Eternal Winter

The main drawback coming to Paraguay when we did is that we missed out on the summer in the U.S., including the nice weather, the summer and fall produce, and the non-cold season. Today I woke up with a very sore throat, making this the second cold I have had in a single month, both of which I caught from David. I didn't believe him when he said he was getting sick again, because I thought it was ridiculous to catch two colds in three weeks. But I was careful to keep at least 10 feet of distance from him at all times, and I still woke up sick today just as he was getting over it. This comes after a winter in which I had 3 particularly virulent colds, also with David serving as the vector. I don't know what it is, but he gets more colds than anyone I know, and when you live with someone its hard to avoid getting infected.

So, we finally got internet in the house, and while it is a bit slow, it makes my life a lot easier here. Something that would get done in a single day, takes a week to get done without regular internet access. Partly, this is because people aren't great about answering their phones, or being in their offices here. At any rate, all is well, aside from my cold. My work has progressed somewhat, and I am feeling better about it, but time is running out and I haven't gotten nearly as much done as I would like. Today is a holiday though and all the offices are closed, so at least I have an excuse to stay home in bed today. It is the anniversary of the founding of the city of Asunción, which was founded 470 years ago today, is one of the oldest cities in South America, and served as a Spanish base for the second founding of Buenos Aires and other cities in the Spanish empire, which is why it is known as the "mother of cities," or sometimes the "cradle of America" Yesterday there was a modest display of fire works and an outdoor concert in the main plaza downtown.

We've been eating lots and lots of meat, which we are not really accustomed to, which has made me realize how large a proportion of our diet in Boston was made up of shellfish and their relatives. I'm not terribly confident about cooking meat, especially when it is just for two people, rather than a roast for a dinner party or something. On top of that, the cuts here are different, and looking at the meat counter at the super market just bewilders me. I made my best guess for what might be skirt steak, and it turned out I had gotten one of toughest cuts of meat that is only good for puchero, a beef soup that boils for hours. So in the meantime, I feel guilty to say, I haven't adjusted my cooking to local ingredients as well as I imagined I would. There are several reasons for this, 1) my tia Silvia cooks a lunch (the big meal of the day) of delicious Paraguayan food for us every day, and when planning dinner I always feel like we should eat something different; 2) Traditional paraguayan food ingredients are cheap, plentiful, and fresh, but they require a lot of preparation and time that I don't really have-- Beans have to be cooked, meat has to be boiled, cornmeal has to be made into something 3) my mom left a whole cabinet full of non-Paraguayan ingredients here a few months ago that I have found pretty handy in coming up with quick and tasty meals based on the techniques and recipes I am used to; 4) I feel far out of my element here. I don't have my own highly personalized kitchen any longer and I am not surrounded by the groceries and specialty stores that I have grown very used to. You'll also notice, perhaps, that lighting is an issue in the pictures. We haven't found a good place to take the pictures and the flash makes things look terrible. We don't really have a table to eat at either in the part of the house we live in, so we end up sitting on the edge of my bed in front of the tv with our plates in our laps and putting the serving dishes on a chair.


While what we've been cooking has been tasty and convenient, it has also been pretty expensive. I am kind of shocked at the grocery bill we are running up. I'm hoping with time we'll develop more frugal shopping habits, and figure out how to do more with the more common and economical local ingredients. Here is the run-down, starting with our last meals in Boston, using farmer's market produce:

1. This was a black pepper linguine (which somehow ended up being one of my favorite flavors at Capone's) with garlic scape pesto, garnished with fresh basil, lemon zest, and parmagiano.




2.The foto of our "eat up our food and drink all our alcohol party." We invited anyone who was left in Boston to eat a meal that I made out of what was left in the house. At the very top are some fingerling potatoes roasted in duck fat with rosemary and sea salt. Clockwise, are the long-promised empanadas (these were as guilt free as I've ever made with free-range beef and eggs); next a simple salad of red romaine; a pear tart using some puff pastry I'd had in the freezer for much, much too long; and finally free-range beef ribs braised with ancho chile and coffee. These were amazingly rich and flavorful.


