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.

Okonomiyucky

So . . . [I think I am finally give into my desire to start every post I've ever composed with the word 'so'] I have of a lot of catching up to do after my long absence from this blog--an absence that even my tech-not-so-savvy mother called 'shameful.' But this is not that post. I promise I will write all about my second trip to Japan, my family's visit to Paraguay for Christmas,
and the other meals I've cooked soon. But It is just too late tonight for such a marathon of writing and excruciatingly slow picture uploading. Instead, I'll just relate my improvised attempts to introduce Japanese culture to my household in a country that is as far from Japan--geographically, culturally, demographically, gastronomically--as you can possibly get.

Tonight, after watching a chance broadcast of memoirs of a geisha, I attempted (mostly unsuccesfully) to make Okonomiyaki. Granted, this was not a well thought out and planned attempt to carefully recreate the meals I had in Tokyo as much as it was a desperate attempt to scrape together dinner from the ingredients in a refrigerator left bare after the Christmas and new years holidays. But still, most of my meals are just as improvised. I had plenty of okonomiyaki's mainstay: cabbage, and despite its four-month repose in my vegetable bin (seriously) it was still light, fresh, and sweet. Besides that, I had only red bell pepper, and onion. I also lacked bonito flakes and the seaweed powder we sprinkled on top (is it kombu?), but I figured if I had the essentials, I could successfully create the main idea of okonomiyaki and my tastebuds and memory would forgive the absence of these embellishments. I made the sauce from ketchup following some instructions on the internet, using Paraguayan molasses (miel de caña) in stead of sugar and fish sauce in stead of Worcestershire sauce and it actually turned out remarkably similar to what they use in Japan.
The recipe I found online for the actual okonomiyaki was decidedly less accurate. I was suspicious after seeing that it required an entire cup of flour, but was too lazy to find another recipe and figured I could adjust the consistency. Despite its promising appearance, pre-flip, they came out extremely doughy, heavy, and gloopy, not a pleasant combination, especially when topped off with barbecue sauce and mayonnaise, as these Japanese griddlecakes are intended to be eaten. I put a lot less flour in the second one, and it turned out a lot lighter and tastier, but still not quite right. And with the first attempt having settled at the bottom of my stomach like a bottle of elmer's, it was hard to appreciate the improvement.
In addition to a recipe of dubious authenticity, I was working with a pan that lost its non-stick properties long ago and whose wide lip made it impossible to wield the spatula with sufficient leverage to flip the pancakes without turning them into an unsightly cabbage hash. While this was one of my least successful meals in a while, it wasn't so bad as a first attempt, especially given the circumstances. If I give it another try, I think that some ground pork or shrimp would definitely improve the results, and even less flour.


Yesterday's attempt at yakiudon fared much better. The noodles I purchased in one of asuncion's ambiguously asian shops (this one had mostly Chinese products but also a big bulk bag of Japanese rice and a smattering of southeast asian goods) did not turn out to be udon, despite the equally ambiguously Asian saleswoman's affirmation in this regard. The result was still very tasty, with thin slices of beef, cabbage, green onion, and red pepper along with the fried noodles.

I now have something like my own kitchen, be it a partial and partially furnished one, in the quincho, or the covered outdoor grilling area where there is also a stove and a newly purchased refrigerator. We've been investing in the minimum necessary kitchen accoutrements: kitchen towels, tupperware, a dish rack, a salad spinner. The latter has got to be one of the single most useful kitchen accessories; I use it every day to dry salad greens and fresh herbs and it far more efficient than the towel or paper towel alternative, which is time-consuming and cumbersome, and always leaves your greens soggy and makes your dressing watery. Salad spinners are pretty exotic in Paraguay, however: there were only two units, both on display in the store and everyone who has seen it has looked at it quizzically and asked what it is for. Moving into the quincho kitchen also instigated a daily covert knife war. At night I would go to my Tia Silvia's kitchen and take the sharpest chopping knife (which incidentally was too dull to cut a tomato before david sharpened it) to make dinner with. Then, each morning, my aunt would sneak to the quincho and steel it back while we were asleep. Since then, we bought our own extremely cheap chopping knife from the supermarket and my cousin's wife made gift of a second one after hearing about the knife wars. To make the kitchen fully functional we'd need to get a microwave and a toaster oven, but in the meantime we just walk over to my Aunts's kitchen if we need to heat something. Despite our incomplete kitchen I've managed some pretty good meals.


