Meal 51: Dominican Republic

Another Thanksgiving weekend, another nosh in San Francisco!  To go with the gorgeous weather, the calendar aligned on Dominican Republic, the second-largest country of the Caribbean. While the Bay Area is no stranger to foods from Spanish-speaking lands, there's few Caribbeans around, so these dishes made for something more of a novelty here than they would have been in Dominican-immigrant-heavy New York.

Thanks to the kind folks at Hattery, I had a big kitchen to discover the intriguing Dominican way of cooking, which was just, well, different. I used a grand total of one onion with none of that going into the stew, scrubbed every cube of meat with lime halves, and boiled rice at full hilt rather than gently simmering. And that's not even mentioning the oddness of a dessert built around kidney beans.

Around the table are Jon, Bryan, Alley, Suj, Drew, Greg, Emily, Shilpi, and my mom and dad! It was great to catch up with three friends in town from Portland, and of course to share the joy with my parents, cousin, and future cousin-in-law.

Sancocho de siete carnes | Seven-meat stew | Recipe

Can you even name seven meats? Well, it's kinda cheating since there are actually four types of pork (cubes, ribs, ham hocks, and longaniza sausage), plus beef, chicken, and goat. This is a truly rustic stew, with little more than meats plus some whole chunks of vegetables. The trick is putting in the longer-cooking items first, and gradually building up the pot, and getting a good longaniza since that's where the spices will come from.

The result was a really satisfying stew, with tender and flavorful chunks of meat and a sauce worth spooning on top of everything. Given the fun textures of the different root vegetables, it's worth making the effort to find them, especially the true yam, which isn't the same as a sweet potato. If you make this recipe, just be sure to give yourself plenty of prep time, it takes longer than you think to scrub each and every piece of meat! Or if you don't, at least take away the lesson to cut whole ears of corn into rounds, it's a fun addition and much more dramatic than tossing in individual kernels.

Guandules con coco | Pigeon peas in coconut milk | Recipe

Pigeon peas don't seem like much more than pale little lumps when dry, but once cooked they exhibit a rich caramel color and an unexpected smoky taste. They're often served in rice, much like rice and beans, but there's more you can do. This vegetarian preparation uses coconut milk and squash to give a more tropical feel. I'm kicking myself for neglecting to eat the final version, but reports are that even the carnivores thought this was a good dish.

Arroz blanco | White rice | Recipe

The goal with Dominican rice is to get concón, layers of crispiness mixed in with loose, fluffy kernels. Well, I got the loose and fluffy part all right, but nothing approaching crispy. Maybe I didn't let the oil sear the bottom of the pot long enough, or maybe that huge pot was just too big to deal with. Anyway, the rice was plenty fine, and served valiantly to sop up the sauce.

Jugo de tamarindo | Tamarind juice | Recipe

No photo, but imagine a pitcher full of brown liquid and you're set. This recipe is for if you've thought ahead. If you're like me, and you're starting from whole tamarind pods, first peel them (don't need to be obsessive over getting every last bit of peel), cover with water at about six times the volume of the nuts, bring to boil, and simmer for 15 minutes. Place a chinois or strainer over a bowl, dump the pot into the strainer, and use a wooden spoon to press the pulp onto the edges until the pulp is all squeezed through and into the bowl and only the seeds remain which you then throw out. Mix sugar into the still-warm juice, chill, enjoy the distinctive tang. For a really good time, make a cavarindo: half tamarind juice, half cava. (Watch out, it'll foam up like a root beer float!)

Habichuelas con dulce | Sweet bean soup | Recipe

A chilled soup made of pureed kidney beans and chunks of sweet potato doesn't exactly sound like dessert, but we were all pleasantly surprised by how tasty this inventive dish is. With evaporated and coconut milks, it's got a nice but not excessive milky richness, and the spices make it feel vaguely Christmasy. If you're adventurous, it's worth trying!

Ponche de ron | Egg nog | Recipe

One of the few scenes from the Jetsons I remember is the Christmas special, in which Rosie the Robot creates egg nog by mixing one egg and one "nog." Well, two decades later, I've finally made it — or, at least, the Dominican version — and while I can affirm that egg nog indeed has eggs, the "nog" part of it is a bit more complicated, in this case three types of milk plus sugar and spices, all cooked over a bain marie. But gosh it was tasty, not unctuous like the stuff in a carton, but really smooth sippin', and just the right density to warmly embrace the rum and make you forget you've eaten too much and shouldn't put any more in your belly.

