4. Costa Rica: Gallo Pinto

Gallo Pinto means "spotted rooster" in Spanish, and gets its name from the way the white rice looks mixed with darker beans. It's a very common dish through much of Latin America, but this name seems particular to Costa Rica and Nicaragua. When it's my turn to do Nicaragua, I might seek out a version that's particular to that country rather than find a completely different dish, for Gallo Pinto was the easiest and most rewarding of the four dishes I've made so far for this blog.

About Costa Rica

Capital City: San_Jose
Population: 4,586,353 (2011 census)
Language: Spanish

Here's the recipe I followed. Most recipes I found were very sparse in their ingredients, unfortunately. Not wanting my finished product to be bland, I chose this one because of its use of coriander and cumin. I'm glad I did because it turned out well.

Gallo Pinto is basically oil/spices + cooked rice + beans.  Most of these also call for a native Costa Rican ingredient called Salsa Lizano. Most of the recipes also said you could use Worcestershire sauce instead, and I chose that path. I love Worcestershire (a top 5 condiment if ever there was one) and I didn't like my chances of finding any Lizano locally.

I doubled the recipe to feed my family, and it made a nice, very tangy dinner for us. Some photos:

Next countr: Andorra. Hmm... Time to go research.

3. Thailand: Pad Thai

Pad Thai (ผัดไทย) may not be the actual national dish of Thailand, but it's certainly the most famous one, and the dish that most people have when first exposed to Thai cuisine. Experts might point to Tom Yum Soup as the more revered national dish, and one that is more likely to be served in restaurants than Pad Thai, which is normally a street food.

But I'd never made Pad Thai on my own, and since it's one that my family knows and likes a lot, I decided to go with it for my Thailand entry. First, some Thai facts:

About Thailand

Capital City: Bangkok
Population: 66,720,153 (2011 estimate)
Language: Thai

I did a lot of research into Pad Thai before embarking on making it. Lots of recipes are out there, all of them different. I settled on this one, with some tiny modifications. I didn't use the pickled radish/turnip, because I couldn't find it. I skipped out on the tofu because at the last minute discovered I didn't have any and didn't feel like going to the store. Finally, I decided to omit the dried shrimp because the ones at my asian store still had shells on, and I was almost certain it would be a deal-breaker for my family.

Unfortunately, these three ingredients comprise an entire step in the process, so while I followed the "authentic recipe," I'm afraid my results were short of actually being authentic.

If you decide to make Pad Thai, here are some lessons I learned:

• Allow for at least an hour of prep time. 
• I recommend buying pre-shelled peanuts. Shelling peanuts and making sure the paper skin was off was easily the longest part of my prep.
• Get the real Chinese or garlic chive for this dish if you can! They taste much better than scallions in this context. If your Asian grocer is Vietnamese, look for something labelled Hẹ. It's the real thing!
• Have your mise-en-place set to go before you start cooking.
• Buy fresh shrimp, not pre-cooked. I bought fresh and was glad I did, even though I needed to take the shells off of each individual shrimp.
• Don't let fish sauce scare you, and unless you're a strict vegetarian, do not substitute out for it. It will not taste like pad thai.
• Don't substitute for the tamarind paste. Try your best to find it! It's also called tamarind concentrate, which is what I ended up buying.
• Get into a rhythm of adding ingredients. I made a list of steps and pinned it to just above my stove-top, where I could quickly refer to it during the process. By my fourth time through, I had it memorized and felt like I'd been making it for years.
• Depending on the size of your pan or wok, do either 1 or 2 portions at a time. Pad Thai isn't like a stew where you make the whole thing at once. Your portions will be much better if they are given appropriate individual care.

Now some necessary photos!

Sauce ingredients: fish sauce, tamarind paste and brown sugar	fresh rice stick noodles	Chinese or Garlic chives
my mise-en-place for the evening	My personalized instructions based on the recipe proved invaluable.	This is one portion being cooked!

And the final plating, nice and big:

This is definitely one of those dishes that even though I hold in such high regard, I don't think I'm going to make it again. More prep than I'm normally willing to do for a dish, it made my kitchen smell pretty bad for a couple of days, and my favorite restaurants can make it ten times better than I can.

Still, the finished product wasn't too bad. The family liked it, the wife was impressed, and it was a fun experience. Now I have to get to another southeast-Asian country to use up that fish sauce I bought!

Next country: Costa Rica. This is going to be fun! I love cooking Latin dishes.

A Return

Two years ago I created this blog and then promptly neglected it. I'm going to try again.

I just rolled the dice, and Thailand is up next, which means I'll probably be cooking up some Pad Thai pretty soon. There are other dishes that could be considered, but as popular a dish as Pad Thai is, I don't think I've ever attempted making it. The only drawback: this means I have to buy fish sauce. Yuck.

