Meal 58: Fiji

We had been planning this meal with 18 Reasons, a warm and welcoming non-profit community food space in San Francisco, for almost a year. Taking the day off of work to prep and cook with my parents, the larger audience of friends new and old, and the gorgeous organic ingredients from Bi-Rite Market all contributed to a special and gratifying experience. But didn't really hit me how this meal was operating on an atypical plane until one of the volunteers very politely asked if there was enough food that they could try a bit. Two full-on staff helping to serve dishes, pour wine and wash up, without even the expectation of joining us at the table, was a first for this amateur chef.

Not only was the setting unique, but this was first adventure into the islands of the Pacific, a region rich in root vegetables, tropical fruits, seafood — and in the past several decades, canned meat. Thanks to a large Indian population, courtesy of British colonial practices a century and a half ago, Fiji's cuisine has a strong fusion streak, with the spices and techniques of South Asian cooking. I found most of what I needed, including citrus (50 limes!), coconut milk (7 cans!), and some beautiful fresh fish, at 18 Reasons' parent market, Bi-Rite. We did have to adventure to the appropriately named Fiji Market in nearby San Bruno for taro, kava, and canned corned beef.

We had a really wonderful time, with a fun cross-section of friends we knew, members of the 18 Reasons community, and others who'd heard about us. The spirit of getting to know food, culture, and each other through shared experience, that we and 18 Reasons both celebrate, shone through brightly. We owe a huge thanks to Olivia, the program coordinator, who not only made sure things ran smoothly and that we kept on schedule, but brought an awesome blend of hospitality and helpfulness that made us feel right at home in the unfamiliar surrounds of a commercial kitchen.

Kokoda | Coconut milk ceviche | Recipe

This dish is pretty much as excellent as it sounds. The types of fish the recipe recommends were either prohibitively expensive or unsustainable, so we went with local rockfish, which worked out great. The only challenge in making this dish is not feeling sad when you have to drain the acid-cooked fish of all that lime and lemon juice you hand-squeezed! (But don't worry, plenty of that citrus flavor remains. And you don't have to pour out every last drop.) This is a great dish to make ahead for a party, and if you like it spicy feel free to liven it up a bit more than we did.

Curried sweet potato and banana salad | Recipe

It sounds strange, and looks unappetizing, but this dish is a real winner. Bananas and baked sweet potatoes, which I've never seen together in a dish, have a similar mushy texture and earthy sweetness that complement each other quite well. The garlic and curry powder provide a robust, savory counterbalance, which is enlivened by sautéeing the two together to release the flavors and colors of the powder into the oil while making the garlic a bit nutty. (I just learned that this technique is core to Indian cooking, and called chaunk). The seasoning is mixed with a generous hunk of mayonnaise and folded to coat everything. I imagine this lasts long in the fridge; we wouldn't know as it was all gobbled up, the blend of sweet, creamy, and turmeric-heavy spice proving too much to resist.

Palusami | Corned beef and coconut milk baked in taro leaves | Recipe

 Gonna be honest, this didn't seem like it was going to go well. The folks at the Fijian market have to chase us down as we were getting in the car to remind us to take the cans of corned beef, and when we opened them, the smell bore a striking resemblance to cat food. Happily, it was all uphill from there. We'd found beautiful, fresh taro leaves — the above-ground part of the tuber — which worked nicely as the outer layer of this sort of casserole. Mixing with coconut milk and herbs toned down the intensity of the corned beef, and layers of sliced tomatoes and onions added some texture and calmer flavors. Traditionally it's baked by being buried with hot stones, but instead we had a fiercely efficient commercial convection oven at our disposal. The dish is a pretty intense combination of flavors, textures, and colors, and at least as far as I'm concerned, it was pretty good (and in particular not as salty as I'd feared) but not exactly something I'll add to my repertoire.

Steamed taro

This fairly bland and starchy tuber is very high in oxalic acid, the same chemical that makes the back of your teeth feel dry after eating a bunch of spinach. Some people even need to use gloves to handle it so their skin doesn't get irritated. There are a lot of ways to cook taro, and in Fiji they tend to steam it. The kitchen didn't have a true steaming setup, so we improvised, and apparently undercooked, because some people got itchy mouths and throats from it! Lesson learned.

