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 :-)

Books and Armenia!

So last night was my book club's regular meeting. We read the book The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. The dinner theme was to take a chapter title, all of which were ingredients, select one, and use it to make a dish. Most of the ladies signed up to bring desserts, so I decided that I would make a main dish. While I didn't finish the book, I read in the jacket notes that it had something to do with the Armenian genocide, so I decided to make some Armenian dishes. There was an Armenian lady who volunteered at my old job in Boston, and I used to love the food that she'd make, so I was excited to select some dishes and make them.

I found The Gutsy Gourmet online and decided to use their "Gourmet Armenian Recipes" from the cookbook "Dining at Noah's Table". I selected three recipes to make: sou-berag, imom bayeldi, and stuffed zucchini.

I was cooking at my sister's house, and she has still not fully unpacked, so it was going to be a challenge to find everything I needed equipment-wise, but that is kind of the adventure of cooking in someone else's house. I also had no choice but to use ingredients of which I was not fond--most notably eggplant and cottage cheese.

I cooked everything all at once, but I'll try to divide up each recipe and report on it on its own to make it easier to read. I'll start with imom bayeldi, also known as Sultan's Delight. This is a wonderful vegetable dish, and a great way to use up extra veggies if you have them! I did cut down on the amount of eggplant that I used because I am not that crazy about eggplant, and also the local grocery store's selection of eggplant SUCKED. There was only one worth buying, really.

So the first task is to slice up the eggplant into rounds, leaving the skins on. Then you dump some salt on them and let them sit for about 30 minutes and let them release water.



I don't know if I did something wrong, but apart from a little bit of sweating, not a damn thing happened with the eggplant. The directions said to squeeze out the excess moisture and then put them in the oven to roast until they are lightly golden. I did that too, but frankly, they were in there for a while and nothing seemed to happen. Since I didn't eat them, I can't say if I know they were undercooked or anything, but no one was complaining, so I figure they were probably fine!

Next job was to slice up a boatload of vegetables and herbs. The recipe called for slices/rounds of peppers, onions, and tomatoes, crushed garlic, and basil, parsley, and mint. I was at a slight disadvantage in that my sister has lost her cutting board, so I chopped on a cookie sheet to save her counters.


Aren't they beauties?

I used red onions and green peppers to give some nice color to the dish. The Pampered Chef's garlic press can't be beat for crushing garlic, it does a thorough job indeed!

Here's a little tip of you need to chop fresh herbs. I hate doing it because, really, if you do it on a cutting board, it can be a challenge to get them really finely chopped and you run the risk of mashing them into the board, which is then where all those great flavors stay without going into your food! Try this instead. Put a handful of the herbs into a cup or glass, and chop the heck out of them with a pair of scissors. The herbs stay nicely contained and if you have any extra, you can store them in there for your next recipe (since two of these recipes required fresh herbs, I did the old "chop it once, use it twice" routine using this method. And because mint, basil, and parsley smell radically different from one another, it was easy to tell which was which despite their chopped states).

Then it was time to sautee everything up. You start with the peppers and onions and garlic, and sautee them 'gently'. Once they're soft, you add the herbs and the tomatoes and let them all cook in together. I did find that I had cut the peppers quite a bit too big, so I cut them a bit smaller, but man were they HOT! (heat hot, not spicy hot) So I may have burned a finger or two in their preparation. It took a while, honestly. I didn't turn up the heat very high because I didn't want to overtly fry anything, but there were a LOT of veggies in that pan, so it took the better part of 30 minutes to get everything even remotely soft. The pan was cast iron and HEAVY and with everything in there, I could lift it up to dump everything into the pan with the eggplant, so I wound up trying to scoop everything on top of the eggplant. It worked out OK, but I did wind up making a bit of a mess for myself to clean up afterwards.

Once the pepper mixture was spread out on top of the eggplant, the whole thing was lightly covered in "a can of tomato sauce". I really didn't know what size can to buy, so I went with a 14 ouncer since it was only supposed to be a smattering of tomato sauce. Then it was back in the oven for another 30 minutes before letting it cool--this dish can be served warm or at room temperature, so I decided to let it cool off. (I'll post a picture of the three finished dishes at the end--be patient :-D)

So that done, I turned my attention to the stuffed zucchini. I love zucchini and if I start some container gardens this summer, I might plant a couple of zucchini plants. Especially now that I know this dish! The zucchini dish was my entry into food for omnivores and had sausage in it. I LOVE sausage!! I was nervous that it used hot sausage, and I briefly considered substituting sweet sausage, but I wanted to be authentic and true to the recipe, so I decided to use the hot.