Here is a close-up of the beef ribs, the picture isn't great, but it gives you an idea. I found the recipe on line:



3. Our final meal in Boston, prepared and scarfed down in literally in less than five minutes while we called the cab to go to the airport. I had bought the ripest tomatoes available and put in them in a brown bag a few days earlier. I couldn't miss out on at least on Caprese salad.


4. Our first meal in Paraguay was in fact all local. A salad of watercress, heart of palm, and hardboiled egg. David loves watercress and heart of palm, both very paraguayan ingredients.



5. Our next meal was also fairly local, given that Paraguay has substantial german influence in its cuisine: Sausages and Sourkraut. They make very high quality wursts in Paraguay, which are usually grilled as the first course of a barbeque and eaten with mandioca. They worked perfectly in this application as well. The funny part is that when I was packing up the kitchen, I debated whether to bring the juniper berries and decided I would never make SourKraut here. It turned out to be practically the first thing I made. Luckily my mom left some caraway seed, so it tasted fairly authentic, and I have since found juniper berries at a gourmet store.

6. This meal was all local. I was inspired by the fresh vegetables at the supermarket to make an Indian curry. Lacking a spice grinder, and too lazy to grind the spices by hand in the mortar and pestle I relied on some curry powder my mom had left in the cabinet. It did the trick, but not as well as home mixed spice powder. The yogurt here is absolutely delicious though, and after years of making our own yogurt, I think we'll be taking a break here.


Here is the finished curry.


7. This was a not entirely successful pasta carbonera with smoked pork loin. I had to improvise the recipe to the best of my memory and knowledge, because I did not have internet access. It would have been fine, but I ended up putting far too much black pepper. Again for lack of a pepper mill I had david grind it in the mortar and pestle. Not realizing how much was in mortar I added it all to the sauce and had to cook some of harshness out of it, inadvertently (but not surprisingly) curdling the egg yolk. All things considered, it was still pretty tasty.



8. Another example of how far out of my element I am. This was corn chowder with smoked pork loin and red bell pepper. I intended this to be a quick and easy meal, but I did not count on the drastic difference between sweet corn in the U.S. and sweetcorn here. I think I have commented on it before, explaining that US corn doesn't work as well for Chipa Guazu. But it turns out that Paraguayan corn isn't so great for U.S. recipes either. I had to boil it for almost an hour to get it tender enough to drink in a soup, and there really is no need to leave any whole kernels for texture here, the tremendous amount of fibre in the blended corn kernels is more than enough.



9. Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce and Italian Sausage. It was very good.



10. Here we used up some leftover beef (the cut is called vacio, which I suspect is flank steak, translation anyone?) To make a sort of asian beef salad with watercress, tomatoes, and cashew dressing. We didn't have any soy sauce or sesame oil, but it worked out anyway.



11. The leftover cauliflower went into another curry with some potatoes and onions, this time without yogurt and with hand ground spices. It was definitely worth the trouble.

12. Cellophane noodles with shrimp, red cabbage, and sesame seeds. While the cellophane noodles and shrimp are certainly not Paraguayan (and the shrimp were pretty pricey), the sesame seeds actually are. Over 35,000 small farmers are now growing sesame seed, as the result of a Japanese companies effort to create a supply base in Paraguay. It is one of the few positive examples of agricultural diversification with a substantial socio-economic effect, and details about this case might just find themselves a place in my thesis. This was really good.




13 Finally, arrugula salad with goat cheese, candied pecans, and apple. This was after we went to the "agroshopping" for the first time. It is basically a farmers market styled after those in U.S. and Europe. It was a development project of the Japanese Development Assistance Agency (JICA), to give small farmers direct access to some of the country's most affluent consumers. Every tuesday they set up in the first floor of one of the fancy shopping malls (Mariscal Lopez Shopping) in a ritzy neighborhood. I was surprised to see that there is in fact a variety of high quality produce and farm products, though definitely a reduced variety compared to the US. In particular there are swiss and french cheese makers that make very high quality cheese in about 20 varieties (emmental, gruyer, brie, camembert, muenster, a soft rind goat, fresh mozzarella, a manchego style, and many more). There is also a stand that sells all manner of cured and smoked meats. If I go next week I'll take some pictures. At an rate, we used some arrugula and goat cheese from the market, some pecans left by my mother, and some maple syrup we brought with us to make this salad. I love this picture too.

