80 Plates In My Kitchen & How Emily Used Every Single One of ‘Em

So last weekend, I had Emily and Melissa down to do 80 Plates: Central and South America.  We started out planning to do just Chile and Mexico, but then Emily thought, “what the heck!  Let’s toss in El Salvador to round things out!”  We divided up the ingredient list and after a delay of a couple of weeks due to Snowmageddon, we were ready to roll!  Melissa came down to party too, since there is no party like a cooking party :)

My request was to learn to make empanadas, which is one of my favorite foods at my favorite Mexican restaurant, Pancho Villa.  Emily had an empanada recipe from Chile, so we decided to use that, and she brought a chalupa recipe from Mexico and we decided that would be our Mexican dish.  She also had been wanting to try horchata, a rice drink that is quite popular in Central America, and we decided to try that for El Salvador.  Thus, we had a menu.  Melissa ran to the store and contributed salsa, guacamole, and sour cream, and the party was on :)  Oh, and to celebrate EMILY’S BIRTHDAY, she made a Tres Leches cake, and we finished prepping it here.

DISCLAIMER:  Leah was cuh-rank-ee during this whole afternoon, so consequently I didn’t do the picture taking or a whole lot of cooking.  I’m doing my best here, people, work with me!

We started out by making the empanada dough.  I will include the recipe at the bottom, as this is a recipe from the same cookbook Emily provided when we did 80 Plates Ecuador.  The crust was a mixture of butter, flour, baking powder, salt, egg, and water.  My stand mixer was put to work to put it all together.

Once she formed it into a ball, it went into the refrigerator until we were ready to bake the empanadas.  Meanwhile, I worked on the filling.  It required finely cubed steak, chopped onion,   cooked together in a bit of oil until tender.  I chopped up onions and the steak and got to cooking! Once it was done, I added cayenne, oregano, flour, salt and pepper, then let it cool in the pan off the heat. 

Then we decided to pour the liquid over the Tres Leches Cake, which translates to “Three Milks Cake”.  The three milks in question were evaporated, sweetened condensed, and heavy cream.  We did use fat free evaporated and sweetened condensed milks, but what can you do about the heavy cream, really?  So Em mixed them together, and we were all going to take turns doing some ladling onto the cake.  Emily got the first ladleful on there and screamed, “Stop!  We’re supposed to poke holes in it first!” and we all busted up laughing.  Alright, it was funny at the time, ok people?!

(I should note that she had already baked the cake before she got to my house, and she used The Pioneer Woman’s recipe for it.)

So she and I got forks out and we poked holes in the cake, and whaddaya know, it absorbed the milks much better!  We all took turns with the ladle and soon the cake was swimming in sweet, delicious milk.

 

YUM!

We set that aside and used the  extra milk that was left over to make the the horchata.  Emily decided to make up her own recipe to an extent, as the recipe she had called for soaking rice in water for hours, straining it, and then blending the hell out of it to make rice milk.  Why bother when rice milk is readily available?  Basically all that was required was to pour the rice milk and the other milks into a saucepan with some sugar and cinnamon and regular milk and heat it up!

Once that was done, we put it in the freezer and let it cool off for a while.

This was all taking some time, mind you.  When Emily first arrived, she, Michael, and I all spent a couple hours catching up on all the hot gossip since we’d seen each other in October (was it that long ago!?).  Then Melissa arrived and since they didn’t know each other, they had to become fast friends.  Meanwhile, we had a 10 month old squealing at us.  And we were trying to make 3 or 4 different things at once!!!  It was wonderful chaos in the kitchen :-)

So, now it was time to stuff the empanadas and get them baking so we could make the chalupas.  I had vetoed the idea of putting olives in the empanadas, since I don’t like olives, and on Michael’s behalf, we agreed not to let raisins into the empanadas.  We added cheese and hard boiled eggs and while I rolled out the dough, Emily stuffed the empanadas and got them oven ready!  And look!  She brought me a real rolling pin!!!!!!  WAHOOO!!!!  No more using a wine bottle!!!!!

 

Yum!  A quick brush with some egg yolks and we were ready to roll!!!

Time to turn our attention to the chalupas.  Again this was a Pioneer Woman recipe, and we did make a modification for The General:  he didn’t get refried beans, while the rest of us did.  Emily was fully in charge of the chalupas as by now, the only thing keeping Leah calm was me sitting on the basement floor playing with her.  I felt like a heel in that I wasn’t helping and I wasn’t really learning, but I did make the chalupas again this week for dinner, so I can say honestly I have made them now and know how.  In addition to a traditional Mexican cheese blend, we used a Queso Fresco, which is a delicious crumbly Mexican cheese.  And we did use fat-free refried beans.

