Finally!
Piled high in a platter and garnished with roasted red pepper and peas, this is a Puerto Rican classic!
Puerto Rican food is not as widely known as some other Caribbean cuisines (think Cuba and Jamaica), but when it comes to arroz con pollo — chicken and rice — you know what I am talking about. And I know I should have blogged this one for you a long time ago. Here, finally, is the one you’ve been waiting for.
You say party, I say tortilla. I have loved Spanish tortillas since I tried them on my first trip to Spain a million years ago and have been making them just about as long.
Let us be clear. I am not talking about the bread-like Mexican tortillas that are used for wrapping burritos and quesadillas. I am now talking about Spain, where tortilla means a stove top egg cake, a thick omelette, a frittata. Many are vegetarian (and many are not). All of them allow you to play with ingredients!
This is one spread that makes no excuses. It has full-on, big-ass, unapologetic, salty flavor: black olives, capers, anchovies…This is for your friends who really enjoy robust and lusty food and who will slather spreads generously and lavishly. It is not subtle, so don’t waste these party snacks on the tea and crumpet crowd.
I have just done a listening exercise with my ESL students on The Marshmallow Test … a 1960s experiment that offered four-year-olds one marshmallow off the bat, but an additional marshmallow if they could just wait alone in a room for 15 minutes with that first marshmallow and not eat it.
Plunged into ice water and ready for processing into tomato sauce
Astonishingly the findings over time showed that kids who could delay gratification for longer times at four, were likely to be more successful socially, educationally and professionally when they grew up than the kids who couldn’t wait and sucked that first marshmallow down as soon as they were alone with it.
Pollo Guisado is one of those abuela (grandmother) dishes that Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-Caribbean folks grow up on. It is uncomplicated, but rich in flavor.
Yes, there is both wine and beer in it; that is not an error in the recipe! This is a modified and milder version of the classic Pollo Guisado which I have posted before (which uses flavorful chicken thighs rather than mild breast, and twice the beer). Very kid-friendly, it is best served with rice. It looks and tastes impressive, but is a cinch to make and is mostly hands-off.
Yes! Those adorable yellow Madeleine berets next to the zucchini and yellow squash are edible! You can even eat the rind!
I really need a steamer. And after this little experiment, I also need a new strainer. it went kaput!
Pattypan squash is the single most searched for recipe on this blog, so I know many readers are out there trying to figure out whatever to do with them. I was equally mystified when we first started getting them at our weekly CSA pick-up. But a little experimenting later, now I know they are loads of fun.
I got my first inkling of disaster from the Blogosphere.
The fabulous Karen of Backroad Journal chronicled her battle with late blight in a recent post about her tomatoes. I gasped. In my myopic focus on avoiding the blossom end rot that plagued my tomatoes last year – a result of uneven watering while we were gallivanting about the island keeping the boy on the hop and too busy/tired to cause trouble — I had neglected to consider the possibility of late blight. After all, wasn’t that all done with in the catastrophic 2009 season? (It should have been done with after the Irish Potato Famine of 1845, but apparently not). Continue reading
Wanna get roasty flavor from your tomatillos and tomatoes without added oil or turning on the oven? Try pan-roasting, an old Mexican technique that I learned about from Reed Hearon’s La Parrilla: The Mexican Grill (Chronicle Books 1996).
Pretty all the way from start to finish
According to Hearon, Pan-roasting dates back to the times when Mexicans didn’t have enough natural fats available to fry or sauté. It is pretty easy and gives an added depth to those bursting-with-freshness summer flavors. Just cook whole vegetables at a low temperature till they brown thoroughly and Bob’s Your Uncle! Continue reading
When I was a kid, I love-love-loved Campbell’s Tomato and Rice Soup, the kind from the can that you just added water to and stirred around on the stove top for a while. Holy Happy Meal, Batman, with a couple of saltines on, that was the best stuff ever to slurp on a fall day, and best of all, I could do it myself from a young age. Don’t ask me how young, because I don’t remember! But it was a handy thing to make, and it got you tons of labels for your school back in the day. Ah yes, the Campbell Soup Label Drives…. Continue reading
My darling son starts kindergarten this week. Yikes!
And I go back to the classroom to teach next week. Double Yikes!
Drying blanched basil
I look upon school food with deep suspicion; I haven’t spent the last five years nurturing a good and healthy eater only to surrender him to the deep fryer as well as the public education system. And for myself, I refuse to waste $10 a day or more eating lunch out when I can eat better for less in the comfort of my office, listening to Pandora and checking my emails. Continue reading
Great food - Simply
Click on the image to purchase at the iTunes store!
Click on the image to purchase the Kindle Edition!
It was another summer Friday in the neighborhood and that called for another festive cocktail. Riding high on the success of last session’s passionfruit mojitos, I decided to make mango mojitos. The drink itself followed much the same construction, but the mango was decidedly sweeter than the passionfruit, so I decided that it needed a […]
Summer evenings in the neighborhood can be wonderful. Occasionally on a Friday some of us neighbors bring out folding chairs and sit together in one front yard for a bit of happy hour while the kids go mental on someone else’s lawn. It’s pretty much BYO, but we do mix up a pitcher of experimental […]
We spent the better part of last summer in Puerto Rico, and among the tasty things that my little guy fell in love with was tembleque, a jiggly (temblar means to tremble) dessert that falls somewhere between pudding and flan. I promised him we’d make it back in New York, and this weekend, for a […]
When the heat gets tropical, so should the drinks. On a recent trip to the mountains of Puerto Rico, I was inspired by a wonderfully cooling and exotic sangría I had up around and about El Yumque (Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. Forest Service system) at Noelia’s, recommended to us […]
There are a number of land crab species skittering about Caribbean coastlines. Some are edible and the one we eat most here in Puerto Rico (although I am told they mostly are imported from Venezuela these days) is Cardisoma guanhumi which we call juey and — if you are English-speaking — you might call the […]
Hot, Cheap & Easy 