The first task was to halve and hollow the zucchini into little boats. This doesn't seem like it'd be that hard, but the zucchini offered at the Giant was actually pretty puny, so I had a bit of a challenge with it. In fact, one of the halves broke. But I soldiered on and eventually had some lovely little vessels waiting to be filled with sausagey goodness.

Then it was time to get cookin'! The recipe only called for 4 ounces of sausage, so really this is a fairly healthy dish when you consider that those 4 ounces get spread over 8 zucchini halves. I fried that up in a mercifully smaller frying pan that didn't break my wrists when I tried to pick it up!



Meanwhile, I combined the rest of the stuffing ingredients. These included 4 ounces of feta cheese (I used that instead of goat cheese, because I couldn't find goat cheese at the store), 4 ounces of mozarella cheese, 2 cups of diced Italian tomatoes (I used canned), fresh basil, and salt and pepper. When the sausage was done, I added it to the cheese mixture and stirred it all together.



All that was left was to STUFF! So I carefully stuffed each zucchini to its fill. I had a little bit of stuffing left over, so I put it in a pan and threw it in the oven separately, and later sampled it as a pre-book-club treat. YUM. Once the zucchini were stuffed, I sprinkled a little parmesan cheese over them and put them in the oven to cook away!



Time to turn my attention to the sou-berag, which is an Armenian lasagna. In order to save time, I decided to buy the oven-ready noodles, which was probably a mistake in retrospect. I should have just boiled the noodles. But oh well. This dish is also vegetarian friendly, but since it uses animal by-products, namely dairy, is not vegan friendly. It's also a recipe I was slightly anxious about due to the fact it uses cottage cheese. But since it used small curd cottage cheese, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. And the fact that it is a pretty simple recipe to make endeared it to my heart.

By now, you all know of my love for pasta, and I love lasagna a lot! I had high hopes for this dish. And for a lasagna, I found it pretty easy to boot! WOO HOO! Basically, you mix together a lot of cheese and spread it over the noodles.

The main problem I had was that I don't think Judy has a cheese grater. And I had a full pound of jack cheese to grate. So I wound up crumbling it. It actually worked out just fine. After that, it was easy--measuring out ricotta and cottage cheeses, chopping up parsley, beating up and adding a couple of eggs, and melting some cheese. The recipe had the baffling instructions of "half a cube of melted butter" and I couldn't tell if that meant half a stick or half a pound. I erred on the side of more is more and melted a quarter pound, which was right in the middle. Since most of it was supposed to be poured over the top of the finished, assembled lasagna, I only poured a splash into the mixture itself.

And then it was assembly time! I put down a layer of noodles and then a layer of cheese, another layer of noodles, another layer of cheese, and finished it off with a layer of noodles, which I then drenched in butter.




So that was it! I put it in the oven to cook up. I pulled it out after what I thought was a good amount of time, but those top noodles looked a little sketchy to me. My sister asked, "Aren't they supposed to be, you know...?" and she trailed off, so I supplied the word she was missing, "Edible?" "Yeah," she said, and I pondered the situation. We decided to put it back in the oven for a while to continue to soften, and I added some more butter just to be safe. In the end, the top noodles were kind of crispy, which is why I think I should just have boiled the noodles and been done with it.

My three finished dishes took up most of the table (sorry ladies!).



Man were they yummy!!! I was surprised about the vegetables with the mint--it was very subtle. I don't think I will make that dish again, just on account of we're not vegetable people. However, the other two dishes I LOVED!!! I will definitely make them again.

Try them and let me know what you think!

Ich Bin Ein Berliner

So I've been lamenting that we're somewhat falling behind on our 80 Plates cooking, and that we need to step it up some. I've got 2 countries planned--Italy on March 28th (open to friends--please RSVP if you are coming! You won't be alone, Elizabeth is intrepidly being our Test Italian) and Turkey on April 6th (book club only, I'm afraid!), but beyond that we haven't found time or recipes that inspired us to get cooking! Mike and I have been playing "clean out the freezer" from many of our previous dishes, and also from things we put in there and forgot. It's saved us money on the grocery bills in addition to providing some challenges with "what the the heck am I going to do with a half pound of pork!?"

