As I was getting ready to head back to the states and I got very engrossed in my thesis proposal, I definitely indulged in some convenience meals. Normally I really hate doing this, because I really enjoy cooking, and if I don't have time to do any, it means that I am not really taking any sort of break from work all day. But, in this case, it was nice to feel really productive in my research. Plus, since it was the tale end of the summer holiday in Paraguay, my cousins and their friends were having nightly beer sessions around the pool, and I would join in, share a beer, and offer some of our dinner before heading in to do more work or to sleep--so I did get a little bit of social time.

Here are the nachos we made. Very quick and the ultimate in convenience food. We don't make them often because I really doesn't seem healthy, but once in a while to save you some work. I'm really glad they have tortilla chips at the supermarket now. When me and my sisters tried to make guacamole one Christmas, we had to serve it with crackers because there was nothing remotely like a tortilla chip in the country. But, I'm still considering smuggling an avocado tree into the country. They only grow reed avocados in Paraguay. They are really big and bland. The flesh is watery and slightly bitter, rather than buttery and creamy like the Hass avocados we get in the U.S. People think of avocado as a fruit here, and mash it with milk and sugar as a desert and are kind of grossed out by the idea of putting it in a salad or eating it as a vegetable. At any rate, they make really terrible guacamole, but weren't so bad chopped up along with some shredded chicken and homemade salsa for these nachos.
The next night we made some chicken quesadillas, using flour tortillas from the supermarket (Paraguay is getting so cosmopolitan). We managed to use up the rest of the chicken and the last of the leftover cheese from the christmas-time pizzeada here.
Then I made some hummus. While I actually had to make it completely from scratch (including the tahini) this still turned out to be a really fast and convenient meal. I just blended some sesame seeds with some oil, before adding the garbanzo beans which I had pressure cooked and the rest of the ingredients to the blender. It came out perfect, and along with the excellent and fluffy pita bread from the supermarket, and a watercress and roasted red pepper salad, we had an awesome and fresh dinner in less than half an hour (beat that Rachel Ray!)
I did manage to cook one really excellent, and rather labor intensive meal before taking off for the U.S:
squid-ink fettuccine with cuttlefish, yard-long beans, and yellow curry sauce.
We found the squid-ink pasta at the supermarket, imported form Uruguay, and the cuttlefish frozen from Argentina. We had to make everything else from scratch, which meant grinding the spices and making the curry mixture, and making the coconut milk from whole coconuts. It was really excellent. Squid-ink pasta has a really unique and sort of sweet and savory flavor and is also really visually striking. I think it is kind of intimidating to work with, because you don't want to just through a standard sauce on it. I wanted to pair it with flavors that could stand up well, and was really pleased with this. The coconut's richness and the aromatic spices worked really well with the pasta's flavor, the sweetness of the cuttlefish, and the freshness and crunch of the beans. This was a good meal (and a nice picture for a change--click on it to see it the large version), so much so that you can look forward to another installment of squid-ink fettuccine. I was in Somerville on super Tuesday to place my vote, and Capone's just happened to have squid-ink pasta that day. I'm trying to plan a special meal around it.

Navidad Tamalera

So since this was David's tropical Christmas in, and if I'm not mistaken his first Christmas away from the U.S. and away from his family, we decided we would adopt his family's Mexican Christmas tradition of making Tamales. This is no small commitment in Paraguay, where to my knowledge the Mexican population is limited to one NGO employee who is married to a Paraguayan. No masa or maseca is available in Paraguay so we had to do the whole process entirely from scratch. My mother brought us some powdered lime (cal) from the Mexican store in the U.S., and we proceeded to do everything ourselves from gathering the banana leaves, to making the nixtamal and grinding the masa, to cooking the filling and forming the tamales. Here it is, all documented. David wanted to be sure we didn't miss a single step of his tamalero exploits.


Well, they don't sell packages of dried corn husks in Paraguay, but luckily the place is silly with banana trees. Here is David harvesting some leaves from a small banana tree in my cousins' yard.
Rinsing the corn

Cooking the corn in the lime-water.
The result of cooking the corn in the lime-water. According to the instructions we were following, at this point, they the corn was supposed to swell up and its hulls are supposed to sort of dissolve into a slimy mess, leaving the white kernel of nixtamal behind. We must have been using a not appropriate variety of corn, because nothing remotely like that happened. We went on as though everything was fine though, because what else were we going to do? I'm not sure what went wrong, but the end result did not suffer for it.
Grinding the corn in the molino. This was quite a process. We ended up attaching the mill to a bench and working as a team. One of us would sit on the bench to weigh it down and load the corn in the hopper while the other one would grind away until he was too tired. Then we would switch, and so on until the entire vat of corn was ground.
The ground nixtamal.

The large cube of tamal dough that resulted from mixing the masa with lard and some broth.

Since the rest of Christmas dinner consisted of various kinds of pork, including this little guy (who turned out to be delicious slow roasted on the grill)




We decided to go with untraditional chicken as the filling for our tamales. Here is the chicken cooking in a broth. Incidentally 'with giblets' in Paraguay includes not just the gizzards, and liver and neck as in the U.S., but also the heart, the feet, and the head!While the chicken was cooking, David was making the chile sauce from dried chiles I had brought from the U.S. fur just such a special occasion. Here is the cooked shredded chicken mixed with the chile suace.


Here are all the tamal fixings ready to go, and the tortillera that my mom also brought from me from the U.S.Setting up the tamales in a make-shift steamer.


and finally serving them up at the dinner table.


The happy customers.