Coconut chutney | Recipe

I might call this more of a slaw or a salad, since it doesn't really resemble either the syrupy or soupy, tangy, highly spiced condiments we're used to carrying that name. Call it what you may, a little pile of this limed-up coconut shred definitely added some flavor and intrigue to the taro. (Also, gotta say this coconut was a lot easier to break and separate from the shell than most I've used, maybe it was fresher than what I normally find?)

Squash and chana dhal | Summer squash and yellow lentil stew | Recipe

I chose this dish partly to accommodate the vegetarians, but also to more wholly represent the Fiji-Indian population. This recipe is a pretty good dhal, not too hot but with a good variety of spices. The squash is a novel addition; in my experience with Indian food, generally a dhal is pretty much legume and onion, with no other vegetable sharing the stage. It would seem I made one error, though: after cooking this dish, I discovered that "chana dhal" is peeled split black chickpeas/garbanzos and commonly used in India, whereas in Fiji, this dish would have been made instead with yellow split peas. My guess is the Fijian dish would probably have been a bit softer and not cooked for as long, but I think this one still turned out quite well.

Roti | Indian flatbread | Recipe

Guess what: if all you've got is 20 minutes, some flour, and optionally a bit of butter, you can make bread! Roti is really as simple as it gets: mix flour with water until it's a decent dough; knead it a bit, then roll it into rounds on a floured surface; then cook for about a minute on each side on a pan or griddle. The butter, added once the roti hits the grill much as you'd put blueberries in a pancake, makes it tastier but isn't necessary. (The variation in colors in the photo is due to the fact that we made them with whole-wheat flour until we ran out, and then turned to white flour.) Huge thanks to our friend Felicity for showing up, strapping on an apron, and jumping in to help my mom whip up a few dozen just in time for dinner!

Cassava cake | Recipe

Throughout the world, we've seen cassava prepared so many ways — steamed, boiled, sauteed, fried, powdered, fermented — and you've surely had it as a dessert at some point in the form of tapioca pudding, but never have I seen this flexible and widespread root in its solid form. The ingredient list is so simple, basically just cassava, sugar, and coconut milk, though it does take labor to peel and grate the root and then squeeze it to extract liquid while retaining starch. But it's a very forgiving recipe, you can tweak the proportions to your taste, and cooking it for a few minutes more or less will pretty much just affect how brown the top is. After a meal with some pretty odd flavor combinations, this mildly sweet and moderately spongy-sticky dish was a nice wrapup.

Kava 

But wait, there's more! A Fijian feast would be quite incomplete without this traditional relaxing drink. We were very lucky to have Monica, a returned Peace Corps volunteer, who taught us how Fijians dry and ferment the root, grind it up, and often drink bowl after bowl. While it's not alcohol, the similarity of the effect leads them to call it "being drunk." It's pretty straightforward to make, just put some amount in cheesecloth, dunk that into water, and massage the lump until your hands start to get numb. It smells no better than mildly decomposed leaves, and tasted pretty bitter, but once the sensation of calm and lethargy starts to hit, it's amazing how easy it is to overlook all that.

18 Reasons generously included local beer (the Fijian stuff doesn't seem to be very good) and some nice, crisp New Zealand sauvignon blanc. Laura pulled together an intriguing playlist, including one type of music that surprisingly combines country, disco, and island sounds in roughly equal proportion. And huge thanks, once again, to the volunteers who spent the evening helping us have such a great time.

We had such a fun time, both in the preparation and the enjoying of the meal, and hope to be able to do more of this sort of collaboration — both with 18 Reasons and other great food-community orgs — in the future!

Meal 57: Estonia

Vikings, Russians, Swedes, Poles, Russians, Germans, Soviets... pretty much, if you were an empire within a few hundred kilometers of Estonia, you probably had dominion over this small country at some point. But things are now going well for the Estonians, who emerged from the USSR with a bang, and now enjoy a strong economy, EU membership, strong civil liberties, and Internet access so pervasive they have online voting. (Thankfully this made finding recipes a lot easier than expected!)