So today we pulled out bratwurst that has been in there since who knows when. The thing is, I've made brats a thousand times, so I didn't really feel good about counting it for Germany. The aforementioned Elizabeth, also an expectant mommy, (click here to visit her blog) and I were talking and we both hit on a flash of brilliance at the same time: spaetzle!

I love spaetzle. The first time I remember having it was when my mom got us beans and spaetzle from Birds Eye when we were little and visiting my grandparents in Connecticut. Since then, I've had it prepared in several German restaurants, including one here in Stafford County, which I highly recommend. However, if you visit Zum Rheingarten, make damned sure you have reservations and don't wear blue jeans. Although the General and I broke both rules and they still seated us anyway and were darned nice about it, so what can I say?

Anyway, I had found a recipe on line for spaetzle that garnered rave reviews from German cooks and I'd been wanting to try it, so what better occasion than this? So out of the blue, another country down.

I'm including my preparations for bratwurst here too, just in case you want to see it. It is basically what they used to show during the Johnsville brats commercial, but it's so good and so yummy that it's how I've always elected to make ours! So it was a gorgeous day here in Fredericksburg, 72 degrees this afternoon. So nice in fact that I put on the ceiling fans and opened the windows. I decided I was going to go ahead and fire up the grill for the first time since last fall. Remember I said we call it Vesuvius? Well, here it is! You can see why. That sucker is massive. But I could also call it Old Reliable, because it fired up with no hesitation this evening when called for duty.

My recipe for brats is a simple one: Thick slice an onion, throw it in a pot, dump a can of beer over it, bring it to a boil, add the brats, boil them up a bit, and then throw them and the onions on the grill till done. See below!











Ok, time to make some spaetzle!! If you want the recipe I followed, please visit this site. Yes, yes, it is Tyler Florence again, but reading the feedback, it is an authentic recipe, so I felt justified in using it. Not to mention that every single spaetzle recipe I read had the same ingredients as this one, so I think you make one spaetzle, you've made them all. You can buy spaetzle mix at your local grocery stores, but it really isn't hard to make, so why bother? Also, in reading the comments left on this recipe, everyone said that the spaetzle came out really nutmeg-y, so if you are leary of nutmeg, you should add a bit less. I like nutmeg a lot, but I didn't want them to taste of it overpoweringly, so I only put in a quarter teaspoon instead of a half.

Ok, so the ingredient list is pretty easy: flour, eggs, salt, pepper, nutmeg, milk. You will also need butter to sautee them in and chives for the top if desired. I did put some chives on them to make them more colorful. So the prep is pretty easy--mix together the dry ingredients, combine the wet ingredients in a separate bowl, combine the two. Only, I guess I got excited because I dumped the milk on the flour mixture without first combining it with the eggs! Oops!



I mixed it all together using a silicone spatula because it allowed me to give everything a good beating and mush out any lumps in the dough. Then it had to be set to rise for a while before I could boil it up. I put it to the side while I put the brats out on the grill and then came back to make the spaetzle.

Spaetzle is fun to make!! Basically what you do is force the dough a little at a time through a slotted spoon into a pot of boiling water. Once it floats to the top, you skim it out and put it in a colander to drain, and rinse it under cool water.





Once this is completed, it's gravy. My hands did get a little bit messy and occasionally the dough overflowed the spoon and made giant dumplings instead of sweet little neat ones, but all in all, it went perfectly. They looked and felt like authentic spaetzle.

All that was left was to saute them up. I had the butter melted already, just having put the pan on the hot burner from when I had boiled up the brats. I just turned it back on and tossed the spaetzle in. I didn't think they'd really fry or brown up, and they did not. It just kind of sizzled in there and got buttery delicious. I tossed on the chives, and it was time to eat!!



I made a side of green beans for myself, and Mike just had his spaetzle and brats. He thought they were "good". He said that when he thinks of dumplings, he thinks of something bigger that has a filling, but over all he thought they were good. I was really freakin' impressed with myself for having made them!! I thought they were really good.

So another country knocked off! We need to get more heavily into Africa--we've only done one African country so far. It's hard finding recipes from there. Here is a map of the places we've been so far:


visited 15 countries(6.66%)
Create your own visited map of The World

I recommend this recipe for a fun and delicious dish to cook! :-)