The directions are pretty simple, you fry up your corn tortillas in a little bit of oil on the stove until they are crispy on both sides, but haven’t turned brown.  I don’t know about Emily, but when I made them later in the week, I found that turning them pretty regularly and keeping the heat consistently on medium was the key to making it work.

Once the tortillas are are cooked, you spread each one with some refried beans and then top them with the cheese!  Then into the oven they go under the broiler until the cheese gets nice and bubbly.  We did keep a close eye on them while they were in there because broiling is very tricky and things burn very quickly.

Finally, it was time to eat!!!!!  I took the obligatory group shot of my guests:

…and we dished up and dined.  From the left, you can see the chalupas, the horchata, and the empanadas.  YUM!!!  It was time for The General’s obligatory first bite and he decided to go with the chalupas:

 Everything was absolutely DIVINE.  YUM!  I so enjoyed our tour of Central and South America on this one.  The horchata was very sweet and creamy, but the cinnamon was a nice touch too, kind of like an egg nog.  The chalupas were crispy and cheesy and gooey and delicious.  The empanadas were very filling and the crust was perfect while the filling was delicious. They had a real kick to them courtesy of the cayenne pepper.

After we stuffed ourselves, I made up some whipped cream to go atop the cake.  Leah decided to help by eating her first beater, and fingerpainting an obliging Melissa with whipped cream!  (God, I know she’s my kid, but she is SO STINKIN’ CUTE!)  Then Emily frosted the cake and added cherries to the top!  We put in a birthday candle since it was her birthday the day before and then it was time to eat some cake!

 

Oh my, what can I say about Tres Leches cake?  I have always been very hesitant to try it on account of the fact that I don’t tend to like things that are squishy from being in a liquid, but this was a-ma-zing!!!  YUM!!!

So all in all, an excellent meal with excellent company.  Hooray for cooking from south of our borders and thanks to Emily and Melissa for a wonderful Saturday!  Can’t wait for “ladies night”!

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Recipes

Horchata

1 box vanilla rice milk
1/3 can evaporated milk
1/3 can sweetened condensed milk
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 T cinnamon

Combine all ingredients in sauce pan and heat over medium until cooked through.  Chill thoroughly.  Serve over ice.

Empanadas Chilenas

Crust:
1/4 lb. butter
2 c. flour
1 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 lg. egg
1/4+ c water

Cut butter into small cubes and mix with dry ingredients.  Mix in egg with flour mixture.  Slowly mix in water until dough is semi firm.  Shape into a ball and refrigerate at least 15 minutes.

Filling:
1/2 lb. boneless beef round steak, cut into 1/4 inch cubes (Chilean style) or 1/2 lb. ground beef (Argentina style)
1 c chopped onion
2 T cooking oil
1/2 t cayenne pepper
1/2 t oregano
Salt and Pepper
2 t flour
3 T raisins
1/3 c sliced green olives with pimientos
2 hard boiled eggs, chopped

In skillet, cook beef and onion in oil about 5 minutes until tender.  Add in spices and flour, remove from heat and let cool.

Assembly:

Divide dough into 8 portions and roll each portion into a 6 inch circle.  On half of each circle, place 3 T meat, 1 t raisins, some olives, and some eggs.  Fold over remaining dough and press edges closed to seal.  Brush empanadas with egg yolk.  Bake in 400 degree oven for 20-25 minutes.

From Russia With Love

My family on my father's side is half-Russian. Specifically we are from Belarus, and interestingly, when Michael met a few Russian people when we were living in Boston and told them my last name/maiden name (for those who don't know, it's Cherepon), they immediately knew Belarus! I find that fascinating, because if someone in the US says their last name is Smith, we wouldn't know that all Smiths live in Texas. So I was really fascinated by this.

Anyway, I'm pretty good with Eastern European and Russian cooking. Every year, my sister and I put on a big feast in January and do a lot of traditional cooking. I could certainly have counted that towards 80 Plates, but I felt like doing something from my family's countries of origin that I hadn't done before. Recently, the Fredericksburg Library had its semi-annual book sale and I went to the preview show and found a Russian cookbook. Inside was a recipe for beef stroganov and I decided that's what I'd make.

