Meal 69: Guinea-Bissau

If you know anything about Guinea-Bissau, chances are it's the dubious media-granted title of "the world's first narco-state" and the ensuing coup. Conveniently located just a few days' boating from South America, the small former Portuguese colony has become a waystation for drugs en route to Europe. The army not only consents but participates, increasingly so since last year's coup. Not surprisingly, the money hasn't reached the people; Guinea-Bissau is among the least-developed countries in the world. While the country is poor, it does offer some rich culinary opportunities. Not surprisingly, given its coastal location, much of the dishes are fish and seafood based. Due to scheduling confusion and illness, half our guests couldn't make it, so we had an intimate crowd of Karen, Ryan, and Sarah-Doe.

Cashew rum

Did you know that the cashew is actually the seed of a fruit? It's known as the cashew apple, and looks like this:

The Portuguese found cashews in Brazil, and as far as I can tell, wherever the Portuguese colonized, they brought cashews with them. In fact, the economy of Guinea-Bissau has become so dependent on cashew farming that a recent price dip has been wreaking havoc on an already fragile economy.

While cashews are a cash crop traded around the world, the fruit -- which is tasty and tangy and packed with vitamins -- bruises easily and doesn't transport well. But one thing that could transport, but for some reason we don't see in temperate climes, is cashew rum, the brandy made from fermenting and distilling the fruit. We found some in Goa on our trip to India in January, they call it feni there, and it has a distinctive and almost cloying tropical-fruit aroma. We brought some back, and had no clue what we'd do with it, until I read in a travel guide that cashew rum is popular in Guinea-Bissau. So I whipped up some hibiscus drink, poured in some rum, and it was a great combo, the tartness really cut through the strength of the rum to just be all around satisfying.

Bolinhos de mancarra com peixe | Fish and peanut balls | Recipe at end of post

A large portion of the recipes I found were for fried fish balls, so for the first time in months I pulled out the deep fryer. Oh boy, was it worth it. The unlikely combination of fishiness and nuttiness works so well. And the texture was an extra bonus: a dense and moist inside with a crisp outside, and just enough grease to make you want to take a sip of your drink and eat another! As you'll see from the recipe below, it's a fair amount of work, but I don't regret it a bit.

Pitche-patche de ostras | Oyster stew | Recipe

Oysters in Africa? Apparently so! If you happen to have a bunch of oysters laying around, and you don't feel like eating them raw, it's hard to think of a simpler way to prepare them in a tasty way. This is, naturally, a pretty soft and filling food: pale, mushy oyster and plump, white rice in a clear broth. But the chili and smattering of veggies give it just enough color and bite to make for a surprisingly satisfying soup.

Frango com bagique | Chicken with spinach | Recipe

A pretty simple dish, essentially chicken gently simmered in red palm oil with greens. (I did quite a bunch of sleuthing which led me to come to the not-firm conclusion that bagique is sorrel leaves, but since I couldn't find any sorrel, I just followed the recipe and went with spinach.) I marinated the chicken in the oil and onion mixture for a while, maybe it helped a bit. If you don't want to do all that pounding you could save yourself some effort and grind it in a food processor. The cooking time is an underestimate, I probably needed an extra 20 minutes, which you could probably cut out if you put a lid on the pot. A decent dish, and a fine introduction to African cooking that requires only one specialty ingredient.

