Cuba

From Grenada to Cuba.

I've always thought that food should equate with things. Not just nuitrition, but family, events, holidays - you name it. Cuban food holds some great memories for me. My uncle Larry is Cuban and I remember spending a few Christmas or New Years Eve dinners eating at a Cuban restuarant in Sommerville, NJ (Martinos). 

To me, Cuban food is comfort food. Black bean soup and rice dishes. I suppose if I wasn't a vegetarian I might associate pork with it too? In any event I'm not.

So on to the recipes this week:

Entree: Cuban salad

This was quite a simple salad and to be honest, it doesn't really make me think of Cuba. But the radishes were great and the salad dressing was lovely.

Main: Moros y Cristianos (black beans and rice) 

Now this is Cuban food. This recipe was easy to coo and very straight forward. It reminded me of a recipe my Aunt Debbie (Larry's wife) shared with me in my engagement cookbook. It has green olives in it and they add a great kick! I could see this working well in this version of the rice and beans.

This came out great and would be a great main on it's own!

But the main dish for this country was....French toast?

Main: Torrejas (Cuban Style French toast)

French toast for dinner conjures up a few other food memories for me. Growing up my stepfather Pat didn't really cook dinner. But when he did we had french toast - often with fresh grated nutmeg.

For yet another Sunday, I've opened the book been ready to cook and gone, Whoops....I've forgotten something.

For this week it was evaporated milk.

There are some items here in NZ which I always struggle to find. Rubbing alcohol. Hydrogen Perioxide. Evaporated milk. 

In my lazy state I thought, surely I can use condensed milk - they must be the same.

Turns out they're not. But this would be a positive change. Wow. I'm not sure why I never thought to use condensed milk in french toast (or pancakes before) but YUM!

The recipe said to serve with syrup or jam. Figuring that syrup is always used, I thought i'd try a blackberry jam from South Australia that my father in law left in our fridge a few months back. YUM! The blackberries were perfect and were not too sweet (probably because the condensed milk made the french toast sweet enough). I also used a textured/seeded grainy bread. Normally I would have used something like a sourdough, but again, being lazy and waiting to the last minute on Sunday meant that this was all that was available at the corner shop. The seeds and grains made a great texture

Dish: chichachirritas (plantain fritters) with mojo

I also tried to make the chichachirritas (plantain fritters) with mojo. Except I didn't have plantains. As I mentioned in the Grenada post, my tree is only just now fruiting and sadly plantains aren't quite a staple fruit in NZ grocery and fruit and veggie stores.

I let Matt talk me into using bananas, but to be honest, I should have known better. Plantains would work for a dish like this because they are so starchy and paired with the garlic might be nice. Bananas I'm afraid just did not work. Not having a deep fryer I tried to shallow fry them - fail. 

I'll have to wait and retry this later on in the year. I love making plantain chips (see my recipe in older posts on this blog) and will be excited to try the mojo with it.

Grenada

The next destination is Grenada

I'll admit. I don't know much about this Carribean nation. I hear Grenada and sadly the only thing I can think of is that Rhianna is from Grenada. 

Looking at the recipes from here one ingredient stands out - COCONUT! Almost every recipe up on this list has coconut in it.

I thought with a trip to the Carribean in order I would add my own favorite twist and taste to it - in this case by adding a Guana Grabber. A Guana Grabber is a cocktail from Great Guana Cay, an island in the Bahamas where my family likes to spend time.

I thought I'd share the recipe (as best as I know it):

Guana Grabber:

1 parts Grapefruit juice

3 parts Pineapple juice

1 part light rum

1 part dark rum

1 part coconut rum

Shake all ingredients together with ice and strain.

Add a tiny dash of grenadine for colour.

And with a cocktail in hand, it's time to start cooking.

Up first: Coo Coo with spicy tomato relish and plantain

This dish feels Italian to me - except with the coconut milk in the polenta its different. What a great taste and texture! And with the fresh basil and the coconut. Super refreshing. 

