Miserere Mei - 申し訳ありません｡

I'm so very sorry for being away so long. Traveling so much has taken its toll, and I have been very busy trying to get my dissertation proposal completed and presented. In reality, I didn't have sufficient internet access to post until I got to Boston, and was too overwhelmed with work until now to update. More about school later. First, let me catch everyone up on a month of absolutely wonderful eating.

Before I left Paraguay, we had a feijoada with my extended family. There was nothing fake about this joada. I had to prepare the beans in two different pots in order to make enough, and, while one pot didn't turn out quite right, the other pot turned out exactly like the feijoada that my Brazilian friend Ana made for her going away party in Cambridge and that both David and I have been dreaming about ever since. I hid the truth about the other pot from my cousin Mari, who is from bellavista--a city that lies on either side of the boarder separating the department of Amambay, Paraguay and Mato Grosso do Sul,Brazil--and whose house I am always eager to visit at meal time. But the truth is that the pot was neglected too long while I ran to the store to get mandioca and bread and it ran out of water and nearly getting scorched, thus never acquiring the thick creamy consistency that takes many, many hours to develop and makes this dish much more than Brazilian pork and beans. I'm making myself hungry writing about this!

Here is everyone at the table, waiting to eat and wanting desperately for David to finish taking the pictures.
Here is the plated feijoada with all of the appropriate side dishes, bread, rice, orange slices (apparently eaten to help digestion), collard greens, farofa (yuca flour toasted with garlic and butter), mandioca, and vinegary tomato-green pepper relish or molho de campanha (chimichurri in paraguay).
I then spent a very brief week in Boston, madly completing my Fulbright proposal and application before going to Japan. I was lucky enough to stay with my friends Abby and Sam. They might have gotten a hint about heirloom tomatoes from my posts in Paraguay, because they greeted me with a meal that would have satisfied a condemned man's last request for tomatoes: two salads of heirloom tomatoes, steamed mussels, and penne with peppers and sausage. You can see the pictures of this and the other excellent meals I've had at Sam and Abby's house on their food blog. An invitation to their kitchen is quite a treat. Sam has got a fantastic knack for planning impressive and very well balanced meals in which each element really compliments and enhances the others. He also has the kind of talent for plating and presentation that always makes you feel like a very special and honored guest.

Upon arriving in Tokyo, I wasted no time in satisfying my tremendous anticipation for two weeks of gastronomic exploration and discovery (oh wait, I was there for a workshop on sustainable forestry and regional development). I got to the hotel the first night after more than 16 hours of traveling and desperately in need of a shower. As I was headed to the elevator I was greeted by one of the program staff and invited to join the other participants for dinner. Despite the protests of my apparently starving dinner companions, I decided I should take said shower, as much for their sake as my own, and rushed back down to join them on what turned out to be a 40 minute hike through Shinagawa for Okonimyaki. Here we are waiting for our meal.
As you will see, the Japanese are very fond of table top preparation. The most special meals we had all involved cooking them yourself. Okonomiyaki are what Americans inevitably lack any word but 'pancakes' to describe, but what we would call a tortilla in south america, that are filled with all manner of different meats and vegetables but typically contain a lot of cabbage. You order what you like, and the waiter brings you a bowl that contains the requested ingredients. This bowl contains cabbage and cod roe, in addition to the eggs, flour, water, and other standard ingredients. You then blend all these ingredients and pour the batter onto the griddle.
Flipping such things is always a bit of a challenge, apparently even for Japanese, and okonomiyaki are quite thick and are still soft when they need flipping, so there were a couple Julia-Child-like repair operations, but the results were still delicious. After flipping, the pancakes are covered with a Japanese barbecue sauce, mayonnaise, seaweed powder, and bonito flakes. The Japanese love of mayonnaise, while sometimes manifesting itself in unexpected ways, warmed my heart and pleased my belly after living most of my life with what I can only describe as the absurd squeamishness that many Americans have regarding this delicious and indispensable condiment.

Here is a professional making some loaded okonomiyaki in asakusa.