Mandioca assada com xarope de cana | Grilled cassava with cane syrup | Recipe

When life gives you sugar cane and a bland, mealy root vegetable, I guess you should heat up the former and roast the latter and mix them. I dunno, this didn't do it for me, baked is so flavorless that even with the syrup on top I kinda felt like I was eating a whole lot of nothing.

~~~

As promised, here's the recipe for the deep-fried goodness!

Bolinhos de mancarra com peixe

Fish and peanut balls

Recipe adapted from Cuisines of Portuguese Encounters by Cherie Hamilton

1 cup shelled roasted peanuts (or a few cups in the shell) 2.5 pounds mackerel fillets (for me, that was three medium-small fish) Juice of 1 lemon 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1/2 onion, sliced thin 1 tablespoon vegetable oil 2 medium onions, grated A few sprigs parsley, chopped 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg Vegetable oil for frying

Grind peanuts in a food processor and set aside. Stop a bit short of making peanut butter.

Mix lemon juice, salt, pepper, and onion in a wide dish, add the fillets, flip the fillets to coat them, and let marinate for at least 30 minutes. Heat the tablespoon of oil in a skillet or frying pan (a non-stick one would be convenient), and fry the fillets until brown on both sides; discard the marinade. Don't despair if the fillets break up. Remove the fillets to a paper-towel-lined plate; once they're cool enough to handle, flake the fish into a bowl. Start heating up your frying oil; I went for about 350 degrees in a deep fryer. (Note: this is a great article about deep frying, it focuses on how many times you can re-use oil but contains many great tips.)

Add onions, parsley, salt, and the egg to the bowl, along with the peanuts you've ground. Mix everything together with your hands. Form into ping-pong size balls, paying a bit of care to pack the mass and smooth the edges. You should get about 30. In my small home fryer I cooked four or five at a time, jostling halfway through to ensure even browning. (If the balls break up partway through, do something to help the balls stay together more: maybe another egg, or cornstarch. All is not lost, you can take the broken fried bits and re-combine them in with the rest of the mixture to start afresh and extra-crispy.) Remove to a paper towel. It's your choice whether to serve hot or cold; it's obligatory to serve with a drink!

Meal 68: Guinea

Teeny dried shrimp. Pre-cooked fonio grain. Okra powder. Unlike shopping for Ghana, this time Diaby had everything I needed. As I got to talking with the man behind the counter -- finally, for the first time in a half-dozen trips, we broke the ice! -- it turns out he's from Guinea. (I was startled to hear the name of his city, Mamou. That's pronounced the same as the family name for my grandmother who passed away last month. I suspect she had no idea she had something in common with a West African trading town!)

This meal owes a big debt of gratitude to the really wonderful Guinée Gourmande, which helpfully divides recipes regionally and also has some handy commentary and articles giving color about ingredients that bare recipes normally don't. If only every country had at least one site with such thoughtfully organized and lovingly produced content!

So, between the Guinean shopkeeper and the blog, here's hoping this meal turned out authentically! (And apologies for the sparse photos, the camera wasn't working so these are from a phone.)

Djindjan | Ginger drink | Recipe

Another source I've been increasingly cross-referencing for local recipes is the Peace Corps. Many (most? all?) volunteers get a cookbook as part of their training, which tend to be adapted for each country. While many of the recipes tend to be creative adaptations of local ingredients and cooking methods to create comfort foods, there's usually some for cooking what most people tend to eat around there. And hence, this recipe for a ginger drink. This recipe had me at "this tastes just like the stuff you get in little bags" -- I know that it's common in Africa to sell drinks in plastic bags, so I was sold. I'm no judge of whether it really did taste like a bagged beverage, but it was sure tasty! The spices and the citrus round out the sharpness of the ginger very well. Oh, and this stuff mixes up great with rum.

Kansiyé 'Mafe' | Smoked chicken and beef stewed in peanut sauce | Recipe

I couldn't find a smoked chicken, nor a recipe for how they smoke chicken in West Africa, so I winged it (haha) a few days before with a bundle of hickory chips. Turns out it's not too hard to do on a gas grill, though it took four hours and ended up a bit less smoky than I'd hoped. I'll keep working on my technique. Though the title of the recipe doesn't mention it, it's as much beef as chicken, and the shank meat I picked up at the farmers market was so flavorful. For the vegetables, I threw in cassava and a big eggplant, and it was a substantial and tasty stew, one of my favorites of all the African cooking thus far. You could easily make this with a plain, unsmoked chicken (just increase the cooking time for the stew), and if you don't have the ground dried shrimp it's not a huge deal (maybe use some Thai fish sauce to substitute?).

