Week #37 Peruvian

Peru will not let me off easily. With its Pacific coastline and geography that includes rain forests, mountains and parched plains, not to mention an array of ethnic influences, Peruvian cuisine is no easier to define and categorize in the space of a single blog entry than any other country's has been.

Himself and I convened with a group of friends at Puro Sabor in Van Nuys to try the eats of this land on the Pacific coast of South America. We ordered a number of dishes and passed it all around the table, making for a fun and tasty but discombobulated event. As is the risk of gathering with friends for such enterprises, we were so busy talking that we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to what we were eating. So Himself and I made a return visit a few days later, during which we sampled more dishes and completely fell in love with Peruvian food.

The most apparent thing I noticed is that ceviche is the national dish of Peru, and they serve it there with camote, or sweet potato. I couldn't wrap my mind around that one, but as soon as I tried a bite of ceviche and sweet potato together, I was hooked. It's sweet-n-sour bliss. Most ceviche is cut into tiny cubes, so that it "cooks" in the acid more quickly. But this fish was cut into bite-sized pieces. I'm happy to report that it was super-fresh and cooked adequately, without being so heavily acidic as to make my mouth raw. It was served with an array of accoutrements, including onions, corn on the cob and boiled potato. And take a look at those loose corn kernels. Our server explained that they had been dried in the sun and then toasted in the oven. Their crunch was a nice foil for the smooth texture of the fish and potato.

You might not be able to see it well, but along the bottom edge of the photo, you can just make out the juice on the dish that is produced by the ceviche combination. In Peru they call it leche de tigre, or tiger's milk. Hot, salty, sweet, sour and attitudinous. Makes sense! On our return visit, Himself and I shared an order of ceviche de mariscos, which was loaded with shrimp, squid and octopus. This is the perfect way to prepare seafood that so easily overcooks. With calamari in particular, it's easy to end up with a plate of thick and chewy rubber bands. But that didn't happen--it was delicate and wonderful.

 

But I've gotten ahead of myself. For an appetizer, Himself ordered a papa rellena, a deep-fried ball of mashed potato stuffed with ground beef, raisins and olives. This may sound like a strange combination, but I recognize it as a culinary touch brought to the New World by Spanish explorers. Old California-style cuisine includes raisins and olives in the enchiladas. It's a great combo, believe it or not!

I began with a pork tamale, which I've had dozens of times, but this one was the best yet. It was made with just a hint of saffron mixed into the masa--another of those Spanish contributions. It was incredibly good. On the return visit we had the chicken tamale, which was equally pleasing.

Ocopa is so popular we had to wait until the return visit to score some. It is sliced boiled potato blanketed in a sauce made of peanuts, aji chilis and huacatay, a South American herb that's known by a variety of names including tagetes minuta, black mint, Mexican marigold and assorted other names including "Stinking Roger!" There's nothing stinky about it. It may look a little like wallpaper paste, but don't let that put you off--it's lightly sweet, lightly salty and altogether good. Since huacatay is difficult to find in North America, you can approximate its flavor with equal parts of basil, mint and cilantro.

Himself got bisteck a lo macho, that is, a thin steak topped with shrimp, octopus and squid. The idea is to get a little seafood and red meat in each bite. This is a sensible way to do the old surf-n-turf combo, since the steak is thin and lean, and the seafood isn't breaded and deep-fried. You get a lot of flavor without the heaviness.

 Carapulcra is a stew of pork and dried potatoes, with peanuts, cinnamon and cloves. The addition of those spices shows that the Spaniards who visited brought with them ingredients they received from the Moors who settled in Spain and Portugal. The name translates as "the stew of hot stones," which comes from the appearance of the potatoes--they look like rocks after they've dried and broken apart.

Ralph just had to be different and order pasta, which turns out to be authentic, too. Italian influences are strong in Peru, as are Chinese and various African. This plate of linguini and shrimp is sautéed simply with tomato and onion and called tallarin saltado de camaron.

Chicha morada is a grapey-looking beverage made from a purple variety of corn that is used only for this purpose--it isn't eaten. Our server said that most places buy it premade, but they make their own here, and it's a labor-intensive job. They boil the dried purple corn for four hours and mix the extract with an assortment of juices, plus cinnamon and cloves. Served without ice, you get a slightly velvety texture that becomes watered down when it's served with ice. So if you find it on the menu, be sure to order it sin hielo, por favor.

