Posts from the ‘Cuisine by Country’ Category

Apr 12

Rites of Spring

In the two years since it opened, the Brooklyn Flea has gone from a neighborhood novelty to something that I look forward to each year. I knew it would be crowded but made a plan to meet a friend there when it re-opened its outdoor location in Fort Greene’s Bishop Laughlin Memorial High School this weekend. Slowly working our way through the aisles, I always go with the same hope, that the stands will be full of new (to market) retro kitchen gadgets and that the Red Hook Vendors will be there selling pupusas, tamales, grilled corn sprinkled with chile, and agua fresca. Read more

Apr 8

Manjarblanco de Chirimoya

I’ve had one recurring thought since I tasted my first chirimoya a few months ago – there are parts of this world where flan grows on trees. Flan on trees. I’ve been pining for chirimoyas, also known as custard apples, ever since. In response to my previous post where I used them to fill pavlovas, my aunt described an alternative recipe that’s popular in Peru. The chirimoyas are folded into manjarblanco that’s been lightened with whipped cream and chilled, like dulce de leche pots de crème. I went back for more to but it’s been weeks since I’ve seen them. Then suddenly, there they were, looking proud but out of place at the Park Slope Food Coop. I scooped up a pretty heart shaped one and let it ripen on my counter like an avocado. After the whirl of Easter weekend had passed, I finally got down to using them. It was as simple as it seemed and the fresh fruit provided the right balance to the manjarblanco. I don’t know when I’m going to find them again but I’ll always look. From the moment the last scoop was served, I started to miss them.

Apr 6

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A Panamanian Afternoon

I was talking with someone about cooking the other day, and we both agreed that we did not like having people in the kitchen with us when we cooked. I realized as I was nodding sympathetically that I had made a plan with my friend Valerie to do exactly that the very next day. Rather than grab a coffee somewhere, I thought it would be fun if we got together and made something that I could write about here. I hadn’t included any Panamanian recipes until now so Val was supposed to consult her aunts for suggestions, and I was going to get everything ready so that when she got here we could whip something up quickly. We decided to make carimañolas, mashed yuca formed into a roll then stuffed with picadillo and deep fried, a popular breakfast and afternoon snack in Panama similar to the croquetas de yuca that I have when I’m home. An easy afternoon of catching-up, photographing my food, and turning Panamanian street food into an appetizers-for-lunch meal. Read more

Apr 2

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What’s Left?

I’ve always hated the word leftovers (though it’s invisible to anyone reading this, I’ve written that first sentence three times to avoid using that word to no avail). I love the feeling of having bought, made and served just enough. Though I dutifully store away the smallest amount that remains of any dish or ingredient, I resent it. As someone who often cooks at home with an ongoing game of tupperware jenga going on in her refrigerator, it was time to reconsider how I used the (ugh) leftovers that were piling up. My attitude started to change last week when I was making papas en salsa verde. The recipe suggested serving them with refried beans. With bags of frozen beans periodically jumping at me from the freezer, crashing to the floor, and threatening to knock out one of my yorkies, I decided to defrost some of the black beans I’d already made rather than start from scratch (too late) or open a can (too bland). Having congratulated myself on completing a second recipe from my initial batch of beans, I decided to use the remaining salsa verde to try a third one for pipián verde, a tomatillo sauce combined with toasted pumpkin seeds. Perfect for the last Friday before Easter, I decide to make it again tonight to end the Lenten season. I still don’t like leftovers but I’m starting to like the idea of one dish becoming another and then another and then another… Read more

Mar 30

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Lucky Coins

I decided to skip last month’s ñoquis del 29 post on a leap year technicality. Picking up in March, I decided to make cornmeal ñoquis baked in béchamel. I had never associated ñoquis with Cuban cuisine but, after finding several references in a few older Cuban cookbooks, I wanted to try it. The cooked cornmeal is shaped into small discs then baked with white sauce or cheese and put under a broiler. Though not like any ñoquis I’d had before, I thought their similarity to gold coins fitted with the Argentinian tradition of putting a coin or peso under your plate while you ate them to attract greater prosperity. I was a little up in the air about doing another one and questioned whether I really wanted to make ñoquis again so soon. As with most resolutions, the first time is all zeal, the second time may be a fluke, and the third time is when you decide whether or not to stick to it. After some starts and stops, I realized that I looked forward to answering the same question in a different way every month. Hopefully, with some consistency, I can be consistently lucky. Read more

