A Bangkok street food staple, phat phak bung fai daeng (flash-fried morning glory) delivers fiery garlic-chili heat in under two minutes. Crisp greens, wok smoke, and a splash of oyster sauce make this simple stir-fry one of Thailand’s most beloved everyday meals.

Editor’s note: Carolina Doriti, our Athens bureau chief, was born in the Greek capital, where she grew up in a family with a long culinary tradition. Having studied arts management, she pursued a career as a curator but quickly set her museum work aside to follow her true passion: cooking! Since then, along with her work with CB as both a writer and tour leader, Carolina has been working as a chef, restaurant consultant and food stylist. She is also the Culinary Producer of My Greek Table, a TV series on Greek gastronomy, broadcast on PBS across the US. She has appeared on various cooking shows on Greek and Spanish TV and gives cooking classes and workshops in Athens. The Greek Islands Cookbook is her second cookbook.

Ask anyone who has been in Thailand for a while what its national dish is, and they will invariably say pad kaprao. People like to think of pad Thai or green curry or spicy lemongrass soup as ubiquitous dishes in Thailand, but it’s really this holy basil stir-fry that millions of Thais eat every day, all over the country. Pad kaprao – which is most often made with pork, beef, or chicken – is a ubiquitous sight on office workers’ desks at lunchtime, as an accompaniment to a cold mug of beer in the evening, and can even be spotted streetside for breakfast. Every aharn tham sung (“made to order”) vendor serves it, and such is its unique mix of garlicky heat with meaty umami that makes for a delicious dish nearly anywhere you try it.

Start with stale, leftover bread. Add to this some of Portugal’s most decadent, richest ingredients, and you have açorda de gambas, a dish that manages to bridge the gap between poverty and indulgence. The Portuguese are masters at transforming leftover or stale bread into new dishes. In the north, leftover slices of bread are dipped in eggs, fried in oil and sprinkled with sugar in the dessert known as rabanadas. In the south, açorda is a soup made from slices of day-old bread topped with hot water, garlic, herbs, and a poached egg. The south is also home to migas, bits of stale bread and fat that are cooked into an almost omelet-like form.

In Greece, Easter is not just a holiday; it is a celebration of life, faith, and hope – a tradition that unites families and communities in ways that few other occasions can. It is a time of reflection, renewal, and festivity, where centuries-old customs are lovingly upheld. The journey to this sacred day reaches its final peak on Lazarus Saturday, which marks the start of the most important week in the Greek Christian calendar – Holy Week. This day, a week before Easter, holds both religious and cultural significance, setting the stage for the symbolic meaning and importance of each day of this Holy Week, culminating in Easter itself. Lazarus Saturday is also the day that the baking begins in homes across Greece.

We are in Lota da Esquina, in Cascais, staring down a small bowl filled to the brim with a mix of crab meat, chopped eggs, mayonnaise and other seasonings. On the surface, it looks like a straightforwardly decadent dish but according to chef/owner Vítor Sobral, it’s actually a way to boost a product that’s not quite at its peak.

On March 27 of this year, Monique and Josef, the Moroccan-born couple that own Patisserie Avyel, plan to roast a turmeric-coated lamb shoulder above a bed of onions. My friend Judith, whose family hails from Algeria’s Tlemcen region, will blend almonds and raisins into mlosia, a thick jam. And, in my apartment, I will simmer matzo balls in chicken broth as my Lithuanian ancestors once did. All of us Marseillais will be cooking these foods for Passover, the Jewish holiday that commemorates the exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. While Jewish celebrations and cooking are as intertwined as the braided challah bread we eat on Shabbat – “all of our fêtes pass through the kitchen,” quips Frédérique, a Marseillaise with Tunisian roots.

In Georgia, there are certain dishes that everyone associates with Orthodox Easter: paska, a sweet panettone-like bread and chakapuli, a lamb stew. However, there is another Georgian Easter tradition, one often overlooked: nazuki. Beautifully glazed and filled with raisins and spices, in recent years these fluffy sweet breads have become associated almost exclusively with the village of Surami in the Kartli region. In this small settlement between Tbilisi and Kutaisi in the West, huts line the side of the highway, each with a tone (a cylindrical traditional oven), a baker and a family nazuki recipe.