Uncooked quinoa: It's tiny and doesn't look like it would amount to much, but it holds a surprise.

The next day I still had Peruvian food on the brain and wanted to make something, so I stirred up a pot of quinoa vegetable soup. For two servings, you put a little vegetable oil into a pot and sauté a carrot, a stalk of celery, half a green bell pepper and some onion, all finely diced, add in two ounces of dry quinoa and a couple of cloves of garlic minced, and continue to cook until you can smell the garlic. Then add a pint of water, two diced tomatoes, and a healthy handful of chopped green cabbage. Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for ten minutes. Season to your liking with salt and black pepper. I was amazed by what happened in that short space of time. The quinoa unfurled and gave the soup some heft, and the veggies made a nice broth.

 See all those tiny O's in there? That's the quinoa.

Himself and I had a bowl of this soup with a piece of garlic bread for dinner. We expected to be hungry by bedtime, but we weren't. And we weren't feeling ravenous when we got up the next morning.

In that tinker-with-it way I have--and that people migrating from place to place have of taking a new food and injecting something familiar--I'm tempted next time I make this soup to toss in a handful of beans or some chicken or beef. And to give it a hearty dash of Tabasco Sauce.

One of the beauties of foods is that it's open to endless interpretation and creativity. As long as we play with our food, how can we ever be bored?

Week #24 Oaxacan (Mexican)

Lately this "52 Cuisines" project has been heavily weighted toward Asian food--obviously the blog itself has been!--so it's time to visit a different hemisphere for awhile and explore another of Mexico's many cuisines.

The cuisine of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, contains a dizzying blend of indigenous ingredients, like chocolate and peppers, with the Arabic contribution of nuts, raisins and spices brought to the region by Spanish explorers. (Our hemisphere repaid the favor by sending tomatoes, potatoes, corn, chocolate and peppers to the rest of the world. Not a bad trade, I'd say.)

Antequera De Oaxaca is a modest little restaurant on Melrose between Koreatown and Paramount Pictures. This strip of Melrose has tons of great finds, and Antequera is the place to go for Oaxacan food cooked by Oaxacans for Oaxacans. I met Pat for lunch there, and we sampled an array of eats, with an eye toward carrying home plenty of leftovers.

Black beans are popular in Oaxaca, sometimes simply smashed and smeared over a tortilla.

 Pat ordered what looked a bit like a Mexican pizza, a giant, super-thin homemade tortilla topped with the smashed black beans, Oaxacan queso, tomato slices, cabbage and avocado. This is about as light and as vegetarian as a Oaxacan meal can get, unless you opt for a very basic salad. A smart choice if you don't want to fall into a postprandial coma at siesta time. Or if you're constantly training for marathons, like Pat is!

  

a quartet of memelas

In the memelas the black beans were spread on each of these four masa cakes, then topped with Oaxacan cheese and chorizo (12:00), zingy, flavorful chicken (2:00), pork (5:00) and beef (9:00) and a slice of avocado. A pleasantly warm salsa on the table provided a little extra kick. I appreciated our server bringing the  memelas with this assortment of meat so we could sample them all. The chorizo was surprisingly mild, while the chicken was the one that carried a surprising punch.

The masa cake is a flat bread roughly the size and shape of a hamburger bun bottom, and while it didn't feel at all greasy, toasted on a grill, I'm sure it was loaded with lard, so lush was its texture. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, with a nice bit of char from the grill. Okay, so that's not umami--I wonder what it is in the carbony flavor that so appeals? I think I could have eaten an entire basket of masa cake and been quite happy.

 Stew made from goat ribs--all those little bones give the broth extra richness.

I just had to give the goat stew a try. It was tasty and only a wee bit gamy. A generous squeeze lime helped tame it. It came with a roll of fresh, hot tortillas, so I could fish out hunks of goat meat and make my own tacos with fresh onions, jalapenos and cilantro.

  

Horchata: a rice drink that is lightly sweet and refreshing. This one had pecan pieces and chunks of cantaloupe in it.

While Oaxaca has a diverse cuisine to match its diverse landscape, it's probably best known as "the land of the seven moles" (although there are many more) and we're not talking little animals. This region's cooks are the ingenious souls who took chocolate and made something savory with it.