1. Tofu salad with carrots radishes and thai-style dressing. We discovered what might count as Asunción's china town the other day on the outskirts of the largest public market. Just outside the market's labyrinth of clothing, electronics, crafts, produce, meat, medicinal herb, hardware, and just-about-anything-you-can-imagine vendors are a strip of Chinese restaurants and grocery stores. I have been told there are a cluster of Korean restaurants and shops as well, but they are harder to find because they are unmarked mom and pop affairs. At any rate, the tofu bought was actually made in Paraguay and was really delicious. It was not as firm as we are used to in the U.S. which made it kind of a mess to brown, but it had a really good flavor and was really creamy. We would eat tofu at least twice a month in Boston, so I'm glad we won't have to go without it here. It would be kind of ridiculous too, given the amount of soybeans produced in Paraguay.


2. Rosemary roasted chicken and sautéed radishes with mustard-chive sauce with mashed potatoes. This was a really great meal. After seasoning with salt and pepper, I slid some some garlic and rosemary leaves under the skin of a few chicken quarters and pan seared them until the skin was nice and crispy. They went into the oven to finish while I made their mashed potato bed and sauteed some radishes we got from the market in butter and olive oil with garlic and green onion, followed by a deglazing and short steaming with dry vermouth, and finished off with some brown mustard. The skin was perfectly crisp and the flesh juicy and succulent.

3. Mostacciole al pesto with baby lima beans, smoked bacon, and zucchini. The difference between fresh versus dried vegetables in Paraguay as opposed to the U.S. is quickly becoming the bane of my kitchen. Ironically, after the sweetcorn and pea mishaps, I was prepared for the 'fresh' lima beans I purchased from the supermarkets refrigerator case to take at least 30 minutes of boiling to transform their starchy toughness into buttery creaminess, and felt very clever indeed for not falling prey to the freshness ruse of Paraguayan vegetables for a third time. And so, after browning the garlic and smoked bacon with the lima beans, I deglazed with some vermouth and added enough chicken broth to cook the beans. Unfortunately, they cooked very unevenly, and my judgment that they were done was based on what turned out to be a very unrepresentative sample. So while some of the beans were creamy and buttery, others were unpleasantly crunchy and raw tasting. It made me really mad, because I made a very deliberate attempt to avoid this pitfall, and because this meal would have been absolutely perfect had the lima beans been done right. The flavor and texture of the few beans that were cooked paired perfectly with the richness and smokiness of the bacon, and the freshness of the zucchini and pesto.

4. Ingredients for roasted pork spring rolls. I brought back some spring roll wrappers from Boston because all of the other ingredients to make them are available here, maybe the wrappers too if we look in the Korean shops (but I really doubt it). After going through all the trouble of bringing thai basil seeds here (none of which sprouted incidentally) I realized that the variety of basil in Paraguay has remarkably similar strong liquorish flavor and is a more than acceptable stand in. I marinated a couple of pork loins in garlic, fish sauce, pepper, sugar, and a little olive oil and roasted them in the oven. As stinky and offensive as fish sauce smells--and really isn't rotting fish a flavor that most of us would think to avoid rather than add to our dinner--it adds a really wonderful savory quality to anything you add it to. I think it makes a great marinade for this reason, I read somewhere about how anchovies are actually a secret ingredient for many chefs and that they find their way into some unexpected dishes for similar reasons.


5. Roasted pork springrolls with peanut sauce. When you get these at a Vietnamese restaurant they are usually filled with rice vermicelli, but instead we fill them with julienned carrots, green onion, and bean sprouts, in addition to fresh basil, mint, and cilantro . Generally, I think that trying to be as authentic as possible in recreating the cuisine of other cultures yields the best results. But I'm never a fan of starch-filled starch, and I really think that filling them with julienned vegetables is an improvement. They are even lighter and fresher tasting this way. It also helped that, instead of the miserly bits of leathery pork that you sometimes get, we used tender slices of rosy-pink pork tenderloin.