Cynthia, a fellow MIT student and participant in the University of Tokyo Intensive Program on Sustainability, and I took advantage of our intense 12-hour jetlag to visit one of Tokyo's must sees (even for the non-food obsessed): Tsukiji fish market, the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world and one of the most economically and gastronomically impressive places I have ever been. The market was immense; really, "market" just does not convey the scale of this place which is for fish what Manhattan is for finance. I'm afraid my camera was running out of batteries at this point, so I didn't get too many good shots. But here is one of the hundreds of aisles that stretch the enormous distance of the main warehouse and are lined with stalls selling all that the world's oceans produced that day. We arrived a bit late (7:30am), but lifts and carts still zoomed about, narrowly dodging wide-eyed tourists like myself, and a flurry of packing and unpacking, gutting and cleaning, and buying and selling revealed the gears of the global fisheries market as thousands of individuals transacted so that the world's most piscivorous nation could satisfy its demand.

The fish seemed to be generally of very high quality and very fresh, and of tremendous variety as well.

Quite a large amount of octopus.


Outside of this main warehouse were other stalls selling produce, kitchen equipment, and other ingredients. It was like seeing a book or magazine article come to life for me, or stepping through the television screen into iron chef, where familiar characters like fresh wasabi, or matsutake mushrooms were suddenly within my reach.

Matsutake Mushrooms

It was very difficult for me to be in the world's marine garden of eden and know that I had no kitchen available to me and that I would not have an opportunity to cook. The pain was only assuaged by the knowledge that only a few feet away, my breakfast of the freshest and most authentic sushi of my life was hopefully waiting for me at one of the many tightly packed restaurants inside the market. Lacking any Japanese skills whatsoever, I had no choice but to order the 10 piece set and hope for the best. I was not disappointed. Except for a battleship sushi that overflowed a bit too much with its cargo of sea urchin roe, this was one the most delicious experiences I had while in Japan. The exquisite texture and flavor of the fish left no doubt about its freshness. The highlights included the creamy and delicate anago, or simmered salt-water eel (not the typically barbecued fresh-water unagi that is also common in Japan and readily available in the U.S.), the mackerel, and of course the fatty tuna. Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed in the restaurant for some reason.


That afternoon, the group of participants left for Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost major island, where the University of Tokyo Forest is located and where we would spend the two weeks of the program. My fears that they would either skimp on the food budget, as often happens in the U.S., or that they would somehow try to accommodate the very wide range of non-Japanese palates was quickly allayed, as even the lunch box we got before boarding the airplane contained a tasty assortment of sandwiches that were more high tea than gate gourmet.

Our first meal upon arriving at the university forest in Hokkaido was also impeccable for what was essentially cafeteria food. It included (from the bottom left) steamed salmon with shitake and inoki mushrooms, what I believe was spinach stuffed cabbage rolls, seafood and vegetable tempura, japanese pickes, a mixed salad, and tofu miso soup (not shown).
The next evening was the welcome party, which began with Mongolian hotpot and large amounts of beer and sake. The hotpot consisted of a dome-shaped grill surrounded by a broth-filled trough. slices of mutton are grilled on top, while cabbage, onions, beansprouts, peppers, and onions are cooked in the broth.
What appeared to be an uninspired desert turned out to be a life-altering experience. Hokkaido is japan's main agricultural area, and despite highly unfavorable conditions, its small farmers have survived and continue to compete with much cheaper imported products by forming production and marketing cooperatives and specializing in very high-quality high-value produce. One such product is melon. Mind you, I had had quite a lot to drink, but this was no ordinary cantaloupe. It was the perfect fruit. The platonic ideal of melonhood. It was sweet and perfumed, but not cloying; it was juicy but still rich and not watery, and above all, it had a texture unlike any melon I've ever tasted. Somehow firm and silky or at the same time, not tough or squishy or slimy as melon is apt to be, but imparting a luxurious sensation as you bit through the flesh and swirled it around your tongue. Clearly, I enjoyed this more than anyone else.



Another local specialty is lavender, and, while the fields were not in bloom, a lavender theme park did have fields planted with other beautiful flowers and had the broadest variety of lavender products imaginable, including lavender-flavored ice cream.


My delight continued the next day as I opened my first Bento box, and marveled at what an ordinary lunch is like in Japan. To begin with, the rice by itself is excellent, and though I am not Japanese, I suspect its worth the tremendous amount of subsidies payed out by the Japanese government each year, largely to farmers in Hokkaido, so that this product of paramount cultural importance is not obliterated by the free market (liberal economists be damned!). As I write about the food in Japan, I am starting to believe that Japanese food is all about texture, because, again, the texture of rice in Japan is incomparable, even to the Japanese rice sold in the U.S. The box of rice is accompanied by a multitude of side dishes, which typically included a piece of grilled fish, something breaded and fried or what Japanese call 'cutlet,' some pickles, a salad, and some kind of fish roe. While it was undoubtedly better than peanut better and jelly everyday, I'm sorry to say my enthusiasm did wane a bit after about two weeks of nothing but bento for lunch, and, while I quite enjoy fish roe in many applications, I doubt that I'll ever have the Japanese appetite for it.