David claimed that these were the best tamales he had ever eaten and that the entire process of making them from scratch is worthwhile. Not having had nearly as many tamales as he has, I couldn't vouch for their authenticity. I can say that everyone really liked them a lot, which was a big relief. I think we both would have been disappointed if, after working so hard (the entire process took about two days), people weren't really crazy about them. But my family, which never really liked tamales before, said they were great, and my relatives liked them so much that they enthusiastically helped out when we used up the leftover masa in a goodbye party before my trip back to Boston.

Pesto Party

Ah, I remember summer like it was only a few weeks ago, and in fact it was only a few weeks ago that I was enjoying the best fruits of summer in Paraguay. In January in particular there are really amazing pineapples, melons, and mangoes. If you think you are a fan of pineapple--or if you think you are not for the matter--you really ought to go to paraguay. I have never anywhere in my life tasted such amazingly juicy, sweet, and perfect pineapple as in
Paraguay. It has absolutely nothing in common with the sour cardboard that passes for pineapple in the U.S.

In December, David, having missed out on the pesto season in the U.S., made me purchase five huge bunches of basil. The resulting pesto was too much to possibly use before it went bad so we had a week or two where everyday we tried to find some use for it. Utlmately we did have to throw some out, but here are some of the meals we made from it:

Pesto crusted with leeks, yard-long beens and ginger. It was so long ago now, i don't remember too many details, but I really love yard-long beans and am really happy they are available at the agro-shopping in Paraguay. They are denser and less watery than green beans and seem to have a more concentrated, greener flavor.
This gnocchi with asparagus, oyster mushrooms, and pesto was really excellent. Mushrooms have been available pretty regularly at the agrofair and sometimes even at the supermarket, which is a very recent and big development. Until very recently, only canned or jarred mushrooms were available in Paraguay.
We also made this pizza out of some dough we had frozen, fresh mozzarella and some of the best tomatoes I've found in paraguay, and, of course, pesto instead of tomato sauce. There is fresh arrugula on top. We actually made some much better and more attractive pizzas during my families Christmas visit, we didn't take any pictures.

Fire, Fire! My Beets!

Sorry again for the delay. I have been back in Boston for a couple of weeks now, focusing much more on trying to make sense of my thesis research and forge a new direction than on cooking and blogging. But I have managed to cook a few nice meals, including really fantastic mussels and clams marinier, which unfortunately I could not photograph, because my camera didn't have any batteries. I really need a new camera, one that you can recharge. Keeping mine supplied with batteries has been a whole ordeal which has interfered with my blogging. There has been lots of meals I haven't photographed in the last months because I had no batteries or because the recharger was broken, and then there has been other times that I couldn't load my pictures onto my computer because the camera had no batteries. I took virtually no pictures on my second trip to Japan because I had no batteries. I don't know if that's a good enough excuse, but it really is the main reasons I've been less diligent about posting in the last months.
At any rate, one of the more notable meals I recently cooked was at my friends' Abby and Sam's house. It was actually the day I had arrived in Boston from Paraguay, and, as they have played host to me before on my brief and tardily announced trips to Boston, I wanted to offer to cook them dinner partially by way of thanks. They gladly accepted, and before I set off to look at apartments in Porter Square and Beacon Hill (where I did in fact find my current residence), I hurriedly scoured the rather extravagant shelves of Savenor's market for something from which I could throw dinner together after returning from my frigid hunt. Despite having been transported from the tropical splendor of Paraguay to the gray, icy, darkness of Boston in less than a day, I was already craving wintery comfort food. I spotted some duck sausage and settled on making a meal from fettuccine with duck sausage, wild mushrooms, and radicchio and a warm salad of roasted beats and shallots with lemon and goat cheese.

While I think the meal certainly showed Abby and Sam the extent of my burning gratitude, I think they would probably have preferred a nice thank you card. Suffice it to say that I did, without a doubt, the stupidest, most embarrassing thing that I have ever done in the kitchen--and mind you I have been cooking since I was probably seven or eight and starting cooking whole meals in high school. The beets were taking a longer time than I had anticipated and so I had to keep checking them and finally, in frustration, I turned the temperature up to 500 degrees hoping that a few minutes of intense roasting would finish them off while I finalized the rest of the meal. Well, it did nearly finish off beets along with the occupants of the whole building, because, minutes after I turned up the heat, the oven started billowing foul-smelling black smoke that quickly filled the whole apartment. As it turned out, I had inadvertently left the oven mitt inside the oven beneath the roasting pan after returning the beets to the oven and turning the heat up. I must stay that such things really are well made, because rather than bursting into flames in the 500 degree oven, the hot pad simply blackened and smoldered, and it ceased to exude any smoke as soon as I extracted it from the oven with a pair of tongs and ran it under cold water.

As Abby, Sam and I desperately tried to vent the smoke out of the house by creating as much of an icy draft as possible, we noticed the flashing red lights outside.


Literally less than five minutes after we noticed the first bits of smoke, the Cambridge fire department arrived at the apartment with two trucks and a full team of firemen ready to kick some serious ass. The neighbors had smelled the smoke and called in the emergency thinking that plumbing work done earlier that day had provoked an electrical fire or something like that. By the time the firemen were there, the smoke was all gone, and everything was under control, but we had to sheepishly explain that 'we' had left an oven mitt in the oven and apologize for the false alarm. While I walked away from this meal with a great deal more confidence in oven mitts and my local fire department, I was deeply embarrassed and shaken, and I don't think I'll try cooking a meal after international travel again.

In the end, nothing was ruined, and the beet salad and pasta were both pretty good. I left the skins on the beets which gives them a roastier potato-like quality,


and, while the pasta was good, I think it need to be a little saucier. The bitter radicchio contrasted well with the richness of the duck, but it would have been better if I had made the effort to get a bottle of sweet vermouth, as I had originally planned, to reduce as part of the sauce to give it some sweetness as well.