Mar 25

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Frida’s Fiestas

A few months ago a friend recommended Frida’s Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo. Written by her step-daughter Guadalupe Rivera and Marie-Pierre Colle, it’s part cookbook and part food memoir. Organized by month, each chapter centers on the holidays and seasons as they were celebrated in the Blue House in Coyoacán. Describing a trip with Frida to the pyramids of San Juan Teotihuacán, the author writes:

After offering us the traditional refreshment of agua de chía, doña Rosa invited us to eat. She had prepared a number of Lenten dishes typically served throughout the central Mexican plain, where the gods that Frida invoked in her paintings had once upon a time resided. As it turned out, doña Rosa and don Tomas extended their hospitality to us for three more days, days in which reality was inseparable from magic. Read more

Mar 22

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Albóndigas de Pesach

I’ve always been superstitious about throwing away keys. It could be a tiny gold key to a tweenage diary, an extra hotel key I forgot to return, or a loose spare to a forgotten door in a past dorm, house or apartment. I’ll be ready to toss it then have a last minute misgiving that makes me put it back in the drawer, giving in to the anxiety that I’ll be faced with a lock I can’t open. That’s probably why I was so fascinated when I heard about Jewish families in Spain who kept the keys to their homes after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. A poignant detail in a larger history that’s always stood out in my mind. Convinced it was a misguided policy of Queen Isabella’s that would soon be corrected, they kept their keys with them. Another story I heard soon after that’s very popular, is about a man who stopped by a local bar in Toledo to ask directions to the house where his family had lived five hundred years before. Sent to a nearby address and carrying the key they had saved, he came back a few minutes later, shaken, only able to get out the words, it worked. Read more

Mar 21

Not So Hungry

While I try to keep to my posting schedule, I haven’t been sure of how to write about not eating. This past Thursday, I was asked to participate in a day of fasting in support of Las Damas de Blanco. I became aware of them a few years ago when I read Mariane Pearl’s Global Diary: Cuba for Glamour. A diverse group of Cuban women, they were brought together by the arrest and imprisonment of their husbands, sons and brothers during a government crackdown of over 75 political dissidents known as Black Spring. Since that time, they march every Sunday, dressed in white, through the streets of Havana to peacefully protest the continued imprisonment of their loved ones. In this light, a twelve hour fast was no great sacrifice. Completed by 8:00 PM, I experienced more heart pangs than real hunger, just a heightened awareness of women I admire. Though it’s not unusual for me to miss a post and pick up where I left off, that would have made it seem as though March 18th was any other day, and it wasn’t.

Mar 17

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More Than Salsa

In 1992, salsa out-sold ketchup in the United States. I’ve heard that statistic for years, referenced it a few times, and read it again in Julia Moskin’s “Rediscovering Salsa, the Soul of Mexico in a Bowl” in this week’s Dining & Wine section. By now, most Latinos in the United States have claimed salsa’s success as our own. I have friends who’ve worked it into sales pitches and if anyone brings it up around the chip bowl, Mexican or not, we nod knowingly. Yet I’m not sure what kind of legitimacy we feel this confers on Latino cuisine or the growing market for Latino products. What does it say about us? What does it say about them? What does it say about ketchup? With so much baggage, it was great to read an article about salsa that was just that.

Mar 11

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Spring Forward

I didn’t realize what a hard winter we were having until it got warmer this week and everything became SO much easier. I was in a neighborhood shop the other day when someone asked what I’d been up to. My mind drew a complete blank – I couldn’t remember what I’d been up to because I felt like I’d just woken up. We’ve been so storm tossed the past couple of months that it felt like winter was having us. It’s been weeks of face down, boots on and scurrying from one place to another. All that changed overnight – which it always does though I always forget.