Togs Tuck

Easily mistaken for Gallo Pinto in restaurants by travellers, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, a dish of White Rice & Red Beans, simmered in coconut milk has a similar name, but a very different flavour.

Nothing says Cost Rica quite like the famous Rice & Beans dish, Gallo Pinto. The biggest challenge is finding the Salsa Lizano, the signature flavour of Costa Rica.

It has been a very long time since I've eaten Jollof Rice. About twenty years ago I lived in Lagos and Jollof Rice was a staple of my meals.

A nation as huge and varied as the USA offers a wide array of cuisine, but if you're looking for the quintessential main meal, to eat with an Apple Pie chaser, you can look no further than the Hamburger.

A traditional Latvian side dish for Christmas, it also formed a key part of my Christmas meal this year. Eating alone due to the ongoing Covid pandemic, I went all out creating a traditional Christmas meal.

Germany's national dish of Sauerbraten is a sweet and sour beef slow marinated and cooked in what becomes a think gravy. Done right, the meat is tender and succulent with a unique flavour.

My random number-driven tour of the world landed me in my neighboring country of Denmark. The national dish of Denmark is the simple, and delicious, Stegt Flæsk. A crispy pork dish with parsley sauce.

Italy has a vast number of dishes that define their cuisine, different regions will give you different answers, but for my Italian stop on Tog's Tuck, I chose to cook a Lasagne from scratch using the recipe from Walks of Italy

My culinary tour (and random number generator) took me to Bulgaria, where the national dish is Bob Chorba, a bean soup made for centuries (if not longer) in monasteries, as well as Patatnik, a potato pancake made with egg and mint.

Fårikål is Norway's national dish, and its position was reaffirmed recently in a national vote. It is a deeply simple meal with only six ingredients assuming you count water as an ingredient.

Something of a taste from my childhood, Nasi Goreng is a staple of Indonesian (and Malaysian and Singaporean) cuisine, spicy fried rice with omelette pieces its a filling dish.

An Australian friend of mine was horrified that I'd never heard of, let alone tasted Tomato Relish, a key staple of the Australian diet. Shortly after Christmas (thanks to international postage and general Swedish post delays) I received a Christmas present of two jars of Relish, with some instructions on how best to use them.

Working from 192 Flavours, I cooked a lamb Tagine with Couscous for my Tunisian international meal.

Using the recipe at The Spruce Eats I made Finnish Karjalanpaisti, a traditional meat stew. Listening to the comments, I added much more seasoning, which helped, but the stew was a fairly thin mix of watery sauce and meats, rather than the thicker red shown in the illustrations.

The next stop on my culinary world tour is Spanish Paella. As I'm not a seafood fan, I picked a chicken and chorizo recipe from Epicurious.

The sixth meal in my international tour was Romania's Mititei. A Sausage like dish, made with minced lamb, chicken and beef and flavoured with cumin, coriander and thyme, it's a perfect BBQ dish. It needs preparing the evening before but requires little in the way of unusual ingredients.

Goulash is Hungary's national dish, a hearty heavy beef and tomato stew, served with rice and sometimes sour cream it is a great meal in poor weather. It's a favourite of mine when I'm snowboarding.

I've not eaten, or even thought about Stamppot for years, not since I lived in the Netherlands. Its a customised mashed potatoes featuring mustard, bacon, onions and kale (Ideally andijvie, but that can be tough to get outside of the Netherlands.

Irish Stew is a deeply comforting and hearty meal, with no formally agreed recipe. Most commonly created with lamb or mutton, slow cooked. Almost always with potatoes, carrots and onions, other ingredients are also found.

The United Kingdom has a few national dishes, Fish and Chips, a Sunday Roast, a Full English Breakfast, but perhaps the most interesting is Chicken Tikka Masala, an Indian inspired meal that is uniquely and quintessentially British.