The hole in the world wide web

So still no internet at home. For my political economy colleagues, paraguay certainly makes you consider the upside to telecom privatization. Anyhow, things are going well here. I have started on my field work, and while it is pretty late in the game to be torn between different research projects, there is at least not a lack of interesting avenues to explore. Most of my interviews have revealed intriguing possibilities and made me excited to do this work. The problem is that it only takes one interview that seems to contradict or complicate in some way the hypotheses I am exploring to make me doubt the entire research agenda and whether I really ought to be doing a PhD in political science at all. This is really unfortunate, since I know that I´m bound to have a lot of these sorts of interviews before my fieldwork is done, and that I´m likely to get more confused as time goes on rather than more sure of what I think I know. Knowing that doesn't really help though. In general, I'm kind of shocked with how much some of my interviews confirm the view of small-producers, innovation, high-quality niche markets, and cooperation that I developed in Boston. The problem comes when someone disagrees with how I see things or challenges my proposal. Obviously, this is a necessary and generally desirable part of the process. However, its impossible to decide whether this difference comes from my infinitely inferior knowledge of local conditions and utter lack of experience in development work compared to those I am interviews, or from a difference of interpretation. It's a tough call, because in writing a dissertation, I want to come up with something new and not just repeat the conventional wisdom that is guiding people in the field, but I also have to learn from people whose experience vastly exceeds my own. You need to be confident enough to not have an existential crisis every time someone sees things differently, but not so much that you don't realize when you are barking up the wrong tree. It doesn't help that I'm "very young to be doing a PhD." I've grown a beard to appear slightly older, but still, I know people would take me more seriously if I were older. Or if i had more experience working in international development. I know that I would feel more confident, and probably command more respect if I had more experience. We all have to start somewhere, but it definitely have inklings of being in over my head as I try to get this project off the ground. Its hard to start anything though, and I guess i I look at this as the start of a new career, then I'm not doing so bad.



As for the cooking, it's hard to not have my own kitchen for the time being, but we have been cooking some. I promise I'll upload some pictures as soon as I have better internet access. I've been assured that it will not be more than two more weeks. I can also commence with a series of traditional parguayan recipes as well.

¡Saludos desdel Paraguay!

Faithful blog readers:



The move out of the apartment and to Paraguay has gone pretty well, and I do have pictures of the last meals we had and our "eat our food and drink our alcohol" party. However, internet access is a bit scarce here, so it might be a while before I get to posting again. We're trying to get internet in the house, but it apparently takes a very long time. But keep checking, I promise I won't disappear for ever.

Cleaning House

Sorry to those of you who might have checked on Wednesday for my weekly update. I meant to post, but this week has been really crazy and continues to be, as we are packing up our apartment and preparing to move to Paraguay! It's been exhausting and we are not even close to done yet with only a few days to go. We've been eating pretty well though, and very often. I'm trying to avoid throwing out any food, so I've been cooking every day to use up all the ingredients in the pantry, fridge and freezer. Here's the recap:

A chicken torso (without legs, thighs, or wings) was left over from the paella last week, some tandoori paste left from the grill-fest a few weeks ago, and the last of some homemade yogurt combined to make tandoori roasted chicken breast. We experimented with the naan and found that it comes out much better on the flat iron grill than in the oven on the baking stone. It rose beautifully and came out soft on the grill, while it was tough and cardboard-like on the baking stone. Go figure.
Basil and red chard from the farmers market went into this red chard and sausage ravioli with basil pesto.
The rest of the italian sausage went into a broccoli rabe and italian sausage pizza with fresh mozzarella.
Next was crab cakes with fresh shelled peas and fava beans and some radishes and curly lettuce from the farmers market, with a whole-grain mustard and lime dressing. These crab cakes were awesome, and used up a bit of old baguette. The recipe is actually from Martha Stewart's hors d'oeuvre book, also a worthwhile investment.
As promised some weeks ago, the home-made lard I rendered for the chipas found their way into some home-made flour tortillas. They came out perfect, flaky and light, and ideal for these free range beef fajitas. I used the last of some canned tomatoes to make a quick-cooked salsa with green chiles.
Plated
The next night I was too exhausted to cook, but by the time we got to dinner it was too late to order out, and we were starving. So I threw a box of beef broth into a pot with pho herbs and spices, some dried shitakes, and the last of our dried udon noodles for an improvised dinner of vietnamese spiced udon with peas. It was decent considering how improvised it was, though a little on the salty side, and could have stood the addition of some actual beef or at least tofu.
We bought a Pullman-shaped loaf of brioche for sandwiches at the farmers market last saturday which was absolutely perfect as a toasted base for some crabcake leftovers and spicy tuna sandwiches. The nasturtiums started blooming on the balcony too, so I'm trying to enjoy them while we have a chance. I love the idea of eating a flower, and nasturtiums are peppery and delicious.
The leftover flour tortillas made for some breakfast quesadillas with scrambled egg, green chile, and the last of the misfit alpine cheese.
The leftover dough from the broccoli rabe pizza was the base of our lunch today, which I've got to say was even better. I made pesto from the garlic scapes we got last saturday at the market and the last of the pine nuts from the pantry, and topped the pizza with the pesto, ricotta cheese, and the very first of the summer's tomatoes (hothouse grown and coaxed into complete ripeness in a paper bag on our counter) and some chopped basil. This was an amazing pizza. And as excited as I am to go to paraguay, I'm really very sad to miss the tomato season here. We go into a tomato feeding frenzy during the month of august, and every meal is something tomato related: salsas, gazpacho, pasta with fresh tomato sauce, caprese salad, bruschetta, tomato sandwiches, it goes on and on.

I find it really satisfying to use up the last bits of things and clean out my kitchen that way. It seems like its all accelerating now that we've only got a few days left in this apartment, but there is still a lot of food in the fridge and freezer.

Two blogs collided

Here's where blog meets blog. My sister, author of domisworld, and her husband brought my nephew Domingo to visit his tio in Boston last week. By all accounts it was a fantastic weekend, and we managed a worthy culinary encore to my parents visit a couple weeks ago. Domi is the sweetest baby in the whole universe and it makes me sad that it will be at least several months before I see him again. He is really the most agreeable and easy going baby I know. He hardly cries at all, and he is always smiling and laughing and snuggling with you. I think he liked Boston and his tio's house. And, while he's still too little to eat many things and eats mostly milk, baby food, and little bits of what his parents are eating, maybe someday he'll look forward to visiting and eating at my house.
Somehow we failed to take a picture of the empanadas we made upon my sister's arrival. I made the traditional filling out of free-range ground beef and organic eggs--not your typical empanada--and bought pastry disks for the shell from the Brazilian butcher in union square (they are definitely not the same as my tia's homemade dough, but they do the trick). We froze some to fry up later, so we'll be sure to snap a picture and perhaps post a recipe as well.

Our next item of business was a trip to formaggio kitchen, a cathedral of fine foods near harvard square, and definitely the widest selection of cheeses I have ever witnessed. It's the kind of place that makes you wish you were very, very wealthy. Really, only cheese and perhaps sushi (see below) make me second guess my career choices and wonder whether I should have tried my luck on Wall Street.

Dinner was a thai squid salad, with avocado and mango. It was light, fresh, and very flavorful. Perfect after the fairly heavy lunch of empanadas, of which we all had one or two more than we probably should have.

The salad was also perfect to precede our cheese course from formaggio kitchen. We picked out three cheeses: an italian robiola, wrapped in chestnut leaves with pronounced goat milk flavors, a french sheepsmilk, and a swiss alpine style cheese. It might start to sound like I'm crying wolf, but this robiola was even better than the 'la tur' I wrote about two weeks ago. It was like no cheese I've had before. As my sister's husband said, "there is not moment of doubt; this cheese is good from start to finish." The sheepsmilk was very good as well, but I'm afraid I don't remember the name, and the alpine style cheese didn't really pair well with the other two, but was very good grated onto some breakfast sandwiches a few days later. We also picked up some fresh figs at formaggio.