  

These don't look like much, but they're the secret to great mole. At 2:00 is poblano, a red chile mole base; at 6:00ish is pepita, or pumpkin seed, and at 9:00 is almond.

A typical mole recipe calls for about two dozen ingredients, but it can contain even more. Making it is understandably a labor intensive endeavor, so you have to set aside a day to do nothing but roast and toast, chop and pulverize and mix, so you can make enough mole to last a really long time. It's fun to do in a group, and the effort is worth it. If you dissolve a couple of generous spoonfuls of one of these pastes in a little broth, you'll quickly create the most wonderfully flavored, richest sauces you can imagine. Pour it over the meat of your choice, or drizzle it over an enchilada or into a taco. It's bliss. Forget the bottled stuff--try making your own mole sometime. Be sure and invite over some eager friends to help share in the chores and the rewards.


I have a trio of moles on hand (they're in the photo above) that I picked up at L.A.'s Central Market, a downtown treasure trove not only of fresh produce but of authentic Mexican eats. The green mole is made of pepitas (pumpkin seeds) and is mildly spicy. The almond mole is redolent of toasted almonds and packs some heat, while the poblano mole is chocolaty-good and contains the heat and smokiness of an array of dried chiles.


There's a more obscure mole called manchamanteles, a.k.a. the "tablecloth stainer," because it's made with lots of charred tomatoes. I've not found this one yet, but I'm eager to try it, with lots of napkins!

Chicken mole tamale: a rich, happy-making treat wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf. This time the mole is on the inside rather than the outside. A squeeze of lime helps balance the richness.

We're not even scratching the surface here on Oaxacan cuisine. There are chapulines--crickets--which were not on the menu the day we went to Antequera De Oaxaca. I had them a couple of years ago on a jaunt to Mexico, so if you want to read about it, check out my blog entry on chapulines and huitlacoche. 


My colleague and friend Nancy Zaslavsky is passionate about Mexico and its food. If you want to learn more about the cuisine of Oaxaca--and if you want to visit and learn to cook the local specialties--check out her culinary tours of Mexico. She's been carrying guests to Mexico for years now and teaching them to cook authentic Mexican food on its home turf.

Week #19 Cuban

I think Cuban food is destined to become another of my favorite cuisines (How many times have you heard me say that about a food in the course of this 52 Cuisines project?!). Himself and I visited Mambos, a little Cuban restaurant in that part of Glendale where you think you're still in Burbank. Or maybe it's in that part of Burbank where you think you're still Glendale. Anyway, it's an easy walk from Griffith Park, in case you forget your picnic. Lest you think we completely blew it out, this blog entry features food from three trips we've made to Mambo in the last few months. It's getting to be quite a habit...

 

It's tempting to fill up on the Cuban bread that hits the table first thing. This bread comes in long, squarish loaves and is soft and lush on the inside (mmmm, made with lard) and crackly on the outside. It's advisable to eat your Cuban bread the day it is baked, so as not to break your teeth on it. (I visited Key West a few months ago, which has a strong Cuban presence, and found that the weapon of choice in this self-declared "Conch Republic" is a stale loaf of Cuban bread!) It's great dipped in this house-made sauce. Our server either didn't know what was in the peppery red sauce or didn't want to reveal the secret (I suspect the later). It has a decent amount of heat that neither overpowers the food it accompanies nor fades into the background. We dunked our pork and beef into it, too. Next time I'm asking for extra.

I ordered a mamey milkshake (pronounced mah-MAY), in spite of my concern that it might be too heavy for the meal. I was surprised to find that it was not terribly sweet, certainly not cloying like milkshakes made in the States usually are. It had a delicate tropical fruit flavor but one I couldn't quite put my finger on. I want to see if I can find the fruit itself in one of the ethnic groceries around town and try it fresh. From what I hear, it's divine eaten out of hand.

The deep-fried yuca was oddly both light and dense, with a pleasant starchiness--not as heavy as I expected. It came with an aggressive but wonderful garlic dipping sauce that I'm sure will protect us both from vampires for at least a week.