Gouiki | Mashed plantains

The same recipe explains how to make this side, which is pretty easy. Just make sure to buy green plantains and not the ripe ones. The texture and technique is a lot like mashed potatoes, but the taste is entirely different.

Mangoé rafalari | Susu-style mango stew | Recipe

I've never seen a mango stew before, so I had to try this one. It's got many of the familiar elements of West African cooking, like the dry-smoked carp (so many bones to pick out when flaking it!) and red palm oil (which I now buy by the half-gallon), but throwing the mangoes, whole, into the pot was a new one for me. I probably overcooked the mangoes, because I followed the French version of the recipe, which doesn't have the note on the bottom of the English one saying that the types of mangoes that are exported tend to be the softer ones that don't need as much cooking. Hm. Anyway, it packs a pretty pungent flavor-punch, between the tang of the fruit, the salt of the fish, and the richness of the oil.

Fonio | Info (in French)

It tolerates poor soil and erratic rain, has high nutritional value, and tastes pretty good. So why hasn't fonio become the next quinoa? Turns out that this member of the millet family has tiny grains with husks that are really hard to remove -- the traditional method involves mixing with sand for grit, beating in a mortar and pestle repeatedly, and then washing with a lot of water (which kinda eliminates the whole "good where there's little water" thing). But fortunately, a Senegalese engineer developed a machine that successfully hulls the little seeds. It's still cost-prohibitive for farmers to buy directly, but inexpensive enough that a relatively small amount of outside funding could make a big difference in people's lives and nutrition.

At least in Guinea, fonio is eaten like couscous. It's a bit labor-intensive to cook; even the "pre-cooked" version first is plumped up with boiling water, steamed twice in cheesecloth, blended with a bit of okra powder to make it malleable (when you're eating with your hands it sure helps if it sticks together), and steamed once more. The texture was like couscous with a little more tooth, and it had a nice and mild nuttiness. If you happen to see fonio somewhere, give it a shot, before everyone discovers it in like ten years.

Tarte caramélisée aux mangues et bananes | Caramel tarte with mangos and bananas | Recipe (in French)

I know that dessert really isn't a thing throughout much of Africa, but sometimes I just gotta make something. This inventive recipe exhibits the legacy of the French by making what's essentially a tarte tatin, but instead of apples, it's tropical fruits. I used demerara sugar for a rich and tasty caramel, and the crust recipe is easy and forgiving. Note that if you feel weird about putting your pan (I even used a springform) directly on the stovetop for the caramel-making, you could just as easily do that in a pot and pour it into the pan before baking.

The next meal takes us to the adjacent, and very similarly named, Guinea-Bissau.

Meal 67: Ghana

When I asked for fermented cornflour at Owa Afrikan Market, the kindly shopkeeper replied, "Kenkey? Oh, that's from Ghana. We're a Nigerian store!" I didn't have much better luck at Diaby African Market, which is run by shopkeepers from Cote d'Ivoire who are equally friendly but equally devoid of kenkey. Just as I'd begun to grow a bit fatigued of what seem to be a limited range of very common African staples -- smoked fish, palm oil, cassava, yam, plantain, peanuts -- I was so happy to discover first-hand some real regional variation that I quickly overcame the disappointment of not finding what I was looking for. (Plus, as you'll see below, I got creative and found my way around it.)

Our guest of honor was Jessica, whose family is from Ghana and spent several years there. She cooked up some amazing spicy plantains! Also on hand were Anthony, Angad, Melanie, Christen, and Ignacio.

Shito | Dried shrimp pepper sauce | Recipe

In addition to being a word that makes any English speaker giggle, shito means hot pepper. It also refers, by synecdoche, to any spicy sauce, whether fresh or preserved. The fresh version, on the right, is so simple as to not require a recipe (onion, tomato, hot pepper, salt, pepper, food processor, done), while this one is both more complex and also not as spicy, as the bulk of the volume is actually pungent dried shrimp. As far as I can tell, this condiment, which can also go by the confusing name "black pepper," is like the ketchup of Ghana. It goes well with dishes made of red palm oil and other strong flavors, adding both depth and zing, but I made the mistake a few days later of adding it to a French-style braised chicken and that wasn't the beset combo.

Kenkey | Steamed fermented corn dumplings | Recipe