We started off the next day by visiting the farmers market, where we picked up some vegetables and some free-range pork and chicken that would go into that evening's special dinner. Then we went out for dim sum with my brother in-law's best friend who just happened to be in Boston to meet domi! Dim Sum is one of my favorite cheap and delicious meals. It's a great breakfast, believe it or not, particularly after a night of drinking. This was Chau Chau City, which people say is the best dim sum in Boston.


After a little bit of sight seeing in the Boston Public Gardens, we headed to New Deal fish Market to begin preparation on what would be one of the best meals I've cooked since I started this blog. We picked up two lobsters, some mussels, and clams that would go into a paella along with the chicken and pork we got earlier that day from the farmers market.

After several minutes of Homer Simpson-like groaning, we debated whether this was 'the best' or 'one of the best' paellas we had ever had. My mom makes fantastic paella. It is always a very special occasion dinner, and Alice and I have had many so we couldn't conclude outright that it was the best we had ever had. But Chris and David said they had never had better. It certainly helped that the seafood, and the meat too, I suppose, was as fresh as it could possibly be. Even the peas were so fresh and sweet from the farmer's market that we shelled them and just sprinkled them onto the finished paella raw.




Here it is plated with a glass of Chilean Cabernet. Clockwise from the lemon are mussel, chicken, lobster, country-style pork rib, and clam.
The next day, our plan was to go to the beach and have a light salad as lunch before we went to an early dinner at Boston's best (and most expensive!) sushi restaurant, oishii. The salad was all from the farmer's market, fresh peas, radishes, arrugula, green onion, and boston lettuce.
Here we are at the beach, but you will notice--no salad. We realized after we'd been on the highway for twenty minutes that in the scramble to make sure we had the baby and all his things, change of clothes for the restaurants, printed out directions, etc., we had left the salad sitting on the coffee table in the living room. We ate it the next day, and it was still very good.


And here is our appetizer from oishii, complete with iceblock. It is Kobe beef tartar with fried shallots and osetra caviar. This has got to be the fancy-pansiest thing I've ever eaten. In the very corner you also see white salmon sashimi, served with plum sauce and tuna tartar. Everything was carefully prepared, and beautifully presented. The sushi was amazingly fresh and had an exquisite texture that melted in your mouth. But it's certainly not cheap. If wealth has it's benefits, oishii is one of them.
Before my sister's visit, I experienced an important first. The first meal that I have cooked for David that he hated. It is strange, because I liked it just fine. I've made meals that I've been critical of and he has not minded, but he really had to force this one down. I wasn't terribly hurt, because I realized that in the nearly four years of our friendship, this was the first time it had happened. The offending meal was turnip and purple cauliflower gratin. I was lazy and didn't parboil the greens, which would have tempered their strong 'turnip' flavor. I think David would have liked it otherwise, but he also said it was too 'casserole-like' for him.

Luckily dessert was to follow. A leftover blueberry waffle from breakfast with vanilla ice-cream and some of the strawberry rhubarb compote still in my fridge.

We are leaving July 9th, and their is still a lot of food in my fridge and in my pantry. In the next couple weeks we'll be trying to use up as much as we can, so it should result in some creative combinations.

All work and no cooking (not really)

I'm exhausted today, as I've been trying to catch up on some work and continuing to make preparations for our move to Paraguay. So I don't think I'll have too much to say about the meals we've been cooking. We spent the first part of this week eating up all the yummy leftovers from last week, and cooking very little. Plus we were showing our apartment so we were trying to keep the kitchen very clean.

I snuck in a few purchases along with the groceries for when my parents were here of things we always want but can never afford. One item was good smoked salmon. When we were in New York for the first time we decided we had better go to a deli and get some authentic bagel and lox. I really didn't expect much, because I really didn't care too much for lox or smoked salmon when I had tried it before. We were blown away by how much better it was and baffled why it should actually be any different at this deli in Brooklyn than in Boston or anywhere else. On our second trip to New York, I was skeptical that we could recreate our sublime lox experience, but sure enough we ordered a pumpernickel bagel with lox, cream cheese, etc. at a deli across the street from Lincoln center and it was amazing. We haven't been to New York for a while now, and David has been bugging me about craving lox. I didn't want to buy the cheep stuff because I'm sure it would be disappointing and not a terribly 'eco-friendly' choice either. So I slipped a small package of wild alaska lox into our basket at Savenor's. Thanks mom and dad! It wasn't quite the same as our big apple lox (only god and the deli man knows why) but it was pretty good.



