautiful vegetables. Just a few minutes of attention to feeding your eyes before your stomach, and lunch suddenly becomes a whole new experience. Just remember to say itadakimasu — "I humbly receive."

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

So when I decided to overcome my fear, I did it the right way. I hopped on a train to the Culinary Institute of America, the nation's premier cooking school, in Hyde Park, N.Y. There I learned the foolproof pie crust formula that chef George Higgins teaches his students. "It starts with 3, 2, 1" he explains.

That's 3 parts flour, 2 parts fat (butter), 1 part liquid. We've laid it out for you in pictures here, to make it easy. And we also share his family's impossible-to-resist blueberry pie recipe that's made with a flaky crust.

But it takes just a bit more than that.

Higgins says a successful baker likes precision. So be sure to measure accurately. Then, of course, there's the technique.

The biggest mistake I made — and this is a pitfall for lots of newbies — was overworking the dough. Chef Higgins made me toss out my first attempt and start over! Less is more. Higgins taught me to handle it just enough to form the dough into a ball. (Kneading is for bread, not pie crust!) It's supposed to look like it's barely holding together.

Here are some other pastry chefs' tips to avoid disaster:

Your butter should be firm, cold and chunky. Ryan Westover, the pastry chef at Poste in Washington, D.C. explains the chunks of cold butter will slowly release steam as the pie bakes. And this is important:

"By releasing steam incrementally, you give the starches and gluten time to form a lattice, or a sort of balloon" he says. And this holds the steam in.

This is how a good pie crust develops it's rich, delicate layers of of wonderful texture and flavor Westover says.

Additional temperature tips come from Theresa Souther, a pastry chef and Head of the Professional Pastry Arts Program at L'Academie de Cuisine, a culinary school in Bethesda, Md.

She recommends putting ingredients, including the flour, in the fridge or freezer for 30 to 60 minutes before you begin.

And be sure to use ice water to mix the dough. "Cold temperatures help minimize gluten development," she explains. And if you have too much gluten, you end up with a chewy, rubbery crust.

Also, she says, let the dough rest in the fridge after you mix it and before you try to roll it and shape the pie. Cold dough is usually easier to roll and handle.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

As it turned out, we had a similar dish growing up that we called "veggie noodles" — which made these commonplace salads sound more exotic and fun to us kids. During many Indian summers, they were a cold, satisfying afternoon snack, served with salted butter crackers and a tall, salty lemonade. Kosumalli (coleslaw) continues to be an integral part of many festival and wedding menus in southern India.

This vegetarian was apprehensive about the American version, however, fearing it might contain some hidden shredded meat. Then I learned that traditional American coleslaws are made with shredded cabbage, mayonnaise, spices and no meat — so similar to the salads I grew up with in South India.

Back then, we ate the most fabulous and juicy carrot, cabbage, cucumber and beet salads, garnished with crunchy soaked lentils and mung sprouts, chopped jalapenos, fresh grated coconut and golden roasted cashews.

The most appealing thing to me about these crunchy salads is that they are thirst-quenching but also healthful and filling. The burst of juicy flavor in each spoonful is cooling in the summer. Last spoonfuls of coleslaw are always in great demand, because the last spoonfuls have the most liquid.

These types of salads span beyond the U.S. and India, I learned. Meeting other graduate students from all over the world, I was fascinated by the variations. At global student events, I'd encounter a Thai friend, a Greek classmate or a Vietnamese student preparing a slaw from his culture, each with different vegetables and dressings and gorgeous refreshing flavors. Yet, at every American barbecue, I would see the white cabbage coleslaw made with the traditional heavy mayonnaise dressing.

What most Americans think of as coleslaw came along with the arrival of mayonnaise in the 18th century, but many international slaws don't contain mayonnaise — or even cabbage. There's a Thai slaw with green papaya, and Chinese broccoli slaw with a soy ginger dressing. Coleslaws can be a light crunchy blend of julienne or grated vegetables tossed in vinaigrette, or shredded vegetables with nonfat Greek yogurt combined with spices and herbs.

Most coleslaws do, however, contain cabbage. After all, the "cole" part of the word comes from the Latin colis, meaning "cabbage."

Coleslaws are versatile, come in all colors and textures and are a perfect accompaniment to summer entrees. They are cool enough to go with a spicy barbecue plate, a burger, hot dog or a sandwich. They are sturdy enough to stand up for themselves with a fancier meal and can be a refreshing lunch wrapped in a whole-wheat tortilla or scooped up in bite-sized pita or multigrain chips.