6. Vietnamese sandwiches made from the leftovers. We had the leftover pork in some sandwiches with some grapes and peaches. The fruit has been really excellent. David discovered that the pears here rival Harry and David of Christmas-time fame. I never would have bought them, because besides the box my mother will get for Christmas, I've always found pears to be a rather joyless fruit. But these are juicy and sweet, and have a firm but yielding texture and are just slightly gritty. It's strange though, because the pears from Argentina and Chile (the likely source of these pears) that make it to the U.S. are usually tough and flavorless, or slimy and pasty.

7. An extremely improvised soup au pistou. I made this to use up the last of the zucchini and the pesto. It was definitely not bad given how I unplanned it was and that it was missing some of the principle ingredients.


8. At long last my first real caprese salad in a very long time. At the agroshopping I discovered that someone, specifically a cooperative of Japanese farmers, had beat me in introducing the wonders of heirloom tomatoes to Paraguay. They only had one variety however, and it except for one lumpy one that we quickly seized, you wouldn't necessarily know that they weren't just really sweet, juicy, and meaty regular tomatoes. After purchasing them, we went directly to the cheese stand and picked up some fresh mozzarella. I see some more pizza in our future. Also a lot more pesto. David made me buy an absurd amount of basil from which we made an absurd amount of pesto. I guess we are just making up for missing out on nearly the whole summer and fall in the U.S.


9. Arugula and watercress salad with heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil mustard dressing. The arugula and the watercress are really wonderful here, much sharper and spicier than in the U.S. The dressing was good, but owes its odd color to the fact that the only vinegar I had was a small bottle of watery balsamic.


10. Classic leek and potato soup. Another improvised meal, but a good one. My mom made this a lot when we were growing up and I happened to have all the ingredients on hand. I forgot that I still had a piece of smoked bacon or I would have added that too.

Back in El Jardín del Mundo

El Jardín del Mundo feels more like el Horno del Mundo right now. I got back to Paraguay on monday night and was immediately greeted by the perfume of coconut flowers in the heavy, humid air that very quickly become associated with this place for anyone who has lived here here. I haven't been here very often in winter, so it was strange to arrive in July last time. The feeling coming off the plane was much more familiar and comforting, and it was so nice to escape Boston just as the crisp clear days and beautiful fall colors were ending and the miserly days of late autumn were about to begin. The nights here have been amazing. I love nights that are warm and humid enough to feel tropical and breezy but still not sticky or uncomfortable. The days, however, have already become unbearable, reaching an unimaginable 117F degrees in certain parts of the city, yesterday, and summer is still ahead of us. In January the city empties as anyone with the means goes to the beach in Argentina, or Brazil, or at least to the nearby lake town of San Bernardino.

To my great chagrin, none of the aforementioned heirloom seeds sprouted in our backyard garden, allegedly because the ground has been too hot, though I suspect poor agronomic technique. I think there may be time to take a second shot at it, and perhaps the seeds I gave to my cousins fared better. I will have my heirloom tomatoes!

I booked the cheapest itinerary I could find back to Paraguay for the dates that I needed. Unfortunately, this involved flying into La Guardia on Saturday afternoon from Boston and leaving JFK for Sao Paulo early on Sunday morning. Heavy luggage, despite its name, is not really made for lugging all around New York and surrounding burroughs. This all turned out very well for me, however, and would have been glad to have done it even if it hadn't saved me any money at all, because I got to stay the night at my friend Pat's house. Pat and I met what now seems like many years ago when we both did a semester of study abroad in Argentina, and we have been pretty admirable about staying in touch since, at least about seeing each other a couple times a year, if not at actually talking or writing often. Pat and his roommate Sasha checked out Dinner Bell on occasion, and I've promised them many meals that have never materialized. This quick visit, dictated by the market for international travel, seemed a perfect opportunity to make good on my offer.

Pat and I stepped outside of his Brooklyn apartment about 20 minutes before closing time for the variety of food shops and specialty grocers that populate the storefronts, a bit concerned that we'd missed the boat. Before those 20 minutes had elapsed, we were able to visit a first-rate fish shop, patisserie/boulangerie, wineshop, meat market, and produce stand, assembling all of the necessary ingredients for an awesome seafood stew. Here are the assorted vegetables along with a slice of pancetta.