Estonia's at the upper reaches of the Baltic Sea, so the winters are dark and long and cold. Accordingly, the diet is based on hearty grains like barley and rye; root vegetables, like beets and especially potato; and hardy animals like pigs and oily fish from the sea. The weather played the part, with a crisp wind dropping the windchill to the single digits in Fahrenheit. Many of these dishes were prepared in advance, so it took a lot of planning and work starting four days before the meal! Our brave guests for tonight were Catherine, Lech, Jeremy, Caro, Lauren, Elsa, Pete, and Mel.

Magushapu rukkleib | Sweet-and-sour dark rye bread | Recipe

What a crazy bread! Four days of fermenting, with added sugar, make for an extremely complex flavor, that truly is both sweet and sour.  It sure took a lot of work and attention, especially at the point when I had to punch the dough for fifteen minutes. The gluten got so strong, and the rye so sticky, that it stuck to my fist when I lifted my hand, taking the whole bowl with it sometimes. If you love a really flavorful rye, and have a sourdough starter kicking around and a few days' patience, give it a shot!

Kasukas ehk kihiline peedi-heeringasalat | Herring and root-vegetable salad | Recipe (automatically translated)

When I went shopping at the Eastern European-focused Net Cost Market in Coney Island — a single ride on the F train from home! — I got a few salads to take home. I chose an attractively layered one, and didn't realize until I got a taste of herring in it that it's actually the same dish I'd just bought the ingredients for. Well, I'm glad I had the preview, because I wasn't entirely confident in the machine translation of the recipe.

To make this dish, you boil carrots, potatoes, and beets, and layer them with onions and pickles, as well as herring. Apparently a nickname for this is "hidden herring salad." With such a pungently-flavored fish, it doesn't take much to get the flavor throughout the whole bite! A rich layer of mayonnaise and sour cream rounds it all out. I'd say we found this much better than we'd expected, indeed, many people took seconds.

Marineeritud seened | Marinated mushrooms | Recipe

Mushroom picking is a pastime throughout northern Europe, and Estonia is no exception. It's actually surprisingly difficult to find a recipe based on fresh mushrooms, almost all the ones I found started with the canned variety. But I've got a hot tip for you: all you have to do is cut them up and boil them in slightly acidic water for a few minutes, pour your marinade on top, and wait a day. Boom. Tasty snack.

Hapukapsasupp | Sauerkraut soup | Recipe

The surprise winner of the meal! Essentially you simmer half a side of pork spareribs until they fall apart, adding stuff along the way like barley and sauerkraut. The recipe calls for three total hours of cooking, but I kept the heat real low and went for about six hours, until it was time to serve, which made the meat oh so tender and the flavors so nicely blended, with a delightful yet restrained sourness. It's easy to see why this tasty and comforting soup is well regarded as a hangover cure.

Verikäkid | Blood dumplings | Recipe

I'm pretty sure people figured out how to make food out of blood in times when animals were scarce and no bit of nutrition could be wasted. Estonia for many centuries was such a country, and even though they're now doing just fine, blood sausage and its easier-to-make cousin, blood dumplings, are arguably the national food. Yet here, in this traditionally abundant land, it's really hard to find animal blood. Thank goodness for the Internet; turns out Esposito's, at 38th and 9th Ave in Hells Kitchen, sells it like it ain't no thang. Pork blood is kinda how you'd expect: red and dark, kinda gross (I'm getting a bit nauseous even writing this!), with little bits in it (clots?) that you filter out.

I mixed the blood with onions, bacon, and barley flour to make big dark potato-shaped dumplings, which I boiled, cooled, sliced, and pan fried. For all the work and weirdness, they were surprisingly low on flavor, though sour cream and jam on the side helped. I'm guessing I put in too much flour which diluted the flavor? Anyway, not adding this to my repertoire, but glad we gave it a try.