I used muffin tins to shape the "coo coo" which worked well. I lightly greased them with olive oil just to ensure the polenta cups would come out. 

The tomato relish was fantastic but I would make more! Not sure the relish that's layered in the cups but extra to go on top! I added extra relish with my own homemade spicy tomato chutney (made with a red wine vinegar).

The side of plaintains was difficult. It's ironic that given that we have several plantain trees on our property the best I could manage were the tiny bits in the picture below. Sadly I will be stuck waiting for more plantains - thankfully I have some on the tree and it shouldn't be more than a few months.

Main dish: Oildown

I have to admit the idea of this dish sets my healthy ideas towards food on edge. The idea of having the coconut milk split so there was oil seems so foreign to me.

This dish also proved a challenge to me in terms of ingredients. It calls for Breadfruit, Plantains and Dasheen. Well, it seems dasheen is a type of tarro. Which should be reasonable easy to find in the Pacific but admitedly not without searching. And to be honest, I didn't really look at this in time to check out the Otara markets. The Otara market is a local market in Otara, Auckland which has lots of amazing Pacific produce. A true authentic South Auckland experience.

They say you should eat local and given that I couldn't find the above ingredients, I decided to improvise. So, I added pumpkin and black carrots.

With all these root vegetables I under estimated the amount of coconut milk I would need to cover the dish. 2 coconut creams was not enough and so I added another can of coconut milk to try and make up the difference. Fresh thyme from the garden. Yum! My kitchen was so fragrant!

Almost an hour later later and it's reducing nicely. Except it's not spliting quite as well as it has in the picture in the book. I guess that's what I get for using some coconut milk.

In any event, yum! So filling and warm. It almost reminds me of a gratin but made with coconut cream. This would be a great, hearty dish for winter. Seems strange to see it come from the Carribean where it is usually so warm!

Dessert: Coconut Ice

In my mind, I expected this to be a bit like a sorbet or a granita. But it hasn't quite come out right. My food processor is on the blink so I tried to use the vitamix to shred the ice. Matt, my sous chef, was put in charge of getting the cardamom seeds from the cardamom pods. I had bought both but then realised that the recipe mentioned pods. WIthout knowing how many seeds were in a pod I thought i would try and use those. Turns out, on average there was generally 5-9 seeds per pod. This had a heavy cardamom taste and would suggest perhaps reducing the amount included.

I served my with banana - I would recommend refridgerating the banana when serving. 

Chile

So here I am starting things off, and up first is Chile which is really exciting because I've BEEN to Chile. Matt and I went to Santiago and San Pedro de Atacama in 2011 as part of our honeymoon.  I loved trying authentic drinks and dishes while there (like mote con heusillos). Plus I love food from this region - quinoa is up there with some of my favorite foods. So challenge accepted.

So up for Chile was:

-Dobladitas (Chilean Breads)

-Huevos con piclco de choclo (baked eggs in corn sauce)

-Pebre Chili dip

-Micaos (potato cakes)

There was also a recipe for Calzones rotos (aka torn underwear cookies). Which sound like fun but trying to do 4 dishes in 1 night was already enough. So the cookies will be a rainy day project. You can cook cookies from any country so fine to do then.

Up first was the Dobladitas. The recipe said plain white flour - I only had high grade flour and can maybe use this as the only excuse as to why mine didn't come out exactly right.

I've never been good at following recipes. Like any dough I also used my mixers dough hook to get started. I love breads, pastas, anything with flour. I am a paleo villian. Yet, I tire when making dough, pasta, bread. Maybe it's an arm muscle thing. In any event I started kneading. And kept kneading. Thankfully after 5-10 minutes Matt offered to help. Kneading is his specialty harking back to our pasta family dinner nights. Fine by me.  When it came to rolling out though ours did not look as smooth as the picture. Maybe it was a case of needing to sift my flour? In any event it made folding quite difficult so in most cases we only did a single fold.