On Easter Sunday in Greece the star of the feast is the lamb, which is often substituted with goat. In some regions (and nowadays all across the country) it’s iconically slow roasted outdoors on a large rotating spit, symbolizing the sacrifice of Christ for the salvation of humanity. This tradition of spit roast lamb is linked to customs from ancient Greece and the Jewish Passover. In many parts of Greece, tradition calls for other recipes for cooking or roasting Easter lamb. Tradition generally dictates that the whole Easter lamb must be used and consumed – including the offal and head – as the lamb here is symbolic and represents the animal sacrificed during the Resurrection of Christ, and thus serves as a tribute to the divine sacrifice.

“This is the best time for bivalves,” says Portuguese chef João Rodrigues. It’s late February, and we’re speaking in the dining room of Canalha, his award-winning Lisbon restaurant. “Usually you think of bivalves as something you eat in summer, but you shouldn’t. During the months with no letter R, you shouldn't eat them.” We had asked the chef to share a seasonal dish, but since proper spring produce hadn’t yet quite arrived, he suggested razor clam rice served with deep-fried hake – a fish related to cod, although with a more delicate flavor – creating a dish that takes advantage of those plump, non-summer bivalves.

Anyone who takes more than a fleeting interest in Georgia’s traditional cuisine beyond the inescapable khachapuri and khinkali will probably agree that walnuts are the real gastronomic workhorse of Georgian cuisine. This versatile ingredient is deftly woven into a range of delightful dishes from soups and salads to rich, creamy stews, of which the Megrelian kharcho is one of our favorites. A slow-cooked dish of beef or veal simmered in creamy walnut sauce tempered with fried onions, garlic, and a generous amount of spices including coriander, a local variety of blue fenugreek (Trigonella caerulea) and marigold flowers (often called “the poor man’s saffron”), Megrelian kharcho is a heavy, hearty dish. It’s usually served with corn grits, locally called ghomi, or the cheese-saturated version called elargi – a combination that often calls for loosening the belt after indulging.

We’re in Os Papagaios, the restaurant Joaquim Saragga oversees in Lisbon’s Arroios neighborhood, where we’ve asked him to show us how to make one of Lisbon’s more iconic dishes: ervilhas guisadas, peas braised with Portuguese sausages, typically crowned with poached eggs. Come spring, Portugal revels in green-hued produce: fava beans, asparagus, artichoke, spinach and other leaves. Peas feature in this bounty, but the ubiquity of frozen peas means that the dish makes frequent appearances on tasca and restaurant menus during all times of year.

It’s fall and the wonderful farmers markets of Athens are filled with the season’s harvest; fresh walnuts and chestnuts, persimmons, pomegranates, quince and, of course, the two queens of the season: pumpkin and butternut squash. I love using butternut squash or pumpkin in a variety of recipes and these traditional fritters are one of my favorite ways to enjoy this nutritious vegetable. This is a recipe that I include in my cookbook Salt of the Earth (Quadrille, 2023), and it is inspired by the traditional version from the region of Messenia in southern Peloponnese. In my take on this dish, I add some chopped green olives as I like variety in textures and flavors and the olives, along with crumbled feta, add a beautiful layer of umami to the fritters.

Jambalaya, the rice dish that stands at the crossroads of culture and cuisine, is a staple of celebration, mourning and everything in between in Louisiana. From tailgates to Mardi Gras to repasts and backyard cookouts, it is a ubiquitous food that can be a main or a side dish. The roots of the dish can be traced to West African jollof rice, as well as Spanish paella. At its essence, jambalaya is an odds-and-ends dish that feeds a multitude, a humble rice dish with some meat and/or seafood cooked into it by way of a flavorful broth. As for the origins of the name jambalaya, there are as many theories as the grains of rice contained within. Some believe it to come from the Provençal word jambalaia, which means a mishmash.

We know that spring has arrived in Mexico City when street carts crowned with whole mangoes begin to roll into town. While wandering the Centro Histórico’s bustling streets just last week, we bumped into Maria, a seasonal worker whose cart is currently laden with this favorite springtime fruit. Intrigued, we stopped to watch as she deftly skewered the mango in her hand with a stick, peeled off the skin, made decorative cuts to transform the bright orange flesh into a beautiful flower, which she then brushed with chamoy, a classic Mexican sauce, and dipped in one of the brightly colored powders stored in plastic boxes: salsa tajín, chamoy, salt, chile or everything mixed together.