Now, each time I go to a July Fourth picnic or a barbecue, I do my part to try out a new coleslaw. There's nothing commonplace in any of these "veggie noodles."

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

You won't catch John Durant in a tie. Shoes are optional, too. He has traded cubicle life for something a little wild: Promoting the diet and lifestyle of our ancestors from the paleolithic era. He's blogging and writing a book about his approach.

"For millions of years, we didn't have an obesity problem because we ate foods that our metabolism was adapted to," Durant says — foods such as root vegetables, tubers, fish and, of course, red meat.

"We were active and lived a healthy lifestyle," he says. Durant is one of many folks following the popular meat-laden paleo diet. He packs his freezer with deer meat and has found lots of places near his home in Manhattan to buy marrow bones and organ meats, as well as paleo-friendly barbecue joints for a meal out.

But modern medicine tells us that too much meat is bad for us, so what's a consumer to do?

During a workout at a CrossFit gym, a gathering spot for lots of paleo-enthusiasts, Durant told me it's no longer a challenge for him to avoid the onslaught of bagels and pizza at every street corner. The paleo approach is to eliminate grains and processed food, which are relatively new to the human diet. And, as a result, Durant says, he no longer gets the spikes and dips in his moods, and he feels better.

Now, everyone from the American Cancer Society to the American Heart Association and popular food writers such as Mark Bittman tells us to eat less red meat.

But Durant says it's a meat-based diet that was fundamental to early human development. (Check out our tongue-in-cheek Time Traveler's Cookbook: Meat Lover's Edition for more on this.)

My colleague Chris Joyce has reported on how a meat-based diet helped make us smarter.

And paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisonsin, Madison, agrees: "We definitely evolved to eat meat."

"When we look at the fossils of early Homo [sapien], we see this immediate increase in the size of the body and also increase in the size of the brain," Hawks explains.

But that was then. Very few cavemen lived long enough to get heart disease or cancer. These are the reasons we're told to limit red meat consumption now.

"It really began in a big way in the Framingham study in the 1950s," says Michael Thun, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society.

"It [the study] found a relationship between total cholesterol and heart disease," Thun says. Over the years, there has been debate about whether high cholesterol is a cause or simply a marker of higher heart disease risks. But studies like this one helped raise the red flag about high-cholesterol foods, such as red meat.

Then, the evidence started mounting that people who ate daily servings of red meat increased their risks of developing certain cancers. For colon cancer, studies show that people who eat the most have about double the risk compared with people who eat the least red meat.

"That's been found in lots of studies," says Thun, "so it's pretty well-accepted."

Paleo enthusiast John Durant says he has thought about these studies and has heard the health experts, but he's not worried. He says lots of the people in these big epidemiological studies are sedentary and overweight.

He may be eating more red meat than the experts recommend, but he believes his paleo lifestyle, which includes running barefoot in Central Park, helps keep him thin, active and healthy. And he's not alone — the movement is attracting some medical professionals.

Because there are no studies of people who've been following the paleo diet, Thun says, it's hard to evaluate. "There's just not been enough people eating one kind of paleolithic diet to tell."

As for the rest of us who want to know how much red meat is too much, the best evidence suggests that cutting back to two to three servings a week is a good guide.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The locavore movement is increasingly powerful — but one author says the movement is not nearly diverse enough and excludes some of the very people who most need healthy, affordable food.

We look at eating local — from a radically different perspective.

Guest:  

• Julian Agyeman, co-editor, Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability

Chef Leo Romero opened Boston's Casa Romero in 1972. He shared this recipe with us when we interviewed him for Neighborhood Kitchens.

The entries are arranged by flavor, cuisine, and type of food, making it easy to find whatever kind of snack you desire. And for foods with more than one ingredient, the components are cross-listed to reveal connections between foods (e.g. Spaghetti & Meatballs - see also: Spaghetti, Meatball).

As an art project, Snack Data has a primal, throw-back feel. Accompanying the pixelated images are bits of questionable trivia and highly subjective tasting notes  kind of like a clever middle school kid's book report on foods from around the world, not an authoritative reference.

Johnson creates the illustrations using Photoshop, in the blocky style of early-1990s computer games like King's Quest. But Johnson, 27, says it wasn't meant to be retro.

"I know it has those associations," he says. It's also meant as a departure from the food photography that saturates the Internet, he adds.

For the text, Johnson pulls facts from Wikipedia or simply invents his own, like "the hot dog bun can be thought of as an edible glove" and "taco salad is something that happened when people in the United States got tired of eating regular taco."