Having assembled said ingredients in less than 20 minutes, I was left with something less than what is required for a classic bouillabaisse. Furthermore, after consulting a recipe, it seemed to me that the steps required for bouillabaisse were entirely excessive, particularly considering that I didn't even have the pages of ingredients required. Surely something more delicious could be made with less voulez-vous. So I hesitated for a while, deciding what other brand of seafood stew should form the basis of my creation. I was thinking of the Cioppino recipes I've seen on the food network and the amazing Mexican sopa de mariscos that I had eaten in Puerto Vallarta/approximated with Rick Bayless's recipes. The main dilemma was what to do with the whole octopus we had purchased from the fish market.

There are two ways to cook octopus, the fast but difficult way and the slow but easy way. The former involves dropping in the octopus last after the other ingredients are done and cooking it only very briefly. Any longer than a minute and it gets tough as leather. The problem is that octopus is also tough when it is still raw as well, so it's hard to know if you have undershot or overshot the very narrow window. The latter method involves cooking the octopus for 1-2 hours in the oven, allowing the extended exposure to the high temperature to soften the proteins and the braising liquid to penetrate the octopus resulting in a very agreeable texture and lots of flavor. You could always try option 1 and opt for method 2 in the case that you overcook it, except that we were making mussels and clams and shrimp in addition to octopus and they would be awful after cooking for so long. The other problem with octopus is that it lets out a tremendous amount of water as it cooks, and this could have thrown all the proportions off if I'd used method number 1. Of course, I could have blanched the octopus in a different pot until it was done, and chopped and added it to the rest of the ingredients, but then I would not have taken advantage of all of the flavorful octopus juice (seriously, it was good).

So . . . after what probably seemed like too long to my hosts/diners I decided that I would puree the vegetables and tomatoes and fry them into a paste, as to form the base for any variety of Mexican soups, and after deglazing with a bit of white wine, I would add the uncooked octopus and put it into the 450 oven for and hour and a half. In the meantime I made a roasted red bell pepper rouille, and threw the sliced potatoes in with the octopus after an hour. When it came out, the octopus was nearly done and a nice broth had formed from the cooking liquid and the paste. In went the clams, shrimp, and mussels on top of the stove. Topped off with a crouton and some of the red bell pepper rouille, it was ready to go.




I've made many a seafood soup in my day, but this was exceptionally good. In large part due to the ingredients we had, but the slow braise gave the octopus a perfect texture, and most of all, made a broth more flavorful than any other seafood stew I've made (or perhaps even tasted).



Desert was an assortment of offerings, including butterscotch pudding, pumpkin cheesecake, a sour cherry tart (it had some ridiculous French name that I can't recall now, but something like floucantie) and a chocolate soufflé. The tart and the soufflé were my favorite, but the cheesecake was not bad considering my aversion to pumpkin pie spices.


We had quite a bit of wine and even headed out briefly down the street to one of my friends' favorite beer bars. I at least got a taste of Halloween before leaving the country for a place that knows very little of jack-o-lanterns. It was the perfect way to spend the night before I left the U.S.


I arrived in Paraguay just in time for David's birthday. He has been bugging me for months that he wanted a strawberry cake. We had a slice of one at the expoferia where the producers of Paraguay's agricultural and manufactured goods come together to promote their products each year, and where a small-farmers' association was selling cake made from their strawberries. Admittedly, it was delicious, but David wanted me to buy one for my little niece's birthday even though the lady behind the counter clearly said that kids prefer dulce de leche cakes. At any rate, I knew I'd be in trouble if I didn't produce a strawberry cake for his birthday. Unfortunately, the bakery shop we always go to said they weren't making them anymore because strawberries were out of season (not entirely true, but perhaps they are too expensive in late season to make a cake without a prior order). Rather than losing an entire afternoon running around the entire city in 100-plus degree heat and potentially still coming up short, I decided that I would just make the cake myself. I went to the supermarket and very quickly found all of the ingredients necessary, including two cake pans that I was told I could not return if I found that I already had cake pans at home.

While not the most beautiful cake I've ever seen or made (and much less attractive than the ones you get a bake shops in Asunción), it was very tasty and a close enough approximation to David's dream cake that he was happy. It had mashed strawberries in the cake batter and was filled with strawberries and whipped cream inside and out.


