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 :-)

Good Dining, Vietnam!

So lately my impatient and not-so-impatient friends have been asking, "When are ya doin' another 80 Plates?!" Well, surprise, surprise, Michael and I did one before I left on my 3 week odyssey in the Northeast, I just never had time to post about it. I had wanted to do Vietnam back in June since my sister-in-law took a trip over there and we ribbed her just a little bit about eating fish guts and stuff, which I'm sure is not what they eat, but it was all in good fun and she took it well. (Speaking of which, P., what DID you eat in Vietnam?)

Anyway, after doing a little research, I discovered the Vietnamese dish banh mi. Banh mi is a popular sandwich in Vietnam which consists of a salad and a meat filling. It is often called a Saigon sub. There are banh mi shops all over Vietnam, apparently, or at least so says Wikipedia.

I wound up using Emeril's recipe from the Food Network site for my banh mi, but he does call it "Vietnamese-style" versus "Vietnamese" so I'm not sure how authentic it is. In any event, if you want to follow the recipe I used, you can visit it HERE. I'm not sure where we learned about banh mi, but I'm glad we did! Banh mi has a variety of filling, but we used pork. Some of the recipes we read called for things like "Vietnamese style bologna". First off, I'm not that crazy about bologna, but I wouldn't even know where to find Vietnamese style bologna--I did look at Wegman's, but no dice.

Because the pork tenderloin has to marinate overnight, it was the first thing I tackled. The marinade is a delicious combination of scallions, chili peppers, garlic, sugar, fish sauce (got to use up some more fish sauce, woo hoo!), black pepper, and lime juice. It's pretty simple and doesn't look like much, but it smells AMAZING. I was excited to put my pork in there and stick it in the fridge overnight. I knew it was going to be delicious!



The next day, I preheated the grill, brushed the pork with a little bit of vegetable oil, and tossed it on the 'coals', which of course I don't have since I have a gas grill!




While that was cooking away, it was time to focus on preparing my vegetable toppings for the banh mi. Traditional banh mi has a vegetable filling that consists of carrots, jalapenos, cucumbers, daikon, and cilantro. Emeril's recipe called for all that, but what the heck is daikon? I went to a couple of different stores looking for it and couldn't find it. At first I thought it must be some sort of cabbage, but I couldn't find it near the cabbage, then I suspected it might be like a radish, but I couldn't find it there either, and then I wondered if it wasn't like a root vegetable of some stripe, but I couldn't find it. So my banh mi didn't include daikon. If anyone wants to tell me a) what it is and b) where to find it, I will happily try it if I make this dish again!

The prep work here is pretty simple. You need to make a dressing for the vegetables and then prep the veggies. The dressing is a simple mixture of sugar, crushed red pepper, rice wine vinegar, and salt. You combine it in a saucepan and bring it to a boil until the sugar dissolves, then put it aside off the heat to cool. For this reason, I suggest waiting to do the vegetables until after you finish making the dressing.

Also, I neglected to read the directions. It would seem that you are supposed to put the carrots and daikon into a bowl and put the dressing over them. Well, by the time I got that far, I had done all the veggies and everything was all mixed together, so I didn't get the chance to follow that direction to a T. Oh well! After you combine the carrots, daikon and dressing, you're supposed to let it cool in the fridge for 30 minutes. Oh well! Sorry, Emeril! I didn't have that kind of time!

Meanwhile, I chopped up the carrots, cucumbers, seeded and chopped the jalapenos (I'm not good with a lot of heat in my food and I figured the crushed red peppers was good enough!), and lots of cilantro, which you know I love! I also sliced a nice French baguette in half so it was ready to go and poured the dressing over the veggies. Can you guess which half is mine and which half is Michael's?



By then, the pork was ready to come off the grill. If I do say so myself, I'm starting to master this grilling thing!