So that does it for the D's! Next weekend we head due south to Ecuador. Thanks again to the kind folks at the Hattery for opening their space to us!

Meal 50: Dominica

Dominica is a tiny little island country, in the middle of that north-south string of Caribbean islands. You'd be forgiven for thinking it's the Spanish-speaking half of Hispaniola, but no, that's the Dominican Republic. They both use the adjective Dominican; to assert that you mean this beautiful, actively volcanic, lush-in-parts island, place the stress on the third syllable, domiNIcan.

The national Dominican dish is the so-called Mountain Chicken, which is actually a species of giant frog, so tasty and easy to catch that it's now critically endangered. Since expensive, farmed, previously-frozen frog legs didn't seem like they'd cut it. Plus, this was a hastily cobbled-together brunch in the aftermath of Sandy, and that just seemed out of place. So, regular chicken it was!

We're glad to have gotten a full table together on short notice for this rare daytime meal: Wei, Natalie, Diana, Gino, Bettina, Marshall, and Jeremy. (That's Emmylou in the front!) In acknowledgment of our good fortune, and as a bit of a preview for Thanksgiving in a few weeks, we went around the table discussing what we were thankful for in the aftermath of the storm. Turns out there's a lot that's right, everything from community to far-flung family to our hard-working civil servants.

Banana-mango bread | Recipe

Fortunately, with an emphasis on fruits and sweet flavors, Dominica's cuisine is quite amenable to brunching. This rich bread, kept moist by banana and mango, and enriched with plenty of walnuts, raisins, and brown sugar, made for a great start. (I can also say from experience that it stays really tasty several days later!)

Caribbean reef chicken | Recipes: Chicken, Mango chutney

Where the "reef" in the name comes from, I do not know, but I don't much care because it's quite tasty. A sauce of rum, sugar, citrus juices and spices makes for a tangy and sweet marinade. Just when all the juices from the chicken start to run out from the baking, then you slather it with a generous helping of mango chutney.

Oh, the chutney! Have you ever made it before? It sure lent a heady smell to the house, with this vinegar-based slurry of under-ripe mangoes, lots of sugar, and generous helpings of spices cooking down for hours, but the result was well worth it. Spicy but not too much so, tangy but not overwhelmingly, it's a really great condiment to go with grilled meats and the like. (Note that the recipe makes for about four to five cups of chutney, which is a lot, so either reduce it or plan to give a bunch away.)

Seasoned fig flats | Green banana fritters | Recipe

In this part of the world, a "fig" is an unripe banana. Like green plantains, green bananas are treated more like potatoes than fruit. For this dish, you peel the green bananas (which requires a knife to score the peel first, otherwise you're ripping off little bits of skin all over the place), boil them, mash them, and then add in the other ingredients. I was really surprised to be able to find the "seasoning peppers" at the Latino market I went to in Sunset Park; also known as "ajicitos," these look a whole lot like the ultra-spicy habaneros or almost-as-hot Scotch bonnets, but have a lot less spice and a lot more flavor.

Anyway, these little fritters were fine, not terribly flavorful but pleasant enough for breakfast. Maybe if I'd used real Goya seasoning, what with its MSG, rather than throwing in a few spices like cumin and coriander, it mighta been tastier.

Sorrel drink | Recipe

Avid readers will know we've enjoyed this sort of drink before, but why should that stop us? It's delightfully simple to make, just boil dried hibiscus/sorrel flowers with water, ginger, and spices, let cool, strain, add sugar, and enjoy the tangy, spiced, sweet flavor of Christmas in a glass. Yum!

The meal made for a nice opportunity to unplug from the Sandy craziness for a little while, enjoy the sunshine streaming through the window (it was cold out!), and enjoy the carefre sounds of calypso music.

We're off for a few weeks, our next meal is in San Francisco the weekend following Thanksgiving for Dominican Republic — and we'll be done with the D's!

Week 18: Belize

Belize navidad! In our last feast of the year in Brooklyn, we head to the small yet super-diverse country of Belize. From the creoles in the towns, to the inland Mayans, to the Afro-Caribbean Garifuna in the south, there are several culinary traditions to follow in a country of a third of a million people. So I did my best to incorporate some of all of them, and as I discovered, what ties them all together is coconut milk — four coconuts' worth, in this case.

Our guests were Kirsty, her boyfriend Grant, Elsa, Lisa, and new neighbors Jessica and Alex.