But wait a minute, those of you who have attended may ask. Haven't I eaten beef stroganov at your house before? Why yes you have, my fine friends, but you've eaten it the way my mom taught me to make it, which is quick, easy, and fool proof! To make that beef stroganov, all you do is add one pound of stew beef, one envelope of onion soup mix, and one can of cream of mushroom soup to your slow cooker and let it cook all day. It's quick, easy, and yummy, but not what I'd call "authentic".

According to my cookbook:

Created in the late 19th Century for a Russian count, "bef Stroganov" has become one of the world's most famous dishes. The recipe that follows is the classic Russian version. The numerous European and American variations called beef Stroganov do not in any sense reproduce the dish as it was originally made.

So there.

I gathered up my ingredients and you can see the fairly dismal looking picture in the cookbook in my ingredient picture. This cookbook was published in 1969 and has not exactly aged to perfection. Looking through it, I had to laugh at the photo of a Ukranian family sitting down to have their Easter breakfast, with two bottles of vodka on the table right in front of the kids' places at the table. Hilarious. Anyway, the only thing I did that varied from the directions was to buy the beef already cut into strips by the good people at Wegman's. I didn't want to stand around slicing beef all day.

To start, you combine dry mustard, sugar, salt, and just a dash of hot water to make a paste. I added about a tablespoon of hot water and wound up with more of a slurry than a paste. So my guess is that maybe even a teaspoon or water would do the trick.




Then it was time to slice up some onions. I needed four cups, which is about four onions' worth. I love this picture of the onion slices stacked in my grandma's measuring cup. The onions are very strong indeed, but I once read in the Old Farmer's Almanac that if you slice onions while keeping a piece of bread in your mouth, you won't cry, and I swear to God it works. At least for me. So there's your tip of the day.

As you can see, I bought the mushrooms pre-sliced, one pound of them. It would have been cheaper to buy the mushrooms in bulk and slice them myself, but I was feeling lazy so I let someone else do the work.

Now the first real part of the cooking made me nervous--you place some oil in a pan, turn the heat on high, and let the oil sit in there till it starts to smoke. Um, no thanks. I let it get good and hot till it was kind of running around the pan and kicking up bubbles, but I didn't wait to see smoke before I threw the mushrooms and onions in there. Then all you do is reduce the heat to low, cover the pan, and stir the veggies around from time to time for the next 20-30 minutes.

Meanwhile, it was time to cook the beef. You cook it in two batches, since you use two pounds. This time the directions say to let the oil get hot but not smoke. Well, I just let it get to the same temperature as before with the onions and mushrooms and then threw in the beef. It got kind of bubbly and funny looking, but I guess that's what was supposed to happen! It cooked up just fine and then I got to add it to the mushrooms and onions, which I had drained off and returned to their happy pan.



From there on, it's pretty basic. You add in the mustard paste and some salt and pepper. Unfortunately, this did not photograph real well, but you can sort of see it there?



And then you add a dollop of sour cream at a time, mix it in, and wait for it to make a nice kind of sauce. I used fat free sour cream, and I do think the sauce might have been a bit thicker had I used regular, but I was willing to sacrifice a heavier gravy for a healthier option.




And then it was time to eat! I had mine over egg noodles and Mike had his with mashed potatoes (I had to pick the beef out of the mushrooms and onions for him!). I also had a nice side of steamed veggies and he did not.




YUMMMMMMMMMMM.

I love making beef stroganov the quick and easy way, but man was it good to eat it the traditional way as well! Apparently it is traditional to serve it with crisp potato straws over the top of it, but I liked it our way just fine and dandy.

And I have to say, as I was making it, I was thinking it was one of the easier dishes I have made as part of this experiment. There were very few dishes created, unlike the usual sinkful of dishes I usually have to do, and since I was able to buy a couple ingredients pre-prepped, it made it even faster!

I really enjoyed this taste of the motherland. Yum! Maybe someday I'll eat it at the Kremlin with other heads of state. haha

Honduras: Yo Quiero Chorizo!

I have been looking to get back into the 80 Plates cooking game for a while now. Things are settling down at home with the new baby and it seemed a good time to start cooking and getting back to enjoying some new cuisines and new countries. This weekend, I had my Axis of Evil dinner planned with friends from Maryland coming down to dine with us. When Melissa mentioned she wouldn't mind coming over, I invited our new pal Andy to come too and decided what better time to pick a country and cook something than with extra mouths to feed? As great as 80 Plates has been, often times I wind up making A LOT of food, and it's nice when people are here to help eat it all up!