"I try to give a little bit of real background," Johnson says, but admits, "I don't spend too long researching them." Johnson has added to the database regularly since its creation in mid-April. He's almost done with the primary entries, and he takes requests through email.

None of the entries are brand-name products, although some do resemble well-known brands. Johnson felt it was important to focus on the foods themselves. "If you're writing about an orange or an apple or a scallop, there's no one to answer for it," he says. "You're just kind of commenting on this thing that's always been there."

We've selected a few of Johnson's favorites to feature in our Snack Data slideshow above, as well as a few of our own. Naturally, we've included the entry on salt. To explore the entire collection, visit snackdata.com.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Inskeep and his team are traveling some 2,000 miles from Tunisia's ancient city of Carthage, across the deserts of Libya, and on to Egypt's megacity of Cairo.

In between stories on changing economies, new political systems and emerging social rules, Inskeep is also sharing with us here at The Salt what he's been eating, and tapping us for some insight about it.

Inskeep and the Morning Edition crew have encountered a lot of red chili pepper paste known as harissa in practically every country of their journey. It's as ubiquitous as ketchup is in America. It's served with pretty much every meal and even with simple snacks of bread.

Plus, like its cousin, the Thai hot sauce sriracha, it's hot, complex and totally addictive. (Just watch the video of NPR's social media guru Andy Carvin tasting a popular Tunisian stew made of bread, chickpeas, lime, a soft-boiled egg and harissa a few years ago. He's still talking about it.)

OK, comparing harissa to ketchup doesn't quite do it justice. Harissa is a blend of hot peppers, oil and various spices. It's a flavor base for curries and stews, as well as a condiment, in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, according to Middle Eastern food expert Paula Wolfert.

Harissa ingredients vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, as well as by country and ethnicity, but the basic recipe calls for hot peppers, garlic, salt, and lots of olive oil. Then you add some amounts of coriander and caraway seeds, and maybe cumin and dried mint, depending on your preference.

There are hundreds of harissa recipes out there calling for complex blends of peppers, like this one from Saveur, and simpler versions, like this one from blogger Musical Assumptions.

Libyan Post culture columnist Huda Biuk says Libyans consider harissa more like mustard than ketchup. They eat it with fast food, pizza and in tuna and egg sandwiches. Biuk tells The Salt: "Maybe this will help draw the picture of what is considered a really good meal: When a meal is spicy enough to make your sinus runny, the food is complimented for cleaning out the airways." And in Libya, that spicy heat comes from harissa.

Hot sauce has evolved into many forms — West Indian pepper sauce, Yemeni chili relish, sriracha, and even American Tabasco, fueling a hot sauce craze. But none of it would exist without the lowly red pepper.

So how did the pepper come to figure so prominently in global cuisine?

Archaeological evidence shows chilies were eaten in Mexico thousands of years ago, there they were cultivated by the Aztecs and the Mayans, and further south in Peru, by the Incas. But it wasn't until Christopher Columbus and crew arrived that pepper fever really took off.

"With the arrival of the spice-seeking Spanish and Portuguese, it was not long before chilies were shipped back to Europe and thence to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia," according to Greg Malouf's book, From Artichokes to Za'taar: Modern Middle Eastern Food.

From Spain and Portugal, peppers traveled over the water to Morocco and beyond, where various nations added spices and adapted a harissa pepper sauce to their own cuisine.

Peppers add flavor to food, they're pretty cheap, and they stimulate the body. It's no wonder about a quarter of the world's population eats some daily, according to Malouf.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Seventy-seven percent of you find time to sit down as a family for a meal "always" or "usually" during the week — a proven benefit to kids in terms of physical and mental health. Also, 77 percent of you also say you "always" or "usually" limit desserts to two or three nights a week.

But when it came to whether you swap brown rice for white, you weren't quite as enthusiastic — just 53 percent of you said "always" or "usually." Brown rice is distinct from its pale cousin because the germ and the bran are left intact, which allow it to retain fiber and extra minerals.

So why aren't more of you embracing this healthier, heartier whole grain?

For starters, it may be the lingering stigma. Say the words "brown rice," and people of a certain age might conjure images of hippie communes and 70s potlucks.

But one of our readers, who calls herself "Jenny," suggests brown rice faces far more practical challenges. "I'd like to do brown rice more often, but white rice cooks up so much faster that I almost always go with that instead. I suppose I could use quick rice but I don't care for the texture," she writes.

And it's true - the stuff takes about 45 minutes to cook, compared to about 20 minutes for many white types. Unless you use the quick-cooking, and then you've got a totally different creature.