Mulgipuder | Potato-barley porridge | Recipe

The recipe should really be called "Potato-barley porridge with butter-fried onions and bacon!" This recipe is not your common mashed potatoes, where you boil the spuds, remove the water, then mash them. Here, you boil small cubes of potato with barley (which I soaked overnight), then simmer until they're so soft they break up with a spoon, at which point you keep boiling until it's a thick mush. This would be a hearty but boring dish, except for that you serve it with sauteed onions and bacon. I'm not a bacon freak like some people, but I must admit that this was one darn good improvement to the dish. (We then took some leftover onions and bacon the next morning, sautéed them with a few leftover potatoes which I cubed, and turned that into a frittata. Mmm.)

Pasha | Easter cheesecake | Recipe

We're still in Lent so I know this was premature, but I felt compelled to make this traditional Easter dish. Butter, farmers cheese, cream cheese and cream all go into this ridiculously rich dish. However, I messed up on the part where you're supposed to strain with a cheesecloth. Frankly put, almost nothing came out, and instead of a thick, sliceable mass, it stayed quite goopy. I think I messed up with the weighting — next time I really need to use a flat plate, and more weight. Oh well, still very tasty.

Kulich | Yeasted spice cake | Recipe

As if the pasha weren't enough, it's traditionally served on this spiced cake made with a yeast dough. It's supposed to be made in a tall tin or coffee can — Laura's guess is that the rising-up is supposed to represent Jesus' ascent to heaven — but I didn't have that so I used a flat springform. Although that would have made for a lower crust-to-sponge ratio, it's definitely tasty, especially with the rum-based icing I used. I've been enjoying munching on it for breakfast the past few days!

Next week we're off to San Francisco, and our first meal from Oceania with Fiji! It's a special collaboration at 18 Reasons, which we're really excited for.

Photos by Laura Hadden, who prefers Estonian music to Estonian food.

Meal 56: Equatorial Guinea

Despite its name, none of the country lies on the Equator. Most of its land mass is on the African mainland, but the capital's on an island. Its colonial language is Spanish, but French and Portuguese are official languages too. It's the richest country per capita in the continent, thanks to a recent oil discovery, but most of the population lives in poverty.

That's a lot of contradiction for a very small country — its population is barely 700,000. But improbably, we know someone who spent three years living there when his father was the US ambassador to Equatorial Guinea. Stephen was an excellent guide to the culture, politics, and foodways of a country few people have even heard of. The food was pretty much reminiscent of other nearby countries — peanuts, palm products, etc. — though with a bit of Spanish flair and probably more spice.

Our guests on this decidedly un-tropical, post-snowstorm night were Rafi, Laura, Craig, Marcy, Stephen, Chrys, and Jeremy.

Vino de palma | Palm wine

This mildly alcoholic (~2%) beverage is brewed not from coconuts, but rather the same fruit that is pressed for palm oil. It's pretty sweet, almost like a cider, except with that distinctive palm-y flavor. This sort of thing is typically homemade, but Stephen managed to find a bottled version from Nigeria. Since we were out of space in the fridge, we turned to the great outdoors refrigerator to keep them cold — an incredibly incongruous technique given that the temperature never gets below the 70s there.

Pescado con dos salsas | Fish with two sauces | Recipe

All manner of fish, big and small, is thrown on the grill in Equatorial Guinea. By using small mackerel, I split the difference: the mackerel has the rich flavor of a bigger fish, but the small aspect makes for a faster, crisper grilling, reminiscent of Spanish-style sardines. I cut slits in the skin to let the chili-garlic-lime marinade seep in and also to ensure more even cooking. To prevent sticking and to add flavor, the recipe calls for painting the fish with palm oil before grilling. Barbecuing in freezing weather was a bit of an adventure, and I had to clear the snow off the porch to do it, but it was well worth the effort.

Salsa verde | Spinach sauce

Apparently it's common to serve sauces along with grilled fish. The recipe suggested three; I skipped the peanut sauce because that was accounted for with the chicken. Another sauce is a moderately spicy green sauce, traditionally made with a local vegetable for which spinach was a suggested substitute. While the flavors were fine, it was definitely too watery; if you choose to make this I'd cut down on the liquid by half or so.

Salsa de aguacate | Avocado sauce

I found the avocado sauce more interesting and tastier. Avocado is one of those foods that is treated very differently around the world. In the US and in Mexican cuisine it's treated as a vegetable, always eaten raw. In Brazil and several other tropical countries, it's thought of as more of a mild fruit, frequently mixed with sugar and maybe milk into a drink. But in Equatorial Guinea, apparently they cook it! This dish was essentially a gently simmered guacamole, and surprisingly the texture of the fragile avocado held up.