Since I couldn't find the pre-fermented cornflour, I had to figure out how to make it myself. The traditional method is to simply mix some cornflour and water, leave it for a few days, and let the naturally-occurring yeast and bacteria in the air land and multiply. Unfortunately, whenever I've done that in New York, whatever lands on the surface makes it smell like bad cheese and taste worse. But I had an idea! The recipe I used for injera suggested using a sourdough starter to give it the right microbes, beating the stuff in the air to the punch. So I mixed in a bit of my sourdough starter with the corn, and the next day, I had delightfully sour corn mush. After that, I followed the recipe to heat the mush and then steam it, though I might have cooked it too long because it came out rather firm. A nice, tangy starch that's different from the usual fufu!

Grilled Tilapia | Recipe

Similar to what I made for the Cote d'Ivoire meal, I slashed up some tilapia, marinated it with an onion-chili-ginger mixture, and grilled it up. The flesh didn't turn out as well and kind of came off the bone as much rather than firm flesh. Maybe I didn't have the grill up high enough. But it was definitely tasty, and went well with the kenkey.

Palaver Sauce | Spinach stew | Recipe

Why this stew of greens, red palm oil and peanut butter is named for the Portuguese word for a discussion or a talk is the subject of much speculation and no conclusion. It's stranger still to me because the core ingredients show no influence of European or new world foods. In any event, I made this with spinach rather than trying to make a hard chunk of long-frostbitten greens work, and used the ubiquitous dry-smoked fish for flavoring. Happily, I also have an African basil plant growing in the back yard, which Jessica confirmed is the right seasoning for this dish. This strongly-flavored and -textured stew had a good foil in some grilled yam.

Kelewele | Spicy plantain bits

Ignore anything I said above and just concentrate on this part. I followed Jessica's instructions to get plantains with blackened skin, they were so ripe I had to keep them outside to avoid keeping the fruit flies inside! She showed up with a marinade of ginger, chili, and citrus, cut the plantains into little pieces, and marinated them. Then she fried them to within an inch of burning, so they were so amazingly sweet and caramelized yet still gingery and tangy and a bit spicy. This was by far the hit of the meal!

Jessica also brought a delicious ginger drink. Once again, thanks to her for making our meal so special and authentic!

Laura apologizes for the quality of the photos, the lens she normally uses for food photography needs repair.

Meal 66: Greece

Greece has seen myriad civilizations, invaders, and influences over the millennia, and a climate in which most anything can grow, all of which have contributed to a cuisine that is both abundantly flavored and for the most part extremely healthy. It's also built to be sampled in abundance, with a wide range of mezedes for nibbling and sharing. Fortunately, most of these dishes didn't need to be served piping hot, which made it a little less insane to prepare ten dishes in a medium-sized kitchen with one helper (thanks so much, Neil!).

Our setting for this Nosh certainly encouraged relaxed enjoyment of the Earth's bounty: the porch of our friends' home in Asbury Park, on the Jersey Shore, on a very pleasant summer evening (thanks so much, Jenifer and Phil!).

Fasolada | Bean and vegetable soup | Recipe

In our culinary journey through time, this humble vegan soup of beans and vegetables brings us both to the very beginning and the most recent days of the history of this part of the world. The Minoan civilization, which preceded the Greeks, grew legumes -- this soup, save for a few New World additions such as tomato, is pretty much their direct legacy. Nowadays, with the Greek economy in a shambles, this soup is as popular as ever, as a big pot is cheap to make and fills the family's stomach. The flavors are simple, with few seasonings or fancy techniques to hide the true flavor of the ingredients, so if you're making this dish as a matter of recreation, make sure to get high-quality beans and vegetables, and take your time simmering to draw out the flavors.

While fasolada is considered by many to be the national dish of Greece, I don't know if I've ever seen it at a Greek restaurant; I've only known avgolemono, the egg-lemon soup that nursed me back from many a college hangover. Why is such a common dish, about which so many Greek food blogs tell deep stories, barely seen on menus of Greek restaurants in the US?

Horiatiki salata | Country salad | Recipe

Unlike the soup, this classic Greek salad is known around the world. The real version, apparently, has no vinegar or lemon juice, it's simply vegetables, feta, and olive oil. This one was pretty good, especially with the farmer's market tomatoes, but unfortunately the cucumber was fairly bitter. (Too bad there was no tartness to balance it out!)

Horiatiko psomi | Country sourdough bread | Recipe