So we asked the USA Rice Federation, the marketing arm for American rice growers, millers and merchants, for some tips on how to incorporate more brown rice in our diets.

Shaily Jariwala, manager of domestic production, suggests making large amounts of rice in a rice cooker, then using it to plan meals throughout the week. For example, add leftover chicken, chopped veggies, and nuts to cooked leftover rice, and you've got yourself another dinner. She also says cooked rice will keep 3 to 5 days in the refrigerator in a sealed container or up to six months in the freezer.

Despite the challenges of making it an everyday food, brown rice has been slowly gaining in popularity over the few years.

According to a USA Rice marketing report, the U.S. rice industry's promotional arm, domestic shipments of U.S.-grown brown rice have increased 31 percent between 2007 and 2011. That's compared to a 13 percent increase in shipping all kinds of rice during the same time period.

But brown rice is still a very small percentage of the rice we're eating — white long grain and white medium grain sales dwarf brown rice sales, according to page 22 of the report. The average American ate about 27 pounds of rice a year in 2011, the group says. The report didn't say how much of that was brown.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

And that's one of the wonderful things about trifle  it's at once so simple and so luxurious, so humble and so hoity-toity, innocent yet sexy. There's something about it that hits our basest food pleasure points. Perhaps that's why celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, the ultimate culinary hedonist, is such a big fan of the dessert. On her website, Nigella.com, she writes in the headnote of her Anglo-Italian Trifle recipe: "I don't think I could write a book that didn't include a recipe for trifle somewhere."

It's a concept that most likely has its roots in my favorite way to cook: Someone had a bit of leftover cake and came up with a great way to repurpose it. Trifle is said to date back a few hundred years to England, and this jumble of textures has become a national favorite in that country, often being served at birthday parties and after a big Sunday meal.

Traditionally, it's some kind of cake (typically sponge) moistened with some type of booze (typically sweet sherry) and layered with custard and jam or perhaps fresh fruit, all topped with whipped cream. But for the people of Britain, there is one ingredient that trumps all others: nostalgia. It's the dish that everyone's Gran makes better than anyone else's, and if Gran made it with what the Brits call "jelly," a fruity red gelatin that some people view as an essential trifle ingredient, then a jellyless version won't do.

Lawson recommends buying the cake layer because it's unlikely that anyone would notice the effort if you made your own. But if you have the time and you're up for the challenge, you can make many components from scratch. It's not complicated, although making the custard, the whipped cream and maybe even the cake does dirty a lot of dishes and pans.

But it can also be a no-fuss dessert that you throw together out of things you have in the freezer and the pantry. If you have frozen berries, jam, pudding mix, a can of whipped cream and a frozen pound cake on hand, you've got yourself a trifle.

Of course, fresh fruit is always preferable to frozen, and it's one ingredient that Irish-born chef Cathal Armstrong, owner of Restaurant Eve and a handful of other restaurants in Alexandria, Va., won't budge on. He makes several versions of this comfort food for his restaurants, especially around St. Patrick's Day. And while he sometimes bases it on his mother's recipe, he doesn't need to rely on the canned fruit she once used probably because it was cheaper, easier and more readily available.

"The one area that we would never make exception to is the quality of the fruit we're using," he says of his own trifle. "That one step, not shortcutting there, will really make the trifle a whole lot better."

Good summer variations could employ tropical or flag-colored fruits, as with two of the recipes below, and winter spins could feature almonds and clementines, chocolate and cherries, or passion fruit and ginger. If you don't want to use alcohol, any fruit juice will do  although Armstrong says heating the sherry to 155 degrees will burn off the alcohol while keeping the essential sherry flavor.

The dessert is generally served in a trifle bowl  a pedestaled glass bowl that shows off all those glorious layers. "The prized display in someone's home would be the trifle bowl," Armstrong says of his native land. For entertaining purposes, however, it's fun to make individual servings in wineglasses or even old-timey Mason jars  a good way to make it portable for picnics. And because this should be a no-stress dessert, don't worry if you don't have a trifle bowl. Any appropriately sized glass bowl will do.

Since I'm not from Great Britain, I have no sentimental attachment to any particular trifle recipe. I'm a freewheeling, willy-nilly, equal opportunity trifle lover, which leaves me open to trying all sorts of interpretations to this versatile dessert, picking and choosing from the many, many varieties out there, tailoring my concoctions to highlight my favorite ingredients.

The recipes here are twists on the beloved original. And while traditionalists and British transplants may balk at the idea of updating a national treasure, I'm not about to try to compete with anyone's Gran.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.