I went to the National Dish list I've been using as a research tool and perused through dozens of national dishes before I hit on a winner: Honduras's plato tipico. Translated into English as "typical dish", plato tipico is a favorite in restaurants in Honduras and consists of carneada (carne asada), chismol sauce, plantains, chorizo, cheese, tortillas, guacamole, and refried beans. Wikipedia says preparing the carne asada is typically a real social event, which seemed perfect for having friends over! Andy had never partaken of an 80 Plates meal and Melissa had only been privy to one (Switzerland back in February), so I was super excited that they would both be able to join us.

I did some recipe research and finally decided on 2 Alton Brown recipes, one for guacamole and one for plantains. I found a site with a recipe for chismol sauce and used that, and used a recipe from SimplyRecipes.com for the carne asada. I used store bought tortillas and refried beans, forgive me!

Ok, so task one was to make the marinade for the carne asada, as it has to marinate for a while. Everything I read about the dish said it should be marinated in sour orange juice, but this particular recipe called for lime juice. I decided to use the lime juice, but to substitute some orange juice for some of the vinegar in the recipe. (To me, all orange juice tastes sour, so I don't know if there's something special I needed, but I scoured the Latin American aisle of the grocery stores as well as the juice aisle and didn't find anything marked 'sour orange juice', so I went with the regular stuff.)

I decided to get daring this time and put my food processor to the test. For Honduras, I needed a LOT of lime juice and I get kind of tired of squeezing limes and lemons and getting just a bit of juice out of them. So I decided to take a crack at the juicer attachment. I have owned this food processor for more than 7 years--it was a wedding gift from my mom's best friend and her husband--and I swear it has never gotten such a workout as it has this year. But I've never messed with the attachments before. It has a slicer/shredder, plus the juicer, and a small bowl for smaller items. As you can see, the juicer leaves nothing behind but the skin of the fruit. I have never gotten so much juice from a couple of measly limes in my life. I was so impressed. The Pampered Chef has a nice little juicer that I might get for times I don't want to drag the processor out, but this was an awesome, awesome way to juice limes. And it took like 2 seconds. Plus, there's a little basket to catch the pulp, so it's even better!



Anyway, I digress. Since I had the food processor out, I decided to go ahead and make the marinade in it and save myself a lot of chopping and cutting. So I put in some garlic, jalapeno, cumin, salt, pepper, sugar, vinegar, and OJ and gave it a whirl.



Then came time for my favorite part: CILANTRO! As I've said in the past, cilantro is my favorite herb. And this recipe called for "one large handful of fresh cilantro, leaves and stems". Well, I wasn't going to turn that down! I added a very large handful and had lots of fun pulsing it down into something nice and green and gooey. And then I figured I was done and it was time to put it on the steak.



I rubbed it all over and put it in the fridge, but the whole time I was thinking, "This really isn't sticking very well." Then I re-read the recipe and noted that I had neglected to put any olive oil in the marinade! No wonder!! Well, there was no way to scrape all the marinade back into the processor, so I just dumped the oil on top of the steak and proceeded to re-massage the entire thing until it looked all green and happy.



YUM!

The plantains and guacamole both had to be done much closer to time, so I held off on them and decided to make the chismol sauce. Chismol is basically a type of salsa made from onions, green peppers, tomatoes, lime juice, vinegar, and spices. The recipe called for "Honduran especias", so I combed the Latin American aisle at Wegman's and couldn't find it. I did find something called "Caribbean all purpose seasoning" and bought it. I figured it would be good enough, since the chismol recipe said we could use a blend of garlic powder, oregano, onion powder, and pepper. I cleaned out the food processor from the marinade and tossed everything into it for the chismol. Turned it on, let it run a while, and voila! Chismol sauce!



Melissa arrived right on schedule, which was helpful because by now, I had two executive chef assistants helping me out in the kitchen and they needed a little distracting. Melissa is one of those weirdos who like babies, so she was more than happy to keep them company and keep me company as well!



As it was getting down to go time, I was able to make the guacamole, which needed to sit for an hour. I trust Alton Brown implicitly, so I didn't give any thought to following his recipe and blithely dumped everything in a bowl. It was a very easy recipe to make, compared to some of his recipes I've seen him make on TV. (As you can see in the picture, my cilantro is looking significantly less leafy than it did when I started the day.) The recipe is pretty basic--you half the avocados and scoop out the pulp, which you then toss with some lime juice. Then you are supposed to drain the juice out and reserve, only I must have had some super absorbent avocados, because I had no juice left after the tossing.

I decided to do the cutting and dicing by hand of the tomato and onions and cilantro, just to get my hands on the food again, and it came out looking very nice, if I say so myself. My only slip up was that I did not seed the tomatoes as directed, so I had to dump the chunks back out and pick through them, removing all the seeds. Fortunatey I caught it before I put the tomatoes in the avocado.