Contrichop con arroz | Chicken in peanut sauce over rice | Recipes: Chicken, rice

This is far from the first time we've had chicken-in-peanut-sauce, but this one has a bit of a twist. The chicken itself is very mildly cooked; this is the most elaborate recipe I found and even so it's little more than onions, chicken, and peanut butter. (Once again, I think it had too much water; in the end I removed the chicken and cooked down the sauce to get it to gravy thickness.)

The spice came not from the sauce, but from the rice — which is cooked in a risotto-like way, by first dry-frying the rice and then adding in water a bit at a time. As with risotto, it makes for a mushy mass. Perhaps this is a technique to have the rice absorb more water and therefore be more filling? Or maybe the cooking culture just doesn't like lids? Hm.

Kongodo | Peanut brittle | Recipe

Turns out, peanut brittle is really easy to make. Essentially you toast peanuts in a dry pan, pour in some sugar mixed into water, and stir constantly until it caramelizes. This recipe adds a tropical twist with "a few drops of lime juice," I used half of a half of a lime but couldn't taste it at all, so if you try it, use more! We enjoyed this sweet treat with a papaya, mango, and guava salad.

Next we're heading to somewhere more appropriate to the chilly weather we've been experiencing...Estonia!

Photos by Laura Hadden, whose favorite part of the meal was a post-dessert donut from the fridge.

Meal 55: Eritrea

This wedge-shaped country on the Red Sea has seen a tumultuous history, especially in the past decade and a half: colonization by Italy after the opening of the Suez Canal, being stapled to its larger neighbor Ethiopia in the 1930s when the Italians invaded there too; a thirty-year war for independence that finally ended in 1991; and since then a highly autocratic government that is intolerant of any dissent. (Oh, and a border war with Ethiopia for good measure in the late '90s.)

But how about the food? Well, frankly, it's not that different from Ethiopian, especially from the north half of that country. The berbere spice blend is a bit different, the clarified butter recipe has some modifications, but when it comes down to it, you're eating spiced stews with tangy, spongy flatbread. Since Ethiopia's coming up soon, I think we'll concentrate on food from the south of that country for the sake of contrast.

Joining us for this eat-with-your-hands Saturday night were Dan, Chelsea, Anna, David, Mia, Mike, and Raven.

Berbere | Spice blend | Recipe

I had thought berbere was a type of pepper — a rich, complex, intriguing pepper at that. But no! It's a really complex blend of spices, including two types of chili pepper (three if you include mild paprika), plus all sorts of spices and powdered aromatics.

As with so many great spice blends, you start by toasting the whole spices and grinding them. (Don't over-toast! I was waiting for the "pop" the recipe prescribed and ended up burning the first batch, so I started over. Nobody likes burnt spices.) Since I had whole cinnamon and black cardamom, I added those to the other stuff the recipe said to toast. Thank goodness for my trusty cheap little coffee grinder; my Cuisinart just isn't up to the task of grinding those hard spices.

This recipe gives you about a cup and a half of a blend that, curiously, has so much character that it could go with so many things. If you're not up for that much personality in one Mason jar, cut in half. And of course, if you don't have an ingredient on hand, substitute and improvise!

Tesmi | Spiced clarified butter | Recipe

Similar in concept to, but a bit differently flavored than, the Ethiopian niter kibbeh. Simply put, throw finely chopped onion and a few spices in melted butter, cook really slowly until the solids fall to the bottom, and strain. Boom, a flavorful and clarified milk fat that will heat much higher than butter before burning.

Keyih tibsi | Beef in quick red stew | Recipe

I've sautéed onions hundreds, maybe over a thousand, times. But never have I done it without oil! It went against my intuition to throw a bunch of beautiful, sliced red onions in the hot pan with nothing in between. Yet with no more stirring than normal sautéeing requires, they softened up nicely...but I did breathe a sigh of relief when the recipe finally let me put a bit of the clarified butter in!

