A Moveable Feast: Years of cooking on the go leads to a rare treat indeed.

For an admittedly nervous flyer, Laurent Tourondel sure knows his way around a galley. Maybe it’s the year the chef behind the popular Manhattan eatery BLT Steak spent cooking up cabbage and potatoes in the French Navy. Or his later tour of duty in the early ’90s as the chef aboard the Honey Fitz, the legendary private yacht that once belonged to the Kennedys. Or maybe it’s just in his genes (although a certified Xanax flier himself, his father was a private pilot).

But the 42-year-old native of the central French provincial town of Montlucon is a firm believer that the size of the flavors need not be constrained by the headroom in the kitchen. “At first, it’s intimidating because the space is so small and narrow you don’t have access to an open flame,” he says. “But with really amazing ingredients, you can cook anywhere.”

These days, Tourondel is hardly pressed for counter space. After stops at an upscale private club in London, the famed Paris bistro Ledoyen and Caesar’s Palace, he now has 11 (soon to be 13) signature BLT restaurants. (The acronym stands for Bistro Laurent Tourondel, not bacon, lettuce and tomato.) In addition to the current locations in New York, Washington, D.C., San Juan, Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and his latest in Las Vegas, the Scottsdale and Miami BLTs are due before the end of 2008. Just for old time’s sake, though, Tourondel agreed to head back into the galley to offer up this recipe for Steak Tartare. “I’m not really into what I call fashion cooking, but I don’t consider this traditional comfort food either,” he says, explaining the simplicity of the dish. Here again, he says, the secret is in choosing the finest ingredients, such as premium filet mignon and extra-crusty French bread. “If you put it all together on the plane so that it’s still moist, it’s an amazing thing.”

Steak Tartare

8 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons ketchup
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
5 tablespoons red onion, diced
2 tablespoons rinsed capers, chopped
3 tablespoons cornichons, chopped
2 tablespoons flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 teaspoon tarragon, chopped
1 teaspoon chives, chopped
1 anchovy filet, minced
1 garlic clove, minced
1 1/2 pounds filet mignon, very cold
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
French bread, sliced and toasted

In a bowl, combine the mayo, mustard, ketchup, Worcestershire, Tabasco and mix thoroughly. Stir in onions, capers, cornichons, parsley, tarragon, chives, anchovy and garlic. Remove beef from fridge (it should be very cold). Using a meat grinder with large holes, grind beef. Place meat in a bowl over a larger bowl of crushed ice. Fold in mayo mixture until blended. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately with toasted bread.

The $1.3 Million Vacation: An Asian golf outing might set some sort of new record.

If you’re bored with the links at St. Andrews and Pebble is passé, one California-based company thinks it has the golf vacation for you. This past spring, food-and-wine events impresarios Angel’s Share began offering a private jet golf vacation through Asia that may just be the most luxe — and priciest — golf excursion of your life. How pricey, you ask? How’s an even $1.3 million sound?

Designed for a group of four (although more can be added for an additional, ahem, cost), the Asian golf outing begins aboard a luxuriously appointed Gulfstream G550. The private plane — yours for the two-week-long trip — first touches down in Bali, continues to Malaysia and wraps up in Hong Hong. The itinerary is, of course, fully customizable.

“It’s really a once-in-a-lifetime kind of trip,” says Mark Russo, the former brand ambassador for McCallan who founded Angel’s Share in 2001. “We’re offering experiences you just can’t get on your own.” Exper­iences like, for instance, a stay aboard a 172-foot yacht originally built for the Emir of Bahrain as it floats in the Andaman Sea. Or an unforgettable day on the greens at the Nirwana Bali Golf Club, followed by dinner with Bali’s Prince Rai Girigunadhi at the Royal Palace, capped off with a helicopter trip over emerald rice terraces to a remote Balinese village. Those types of experiences.

Iron Man Air: The creator of this summer’s most popular wearable aircraft tries his hand at something a little more spacious.

In Iron Man, when billionaire/genius inventor Tony Stark is kidnapped by baddies who try to force him to build WMD, he develops a suit of armor to fly through the sky like a missile. In Private Air, when the editors ask Phil Saunders, the concept co-designer behind all of the movie’s gadgets, to dream up a conveyance for battling the evils of commercial aviation, he develops this baby.

