Jun 28
It’s always the little things that trip me up. I was thinking of making arepas last weekend when I came across a recipe for Venezuelan arepitas dulces. Also known as arepuelas or anisitas in Colombia, they’re smaller arepas sweetened with melado de papelón and fried for breakfast or dessert. Infused with whole anise seeds, they seemed as soothing and comforting as the candies in your grandmother’s purse. Read more
Jun 23
It’s hard not to be drawn to a recipe by a beautiful photograph. Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent, and Francis Mallman’s Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way have all escaped from my kitchen shelves to my coffee table (where both the books and I feel they belong). Not surprisingly, Santiago Soto Monllor won this year’s James Beard award for Best Photography for Seven Fires. Read more
Jun 12
I am always looking for the best ingredients, but there are some things I just can’t find nearby and some I probably shouldn’t be able to find nearby. I try to stay local but the temptations of a jet-setting Prosciutto di Parma or a well traveled Chinatown dragon fruit can be difficult to resist. Still, it’s hard not to wonder what your missing when someone else does the picking and packing. The subtle differences between varieties and vendors that you can only discern when it’s close to home. That’s why, when trying a new cuisine, dessert can be the best place to start. I may not find the right Peruvian pepper or Argentinian zapallo, but milk, grains and sugar are universal and need little translation (or transatlantic travel). I’d been looking for a Chilean recipes to try and found several I wanted to include but kept circling back to this custard made with semolina and wine syrup (wine being the exception that was meant to travel the earth). Read more
May 21
I hadn’t planned on re-posting this recipe until I my sister asked for Mexican Chocolate Crackle Cookies for a reading she was doing. It was a last minute request on a busy day. I gave good reasons for not making them and they were all accepted, then I decided to do it anyway. It was a chance to go through one of my favorite recipe posts and make sure I’d gotten it all down correctly, try some adjustments and maybe find some of the typos that play hide and seek when I first hit publish (though I rarely feel like playing). Click here for the original post.
May 9
Many people have a hard time imagining their parents as children, but I very much see my mother in the little girl pictured above — sweet, expressive and indistinguishable from the cake set before her, in essence if not in form. Last year around this time, I asked my mother to show me how to make her merengue con crema de leche. A combination of meringue and custard sauce, it’s similar to a French île flottante but much, much sweeter — Cuban sweet. She always made it for special occasions, though never the same way twice. Used to feeling her way around until she got it right, I distracted her with questions. I tried to note everything down, but secretly believed she was making things up as she went along. When I caught her consulting with her chihuahua about the consistency for the syrup, I knew we were in trouble. Read more
May 4
I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate my 200th post than with a game of dominoes. Growing up Cuban, we loved playing dominoes when we were kids. Our grandparents were happy to have us quiet and entertained for a couple of hours and we were happy to swirl the clacking tiles around the table, dunking oreos in milk between matches, and enjoying the late of hours of a Sunday afternoon. Then we got older and everything changed. Read more
Apr 19
I never thought of myself as spoiled but since starting this blog, I am constantly coming across ingredients and recipes that I disliked as a child for no good reason. Pudín de pan is another example. It’s only crime against me was not being natilla, panetela or another of my grandparent’s desserts that I loved. I’d come to their house for lunch, excited to see the flan tin brimming with the tell-tale amber glaze, only to be disappointed when a caramel drenched bread pudding filled with dried fruits and nuts would arrive at the table. The adults were thrilled but the kids were underwhelmed. Where was the flan? Did that pruny pudding thing eat it? Read more
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.
Mar 22
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 11
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.
Finalist for the 2015 James Beard Foundation Award in the International Cookbook Category for The Cuban Table
hungry sofia 