 

As if it weren't tempting enough to fill up on bread and yuca, a platter showed up on our table loaded with empanadillas, croquetas, pappa rellena, chorizo and tostones, that is, twice-cooked plantains. The plantains are cut into rounds and fried. After they cool, they're smashed and fried again, which makes them firm and chewy.

 

Here are the appetizers with a bite taken out of each, so you can see what's inside. The empanadilla contains ground beef; the pappa rellena in the foreground is a potato ball filled with more ground beef (are you detecting a theme here?); the croqueta is a mixture of mashed potatoes, onions and still more ground beef, coated with breadcrumbs and deep fried. Stop looking for the veggies--there aren't any in there!

 

This petite tamale was filled with pork and green onions. It was delicately flavored and quite seductive. I like my tamales to have those telltale signs that someone has lovingly folded the corn husks around them by hand. Those indentations down the center I'd call furrows of love.

 

 The Cuban sandwich is made with two types of swine, both roast pork and ham (can you really have too many? Maybe they should have included bacon as well!) and Swiss cheese, all tucked into one of those Cuban-style baguettes, pressed and cut on a bias, for easy handling.

 While I enjoyed the roast pork, being a Southern gal, I always expect it to be smoky, and this was not. Still it was moist and flavorful. On the far right side are maduros, sliced and fried plantains. Unlike the tostones, maduros are cooked only once and are soft. Tostones are much more toothsome.

Taking a steak and pounding it thin, breading it and frying it is not my favorite way to handle a piece of beef, but the flavor was good, and I'm sure it didn't take long to cook, which might be why it's prepared in this fashion. Using less time and cooking fuel is much more economical.

 

 I enjoyed the black beans and thought they were quite good. From what my Cuban hair stylist tells me, though, the most authentically Cuban black beans have a balance of flavors, of sweet, sour and garlic. These didn't really have that balance. I'd still order them again, but it won't keep me from seeking out black beans at another Cuban restaurant around town.

Aguacate Fernando is a cool, fresh salad of avocado, tomatoes, onions, garlic and cilantro, a nice foil for the richness of the fried foods and meats. It was as much a necessity as it was a nicety.

We have yet to save room for dessert. I just dug out the Old Havana Cookbook I bought in Key West and started perusing the dessert recipes. I'm tempted to go in search of some fresh mamey so I can make a pudding. Each recipe in this book is printed in both English and Spanish--it might be fun to see how successfully I can make a dish following the directions in a language that's not my native tongue. Of course, the results might be inedible. I probably should think that idea through a little more carefully...

From what I've read about Cuban cuisine, the food from the west side is more Criollo, or Creole, strongly influenced by European cuisines. On the eastern side of the island, though, the influence is decidedly African. I suppose that's from the slave trade throughout the islands that lie to the east of Cuba. A country doesn't have to be an enormous land mass to host an array of culinary styles. I'm eager to learn more about Cuban food. It's a party on a plate.

Breakfast . . . It’s Not Just For Dinner!

North of the border, we have some pretty rigid ideas about what constitutes breakfast. Before my recent trip to Mexico City, I guess I did, too, although I’ve always been game for something different. And we certainly got it there!

Each morning’s breakfast was an adventure. Along with our freshly squeezed juice we’d have tacos or gorditas or tortas. One morning we had tamales, made just hours earlier and picked up moments before we ate them. The sweet ones were deep pink in color and just lightly sweetened. They were nothing like the typical heavily sweet pastries and doughnuts that Americans tend to go for. Other varieties of tamales included mole and poblano. All were tasty and helped fortify us for the days’ adventures. This may seem like heavy fare, but considering that no one really sits down for lunch any earlier than mid-afternoon, starting off the day with something hearty and filling is a smart idea.

And as with the other meals, breakfast was never a quick, on-the-go affair. Everyone sat down together and enjoyed conversation along with their morning’s repast. It’s a much more civilized way to do things than in those households where people eat in shifts, standing up or sitting in their cars. Or not at all.

I appreciate the view of mealtime that we witnessed during our visit. The people around the table are the focus. No television or radio turned on, no reading at the table, everyone present and engaged.

This is the way I grew up in rural Tennessee. Not that everything we did there was better, but in this respect, absolutely! We were much more attuned to our family members and to what was going on in each others' lives. At the table my brother and I learned how to talk AND how to listen. We learned how to be a part of the family.