I decided to chop or shred the pork with my handy dandy Pampered Chef kitchen shears. I wanted it to be bite size and for us not to have to battle through it while we were trying to eat. I really love these shears because they do a great job chopping and shredding meat. Then I added the meat to the baguette and voila! We were ready to eat!



Then it was time for the ultimate taste test. As usual, the General took the ceremonial first bite. He was slightly underwhelmed, calling it 'dry'. I disagreed and thought it was great. I think he thought it was dry for 2 reasons: 1. He didn't have the salad with the dressing on his portion and 2. Banh mi is traditionally served with mayonnaise, which neither one of us likes. Consequently, he asked me to add some barbeque sauce to his sandwich. I decided to leave mine like it was, since I thought it was quite moist and flavorful.

This sandwich could easily serve four people for a very good lunch. Neither one of us finished our half of the sandwich. Good bread is essential to the success of a banh mi, however! We both really enjoyed this taste of Vietnam. It was not our favorite dish we've made as part of 80 plates, but it was up at the top of the middle of the pack, and nowhere near the bottom. I really, really liked the dressing and the salad part of it, I can't imagine just eating the meat! The flavors really came alive in my mouth, most definitely!

I am keeping hope alive that the Axis of Evil dinner will happen this weekend. That's my next 80 Plates adventure. I am also open to doing requests! If you have a country you'd like to see featured, drop me a comment and I'll do it!

East Meets West

Today's 80 Plates edition combines two rather different countries: Thailand and Canada. As my dad once said, "Nothing quite goes with Thailand like Canada." (OK, this is not strictly speaking true. What he DID say, and I swear to God this IS true was, "And if Columbus had sailed East, he'd have discovered Israel.")

This weekend was supposed to be Leah-free and it was until last night. I was feeling very cook-ish/cook-y? and wanted to do something so I decided to return to 80 Plates and knock out a couple of more countries. We flipped through the Around the World in 450 Recipes and hit on Thailand's barbeque chicken. Whether or not it's true, the book claims:

Barbecued chicken is served almost everywhere in Thailand, from portable roadside stalls to sports stadiums and beaches.

Now recently, we've had a TON of barbecue chicken. Michael's mom and dad made some while we were in Rhode Island and the other night while we were visiting baby Kai, Elizabeth and Jesse grilled chicken as well. It has long been a source of unhappiness within me that I am not a great griller. Oh, I can make a burger or a hot dog or a brat, but beyond that, I tend to BURN. My mother-in-law said, "Cook it over low heat for a long time" but my grill is evil and difficult to regulate heat-wise. But I was damned determined that I was going to grill some chicken and it was going to come out well.

I did modify the recipe just slightly: it called for a whole chicken cut apart ( a) I have no interest in doing this and b) we have all agreed that none of us likes bones in our chicken so I went with boneless skinless breasts) and it called for ginger (my sister is allergic). Oh, and I have no idea what palm sugar is, so I used some Sugar in the Raw that my uncle left here after his visit in November. Otherwise, I stuck to what the recipe said to do.

So this was basically a pretty easy recipe to follow! However, I did find one ingredient that my nifty knife does not like to chop: lemon grass! I really had to do battle with it. I slit it lengthwise first and then made chops into little half circles, but I was not going to chop it up beyond that. Still, I think it looked pretty respectable considering.



I smashed up garlic and chopped shallots, although the recipe does not give any instructions on what to actually do with either ingredient, it just says to add them. After combining all of that in a large bowl, I added the sugar and then turned my attention to putting together the liquid part of the marinade.



One of the things I LOVE about doing this is I am getting to use up the bottles of sauce that I might have had use for a tablespoon of here and there. In this case, I got to use up 2 tablespoons of fish sauce! I have no idea what to do with fish sauce, but I do know that when we continue cooking around Asia, I've got it on hand to use, and I'm down to about 1/2 a bottle! Hooray! I added that to coconut milk and soy sauce and it made this rather luxurious looking coffee colored sauce. And I have to say, it smelled pretty good. Then I dumped it over the fresh savories and stirred it altogether.