Anyway, the dish was awesome. The sweet onions balanced the rich beef and the complexity of the berbere very well, and the chopped tomatoes made for a nice base. I skipped the adobo and forgot the jalapeño and still the dish had plenty of satisfying flavor. To really carry this over the top, perhaps I'd go for a slightly more tender cut of beef, but I don't feel like we lost a whole lot on that account.

Tsebhi derho | Simmered chicken | Recipe

This is probably the first recipe I've made from a textbook! I appreciated the description, particularly the part that explained that the recipe calls for twelve boiled eggs to represent the Apostles. (NB: I finally found a good recipe for hard-boiled eggs! Put eggs in single layer covered with inch of cold water. Bring to boil, cover and shut flame, wait 10 minutes, then put in ice bath for 5 minutes. Boom.)

Unlike the tibsi, a tsebhi is a slower-cooked stew. I used about two pounds of red onion in it, which helped draw out the sauce more and made for more berbere conveyance. I also cleavered the chicken into several pieces so it would go farther. Another winner!

Alicha | Simmered vegetables | Recipe

A base of cabbage, carrots, and potatoes doesn't promise the most exciting flavors, but leave it to this part of the world to find a great way to make it exciting. Who'd have expected cardamom and nutmeg?! That, plus a green chili, and parsley and basil at the end, gave these otherwise plain veggies a really interesting flavor. But let's be honest, we all just had bites of the alicha as a brief respite from the more intense meat dishes!

Injera | Sourdough sponge bread | Recipe at bottom of Djibouti page

It's the third time I've made this tangy crêpe-like staple, and I sure have the hang of it now. The only big variation is that I ended up not with teff flour, but rather whole-grain teff — which, at about 1/16 inch, is really tiny! I had to painstakingly grind it in my coffee grinder, 1/3-cup at a time, and even then I didn't get it as fine as from a mill. Don't know if it was the fresh-and-not-fully-ground teff, or something else, but wow, this was the best yet! Really easy to cook, almost never stuck back on itself when removing from the pan, and most importantly, tasty.

Boon | Coffee | Procedure

Coffee was discovered as a wild bush in adjacent Ethiopia. In both countries, it's traditional hospitality to roast, grind, and brew coffee for guests, starting from scratch with the green beans. Given that we didn't have the traditional equipment on hand, including an earthenware vessel with a horsehair filter, we improvised. The beans toasted slowly in the pan on the stove, gradually turning tan and then darker brown. Mike and Dan took turns pounding the toasted beans in the mortar and pestle until they were ground "well enough," and then we boiled the coffee with a bit of cardamom. We then strained into cups, and enjoyed, and wondered if we'd ever get to sleep what with all that caffeine.

All the while, we had whole lumps of frankincense — resin from a particular kind of tree, as it turns out — smoldering on coals, which made for quite the heady scent.

Big thanks to Raven for all the help making this, and for that photo at lower-right!

Himbasha | Spiced bread | Recipe

With all the rich smells and flavors from the coffee, this gentle bread is a perfect contrast. Picture focaccia, with a bit less oil, and the addition of some honey and spices. It was lovely with coffee, and also made for a great breakfast snack the next morning.

We're zooming across the African continent for our next meal, to another small and autocratic yet even lesser-known country, Equatorial Guinea.

Photos by Laura Hadden, who likes negotiating incense prices.

Meal 54: El Salvador

After a three-week trip to India, where our senses were entranced with spices, I was afraid that Salvadorean food would prove mild and uninteresting. While it's true that pupusas are a pretty straightforward food, I was surprised by the creative combination of ingredients, such as aged cheese in dessert, cloves in a soup, and coriander seed in a drink. While the food of this small, dense, Pacific-facing nation shares most of its base ingredients with its Latin American neighbors, a few of the ingredients — namely, morro seeds and loroco flowers — are very particular. I had to ask around at about a half a dozen markets in Sunset Park before I finally was pointed to yet another market with a Mexican flag in front...that had them! The clue was that it was down the street from a Salvadorean restaurant.

Joining us for this first nosh of the year were all couples: Jessica and Alex, Kate and Jason, Michelle and JJ, and Clara and Jesse.