We've also been using up saturday's farmer's market purchases. This was asparagus and some mild variety of asian mustard green, stir fried with oyster sauce and black vinegar. They turned out perfectly crisp and green with lots of flavor. I wanted to spare us the carb calories and didn't make any rice. It was a real mistake because their was nothing to soak up the sauce and balance the rich flavors. Next time I'll just jog a little longer the next day.


Farm egg omelet filled with sautéed pea tendrils, prosciutto, and truffled cheese. This used up the last of last week's cheese board and some prosciutto that was too old for sandwiches. I love farm eggs. Someday I swear I will have chickens in my yard so I can have them any time I want.


Finally, last night we had curried udon noodles with spicy chinese mustard greens and sugar snap peas. I'm thinking of adding sliced beef to the leftovers.

He who eats alone chokes alone

Boy what a week of eating and cooking I've had! I've just passed through the culinary highlight of the year, and it's nice to have this blog posting to reflect on it. Each year my parents come out to visit me in Boston for about a week, and we spend it cooking together and searching for Boston's best restaurants. It's really a very important week for me, because without foodnetwork (or cable television) eating out is really the greatest source of inspiration and continued learning for my cooking. But it all has to happen in one week, since David and I can't really afford to go out very often on our own. Its pedagogical purpose aside, my parents' visit is one of things we look forward to all year. We have a lot of fun, and it makes me really happy to have them as part of my life here, since I am far away from my family most of the year. I love showing my parents and close friends who visit where I do my grocery shopping, what bus I take to school, how I make tea in the morning, where I pick up lunch in a hurry, where a good bar is. All the little details of my life that they would know unconsciously if they could share it more regularly with me. It's strange, I really love my life here, my apartment and kitchen, and--at least in some broad general way--the work that I am doing and career I'm headed toward. But it often seems really incomplete without the many close relationships and dense domestic life I've shared with friends and family in earlier stages of my life. That's why I'm always happier when people visit and I can cook for more than two.

Here's what we ate:



Most recently, and I think the best meal I made this week, was grilled shrimp zarandeado with saffron fettuccine and green garlic mojo. This is a twist on the traditional camarones al mojo de ajo.. We used some more of the huge wild-caught pink shrimp from New Deal Fish Market, and the same guajillo chile marinade I used to grill them last time. The sauce for the pasta is made by cooking a probably 3 or 4 tablespoons of chopped garlic in 3/4 cup of olive oil at very low heat until it is silky, golden, and sweet, about half an hour. You then add the juice of one lime, and a chopped chipotle chile. We used green garlic, the plant's 'baby' stage before the hard bulb and papery skin forms, from the farmers market. It lent a mellow garlic flavor to the fruitiness of the olive oil and married perfectly with the smoky sweetness of the chipotle and the fragrance of the saffron. Alongside this was mixed farmers market salad greens, french breakfast radishes, and avocado, with a lime and whole-grain mustard dressing.



Steamed lobsters with breakfast radishes and spring turnips, braised with their greens with bacon and balsamic vinegar.



Followed by a cheese course and fresh farmer's market strawberries. To the right of the strawberries is 'la tur,' an Italian robiola-style cow, sheep, and goats-milk cheese with a creamy and sometimes almost liquidy texture and dubbed by one food critic 'as close to love as a cheese can get.' This is one of the best cheese I've ever had and I highly recommend finding it or the similar and also excellent 'robiola rocchetta.' Clockwise from there are some bread from the Davis Square farmer's market; a small portion of lavender and lemon goat cheese, also from the farmers market, a truffled semi-soft cows milk cheese, and 'queso al romero' a semi-hard spanish sheeps milk cheese with rosemary.

Standing prime-rib roast, with horseradish rosemary crust and salad of Boston lettuce with strawberries and black sesame dressing. The balsamic and chinese black vinegar reduction I made a couple weeks ago, along with toasted sesame oil, black sesame seeds and some red wine vinegar, was an ideal match for the sweetness and perfume of the strawberries . The roast was perfection. I knew when we picked it up from savenor's market from the beautiful and even marbling that it would be the best beef roast I have ever made. It's expensive to get your meat from such a high end butcher, but if you enjoy meat I think you owe it to yourself and the animal to do it right.