All that was left was to pour it over the chicken and refrigerate overnight. I was really, really excited about this dish because it smelled AMAZING! It was going to be torture to wait for lunch, but fortunately Leah was back to keep us busy! I will say, also that when I look at the picture in the cookbook, the marinade looks almost smooth, so I wonder if they put everything in a food processor to put it together. But I kind of liked getting in there with my knife and just slicing and dicing, and I don't think it affected the recipe in the least.

Ok, so this morning dawned bright and clear and I decided I was also going to take the opportunity to make nanaimo bars. This was mainly because having read up on the matter, I knew how rich the bars were going to be, and I could send them home with Judy and Lucas and not worry about totally trashing my diet.

While Lesley was here, she mentioned that as far as she knew there wasn't really a typical Canadian dish (I feel the same about American cuisine, so I feel her pain). We never got around to cooking anything--mostly because we were too busy--so I went on Wikipedia to the national dish list and looked up Canada and there were nanaimo bars as one of several of Canada's national foods.

This excited me because in A Mighty Wind, Mickey says she won't perform alone without Mitch and that she's going to go back to her hotel with a pan of nanaimo bars. I always wondered what they were, and now I know! So this ties in nicely with Lesley's visit, but also with the recent Christopher Guest concert. As Hannibal Smith used to say, "I love it when a plan comes together!"

So luckily for me, Wikipedia had a link to the city of Nanaimo's website which has the award winning recipe for nanaimo bars. Apparently in 1986, there was a "prepare the best nanaimo bars ever!" contest and Mrs. Joyce Hardcastle emerged the clear winner with her recipe, which is now the official nanaimo bar recipe. You can find it here. The basic idea is a ton of butter, cream, chocolate, and sugar. What could be better than that?!

I was 'helped' in today's adventure by my niece, Dot. Here she is wielding her spatula.



Shortly after this picture was taken, she put her foot into her mother's coffee mug and spilled coffee all over the place and then attempted to dive head first into the ingredients.

So, since the bars are made in layers, you obviously start with the bottom layer first. This calls for melting butter, sugar, and cocoa together in double boiler. I don't own a double boiler, I just make my own with a bowl placed over a pan of boiling water. This is effective, doesn't require any additional equipment, and I've found you can use either ceramic or metal bowls with the same result. When all was said and done, it looked like this:



While that was melting, I got out my food processor. The recipe called for 1/2 cup of finely chopped almonds. Kind of akin to my processing the heck out of the cottage cheese for the blintzes, I knew I'd have to be one step shy of almond butter to suit my sister, who does not like nuts. The food processor does a great job of pulverizing the little suckers. I put in 3/4 of a cup of slivered almonds and got back just over a half cup of chopped almonds.

At this point, the chocolate mixture had cooled just slightly and I was able to add the egg. I didn't want to put the egg directly into the hot chocolate mixture because I didn't want to have hot scrambled eggs in our bars. I did it just a little bit at a time and stirred the heck out of it between additions and it came out just fine.



Then I added in graham cracker crumbs, the almonds, and coconut. It made me think of an Almond Joy bar on steroids. I pressed the entire thing into an 8 inch round cake pan, since I couldn't find my 8 inch square pan anywhere.



That done, we turned our attention to layer two. This very easily called for beating together butter, heavy cream, vanilla custard powder (I used pudding mix, I couldn't find custard powder in my local store--but when Wegman's opens next week, I bet I'll be able to locate it!), and confectioner's sugar. I couldn't help it, I had to try just a bit of it, one little lick. I told my sister, "Those crazy Canadian bastards know their fillings!" and she took a taste and agreed. We decided to let Dot help us spread the filling over the crust.



She did a pretty good job, too!