You mash up the avocados, toss in some spices, and then add the tomatoes and onions and cilantro. Once all that is mixed, you add one more tablespoon of lime juice and voila! Guacamole! Unfortunately, I neglected to take a picture of the finished product, but you'll have to trust me, it looked great! We put the pit of one of the avocados in the bowl to prevent it from turning brown and unpalatable and put it on the table, which we were starting to get ready for the meal.

It was about this time I turned my attention to the store-bought accompaniments of the meal. I had a can of re-fried beans and I got out my handy dandy hands-free can opener. It has one button and is battery powered, you put it on the can, hit the button, and voila! It does all the work for you, kind of like an electric can opener, only smaller and no need to plug it in. Unfortunately, this was the day my handy dandy hands-free can opener would die. No sooner did I put it on the can and push the button than the batteries died. And we couldn't disengage the blade from the can opener to get it off the can. As you can see, my favorite brother-in-law Lucas has braced himself in an attempt to get the thing off the can and he could not, I couldn't, Melissa couldn't, and Judy couldn't. The reset button only works if the batteries are working and the battery door is where the blade is and you can't get it off when it's attached to a can. So finally, I looked at the bottom of the can and told Lucas to use my non-electric can opener to open the other end. Once he did, we got the beans out and threw the can and other can opener in the trash. Bummer! Another casualty in the kitchen!

We were getting close to go time, so I went ahead and fired up Vesuvius and then turned my attention to the plantains. Making plantains is a real labor of love for me. One of my top 5 most hated foods on the planet is bananas. Oh how I loathe bananas. I hate the smell, the taste, the texture. (The others would be licorice, coffee, most fish, and moldy cheeses.) But the research says I must have the plantains, so I was going to make them. I just had no intention of eating them. Unfortunately I found the recipe AFTER I bought the plantains and I should have used green plantains instead of yellow, but they were kind of greenish around the stem, so there.

Plantains are actually pretty easy to make. You slice them, fry them up, drain the oil off, mash them, soak them in water, re-fry them, and voila! Fried plantains!







Ok, so by now, Vesuvius was good and hot, I'd looked up how long to throw the steaks on for and for medium, it said 4 minutes per side. I also put on the chorizo, which was fully cooked and just needed reheating. My sister was insistent on 4 minutes per side and the Joy of Cooking seemed to back her up on this, so after 4 minutes, I brought in the meat. Everyone had helped out by setting the table and minding the baby, so I put the chorizo into a bowl, cut into the steak, and watched as it bled all over the tray and let out a mournful "Mooooooo!" Yeah, it was that rare. Ok, no problem, I told everyone we'd have a steak course, put it back on the grill (it was now pouring buckets outside), and we sat down to dine.



It really was a fun meal. Everyone passed around sausage and tortillas and all the fixin's and we made nice wraps of the food. The General declared the chorizo the best he's had outside Fall River, so I will have to go back to Wegmans and clear them out of it. In fact, everyone was in love with the stuff!!! It was delicious!




Soon enough, I pulled the steak off again and because it was raining so damned hard, I decided que sera sera, I wasn't cooking outside any more--I literally had to change because my clothes were sopping, dripping wet when I came back in. I sliced up the steak and put it on the table, but it was still awfully pink and we were all sizing each other up as to who was going to eat it. So despite Andy's suggestion that I microwave it, I got out the Foreman grill and finished it off that way and we all enjoyed it. Melissa is picky about beef, but I forcefed it to her any way. The chorizo was definitely the hit of the night though, and I think if I host a Honduran meal again, I will dispense with the beef and just buy a lot of chorizo and serve it. Everyone just wanted that and nothing else. Maybe I'll dispense with everything and just put a plate of sausage on the table and we can get in touch with our cavemen selves next time. It was that good!

Now, remember I said I trusted Alton on the guacamole and threw everything in willy nilly? As we were eating, someone mentioned that there was something really spicy that we were eating and we couldn't figure out what it was! I finally took a taste of each thing individually and it was the guacamole. I would suggest that if you are going to make it, you might want to eliminate the cayenne if you don't like spicy foods. Also, Melissa said the plantains were very good when they were fresh, but she took the leftovers home and said that when she tried to reheat them, they turned to mush. I wonder if using the green plantains would have made a difference in reheating.

So that's it! A great success, we loved this meal and it was a fun meal to eat with friends! Try it yourself and see :-)