Another Japanese meal that I can't say I was enthusiastic about was oden. It is a rather bland assortment of vegetables, bean curd, and egg boiled in dashi and served with miso. I had it a second time from a street vendor in Tokyo with a group from the program, where it included fish cakes.

We had one free day during the course of the program, and I spent it as you might expect, eating and relaxing. The day began at the Hokkaido wine festival, where the regions wine-makers showcase and celebrate their produce. I can't say Hokkaido would be my top pick for wine-tasting, but some of it was surprisingly agreeable, and I would have had much more if I was not still getting over the miserable cold I caught in Paraguay. I also had an incredible bowl of soba noodles, which I maintain were handmade. Some of my companions laughed at this proposition, but, again, the texture was remarkable. The noodles' rough edge and their graininess suggested to me that this was not instant soba, and after all, they do grow buckwheat only a few kilometers away.

Contemplating the noodles.


I then very nearly won two bottles of local Furano wine, because there was a contest for the person who had come from farthest away. It was between me and two fellow participants, Niklas from Sweden, and Cau from Vietnam. Here we are being interviewed.



Sweden and Massachusetts are very nearly equidistant from Tokyo, at least in terms of flying time, and I felt a bit dishonest saying I had come form Paraguay since I technically did stay for four days in Boston. So Niklas was deemed the winner, getting two bottles of wine as well as his name and picture in the paper. I lost my chance at minor celebrity, but didn't miss out entirely on the wine as it later formed part of my final meal in Japan.

We stayed at the wine festival a bit longer in order to watch taiko drumming presentation


and then went off to find some lunch. The plan was sushi, but the wait was too long so we settled for a ramen shop, specializing in 'cheese ramen.' Hokkaido is especially known for its dairy products, including milk, custards, and cheese. Tempting as cheese ramen sounds, after a week, I was beginning to crave something spicier than standard Japanese food and went with the 'spicy' ramen, with korean chili sauce.


After the wine festival and getting lunch, our third order of business was to take the train to a nearby town for a highly relaxing afternoon at the natural hotspring. Niklas, Cau, and I enlisted one of our Japanese classmates to help plan our free day, and no one could have planned a better day for me. I have always wanted to visit a hot spring and had suspected that such natural luxury would be highly agreeable to my personality. After finally visiting one, I've got to say that the availability of hotsprings must make a substantial contribution to the Japanese quality of life that is not reflected in their GDP. This particular onsen consisted of ten different pools: a hot pool, an outdoor pool of the same temperature, a very hot pool, an extremely cold pool (which I did not enjoy), a slightly sulfurous cave pool, a pool with tiny bubbles, a sauna, an underwater recliner with massaging jets, large ceramic urns that held a single person and were the water was somehow highly buoyant, and--probably my favorite-- a stone stool above which a heavy stream of hot water fell upon your shoulders massaging your back. Access to all this cost less than $10. No clothing is allowed in the bath, so naturally, I took no pictures. Here we are with our Japanese friend Eiji on our way to the onsen.



Strangely enough, the hotspring was located in a suburban strip mall, so before catching the train back to Furano we killed sometime at a large supermarket, another element of a free day made especially for me. I'm probably the only person who could find an hour too little time at supermarket even when I wasn't there to shop. Indeed, my friends had to drag me out so we would make the train in time. The fish section was impressive

and included whole Alaskan king crabs, which I'd only seen in pictures.
We then returned to Furano and the sushi place that we had abandoned at lunch time. There was still a bit of a wait, but none of us wanted too pass it up a second time. Conveyor belt sushi is apparently the cheaper alternative to a true sushi bar, but I enthusiastically gorged myself on sushi of much higher quality and much lower cost than you'd find in the U.S. I always say that cheap or even moderately priced sushi isn't worth it, because you get what you pay for, and if you are going to eat sushi you might as well cough up what a delicious meal is really worth. Except in Japan, where all the excellent sushi I could eat (well actually, i could have eaten this sushi until it killed me) cost me less than $17.

