Mar 10
I find an excuse to visit the Publix near my mother’s house almost every day that I’m in Miami. And it’s not for the daily free chocolate chip cookie their Danish bakery has for every child (and shameless adult) who asks – though that doesn’t hurt. When every recipe I attempt in New York turns into a scavenger hunt or compromise, I love the everydayness Read more
Sep 6
It was unmistakable. There was a chill in the air this morning. Not a breeze, not a nip, but a chill. This summer went by fast for me and being in the final stretch of recipe testing and writing has only accelerated it. This week I was looking for a substitute for the Cuban aji guaguao and was told that tabasco peppers should work. I stopped by a few of my favorite markets but they didn’t carry them. Earlier this year, I was supposed to visit the McIlhenny Company‘s tabasco pepper fields in Louisiana but the trip was postponed until October. At the time it felt like a long ways off but now it couldn’t come soon enough. With New York produce failing me, I couldn’t wait to be where tabasco peppers were literally growing on trees (or bushes – not sure because I haven’t been there yet). Read more
Apr 8
I hadn’t planned on a traditional Good Friday. I was supposed to meet my friend Carolina, who was visiting, at the Met but was falling behind. I’d spent the day making a tarta Pascualina or Easter pie to write about this weekend when the day got away from me when another friend who was moving to Chicago stopped by in the afternoon to say goodbye. For the past few weeks, Aaron and I had done a lot of before-you-go things in the neighborhood but helping me finish the pie was the absolute last. The pascualina done, I changed to plan to a low-key night at home with Carol and my sister Cami – the better to catch-up on the bear of a week we’d all had. We were about to sit down when we heard the procession outside the window. Read more
Aug 6
The thing about vacation is that eventually you have to come home. Always wanting to make it last a little longer, I hold on by bringing back ingredients, recreating recipes, or incorporating holiday habits to my everyday. In the past year, I’ve visited Paris and Mexico City, which is why I have tins of fois gras and impressionist teas on my shelves, half empty jars of caramel beurre au salé and cajeta in the cupboard, and stacks of corn tortillas in the freezer. This is also why I flounce around Brooklyn markets on the weekend with an enormous Provence basket and can’t stop making batches of salsa verde. Read more
Dec 3
I love the holidays but so much joy can be exhausting. The things I normally love doing – seeing friends, decking the halls, shopping, traveling – become stressful when done for 31+ consecutive days. I miss my kitchen and get in a panic about getting home too early to sleep and too late to cook. Faced with the prospect of nighttime pop tarts (organic maybe but still) and cold bowls of cereal, I opted for tortilla de papas instead. Read more
Sep 9
Nothing takes the fear out of making a soufflé like making three in a row. I found a recipe for one combined with amaranth that I couldn’t wait to try. My training for this year’s New York City marathon is nearing the 20-mile mark so I’ve been cooking up batches of amaranth to have on hand for cereal topped with honey and fruit. While adding eggs and cheese may not be the best way to enjoy my vitamin high grain, it sounded wonderful and I’d been so good. Read more
Feb 5
I’m not used to very much heat in my food. Though most people associate chili peppers with Latin America, food in the Caribbean is more often spicy than hot. While I love having a choice on one menu between caipirinhas and mojitos or lomo saltado and carne asada, trendy pan-Latin restaurants can add to the confusion. Friends insist that chipotle belongs in a Cuban sandwich, and ask me if I had elotes covered in chili powder growing up because they ordered it at Habana Outpost. The answers are complicated. I don’t want chipotle anywhere near my Cubano, but I look forward to my chili covered corn every summer (though not because I had it growing up, but because it’s so good).
Nov 23
Its bothered me for awhile that I haven’t included more Puerto Rican recipes. There are so many similarities with Cuban food, that I dip towards the more familiar Cuban side when in doubt, like a bird flying with one wing. Recently, I found a copy of Carmen Aboy Valldejuli’s classic, Puerto Rican Cookery, which I hope will restore the balance. There are many reasons to love this book. To name a few, words like carefully and thoroughly are in bold making the recipes more emotional while delicioso and sabroso are translated to”Caribbean” when no other word will do; Rafael Tufiño contributed illustrations; and there’s a sweet black and white picture of her husband, Luis Valldjuli serving her a rum drink from the chapter he contributed on the back cover. Read more
A couple of years ago, I found a recipe for eggs baked in brioche that I decided to make for Mother’s Day. It went over better than I’d hoped since it reminded my Mom of a breakfast she’d loved as a little girl in Cuba. Not having had it since then, she vaguely remembered ham and béchamel sauce added to eggs baked in rolls called cemitas. I was especially curious since I’d always thought of traditional Cuban breakfast as pressed pan cubano and cafe con leche. A few weeks ago, a friend lent me her copy of the book Cuban Cookery by Blanche Z. De Baralt. An American who lived in Europe and studied at Packer Collegiate, a few blocks away from where I live now, she moved to Havana at the turn of the century with her husband, a Cuban doctor. Published in 1931, I fell in love with the combination of her Edith Wharton English with her use of “our” and “we” to describe traditional Cuban food. She’d clearly gone native, and I liked her that much more for it. When I found her notes on Huevos en Cemitas or Eggs in Rolls – a hollowed out breakfast roll filled with chopped meat, petits pois, and cream sauce topped with a raw egg and baked till set – I knew I’d found my mother’s missing recipe. Read more
Jul 6
Given the option to spend a semester abroad in Madrid, I decided to go for the entire year, not realizing just how far I would be from everything and everyone. The family I had been assigned to live with at random didn’t help. From the first day, they made me feel like an wandering hobo or stranded motorist who’d washed up to their grim house to use the phone (except I wasn’t actually allowed to use the phone). For the next two months, I had a terrible case of homesickness. The city I’d dreamed of seemed completely closed to me. Family in Spain and a few friends got me through, but it wasn’t until I broke up my year with a trip home for Christmas and arranged for new housing that the spell finally broke. Mostly because of Aurora. Read more
Finalist for the 2015 James Beard Foundation Award in the International Cookbook Category for The Cuban Table
hungry sofia 