That done, we turned our attention to layer three, using a double boiler again to melt together semi-sweet chocolate and butter. Dot got mad that we wouldn't let her near the hot stove, so we gave her a pan of her own and some water and a spoon to have fun with. I think she's a natural chef. (Please ignore my dirty floor--I'm thinking I'll be shamed into washing it in preparation for Evanovich Fest 2009, taking place this weekend.)



Once the chocolate melted together, we let it cool just a bit, enough not to liquify the butter and sugar layer and then I spread it over the top of the bars. It looked amazing. I could only imagine what it was going to taste like! But it'd have to wait for after the BBQ, so I put the bars in the fridge reluctantly and turned my attention back to Thailand.



Woman versus Grill in the epic battle for supremacy. Who will reign supreme!? I felt like I had it regulated pretty nicely, honestly, but then the burners on the sides went out when I turned them too low, so I had to restart the entire operation midway through the cooking process.

But look at my glorious chicken!! I DID IT! I FREAKIN' GRILLED CHICKEN AND DIDN'T DO ANYTHING HORRIBLE TO IT!



The recipe did give me the option for the coward's way out using the oven to bake it, but I GRILLED it. I am a GRILLER. I GRILL. You have no idea how proud of myself I was.



Thumbs up, hell yeah! The sky could possibly be the limit with my grilling capabilities, seriously.

So then we set the table and got down to business. I made a side of jasmine rice, about which the book says "A naturally aromatic, long grain white rice, jasmine rice is the staple of most Thai meals." Of course I made it in my rice cooker, which is pretty well hassle free and which I love. As long as I'm not making brown rice. Anyway, we set the table with rice, chicken, and I made some peas as well, and of course, the General's mashed potatoes. Then it was time to get down to business, so of course Leah and Dot both demanded food.

Consequently Lucas took the first bite. The General asked, "Honey, does the chicken have any sauce on it?" and before I could answer, we heard an indecent moan issue from the other end of the chicken before Lucas gulped out, "This chicken doesn't need sauce" and began gobbling it up! So I cut up the General's and he decided to take a crack at it, with my assurances that if he wanted sauce, we had some in the fridge. "Forget the sauce, honey," he said in total agreement with Lucas. I quickly cut up my chicken and stabbed a piece, sinking into culinary happiness with my first bite before regaining control of myself and taking my child back so my sister could enjoy what the rest of us were experiencing.

It was a QUIET meal for a bit as we all sunk our teeth into the chicken. How I grilled it so well, I do not know, but it was juicy and the marinade had really sunk in overnight. It was AMAZING chicken. God it was good. I'm only distressed that there is but one piece left, but guess what I'll be having for lunch tomorrow?!

Afterwards, we rested a bit while the kids finished their bottles and fell asleepish. Then I began to clear the table and we got talking about the joys of growing up near the Canadian border, which somehow led to Judy and I breaking into the Canadian national anthem, and then I was impressed to learn that my husband knew the words to it too! We finished off quite strong with, "O Canada we stand on guard for thee!" and then cheered while I dished out the bars.



This time, Judy took the ceremonial first bite and the first words out of her mouth were, "Holy shit!" She quickly took a swig of soda and then said, "This makes my soda taste bitter!" I didn't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing, wondering if maybe something went terribly wrong, so I took a bite, but the fact of it was just the absolute richness of all the ingredients combining into this amazing bite. It's one of those desserts that kind of makes you lose your will to live, in a good way if that makes any sense at all. The General tried it and gobbled it right up!



Lucas couldn't even finish his, and he has a real sweet tooth! The rest of us gamely soldiered on. I must say, I think I know why Mrs. Joyce Hardcastle won the nanaimo bars contest. These suckers were awesome!

Thus endeth two more recipes and two more countries, but this one was momentous, for it was our first country from North America! It was such a fun time, I enjoyed having Dot around for cooking even if she did make a mess. :-) Next up, we're going to try Vietnam on June 18th because Michael's sister is heading there that day! And our Axis of Evil dinner cometh! Details to follow!