The 38-year-old Canadian says his sub-orbital private jet is an homage to the Piaggio Avanti (which his real-life aeronautical engineer father once flew during test flights), souped up with scramjet engines and a broad skylight for excellent views of earth when the plane rolls to inverted position at its zero-G apogee.

“It would be great for impressing your passengers,” Saunders says. And readers.

Da Bears: At this fly-in lodge, everyone has salmon on the brain — including some 900-pound guys who really need a shave.

In Katmai National Park on the Alaskan peninsula, spring begins in June. That’s when the icy landscape starts to break up and droves of Pacific salmon — sockeye, chum, pink, silver and Chinook — navigate the long distance from the ocean to the tundra’s thawing tributaries.

Ask any experienced fly fisherman, and he’ll tell you: There’s fishing, and there’s fishing in Alaska. And if the 900-pound grizzlies that can be seen tearing into that rosy salmon flesh all summer long could speak, they would certainly agree. But not all lodges set up to access this mating, fishing and feeding frenzy are created equal.

Standing a cut above the rest is Kulik Lodge, a riverbank enclave located squarely in the middle of nowhere. It’s one of three renowned Anglers’ Paradise Lodges that opened in 1950, when Ray Petersen, a pioneering bush pilot and avid fisherman, set up the first tent camps to drum up business for his burgeoning airline.

These days, accommodations at Kulik (now run by Ray’s son Sonny) are 12 comfortable, modern, two-person cabins spread out over 100 acres. Top-flight amenities include a native-spruce great lodge with a grand-stone fireplace, five floatplanes, 30 boats, an accomplished chef, sauna, full open bar and all the Sage rods, Ross reels and Simms waders you’ll ever need.

You’ll know you’re headed for something special the moment you abandon the last thing resembling a road for 60 miles and board the lodge’s eight-seat Piper Navajo at the King Salmon Airport.

A 30-minute flight takes you over a kaleidoscope of forests, lowland marshes, snow-capped mountains and mile after mile of gin-clear, gravel-bottomed rivers, then deposits you at the intersection of Nonvianuk Lake and the Kulik River, where the enormous rainbow trout are so spirited, their jumping actually makes the waters look as though they’re boiling.

Afterward, you’ll be paired with a guide who will wake you each morning at 5 a.m. to take you to your fly-out destinations — up to another 100 miles into the wilderness. But don’t be too proud to have him stop at least once, just 25 miles away, at Brooks Falls, otherwise known as the Greatest Feeding Grizzly Show on Earth. “It’s so clichéd,” Sonny says.  “We were in a Geico commercial, for God’s sake.”

The Vacation That Just Keeps Going: Turns out the finest way to fly around the world in 80 days is to make it in 70.

Hopping in the Lear for a brioche breakfast in Paris is probably something you’ve done once or twice. But have you ever followed that with lunch in Gibraltar and dinner in Marrakech? Doubtful unless you’re Phileas Fogg or one of the lucky few on Air Journey’s first around-the-world jaunt.

The Jupiter, Florida–based travel planner started its private-plane caravans in 1998, when founder Thierry Pouille — at the time a traditional travel agent — arranged a one-week trip from Florida to the Bahamas for a group of European pilots and operators in their own planes.

Pouille was himself an experienced pilot who had flown solo from Spain to Algeria when he was just 16, and since that first Caribbean jaunt he’s taken 1,000 aviators with a case of wanderlust in self-fly trips to Alaska, Iceland and the Galapagos. But he’s never strung it all together.

Pouille plans to lead the fleet of 10 planes in a Pilatus PC-12, departing from Quebec City on May 14 and returning to Wisconsin, 70 days later, on July 22, a scant week before EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh (part of the reason the trip wasn’t extended the extra 10 days to cement the literary allusion).

Along the 41-stop route, the group will sail through the Greek isles, explore Pharaohs’ tombs in the Valley of the Kings, hike the Great Wall of China and, of course, munch on the aforementioned baked goods along the Champs-Élysées. “I’m French. How can I not go to Paris?” Pouille asks.