I once read (but can't find again, alas) that a good sourdough starter is so cherished in Greece that saints are invoked during its cultivation, and that despite modern science, many Greek homemakers insist it's a magical, spiritual substance. While I'm all cool with the symbiotic relationship of those yeast and bacteria, to me the magic of Greek bread is the additions of little splashes of milk, honey, and olive oil, which turn mere leavened dough into a springy treat with just enough crunch and tooth to stand up to dipping, spreading, dunking, and straight-up nibbling. The protein and oil make the dough more forgiving to work with, and also crisp up more impressively in a standard home oven. Noted for future baking! Since our hosts weren't going to make bread anytime soon, I figured I should double the recipe, and use the whole five-pound sack of bread flour. By the morning, only one of the five loaves remained.

Skordalia | Garlic potato dip | Recipe

Is this a really garlicky, oily, cold version of mashed potatoes? Or is this a cavalry of garlic (after all, "skorda" means garlic in Greek) hitching a ride on potatoes and oil onto your bread and into your mouth? Either way, it's a surprisingly simple dish to make, and lends itself to endless modification. Creativity, too, because we didn't have a mortar and pestle handy for mashing the garlic, so I put it into a ziploc bag and pounded it a few dozen times with an empty wine bottle. Just don't freak out about all the olive oil in the recipe. If you've got good quality stuff, it'll really make the dip sing.

Alevropita | Feta-olive oil tart | Recipe

From the northwestern reaches of the country comes this dish that's equal parts simple, tasty, and ridiculous. If you can make pancake batter from scratch, you've already got more than enough skill to put this together. If you like feta and flatbreads and the taste of olive oil, you'll eat the whole pan. And with nearly a half a cup of olive oil and a quarter-stick of butter with a little more than a cup of flour, you'll probably be half grinning and half cringing as you make the dish. Even without the feta this would be a tasty starch halfway to fry dough, but with the cheese, it's just super good.

Piperies gemistes me feta | Feta-stuffed peppers | Recipe

Macedonia, the covering much of the north of Greece (not to be confused with The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia directly to the north), is apparently the most exciting place for food in a country that seems pretty stimulating all over. It's a real convergence location between Balkan, Greek, and Turkish, and also has the legacy of a once-sizable Jewish community. These peppers themselves mark a convergence of spicy, creamy, and toasty, making use of the broiler twice: once to soften the peppers, and another to heat the cheese filling to brown. Greece is, of course, a wine country, but if you ever need a Greek dish that goes well with beer, look no further.

Kolokitho keftedes | Zucchini fritters | Recipe

Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, is the home of what is essentially a latke (i.e., potato pancake), but made instead of zucchini. Poor Neil spent upward of an hour shredding by hand the two largest zucchini I'd ever seen in my life, along with onion, carrot, and other ingredients. And all that yellow in the photo? That's extra virgin olive oil, in abundance. The fritters were darn good, especially accompanied by the tzatziki I whipped up (Greek yogurt, shredded cucumber and garlic, mint, salt, done). The only problem with making them for a crowd is that you're spending valuable minutes right around service time standing impatiently around a skillet, waiting for them to cook -- out of all the dishes we made, this is the only one that held up our starting at the appointed hour.

Keftedes me saltsa domata | Lamb meatballs in tomato sauce | Recipe

"What do you do with this stuff?" asked the butcher at Fairway while handing me the ground lamb. "I had it once at an Arab stand and it was weird." Well, dear friend who doesn't enjoy what he's selling, you might enjoy this dish as a re-introduction to the other red meat. The lamb is first blended with spices, especially the ever-present oregano, then fried as little meatballs, and finally nestled in with a tomato sauce -- which I made from fresh tomatoes from the farmers market rather than canned. This one was a winner, especially with the little kids!

Karithopita | Olive oil walnut cake | Recipe

For what the EU called its 50th birthday, the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, all its members sent two cakes representative of their national cuisines. This is one of the two Greece sent. The cake starts out rich enough, with a cup of olive oil, lots of walnuts, and semolina and cake flours. But the real treat comes when it's drenched in a lemony syrup -- so much so that you have to pour it a third at a time to make sure it all absorbs. Not too hard to make, and really nice, would make for an excellent coffee cake and is also great with a dollop of Greek yogurt.

Galaktoboureko | Milk custard phyllo cake | Recipe