Panti ripa

Thanks to John and Monica for the heads-up on this drink which is apparently all over Belize. It's super-simple: equal parts of coconut rum and pineapple juice. It's sweet, it's smooth, it's refreshing. Not hard to see how it got its name. (Note: this is Monica's photo from Belize, we didn't find these bottles here!)

Hudut | Mashed plantains with poached fish | Recipe

For our first course we went in the Garifuna direction. The starch is boiled and mashed green plantains, which are on the dry side and plenty starchy, but with one ripe plantain mashed in for some sweetness and flavor. On top is tilapia poached in coconut milk. And this time, I made my own coconut milk! It's actually not too hard once you get the damn coconut open and the flesh peeled; after that you just grate it (thank you Cuisinart), put it in a bowl with water, squeeze a bunch, and pour off the liquid. Much tastier, and apparently less fatty, than the canned stuff. Overall a nice dish, the broth was tasty and definitely necessary with the mashed plantains.

Escabeche | Sour chicken and onion stew | Recipe

There were a bunch of things I could have done for the main course, but since we haven't had much in the way of chicken recently, that's what led me to this nice and simple stew. What I didn't realize is just how many onions it was, a whole three pounds. If I were to do it again, I'd cut down on the onions for sure. Anyway, what makes this one tasty is a a whole lot of vinegar, hence the name, which means "pickle" in Spanish.

Rice and beans | Recipe

I was initially skeptical when I saw different recipes for Beans & Rice and Rice & Beans, but there is a difference. The former are cooked separately, while the latter, which you see here, involves cooking the beans, then adding the rice and coconut milk to the pot. That way the rice gets the nice flavor too. Also, the salt pork doesn't hurt! Worked nicely to soak up the broth from the stew.

Potato pound | Recipe

Apparently this odd name is a Creolization of pone, the word for a basic cornbread from US Mid-Atlantic native tribes. Anyway, this hardly resembles a cornbread, but it is tasty: shredded sweet potatoes (the "sweet" part got left out of the final name too!) with yet more coconut milk, a lot of brown sugar, ginger, and nutmeg. I left out the raisins but it was no worse for wear. In fact, it was quite thick and sticky and pretty yummy.

Thanks to our guests who braved the chilly evening to make it over, and warm wishes for happy holidays to all. The next meal is Bhutan, which we'll enjoy of Laura's hometown of Tacoma. (We're leapfrogging over Benin; we'll get there in January with a friend who did Peace Corps there.)

Week 15: Barbados

Barbados is forever connected to rum — they've been making it there for over three hundred years, probably for nearly as long as it was a British sugar plantation colony. So because given this was our third Caribbean meal, and perhaps because the previous two countries were Muslim, I focused a bit more on the drinking side of things, making two drinks from scratch that are classically Bajan (BAH-zhun, the colloquial term for Barbadian).

Our guests tonight were Elly, her visiting friend Tasha, Alexis, Dan, and Raven. To shop for this meal I took advantage of the unseasonably mild weather to bike out to the southern end of Crown Heights, to a fish store and a produce shop.

Falernum | Recipe

This mildly alcoholic sweet liqueur, pronounced fah-LEARN-um, is a rum infusion of cloves, lime peels, garlic, almond extract, lime juice, and lots of sugar. It's got a really nice and complex aroma, and help prove that rum doesn't have to be mixed exclusively with fruit juices — for example, try the basic rum swizzle.

Ginger beer | Recipe

Really simple and with a big payoff. It's just about as simple as mixing grated ginger with yeast and a few other things, and letting it sit for a few days. The result is precisely that crisp and lightly spicy and sweet taste you expect from those fancy ginger beers. I made this one in the fridge with a loose lid, so it wasn't bubbly; next time I'll try a recipe that's made sealed in a bottle to preserve the combination. And there will be a next time.

Fried flying fish | Recipe

So, I had to cheat. I biked all the way out to Crown Heights to a fish market down the street from a Bajan restaurant, and they didn't have flying fish. Turns out that this national fish of Barbados just doesn't travel well. So I used cod instead. It was nice enough (when isn't fried fish a good thing?) although somehow my breading didn't stay on, and it's also hard to really get the feel of a simply prepared fish if it's not the right fish. Note for the future to perhaps err on the side of a meat if I can't get the right fish. Have to say, though, that with the homemade hot sauce, it certainly had plenty of flavor.

Cou-cou | Recipe

Remember the funje from Angola? Well, this is pretty much the same mush dish, but with corn instead of cassava flour, plus a bit of okra. Thick enough to stand a spoon in.