Greenhouse Effect: At the new wave of eco-friendly seaside communities, the coast is definitely clear.

It’s not easy being green for the man of means. With Al Gore polishing his Nobel Prize and the History Channel airing episodes about the tsunamis and the global fireball that might result if the planet doesn’t get its act together soon, we’ve all gotten the point about reducing our carbon footprint. It’s just that some of us start out with bigger feet than others. You likely already own a Prius and carry your groceries home from Whole Foods in chic canvas bags.

Giving up the plane is simply a non-starter. That leaves the second, third and fourth home. Perhaps at this moment, you’re examining the real-estate section of the El Pedro Daily Mail, comparing prices on beachfront candlelit shacks with their own dedicated “dry” and “wet” composting systems. But we’re here to tell you that there is another way — and it starts with the eight exquisite coastal communities on these pages. Each has been built to exacting environmental standards, and offers enough top-notch luxury and pristine surroundings to make you consider giving up the place in Aspen. There’s no guarantee that purchasing a home in one of these resorts will save the planet, but it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Daniel Island
LOCATION: Charleston, South Carolina
PRICE: Estates $800,000–$5 million
NEAREST AIRPORT: Charleston International Airport (8 miles away)
WEB SITE: danielisland.com

At the end of Gone With the Wind, Rhett told Scarlett that he was headed home to Charleston to “see if somewhere there isn’t something left in life of charm and grace.” Vacation-homebuyers looking for the same could do worse than head for this quasi-island community (technically, it’s a peninsula) jutting into Charleston Harbor. Daniel Island has the look and feel of a late-nineteenth-century Lowlands hamlet if perhaps the Civil War had never occurred and Sub-Zero refrigerators and Dolby surround-sound had come along about 130 years earlier: some streets lined by brick sidewalks, band shells, ice cream parlors and neat two-story twins; others by antebellum mansions with wraparound porches, Jacuzzis and floor-to-ceiling windows. The most exclusive nabe is Daniel Island Park, where the plantation-style estates stretch to 7,000 square feet. Those used to more acreage for their mid-seven figures may be struck at first by the relative proximity of the lots, a result of Daniel Island’s strict land-use policies. But any worries will evaporate once you walk out your long boardwalk, un-tether your canoe and paddle off into the marshes or line up your putt on the Tom Fazio– or Rees Jones–designed golf course and try to block out the gallery of egrets watching expectantly from the creek at the green’s edge. Rhett would have been pleased.

Palmetto Bluff
LOCATION: Bluffton, South Carolina
PRICES: Estates $300,000– $4 million; Family Compounds $2.95 million–$4.95 million
NEAREST AIRPORT: Savannah Airport (30 miles away)
WEB SITE: palmetto-bluff.com

Naturally, anything Charleston does, Savannah is going to want to do better. This new old community set on a 22,000-acre tract just 30 miles outside the Garden of Good and Evil is a warren of metal-roofed cottages, wide-veranda estates planted with fragrant azaleas and camellias and moss-draped oaks that practically echo the song of the South — and that of the bald eagles, hawks and waterfowl that also make their home here. One-third of the property has been set aside as protected preserve, including 600 acres of shoreline, great for scoping out alligators from your kayak and tailing bottlenose dolphins as they chase their dinner into the banks of the creeks. But how do you plop a golf course in the middle of this watery idyll? If you’re Jack Nicklaus, very carefully. Working with the contours of the terrain — just 20 feet above water level at its highest point — and weaving most of the back nine along the shores of the May River, he designed (and redesigned) the 7,100-yard, par-72 to leave most of the wetlands and maritime forest intact. “When we started this process, I was reminded frequently that the most important thing we can do is monitor water quality,” says developer Jim Mozley. To that end, the course has been planted with resilient papsalum grass and is monitored from 20 sampling sites to ensure that any runoff ends up in the man-made lagoons and not the wildlife-laden estuaries. Even the sand in the bunkers is special — it’s made up of angular grains that limit erosion from coastal storms.