I've already made baklava for Armenia, but I felt the need to make something with that flaky phyllo dough for this meal. Behold this amazing pastry, made of an astonishing 10 cups of milk, seven eggs, and a half pound of butter. As long as you're patient and attentive with the stirring, it's actually pretty easy to make, and it's really tasty, a little more subtle and less heavy than baklava. The only tweak I made was to replace about half of the sugar and water in the syrup with honey, which I would definitely do again. The Ottoman influence on Greek cuisine is clear here: "boureko," meaning stuffed pastry, comes from the Turkish "börek."

Meal 64: Georgia

“In the center of Tbilisi, the capital, there is a statue of a woman with a sword in one hand, and wine in the other. It shows how, if you come in war, the Georgians are so fierce the women as well as the men will fight you. But if you come in peace, you’re invited to feast.” Throughout the evening, on our friend Mark’s rooftop in Williamsburg, was punctuated by two periodic events: the rumbling of the elevated J train a few feet away, and stories from Mark, our tamada -- toastmaster -- as well as host.

Time spent in Georgia qualified Mark to guide our meal; having attended a supra, a feast, with President Saakashvili lent him all the more authority to regale us with tales of strength, folly, and complexity, usually leading to a moral and always finished with a toast. These stories of a distant and ancient land, washed down with abundant wine, enriched the meal nearly as much as the walnuts, herbs, and spices.

Even if you don’t have a tamada from Tbilisi to guide your meal, do yourself a favor and get to know Georgian food. Despite its history as a former Soviet republic -- and homeland of Joseph Stalin! -- it has nothing to do with sour creamand pickled fish! Its cuisine is much closer to Persian and Central Asian, overflowing with vegetables, nuts, fresh flavors, and a wide variety of meats. The cuisine is most authentically enjoyed in abundance: Mark’s a generally easygoing guy, so I took it quite seriously when he warned me that if the table were anything short of crammed full of food, it’d be a failure.

Enormous thanks to Justin and Kathryn, who braved a hot and small kitchen to make this absurdly ambitious feast get started before sunset!

Note that we put all the food out on the table at once, so rather than a list of courses, I’ve ordered these roughly in the order in which I prepared them.

Tarkhun | Tarragon drink | Recipe

Georgian cuisine is huge on spices and especially herbs. Whether dried or fresh, just about every recipe is enhanced with flavors from either the backyard or the trade caravan. In fact, Georgians are so crazy about their herb flavors that they even drink them, as evidenced by this drink made of tarragon. It’s quite an experience to drink in the essence of an herb, and we picked up a milky aspect along with the particular clear intensity that makes tarragon so lovely. (Note, also, that this is the first Nosh in which I used food coloring! Had to make it authentic, right?)

Pkhali | Spinach-walnut paste | Recipe

 

It’s a shame I couldn’t find pomegranate in the supermarket, because these nuggets would have looked even lovelier with the particular topping. Anyway, if I had to choose a dish that captured the essence of Georgian cuisine, I’d probably go with pkhali. It has the ubiquitous walnuts, leans heavily on fresh vegetables, and incorporates a whole lot of herbs and spices. It’s also a devil of a name to pronounce! I found pkhali pretty intense, though when I reread the recipe I saw that it’s intended to be spread on bread rather than eaten straight, which makes a whole lot of sense.

Khachapuri | Cheese bread | Recipe

If pkhali is the most representative of Georgian cuisine, khachapuri is arguably the best-known and definitely was the crowd favorite. It’s essentially pizza without the tomato sauce: a bready boat-shaped dough with a filling of sulguni cheese (kinda like mozzarella but marinated in brine), butter, and egg. There are several versions of khachapuri, this one, known as Adjarian, is supposed to have a barely-cooked egg sitting on top so you can dip the edges into the yolk, but time and logistical difficulties made that impossible. The crowd didn’t seem to mind, in fact I didn’t make nearly enough to satisfy demand! You can probably find sulguni at a Russian or Eastern European market, otherwise you could probably use mozzarella or a stringy Mexican cheese like oaxaca. You just might want to salt the filling a bit more to compensate for the lack of brine.

Shotispuri | Baton bread | Recipe

I figured it’d be nice to have some bread to go with all we were having, and this baton-shaped bread was nice enough, I guess, but not worth the effort. My advice would be to just focus on the khachapuri, it’d be nearly impossible to make too much of it.

Badrijani Nigvzit | Fried eggplant rolls with garlic-walnut filling | Recipe

Wow, these were tasty. Garlic and walnuts are an unexpected but great combination, sharp and brash versus meaty and deep. Put that inside strips of eggplant fried dark brown. Who doesn’t like intense flavors wrapped fried things? A real winner, this would make for a great potluck dish. You could replace the fried eggplant strips with marinated peppers or even strips of cucumber if you wanted to avoid the calories and hassle of the eggplant.