Desert was the debut of the cheeses described above, but with an anise-spiced rhubarb and strawberry compote.
Vietnamese fresh spring rolls filled with roast pork, sliced steak, and fresh herbs. We made an afternoon snack of this to use some leftover pork chop and steak frites from central kitchen--a restaurant that gets my highest recommendation for consistently excellent food and great value. We tried our best to make mojitos out of some pretty sad limes, they weren't great, but they did the trick.


My mother discovered fiddleheads--the not yet unfurled bud of a wild fern available only in the spring time--at central kitchen, where the spring market vegetables was by far the most inventive, freshest, and most flavorful dish on the menu. It came as a trio with sauteed fiddleheads, minted breakfast radishes, and a little turnip and maitake mushroom 'package.' We found some fiddleheads in the supermarket and decided to give it a shot. This dinner was roasted duck breast, spiced with star anise, red chili, and black pepper and served with a blackberry port-wine sauce. On the side are Yuca gnocchi with leeks and fiddleheads sautéed in brown butter.

Before my parents came we celebrated the start of the farmer's market season with two different meals. Below is basil linguine with braised grass-fed beef-rib and arrugula salad with local organic fresh mozzarella cheese. For those of you following the discussion of short rib braising chowhound, using the pressure cooker worked perfectly. The meat was falling off the bone in less than an hour; so much so, that the main drawback to this method is that the ribs loose their shape too much and are not as elegant as the much longer oven braise usually required.


Finally, the first farmer's market meal of the season, more than a week ago, was red-leaf boston lettuce with blueberries, pickled onion, lavender-lemon goat cheese and balsamic-maple vinaigrette (thanks to Hanna for the dressing recipe :) ). We wait all year for the farmers market, because, while you can certainly get lettuce all year round, it just cannot compare with what you get directly from the grower. Just-picked lettuce has an amazingly soft texture, its not so crisp and full water as what you get at the store, and it tastes greener and more 'leafy'.

Receta de Chipa - Chipa Recipe

Dear Readers,

The internet is so full of entirely bogus Paraguayan recipes--particularly bogus chipa recipes posted by Argentines who don't even seem to realize that chipa is a predominantly paraguayan food--that I felt it was time to get at least one good, tested recipe out there for my fellow paraguayan-american cooks, aimlessly and hopelessly surfing the internet for some direction. I searched all websites, english and spanish, combined incites from a few recipes that seemed on the right track, and used my good sense and knowledge of what chipa should be like to come up with something that is very authentic in taste, texture, and aroma. I'm pretty sure the ones you get on the street are made from yuca starch alone, but, when I tried that last time, they just didn't taste right. So these are chipa mestizo, meaning they are made with both yuca starch and corn meal. As they came out of the oven today, they were every bit as good as you get in Paraguay.

The process did involve rendering my own lard from pork fat, which I admit is probably more ambitious than many of you get. The alternatives were to use oil, which I guarantee would not come out right; butter, which has more saturated fat and cholesterol than lard and doesn't taste as good; shortening, which generally is full of the newly dreaded transfat; or store-bought lard, which is tasteless and full of the same transfats because it is hydrogenated. If you live near a fancy butcher or a large mexican community, you can probably find fresh rendered lard. For me, there was really there was no other option but to do it myself. I had always wanted to try my hand at it anyway, and it turned out to be completely worth it because the chipa were awesome. I also can't wait to use the leftover lard to make some flour tortillas!

Since I'll be working in paraguay for quite a while starting in July, I'd like to make this the first in a series of paraguayan recipes I'll be posting, in an effort to improve the quality of Paraguayan food information available online. Maybe I can convince a chipera to divulge her formula so that we can finally have a definitive chipa recipe. In the meantime, her is my best effort:




Chipa


500g Yuca Starch
500g corn flour (milled much finer/powdery than corn meal)
6 eggs
500g Grated Cheese (you want a strongly flavored cheese with high fat content; if you have access to a Brazilian grocery, queijo minas curado has the right flavor and consistency)
8 tbs. Lard
1 tbs anise seed
1 cup milk
1 tbs salt

Mix the cornmeal and yuca starch in a very large bowl. Add the eggs, the lard, and the grated cheese. Mix this together until it is fairly uniform; it will be crumbly but you should work out any large lumps and make sure the lard and egg are evenly distributed. Dissolve the salt into the milk and add it to the mixture along with the anise. Knead until it is smooth and uniform and anise is evenly distributed. It should have the consistency of soft clay.