Spring Island
LOCATION: Okatie, South Carolina
PRICE: Estates $1 million– $4 million
NEAREST AIRPORT: Hilton Head Island Airport (30 miles away)
WEB SITE: springisland.com

Residents of Spring Island may cringe when they hear how close their historic Lowlands paradise came to becoming just another cookie-cutter housing development. In 1990, the barrier island southwest of Beaufort had just been purchased by a developer who planned to raze its antebellum plantation ruins and 200-year-old oak trees and put up more than 5,000 houses and two golf courses. Luckily, developer Jim Chaffin heard about the plan and decided to stop by with his wife. “She looked at me and said, ‘If you are going to do something here, you cannot screw it up.’ ”

Chaffin convinced the previous developer to sell — and has done a pretty good job of listening to his wife ever since. The result is a 410-home community whose considerable amenities — a 24-stall equestrian center shaded by a towering stand of oak and pine; a golf course with an eighteenth hole routed by Arnold Palmer and Ed Seay practically inside the ruins of the original plantation manor — are thoroughly folded into the lush tapestry of wetlands and woods. “We like to think of ourselves as a park with a community in it, rather than the other way around,” Chaffin says. The Chaffins’ pride and joy, though, is surely the 1,200 acres they have set aside as protected wetlands. Grab a rod and skiff and head out in search of the island’s legendary 15-pound redfish. Or hike the moss-draped maritime forest with one of the three staff naturalists, who can help you get up close and personal with wild turkey, horned owls, eagles, otters, foxes and bobcats — OK, maybe not bobcats.

Kiawah Island
LOCATION: Kiawah Island, South Carolina
PRICE: $629,000–$15 million
NEAREST AIRPORT: Charleston Executive Airport (15 miles away)
WEB SITE: kiawahisland.com

Forget trees and water hazards. From mid-May through late October, your biggest penalty strokes on this barrier island are likely to come from the loggerheads. It’s around that time in which the endangered sea turtles climb out of the Atlantic Ocean to lay their eggs in the sand and Kiawah residents set out on patrol to help count and protect eggs from local predators. That includes you, Mr. Careless Nine-Iron Swing.

It’s this kind of deference to the environment that has always been part of the Kiawah Island experience. Even before the first course broke ground in 1974, the tone was set with a 16-month, $1.3 million environmental study. Two decades later, work began on the planned 5,000 homes — a number that decreases almost daily — with the developers setting aside half of the island’s 9,000 acres for conservation and green space. The island has since been partitioned into 26 distinctive neighborhoods, including four brand-new enclaves. Most homes come with a membership to one of the community’s seven golf courses. For example, the Settlement, so-named for its proximity to the original seventeenth-century site where colonists first hung their golf caps, grants access to the Tom Fazio–designed River Course and features a mix of traditional Lowcountry and other styles. Seaside Ocean Palms, meanwhile offers privileges at the River Course and Cassique and stucco Old World retreats with loggias surrounding fountains — which are, mercifully, turtle-free.

The Concession Golf & Residences
LOCATION: Bradenton, Florida
PRICE: Villas and Estates $1 million–$9 million+
NEAREST AIRPORT: Sarasota Bradenton International Airport (20 miles away)
WEB SITE: theconcession.com

During the 1969 Ryder Cup, Jack Nicklaus conceded a two-foot putt on the last hole to Britain’s Tony Jacklin, ending the contest in a tie. Nearly 40 years later, the spirit of that moment lives on in this 1,200-acre community designed by the Golden Bear and his old rival as an enduring legacy to the power of sportsmanship, integrity and not always playing to win. The game plan started with one of the largest tree replantings in history to save the property’s spectacular collection of native slash pines, palmettos and live oak. “Palm trees are not native to Florida,” says developer Kevin Daves. “And you won’t find any here.” The next lucky opponent was the endangered gopher tortoise, for which more than 100 acres on and around the course were set aside as protected breeding grounds. The effort has been such a success that the community has also seen a resurgence in predatory species, such as alligator and even the occasional wild boar and bobcat (which evidently never got Nicklaus and Jacklin’s sportsmanship memo).