2. Turkmenistan: Palaw

Seriously, who doesn't like a good pilaf? Or pilav, pulao, plov, or any of the various names for this dish known the world over. I'm fascinated by the fact that this dish has basically the same name the world over: p-l-v/f/w, with vowels in between. OK, you may not find it fascinating, but the linguist/polyglot in me does. And I had to kind of cheat on this one. Alright fine, I cheated twice. But it was in the name of le bonne cuisine, I hope I can be given an indulgence here.

Cheat #1: Turkmenistan isn't listed in the wiki list I'm going by, but it's what my perl get-a-random-country script came up with. Doing some research on Turkmen cuisine, pilav was by far the most-mentioned staple, so I went with it.

Cheat #2: I wanted to use a new cookbook a friend gave me, which I heartily recommend: Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey. The cheat? No Turkmen pilav recipe, so I used an Uzbeki one. Close enough? Probably not if you're from one of those countries, but good enough for this blog's purposes.

I do hope to cheat less in the future and strive for better authenticity, but sometimes, you just can't get goose tripe.

About Turkmenistan

Capital City: Ashgabat
Population: 5,110,000
Language: Turkmen

The ingredients were pretty standard: rice, carrots, some kind of broth to cook it in, currants (I used raisins -- a third the cost), saffron, and almonds or peanuts. Normally I would go with peanuts, but these needed to be raw almonds or peanuts. Ever have raw peanuts? They're nasty. At least my western palate seems to think so. They've got too much earthiness to them, and almost none of the flavor that's brought out when they're roasted. Raw almonds are so much better.

The nuts needed to be blanched and skinned, which is something I'd never done before, so I needed to google it. It's basically just putting the nuts in a bowl, pouring boiling water over them, and letting them sit for a minute. I needed to give them the water bath twice to get the skins to come off. This was probably the most involved or at least time-consuming steps in this recipe. Thank goodness for music in the kitchen.

I then had to heat some oil, and saute the nuts and raisins together, until the raisins had puffed a bit. Removing them with a slotted spoon and placing them to the side, I got to cooking the other ingredients in the same pan, in the same oil. Cumin seed (yum!) went in next, what an aroma! Then some chopped onion.



Like other, similar recipes, the rice goes into the hot pan in its raw, dry state. It gets a pretty lengthy sautee with the other ingredients (in this case: serrano chili, bell pepper, grated carrots), and then the broth gets added, and the rice is allowed to cook covered on low heat for awhile. It's essentially ready when the timer goes off, the almonds and raisins are added, as well as some chopped cilantro.



A great dish, and definitely more of a success than the Tavče Gravče. Make it again? In a second. I love pilaf, and this was a fun one to make. My kitchen smelled wonderfully for days afterwards.

1. Macedonia: Tavče Gravče

This is the dish that gave me the idea for this blog. I was looking at random international cuisines on Wikipedia and it struck me that I knew nothing about what Macedonians like to eat. I went there, and this dish was at the top of the page with a caption that said something like "The national dish of Macedonia." And voila, a blog is born.


Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tav%C4%8De_Grav%C4%8De
Recipe followed: http://www.mymacedoniankitchen.com/?p=428

About Macedonia

Capital City: Skopje
Population: 2,114,550
Language: Macedonian

Official Name: Republic of Macedonia (Република Македонија)

"Balkan chili" is a good Saturday afternoon dish, particularly if you're using dry beans that need to soak or boil for a good two hours.

I did in fact use dry beans, so I boiled them with onions, bay leaves and a dry ancho pepper for a couple of hours. I wasn't sure what to do with the ancho, so half an hour before I took the beans off the heat, I removed the ancho and chopped it, mixing most of the pulp back into the beans and onions. The recipe calls for a dried red pepper, and settling for the dried poblano (which is what I had on-hand) was probably a mistake. It gave the resulting dish a different flavor than was probably intended.

As it turns out, great northern beans need to boil for a bit longer than what the recipe says. Were I to do this again, I would keep adding 1/2 cup water and stirring until the beans are at the desired consistency. And DON'T rely on the 30+ minutes of baking to soften your beans more. They really find their softness in the boil, and not in the bake.

A fun first dish, though, and one that I'll probably make again at some point, if only to fix my mistakes and taste Balkan chili as it's meant to be tasted!

And don't add the spices until the oil is ready! I mistakenly threw everything into the oil well before it was ready to release the flavor, and I'm pretty sure the blandness of the resulting dish has this step to blame. Sunflower seed oil, which is what I used, has a MUCH higher smoking point. My poor spice mixture didn't get the full treatment it deserved!

Next country: Turkmenistan. Should be interesting.

Token first post

It may be a few days before I put the first actual cooking-related post online. I just started this blog (4/12/2011), so I'm putting this here so you're not scared away by a lack of content.

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