While Matt was kneading I started the chili dip. Oh, I need to open a bottle of wine for the 2 tbsp it calls for? Oh ok, go on and twist my arm and make me have glass while I cook the rest of the food. I never thought about using wine in what is effectively a salsa. In any event opted for green chilis over red and a cab sauv. I also decided to use a red onion and thankfully limes, coriander and garlic from the garden.

While the flavors in the salsa (erhm, I mean dip) were mixing I also prepped for the huevos. This recipe reminded me a lot of Shakuska or Moroccan eggs where eggs are poached in tomatoes. I suspect cooking this in summer when corn is fresh and plentiful would be great. Instead I opted for pre-shucked corn in a pack. So much butter! Between the onions, the butter on top of the eggs, the dobladitas and then the pancakes I felt like I was swimming in butter. On the plus side my hands were softer than a babies bottom by the end of the night.

The dobladitas came out of the oven and looked as puffy as they did when they went in. But they smelled good. In went the eggs to cook while I started the pancakes. Hmm. Vegetable suet is not something I keep handy in the pantry. I thought I'd wing it and use crisco thinking that lardy shortening would work the same. I don't really deep fry and just don't seem to do it well when I try. I don't think I use enough oil. Must be my inner health freak trying to be healthy and sparing. In any event my pancakes just didn't fry up perfectly. Straggly bits of potato came off (much like a hash brown) and looked nothing like the picture.

When it came time to eat Matt and I sat down. There was a certain amount of excitment. Maybe it was the new food - the challenge laid out. I'm not sure yet, but we had a lovely evening.

The verdict: 

The dobladitas tasted like scones. Or like the biscuits I used to make from Bisquick batter. I had originally envisioned them like a bread - sopping up chili dip, or corn/egg, but they were too thick for that. Instead they were eaten on their own - dipped in the dip and egg. And they were lovely alebit a bit filling with all the other food.

The huevos were good. Not quite as saucy as the Moroccan eggs I was envisioning but with a nice kind of earthy and corny (no pun intended) taste - particularly when the yolk mixed with the corn. The kernels also helped to give a different texture to the dish. I think in future it might be nice to blend a portion of the corn.

The salsa/dip WAS AMAZING. Wow. What great flavors. I was a bit worries about using green chilis as I almost always use red and know their potency a bit better. But this was great - not too hot and will be my new go to version of a salsa.

The potatoes were my letdown which I think is more a result of my cooking skills as opposed to the recipe. There were some crunchy bits but you could see from the picture I just didn't have it right.

Overall it was a great meal and the eggs and salsa will definitely be made in the future.

The Adventurous Vegetarian

Hello old friend.

It has been some time since I posted here. Which hasn't been for a lack of cooking or ideas. Just life getting in the way.

Some of you may know that I recently went on a big trip back to Europe. Before I went though I was wandering through Tauranga on business and stopped into the shop Trade Aid to have a look. Normally I would go straight to the jewelry section but for some reason that day I went straight to the back to the book section. I was immediately drawn to the cookbooks - of which there was maybe 5. 

The Adventurous Vegetarian. Around the World in 30 Meals.

It called to me. I was an adventurous vegetarian - surely this had my name on it.

While I flipped through it I thought of the movie Julia and Julia where a woman cooks through her Julia Child's cookbook and blogs about the experience and realised I could do that. Instead of suffering that post trip melancholy that usually happens after an amazing trip I could begin another journey from my home. What better than to eat my way around the world!

So here it is:

The Challenge: Be an "adventurous vegetarian" and cook my way through 30 countries - one a week.

When: Every Sunday night - which if I stick to the schedule takes me to just before my birthday in April

Where: Where to start in a book that promises to take you around the world? I realised that at the end of every journey you need to be back home - which is New Zealand now. So that means starting across the Pacific in South America and then up through the Carribean, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia into Australia and then finally New Zealand.

Ready or not world, here I come.