Each of the villas and estates — many with portico-lined courtyards surrounding an outdoor pool — offers serene natural panoramas of the sparkling lakes, mature-growth trees and nightly tortoise-boar matches. Here again, though, residents are encouraged to channel the vibe that gave rise to the place. Daves’s staff will work with buyers interested in constructing their new sanctuary in accordance with LEED-standard green-building practices — the world’s toughest for materials, water savings and energy efficiency. “It’s not mandated,” he says, “but we definitely encourage it.”

Old Palm Golf Club
LOCATION: Palm Beach Gardens, Florida
PRICE: Estates $1.6 million– $5 million
NEAREST AIRPORT: North Palm Beach County Airport (10 miles away)
WEB SITE: wcicommunities.com

Old Palm Golf Club takes its name seriously. The 7,400-yard, par-72 Raymond Floyd–designed course has been built to evoke Palm Beach’s Gilded Age, when the Rockefellers frequently hired architect Addison Mizner to build them such rarefied enclaves: On each of the 3,500- to 7,000-square-foot estates, accents of iron, stone and wood emerge from balconies, spiral stairways and Florentine arches. Intimate courtyards surround Old World fountains; period lighting fixtures grace vaulted studies and drawing rooms of stucco and inlaid tile.

Of course, the Rockefellers never experienced $100-a-barrel oil (just imagine the money they would have made if they had!). You aren’t that lucky — so these villas have been insulated with a state-of-the-art material called Icynene, which helps them exceed national energy-efficiency standards by 20 percent. Similarly, 50 acres have been set aside as a nature preserve. But perhaps the most seamless combination of old-school decadence and new-school social conscience comes on the course, where duffers can step straight from settling wagers on the classic nineteenth Scottish bye hole — planted, like the rest of the course, with immaculately groomed, low-impact papsalum grass — into a golf studio tricked out with the latest digital three-camera swing-analysis system to help them do even better next time.

Property for Sale, Four Ecosystems: Forget a private island. What you need is a place like this.

It’s a rare country that can lay claim to more than 650 varieties of birds, a breed of nearly endangered wolves and its own subspecies of jaguar. So what would you say about a single address that can? Located on the edge of the Pantanal wetlands in central Brazil, Fazenda Santo Antonio do Paraiso is a 400-square-mile ranch that encompasses four distinct ecosystems, along with two rivers — the Piquiri and the Itiquira — that surround the property like a moat. With six landing strips on-site, it’s also remarkably accessible. And it could all be yours for $50 million.

When General Marinho Lutz founded the ranch in 1943, he landed the first cattle in a couple of DC-3s amid a veritable Eden. He eventually built a 300-acre town, complete with a main estate (with 11 bedrooms — one for each of his wives), sawmill, tannery, chapel and farm fields, but left the other 255,000 acres for Mother Nature. On the market for the first time in its history, Fazenda Santo Antonio even comes with 30 of its own indigenous cowboys. But it’s not the agriculture or the architecture that boggles the mind in this mother of all second homes.

Park your King Air at the hangar, settle into the main estate’s veranda (shaded by 100-foot mango trees) and gaze out on a pristine domain teeming with puma, jaguar, deer, wolves, otter and crocodiles. Try doing that in the Hamptons.

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The Challenger: Top Chef’s Casey Thompson

It was the crusher, the challenge that separated the woman from the boys. The final six contestants on Top Chef Season 3 were flown from their swank Miami pad to the Continental Airlines hangar at Newark airport, led to the comissary and given their assignment: wow the judges with a business-class meal on a Boeing 777.

As the groans echoed around the kitchen, discerning viewers might have noticed a sly smile cross the face of Casey Thompson. That’s because the 29-year-old Texan had a secret edge on this one. Seven years earlier, in one of her first jobs out of college, she spent three years trooping in and out of hangars as a jet-fuel sales rep.

“I had no idea what I wanted to be,” she says, laughing about the job. But it did mean she had her galley specs down. “The other guys didn’t realize that there are real ovens on a jet like that,” she recalls. When the meals emerged from the plane’s galley, Thompson’s grilled veal medallions blew away the judges with their tenderness and flavor, helping propel her toward a spot in the final three.

