Hi it's Mark Bitman and welcome to food. As always feel free to email us at

food at markbitman.com. We would love to hear from you and will respond.

If you have some squash sitting on your counter or

you want to have squash sitting on your counter waiting to be cooked, head over

to bitman project.com. Carrie and Holly met up in person, went to the farmers market, got a ton of squash,

and came up with seven recipes. That's at bitman project.com where you can also subscribe

to our thrice weekly newsletter, The Bitman Project.

Please subscribe too to this podcast and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. guests. We'll get back to that conversation in a minute, but first I want to talk about

something that lots of people ask me about when it comes to global cuisines.

There is something magical about eating a cuisine in the place where it originated.

One of the reasons for that is that the dishes that define a cuisine are built around the

produce that's native to a place. It's why the feta and tomato in a Greek salad tastes so perfect in Athens, or the artichokes

and olive oil in Rome are to die for.

They have a certain sweetness and tang that you can get close to, but not easily replicate. and not

surprisingly, one of the best ways to get a sense for how something

should taste is to visit a region of the world

and sample a dish in several forms from lots of different

neighboring areas. Then you can appreciate the local variations as well. And the most

efficient way to do that, for me at least, is the first-class experience of a Regent

Cruz.

I was able to do that on our recent all-inclusive Tor of Asia.

I had a hankering for seafood.

...