We didn't actually get to eating the cake until the day after his birthday, because the night of his birthday I took him out for Japanese food. It was not bad considering that these particular sushi chefs and cooks were working so far from home, and, while it was hard to appreciate after having been in Japan so recently, it was a nice birthday dinner for David who after four months here was probably ready for something a little different. I'm curious to go back and try the meat dishes--beef being something also highly appreciated and well prepared by the Japanese but much more abundant in Paraguay than tuna or snapper (or than in Japan). So the next night we gathered my family for cake and a bilingual version of happy birthday.


Here is David blowing out the candle:

Kitchen Squatter

So it has been two months since I've had a kitchen that I could in any sense call my own. It's been four months since I had a kitchen that I could call entirely my own. So its been hard to do a lot of cooking, which means I've been ordering out and eating out way more than I like and spending way too much money to feed myself. But, I have made really good progress on my thesis proposal while I've been in Boston, and I suppose its worth it so that someday I can say I am no longer a student. Putting a thesis together is such a long and thankless process. It really is like Sisyphus and the boulder. Every time you write a new proposal and expend the enormous effort it takes to address whatever set of critiques you received on the last version, or accommodate new evidence, or place the study in relevant theoretical framework, it just creates new problems and new critiques and you have to do it again, and again, and again with no end. This has been the last year of my life, and, while I can say that I am definitely much closer to having a viable thesis project than I was a year ago, the work is very repetitive and it is hard to ever feel you have accomplished anything. Not feeling any sense of accomplishment is not so good for motivation. I think that is one reason that I like cooking so much. It is not unlike other creative projects like writing a novel or a song or making a sculpture, but instead of requiring enormous of sacrifice and patience, it is instantly gratifying. Even the most elaborate meals and dinner parties I've hosted have been planned at most a week in advance. I plan my weeknight dinners in front of the fridge and produce something really satisfying in an hour or so. Cooking gives me an opportunity to exercise my creativity, solve problems, and concentrate on something that gives immediate results. I think it is really therapeutic for someone like me, who has been investing in an uncertain future for years and has years to wait before making good on that investment, to have some part of each day where I feel so productive and useful. I noticed this especially during the few times that I have been able to cook in the last weeks. I hadn't realized how much I missed the familiar sequence of cooking's physical tasks: chopping the vegetables, frying the aromatics, browning the protein, adding the vegetables, seasoning with salt, deglazing the pan, adjusting the heat, stirring, finishing with fresh herbs; all of this has a logical and deeply comforting flow.

I stopped in Chicago to see my family for a few days on my way back from Japan last month. My mom made me an early thanksgiving dinner, since I'll be in Paraguay at the end of November. I've only ever missed thanksgiving once, and that was when I was doing my study abroad in Argentina. Being from a food-obsessed family, I would say that thanksgiving is probably the most important holiday for us, though any holiday is easily made into an excuse to do some serious cooking. I really love thanksgiving, I think it is the best American tradition (leaving aside the idealized vision it provides of Native Americans' relationship to their colonial intruders). No other holiday is more completely about family and sharing with those that mean most to you. I think it is really wonderful that we all get a day off work and school to do what we ought to do every day. Plus, my mom makes a pretty phenomenal turkey, actually two turkeys and either a pork or beef roast too, along with homemade dinner rolls that people demand year after year and pear and apple tarts made with homemade puff pastry. Each year, my tia Mai makes better mashed potatoes and mashed sweet potatoes than I've ever tasted elsewhere and homemade mayonnaise to dress the sandwiches we make from the leftover turkey after getting back from day-after-thanksgiving shopping. Somehow, I didn't manage to get any pictures of the thanksgiving rehearsal my mom held for me, but it was very good. I'll have to plan thanksgiving for David and I and my family in Paraguay. It will be fun to cook my own thanksgiving dinner and to share these traditions with my extended family, but I know it will be a little sad to celebrate where the holiday doesn't have the same meaning.

I did take a picture of another meal we cooked while I was in Chicago to take care of my Mexican fix. I have way too much luggage to take back with me to Paraguay, but I'm still thinking I should buy a bag of Maseca to be able to make tortillas there. Either that, or I'm going to have to learn to make my own masa from raw corn, because there is really no mexican food to speak of (or to eat) in Paraguay. Don't tell the agricultural inspection service, but I took some poblano, jalapeño, tomatillo, and epazote seeds with me, and David supposedly planted some in the garden. I couldn't go a whole year without any mexican food. This dinner will have to tide me over until the plants start to bear fruit: steak tacos with homemade corn tortillas and homemade salsa, guacamole, and black bean salad.