Horchata | Spiced grain drink | Recipe (Spanish)

You've probably encountered horchata as an opaque, milky-white, moderately gritty, cinnamony drink at a Mexican restaurant. Turns out this drink, whose name derives from the Latin word for "barley," has all sorts of variations around the Hispanic world, with pretty much the only thing in common being a starchy base with spices.

The Salvadorean variety is quite distinctive; as you can see in the above photo it has many components, all of which are toasted and ground individually. On the bottom is morro seed, which comes from a very-hard-to-crack fruit. Next come cocoa, nutmeg, peanuts, coriander seed, cinnamon, allspice, sesame seeds, and finally rice flour. This is then mixed with water, allowed to sit for a bit, and strained before sweetening, chilling and drinking.

The flavor is notably more complex and earthier than a Mexican horchata, or at least the kinds I've had; it's mostly the depth and richness from the morro seeds but you also appreciate the complex interplay of so many spices you rarely see at the same time.

Sopa de patas | Hoof and tripe stew | Recipe

I'm not quite sure what Salvadoreños do with the rest of the cow, because this stew, using some of the most humble parts of the animal, is just about the only beef-based recipe I came across. (If you're familiar with the cuisine of this part of the world, you may know this type of dish as mondongo.) As with so many dishes made of odd parts, it's a long and slow process to cook the hooves long enough that the cartilage and other stuff simply falls off the bones. Between this and the sprinkling of tripe, you don't actually end up with much protein to chew on; what really makes this soup is the rich broth and the variety of vegetables that populates it. That, and the relajo spice mix; in my homemade version, I might have used a bit too much clove and not enough of the other ingredients like chili and sesame seed, but I liked it!

Pupusas | Stuffed corn tortillas | Recipes: pupusas and pork filling

The pupusa is certainly the best known Salvadorean food in the US. It uses the same lime-treated corn that's used for tortillas, but instead of being pressed really thin, it's stuffed with a filling, pressed a little thicker, and then griddled for a few minutes. We made two types. Queso con loroco was a mix of melty and hard cheese with a particular type of edible flower bud. Chicharron, or fried pork, was made from a pork butt (aka pernil) that I cooked very slowly on the stovetop with a bit of tomato sauce (see below); when it was fork-tender I shredded it, cooked it until it started frying itself, mixed in a bit more sauce, and ran it through the meat grinder.

I wouldn't call these pupusas the most beautiful or successful thing I've every made. I probably got the water proportion in the dough wrong which led to cracking edges, and they were honestly pretty bland. Maybe I didn't use enough filling but I was already failing at keeping the filling fully inside. Hmph.

Salsa roja | Tomato sauce | Recipe

This simple tomato sauce, on the other hand, was quite tasty. I made it with summer-ripe tomatos I'd cached away in the freezer. It would have been preferable to use a food mill to make it smooth. Absent that, I used my immersion blender, which was convenient but incorporated more air and hence turned the sauce a bit more orange.

Curtido | Cabbage slaw | Recipe

This is the universal Salvadorean condiment, a simple shred of cabbage and carrots seasoned with vinegar and allowed to ferment slightly. It would probably have been rather tastier had I made some homemade pineapple vinegar as is apparently very common; as it was, my substitute attempt with apple cider vinegar fell a bit flat.

Oh, notice also the dollop of cream on that plate. Crema salvadoreña is about as thick as a soured cream could be and still be pourable, and it has a rich and almost funky culture flavor.

Quesadilla | Aged-cheese poundcake | Recipe

Quesadilla is a portmanteau, a mashup of the words queso (cheese) and tortilla. And as there are two types of tortilla — the Mexican flatbread and the Spanish baked omelette — there's a quesadilla that corresponds to each. The former is, of course, essentially the Mexican version of a grilled cheese sandwich. But the latter, which is enjoyed in El Salvador, is in fact a dessert that closely resembles a poundcake, except with cultured cream as well as an aged cheese that closely resembles parmesan in flavor. Despite its status as a dessert, it's not very sweet, and in fact the savoriness and saltiness of the cheese comes through quite clearly.

We're traveling next week, but the weekend after we're zooming to the Red Sea for Eritrean food!