 Satsivi | Roast chicken with walnut sauce | Recipe

There’s two genius things going on with this recipe. First off, this is the best advice for roasting a chicken I’ve ever read. Trussing is actually pretty easy -- no needle needed, just about three feet of twine to tighten up the bird. The genius, though, is roasting on high heat for ten minutes on each side, like, thigh to the bottom of the pan, then returning to legs-up for the last 40 minutes at regular heat. The result was a perfectly cooked bird. Oh, and the butter basting helped.

I’d have been happy just to tuck into that well-roasted chicken, but the sauce made it sublime. It’s essentially pounded walnuts (walnuts! again!) with onion, a little flour to thicken, and chicken stock, reduced until you can just about slather it over the chicken. I’m pretty sure I’ll make this rich and oh-so-tasty dish again. Bonus: it’s just as good cold as it is hot.

Chakhokhbili | Braised chicken and tomato | Recipe

While the summer doesn’t afford pomegranates, it sure offers tomatoes, and this is a great alternative if you’re looking for something to do with the abundance in your garden or farmer’s market and don’t want to make pasta sauce. This recipe is so easy you can practically tweet it: brown the chicken legs, add an onion, add a lot of tomatoes, braise until meat’s falling off the bones, throw in herbs, serve. The braising makes this take longer you want for an easy after-work supper, but it’s not a lot of work, so if you have the time, treat yourself! (Thanks to Kathryn for chopping all those tomatoes!)

Lobio | Kidney bean salad | Recipe

It says something about Brooklyn that I couldn’t find a simple bag of dry kidney beans in the two food shops closest to my house, but both of them had several types of quinoa. When I made it over to Mark’s, his roommate Justin volunteered to go to the supermarket down the block to get some, and he was so happy to find it he bought two bags. So we made a lot of this salad. It was pretty good, but not particularly awesome; perhaps in the rush to finish up the meal we accidentally missed a spice or put in too little onion.

Khinkali | Georgian “soup” dumplings | Recipe

I think I’m getting better at my kitchen pacing, after so many meals, but I waited too long to get start started on this dish, the quintessential Georgian accompaniment to beer. (Or is it that beer is the quintessential accompaniment to khinkali?). I don’t like making things with rolled-out dough, and  I didn’t have a scale on me and the recipe was all based on weight so I had to completely wing the proportions, and ended up making too little dough. Then when it came to making what are supposed to be cute little meat-filled parcels, they looked pretty ugly, too small -- and then when boiled, many of them broke instead of keeping the juiciness from the cooked meat within. So the dumplings came out late, were misshapen, and there were too few. Oh well, it was worth a try, but I gotta get better at my dumpling-making because so many cultures do this sort of thing. Any tips?

Shashlik | Barbecue | Recipes: marinade, savory sauce, hot sauce

This was the other major screw-up -- I misread the recipe when making my shopping list and got ground lamb instead of chunks! I made the most of the situation by forming the ground lamb into balls, and marinating it in the copious quantity of onions as specified. (Thank goodness for the food processor, shredding 2.5 pounds of onions by hand would have been brutal.) I asked Kathryn to put them on the kabob skewers, but that quickly proved to be impossible, so we instead threw them on the grill directly -- and, despite being completely the wrong format, they were delicious. Several sauces accompanied: an herb-and-tomato sauce, a hot sauce (I used those fat red peppers rather than jalapenos as specified), and a bottled sour plum sauce.

Ghvinisa da tsqlis | Wine and water

Along with the tarragon drink, we washed the food down with Borjomi, a fairly salty mineral water with reputed health benefits, and of course plenty of wine. Georgia’s been making wine for millennia, but apparently the quality took a big hit in the Stalin years. Uncle Joe, as they call him, was actually a big promoter of Georgia’s wine, but his preference was for sweet wine, so they made sweet wine. It’s only in recent years that drier, more complex wines have come to market -- and, in fact, some of them are quite good, definitely fruity and with a moderate terroir. Don’t be surprised if you see a Georgian wine or two at your local wine shop one of these days, because we found one at ours! While our preference was for red, you just might see a special wine called Pheasant's Tears, which is called "amber," distinctively yellower than white wine.

Laura keeps a list of countries that weren’t really on her radar but that she’s now interested to visit after eating the food -- Cape Verde, Comoros...and now Georgia! Coming up is a swing of the pendulum, a cuisine that's familiar yet rather ignored in the culinary canon: Germany.