Macaroni pie | Recipe

Some forums I came across discussed how cheddar cheese just didn't quite replicate the right taste from the Caribbean, so I was thrilled to find cheese from nearby Trinidad at the market. This isn't a standard macaroni and cheese; yes, it's got elbow pasta and grated cheese, but also onions and bell peppers and mustard and a blend of seasonings from cloves to paprika. I made a big batch and it was all gone!

Conkies | Recipe

This dish is so similar to the ducana from Antigua and Barbuda that I meant to skip it in favor of some other dessert, but two things swayed me. One, there were like no veggies in the main dish so the sweet potato and pumpkin in this dish helps a bit. And two, conkies are the traditional dish for Barbadian Independence Day on November 30, and since we're so close to that day, I just had to. Now, I'm not very dextrous with precision work, so I'm glad that Elly, Dan and Raven pitched in to take the sweetened and spiced batter of shredded veggies and coconut and carefully wrap it into banana-leaf bundles. I'm glad we made these: they were more tender and subtle than the last ones!

The drinks were flowing, the Rihanna was blasting (did you know she's from Barbados?), and the apartment was warm enough to evoke a Caribbean evening.

Our next stop around the world is Belarus, and we're taking it on the road to San Francisco over Thanksgiving weekend.

Week 12: The Bahamas

The word Bahamas is attributed to the Spanish "baja mar," or under the sea. Accordingly, seafood was a prominent factor in this meal. Amazing we got through eleven meals before cooking fresh treats from the ocean. (Remember, for Antigua and Barbuda, the fish was salt cod.) And by all accounts, the seafood that defines Bahamian cuisine is the conch — pronounced conk.

To find this and other ingredients such as sour orange, I biked up to south Williamsburg and to the inimitable Food Bazaar. Aside from bird peppers and fresh guava, I found everything I needed, and even then I found acceptable substitutes in scotch bonnet peppers and frozen guava paste.

Our guests tonight were Kate and her husband Jason (our bartender for the evening), Dan and Raven, Sarah-Doe, and Alex.

Old sour | Recipe

A good, medium-spicy marinade and hot sauce that was super easy to make. The sour orange imparts a flavor that really is partway between lime and orange.

Crawfish salad | Recipe

One guest noted that this was like an Israeli salad with shellfish. I don't think I managed to get as much meat as I should have, the one pound of crawfish yielded at most two ounces of crawfish tails, and given that the recipe calls for two tails, I'm pretty sure that the crawfish they get in the Bahamas are much bigger. Anyway, it was tasty and tangy and spicy and a great start into the meal.

Bahamian macaroni and cheese | Recipe

Kate was apparently craving mac and cheese on her way to dinner, and boy was she surprised that I was making some! The Bahamian variation is really easy to make, and with a little bit of veggies chopped in for a very slight semblance of healthiness. (You're vindicated, Cracker Barrel.)

Johnny cake | Recipe

This was really no different from a good old cornbread, but enjoyed nonetheless. (Most johnnycakes are more like pancakes made with corn, but not this one.)

Stewed conch | Recipe

The main event of the meal. That conch was quite a bit to deal with. Fortunately I didn't have to extract it from the shell, but I did have to remove the skin (yeah, this shellfish meat has a skin, imagine that), pound it to the point of falling apart, boil it for 45 minutes, and then throw it in the stew. The stew itself was based on a roux, and was pretty well laden by both sweet and "Irish" potatoes. Went nicely with some of that old sour!

Guava duff | Recipe (scroll to bottom)

Duff is a word for a boiled pudding, such as the traditional English plum pudding. This is a tropical version thereupon: sweet spiced dough stuffed with a guava filling, pressed into a cast-iron pot, which is put into a larger pot of boiling water for like two hours. Many recipes seem pretty simply flavored; I found this version with more spices that seems a little more historically aware. I've never quite made anything like this, and it turned out really nice: the kind of mushy texture was totally OK due to the dual sweetnesses from dough and fruity filling, and any possible objection was drowned out by the sauce made of butter, powdered sugar, egg, and rum.

Rum drinks

Jason put together lovely tropical rum drinks, and then later we transitioned to Dark and Stormys (stormies?) with some seriously fancy ginger beer. Since the weather cleared up by the end of the meal, we lingered over our drinks on the porch.

All told, Bahamian food was a little more interesting than I'd expected. And unlike last week, no leftovers to speak of, other than half a Snapple jar of old sour. And now, back across the ocean to Bahrain — another small island country with a British Empire history, but that's probably where the similarities end.