Preheat the oven (and baking stone if you have one) to 500. Shape the dough as you like, small nuggets for chipitas, or rings for the traditional shape, though the large oval shapes (below) came out the best for me. Bake for 15-20 minutes directly on a baking stone or on an ungreased baking sheet until they are golden brown with a crisp exterior. They should still be somewhat doughy and cheesy inside and are best hot. The rings were slightly overdone in 15 minutes, but the large ovals were absolutely perfect.




Here they are as part of merienda with the obligatory cup of cocido quemado.

The life Aquatic

Unfortunately, I've been contributing to the death aquatic. My fish choices have not been the most responsible as of late. Last weeks snapper already made me feel a bit guilty, but I figured it was the only one we've bought in the last two years, and the shrimp were the most responsible (and most delicious) you can buy. But I had a moment of stupidity or perhaps some kind of Freudian willful blindness at the supermarket yesterday. There was all sorts of fish they don't usually have, some of it much fresher than usual, at Market Basket, where there is no fish counter--just a refrigerator case with the day's 'catch'--usually a bunch of farm-raised salmon, tilapia and shrimp imported from china, and random bits of cod, scrod, and haddock.

But yesterday, there was hake, mako shark, swordfish (pretty sad looking though), halibut, and others. It was strange, a great diversity of fish all at once. So I somehow convinced myself that it these fish must be 'in season' and if they were so cheap they probably weren't threatened species. I bet on the Hake, and the Mako Shark. Turns out hake is neither an 'ecobest' nor and 'ecoworst' choice on sustainable fish purchasing guide, meaning that it was probably an ok choice. I probably should have thought a little harder about the shark, though--A clear ecoworst, as well as a source of unhealthy amounts of mercury. Apparently both mako shark species are categorized as 'vulnerable,' in no small part because the practice of 'finning' them for shark-fin soup in Asia. It looked so fresh and firm though, and it was ridiculously cheap, that I just didn't think it all the way through.

I did make something delicious out of it though. This was tonight's dinner: mako shark ceviche, with sweet corn, yukon gold new potatoes, avocado, and pickled onion. It really was the perfect fish for this preparation, with a firm texture and clean taste, but farmed striped bass is apparently and an 'ecobest' choice and would probably work very well. This is super easy to make and delicious. You just cube or dice the fish, and marinate overnight in 1 clove garlic smashed, one chile pepper (serrano) halved, a teaspoon of sea salt, black pepper, a few sprigs cilantro, and enough lime juice to cover (I juiced 8 limes). The lime juice really does 'cook' the fish and gives it a terrific fresh flavor. I pickle the onions in rice vinegar to same me the time and money of juicing that many limes.



The night before we had the Hake (or Merluza as it is called in Spanish) in a tomato stew with potatoes and peas. I'd been saving some tomato sauce in the freezer that I had been meaning to use and I thought this was a good opportunity. It was a really delicious late-night dinner.


Finally. This meal had got to be one of the best ones I've posted about here. I purchased a can of fresh crab claw meat from the supermarket a few weeks ago (apparently canned and refrigerated, it keeps for several months) because it seemed like a good idea and was pretty cheap for crab. I wanted to make something special out of it, since we don't often get a hold of large amounts of what I hoped would be good quality crab meat. After thinking for a while, I decided I would make crab cannelloni. I adapted a mexican recipe from Rick Bayless, for fish with poblano chile rajas and cream, and made a filling out of shallots, roasted poblano chiles, green onion, garlic, crabmeat, pine nuts, and a little cream. I then filled thin egg pasta sheets from Capone's, covered the cannelloni with bechamel and grating cheese , and into the oven for 30 minutes. The presentation may be lacking, but no presentation, or picture for the matter, can really do these justice. They were exquisite.



Plated