We had the privileged position in the shop, the first booth next to the wall, so we could be the first to pull whatever we liked from the conveyor belt, which included the widest variety that I've been able to try in a single meal: yellowtail, tuna, shrimp, squid, fried octopus, snapper, tuna with grilled mayonnaise, egg, abalone . . . At the end of the meal, the waitress just adds up the number of plates of each color, representing the different price categories, and totals your bill.
The Japanese clearly share my priorities in life, because the program ended with another awesome party centered around Korean barbecue. Each table had a pit filled with charcoal and covered by a grate upon which we grilled the combination of chicken and beef skewers, whole scallops, prawns, and tripe they brought out to us. Generally not a big fan of the cow's digestive organs, I was surprised to really enjoy the small intestine that we call chinchulín in Paraguay.The grill was very hot, and the room was filled with them, so you couldn't help but consume tremendous amounts of the incredibly refreshing and constantly flowing beer, and the mood became very festive very quickly.





After returning to Tokyo, we had one last outing all together to a Persian restaurant, which can only be described as the most insane dining experience of my entire life. The restaurant's proprietor ran about the restaurant yelling at his guests to eat more, literally pelting food at us, at one point placing a chicken in front of me, yelling violently and incomprehensively to me to give it back, and serving a portion of it to a separate party of guests at another table before bringing the chicken back to me, dragging unwilling guests by their ankles on the ground to dance with the belly dancer, lifting a friend of ours onto his shoulders and taking an inexplicable and uncomfortable liking for my MIT friend cynthia.

After the program ended I spent a couple of extra days in Tokyo and enjoying the excellent hospitality of my new friend Yosuke. I had an awesome time and made the most of the little bit of time I had there because Yosuke was willing to show me around. Here we are at Asakusa, a temple and tourist destination in Tokyo


where they sell lots of Japanese souvenirs and snacks.

Here we saw gentlemen hand making little cakes filled with red bean. It was amazing how quickly he moved and how coordinated the whole process was. They were delicious hot off the griddle.

Despite their less than appealing appearance, even more delicious were little fritters filled with red bean. They were like jelly donuts, deliciously crisp and sweet and still hot from the oil.


Yosuke and I also visited a sushi restaurant where we had an awesome rice bowl topped with anago and wasabi.

bonito tataki,


and an assortment of hand formed sushi.

This is, of course, not a food blog, but a cooking blog, meaning that it's not really about the meals I eat but about the meals that I cook. So I'll end my post with pictures of the way I ended my trip. The only meal I cooked the whole time was for Yosuke and his friends to thank him for his friendship and hospitality while I was in Tokyo. I wanted to make pasta with pesto, but fresh herbs are scarce and outrageously expensive, so I went with a seafood pasta with mojo de ajo. To my surprise, the ajo in Japan was unlike any garlic I had ever seen. Unlike garlic in the US and latin america, it didn't have any individual 'teeth,' consisting instead of one large clove. For this application it worked perfectly, saving a great deal of peeling time and energy.
Here was the final product, which contained copious amounts of cuttle fish, grilled shrimp, and shimeji and king oyster mushrooms. Niklas also brought his bottle of prize furano wine, and we made sangría to go with the Mexican theme.
Here we are posing for the camera at my final celebration in Tokyo.

This was an unbelievable experience. I only wrote about the food-related aspects here, but I am so very grateful for all the friends I made and for the chance to engage with students from all over Asia and the world about sustainable development. It really did remind me why I do what I do and convinced me that there is value in a Ph.D. in social science--something I was sorely in need of at this stage in my education. It is hard to keep motivated and stay focussed, and my time in Japan has definitely helped feel prepared for the hard times ahead.

Thanks to everyone who gave me this opportunity!