Since her uncharacteristic fumble in the show’s finale, Thompson has returned to Dallas’s Shinsei, where, boosted by her newfound celebrity, the restaurant is doing so well she and the owners are thinking of opening a second location. Coyly, she admits she’s also been “talking to Bravo.”

Wherever that leads, she recently took time out for Private Air’s “Galley” challenge. Because the personal 777 trend is only now just catching on with our readers, Thompson showed off her flair for Asian cuisine with a black cod miso and chile seared Broccolini, whose buttery firmness stands up beautifully to a tiny microwave. “It packs a whole lot of flavor and doesn’t require much effort — but it sure tastes like you made a fuss,” she drawls. And you don’t even need to pack your knives.

Just clip this recipe out and give it to your favorite local onboard catering service.

Black Cod Miso
¾ cup mirin
¾ cup sake
2 cups white miso paste
1¼ cup sugar
1 1-pound cod filet

Bring mirin and sake to a boil over high heat. Boil to evaporate alcohol. Turn heat down and add miso paste. Stir to incorporate. Dissolve completely. Turn heat up again and add sugar. Remove from heat once sugar is dissolved. Cool at room temperature. Cut cod into portions. Completely cover cod with paste and mar­inate overnight. When ready to cook, heat broiler. Place cod in a sauté pan and cook under broiler until browned. Turn oven down to 375 degrees and cook cod for 10 minutes. Serves six.

Chile Seared Broccolini
1 tablespoon chile oil
½ teaspoon red chile flake
½ teaspoon garlic, minced
2 pounds Broccolini, trimmed and washed
1 tablespoon butter
½ teaspoon soy sauce
Salt to taste.

Heat sauté pan over medium high. Add oil. Sauté chile flake and garlic together. After garlic softens, add Broccolini, butter, soy and salt to taste. Check seasonings and serve.

Whatever Burkes: A master of cooking in high places shares one of his favorite recipes

Gone Fishin’: This angler’s paradise is truly in the middle of nowhere.

For centuries, Panama’s mythic Darien Jungle has simultaneously intrigued and terrified everyone from conquistador Vasco Balboa to Romantic poet John Keats. Referred to by one sixteenth-century traveler as an “abyss and horror,” the isthmus that connects the Americas remains shrouded in mystery even today — in no small part because it’s where the otherwise uninterrupted Pan-American Highway stops dead in its tracks. But concealed in this sultry terrain of dense forest is a coastal oasis where bikini-clad fishing-show hosts and the mayor of Margaritaville reel in the big ones.

Known as Tropic Star Lodge, the clutch of low-lying guest-houses and cabin cruisers has been carved out of a 3,500-foot Pacific-facing mountain on the naturally sheltered deep water of Piñas Bay. Management has plans to extend the lodge’s cement 1,900-foot airstrip another 2,600 feet or so over the next two years, but for now, the only way in remains a 50-minute flight from Panama City aboard a twin-engine bush plane. Once you’ve touched down on the cracking, overgrown tarmac — already 100 miles from the nearest road — you board a panga boat for the last 10 minutes of your journey to the Tropic Star dock.

Of course, it’s more than just seclusion that draws the likes of Jimmy Buffett and other anglers in the know. More than 250 world-record fish have been hooked in these waters since the late 1920s, when American adventure novelist Zane Grey discovered the nearby reef that now bears his name. During prime marlin season, which extends through March, it’s not uncommon to boat 20 250- to 1,000-pounders a day. And while the giant marlin and sailfish (whose season starts in April) are all strictly catch-and-release, you’ll also likely pull in Jurassic-sized dorado and yellowfin, which the Tropic Star’s chef will gladly grill to your specifications.

With no cable, phones or town to speak of beyond a few of the native Choco tribe’s nearby huts, land-based diversions center around the pool, sunset and well-stocked bar. Rooms are simple but comfortable, and for those wanting more seclusion, there’s always the El Palacio suite. Once home to the Texas oil tycoon who built the lodge, the nine-room villa is situated 122 steps up the mountainside. And not to worry: If wrestling with several thousand pounds of fish has left you too pooped to climb, you can hop aboard the funicular railway that — like the Hawker 400s and Citation Sovereigns soon due to start landing here — will whisk you almost to your door.