I've been staying with one of David's friends and fellow clarinetists, Kristian, since I've been back in town. It's pretty far from any supermarkets though, but I managed to carry back some groceries on the T a few times and make some good meals. I made a pretty good African peanut stew that didn't get photographed unfortunately. But Kristian and his brother were pretty impressed, so you don't have to take my word that it was pretty good.

I did get a picture of this linguine with spicy sausage and tomato sauce. It was a good quick meal that used up the leftover ingredients from the African peanut stew.
Yesterday, I had my friend Melanie over for dinner and had a lot of fun cooking and drinking way too much of Kristian's dad's "Three-Buck Chuck." That small step up from Carlo Rossi makes all the difference. We quickly concluded that it was well worth all three of those bucks. After putting away for bottles between the three of us, we engaged in a bought unsuccessful intercontinental 'drunk dialing' unfortunately neither David nor our French friend Vincent answered their phone.

Dinner was wholewheat noodles with browned tofu, broccoli rabe, crimini mushrooms, and peanut sauce. Melanie said she was amazed at what can be done with a few ingredients. It was pretty good considering how improvised it was. I was just going to serve it with rice, but all we could find was super fancy rice at more than $10 for a small jar at Savenor's market in Beacon Hill where we stopped on our way to the T station. The noodles were even better I think, and the bitterness of the broccoli rabe was matched perfectly by the deeply toasted garlic and tempered by sweet and creamy peanut sauce.
Here is the basic recipe:

1 lbs. fresh wholewheat or buckwheat noodles
1 package firm tofu (you could also use chicken, but I think the flavor and texture of tofu are perfect in this).
6 cloves of garlic sliced thinly
Good Soy Sauce (I like San-J organic tamari or shoyu)
1 bunch broccoli rabe, chopped
1/3 cup dry white wine (old sour wine works well, because the sauce needs the acidity)
1 cup sliced mushrooms (shitakes, oyster, shimeji or other wild mushrooms would be good)
1/3-1/2 cup chunky 'natural' peanut better (the kind that separates when it sits and has no sugar)
1/2-1 cup reserved pasta cooking water
small bunch cilantro

Cut the tofu to desired size (I like larger rectangles) and brown well in some peanut oil. It browns much better if you don't move the pieces around at all until they are ready to flip. Once they are browned add a few table spoons of soy sauce (3). Set aside. Wipe out the pan and brown the garlic in some more peanut oil. Don't let it burn, but let it get a deep toasty golden. Add the mushrooms season with salt and saute until the mushrooms have released their liquids and it has evaporated. Add the broccoli rabe, and stir fry over very high heat, deglaze with the white wine and cover the saucepan to let the broccoli rabe steam until it is tender, take off the heat and add the tofu back in. Meanwhile cook the noodles in salted water. When you are ready to serve, add the peanut better to the broccoli rabe tofu mixture and add enough of the pasta cooking water to make a sauce of creamy consistency, it should not be too watery but if it is too thick it won't coat the noodles and other ingredients either. Toss with the noodles and garnish with chopped cilantro. I think I will experiment with adding some sugar to the peanut sauce if I make this again.

Here are Melanie and Kristian ready to pounce.
We also had a dessert course of a single cheese. I forget the name (I have to remember to save cheese labels so I can post my reviews!) but it was a great value. It was only $5 but a very tasty, soft french cows milk wrapped in chestnut leaves. It had a very creamy almost liquidy texture at room temperature, and a buttery flavor that was good with lingenberry jam as for dessert.
A timer shot of Melanie and I.

Bobby "El Gringo" Flay

So how is Bobby Flay's Spanish so horrendous, despite being the iron chef of southwest cuisine? I mean, I'm not asking for Rick Bayless-style painfully laborious attempts at phonetic authenticity, but come on, Flay sounds like the most contact he's had with Latin language and culture is the South Park Episode featuring Cartman's hand as Jenifer Lopez. I've always been irritated by people who draw too much attention to foreign words by over-pronouncing them and entirely switching accents mid-sentence, but there are ways to not entirely mispronounce Spanish words while still speaking English. I've watched too much food network this weekend . . .