Leaving on a Jet Plan

It is very nearly time for me to go back to U.S and I feel like I just got started here. The two months really flew by, and just as I started to settle into a good work rhythm, I'm getting interrupted by a whole slew of traveling. It is probably pretty good timing though. I need an opportunity to stop and take stock of all the interviews I've done and decide what direction to take my research. I'm still unsure of what the central question of my thesis will be, and it is getting difficult to move forward without a very clear focus. I'll be spending a few days in Boston hopefully getting some feedback from friends and professors and preparing some grant proposals. Then, most notably, I get to go to japan for two weeks. This came about after applying for a travel grant to attend a short course on sustainable development through the university of Tokyo. The theme is sustainable forestry and regional development in Asia, which has only a general relation to the research that I am doing, and MIT was giving complete funding for one person to attend. I decided to apply even though it was a stretch, and am really glad I did, because I ended up getting funded. Mostly graduate students and some undergrads from all over Asia and the world will be attending. Many participants from Japan, Thailand, and Southeast Asia, and some from Europe and Australia. It should be a really amazing experience to meet and learn about sustainable development with people from all over. I am also excited to squeeze as much good eating into the the two weeks. There is a cultural show night (Natsu-Matsuri, in Japanese apparently), for which perhaps I will try to cook something typically american. I'm having a hard time deciding what, becuase I'm sure everyone the world over has had the most typical hamburgers, french fries, etc. I thought maybe something mexican would be good, but I bet I'd have to take the ingredients, and mexican always takes ridiculous amounts of work. I also don't know whether to perform something Paraguayan or something American (a folk song perhaps?). Japan has been one of my top culinary tourism fantasy destinations for a while now, and while the motive of the trip is not eating, I certainly don't plan on letting this opportunity slide. Let me know about any can't miss food destinations in Hokkaido or in or around Tokyo.

We have continued to eating well here, and I think we got our food budget a little better under control. Here have been our meals for the last couple weeks.


1. Spaghetti Capricciose with oyster mushrooms, sweet vermouth, and arrugula. We made this with some mushrooms we bought from the agroshopping. It was a Mario Battali recipe and was very good.


2. Spinach Salad with strawberries and toasted almonds. I made a dressing out of balsamic vinager and what I thought was honey, but turned out to be royal jelly. I don't really know what people use royal jelly for, but I don't think I'd put it into a dressing again. It has a stronger, molassesy and kind of funky flavor. I ended up cooking the dressing to try to get some of the raw flavor out of the "honey" and wilting the spinach with it. In the end it tasted good, but I think royal jelly is probably is better used to trigger the development of a queen than to dress a salad.



3. Mostaccioli with peas, ham, new potatoes and minted cream. Much like the corn, the peas here aren't sweet here. Even when they are fresh they are very starchy and need to be boiled for at least 20 minutes to eat.


4. Mushroom omelet with smoked provolone.


5. Watercress and potato soup with yogurt and chives. I've never cooked watercress before, but it was too cold to eat salad and tried it out in soup. It really was very delicious and refreshing.


6. Broccoli with toasted garlic and sesame.

7. The elusive mangosteen. A fruit that has eluded eager consumers of tropical fruit in the U.S. for nearly a century. Attempts to cultivate it in the U.S. have failed, and the first mangosteens to be imported legally into the U.S. arrived in early august, after attempts starting in 1925. I had always read about how delicious and coveted this fruit was, and I had the chance to taste it (imported from brazil) myself after noticing the strange fruit in my supermarket next to the chirimoya and figs (also strange delicious fruits). It really was remarkable. I don't know if it was worth the 82 year wait, but very sweet and flavorful with a very agreeable texture indeed. It would make a very elegant desert for a dinner party served with some sorbet and perhaps a splash cointreau.


8.Fakejoada. I made some approximated feijoada with sausages and a smoked pork chop. It was very good, but didn't really boil long enough to let the flavors develop entirely. The sausage was amazing though, with a strange and delicious melt-in-your-mouth quality. Tomorrow, I'm making the real thing with pork ribs and more of that sausage for a goodbye party with my family.


9. Sesame Beef with pea pods. The pea pods had sat in the fridge for about two weeks, but were still really sweet, and crunchy.


10. Grilled chicken with Tandoori spices. I made this during our grill fest in June, and thought it would make a nice alternative to the sunday chicken stew my tia silvia usually makes. Now we have access to this beautiful built-in grill in our yard whenever we want. I definitely plan on taking advantage of it. Everyone loved this, eating seconds and thirds. We spent the rest of this sunday playing Canasta with my cousins until late at night.


11. We had to make homemade coconut milk because, as close as we are to brazil, there is no prepared coconut milk for sale in our grocery store. I had never done this before, but it is simple enough and requires simply blending the broken up flesh with hot water, and straining it through some cloth.

12. We made some beef masaman curry with the coconut milk and a can of curry paste we brought with us. Its accompanied by some soy braised red cabbage.


13. Finally, a salad of fresh beans with fresh mozzarella and mustard vinaigrette. I started to cut up some tomatoes for a caprese salad, but just couldn't go through with it. They were all mealy and dry as tomatoes in winter a wont to be. I plan on gorging myself on heirlooms tomatoes during the few weeks I'll spend in the U.S.

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.