Pupusas

“What is that?! If it
has a weird name and looks weird it has to taste just as bad” that’s what I hear
from people who look at pupusas. This is
one of my favorite foods ever! It’s something that is served for breakfast,
lunch, and dinner in El Salvador. You don’t have to eat it for all three meals
but it is there if someone wants it. I had never made any by myself, my mom was
always there making some also. I realized that I actually have learned to make
them. Oh I guess I should tell you what these are shouldn’t I? Well pupusas are
like homemade tortillas with filling made of cheese, meat and beans inside of
it. Most people don’t like what they look like or the name but once they try
them they eternally fall in love. It’s a fact.
So
the first 3 weren’t very good, they didn’t come out to be a very nice shape and
I didn’t put enough filling in them. Once I made a few more they really started
to get better and by the end, I thought they were pretty well done. I don’t think
they were up to what my mom would have made but they turned out to be pretty
close. Mostly everyone I gave them to either liked them or acted like they
liked them. It takes time to make them but it’s worth it, they are
traditionally accompanied with a sauce and a salad called curtido. It
immediately reminded me of home and El Salvador!

Atol de Piña!

Even
though I have already made a Salvadorian dish, I was in the mood for another
traditional dish. Having been to El Salvador a few times, and having a mom who
cooks similar foods has allowed me to fall in love with Salvadorian food. Being
away from home cooking was a change, and so this week I started to crave a
pastry, specifically a pineapple delight.
This dish is a traditional
one for my family. It is a pastry that my mom makes… whenever she’s in the mood.
It takes quite some time and effort to make; this is why she doesn’t do it
often. On that note I decided I would try to recreate such a delicious traditional
dish. One of the pictures is the actual dish and the other some of the
ingredients. I had to go home and make this because some of the ingredients I couldn’t
find around here. My mom got a good
laugh out of watching me make the dish because I told her she couldn’t help me.
This pastry is made out of pineapple and it has soup like look to it, it looks
strange but it is delicious and sweet. I had to peel, cut, blend, fresh pineapple
to be able to make the dish. This dish, surprisingly, also includes rice which
is also blended therefore making the taste almost non-existing. My mom gave me
a quick rundown before I made it so I wouldn’t be a complete train wreck but
halfway through I just couldn’t remember what the next step was. I ended up
begging my mom for help because I didn’t know what was next. In the end the atoll turned out alright, not as good as
my mom’s but pretty tasty.

Tour of Asia

For my whole life I have always loved Asian cuisine, whether it is Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, or Japanese. I’ve always tried to find traditional restaurants with real food, I hate eating at those Americanized Chinese buffets. I’ve also always loved cooking different things but, for some mysterious reason, I’ve never tried to make traditional Asian food. I’ve made my own variations of stir fry an fried rice but never the real thing, so for my last cooking experience I decided to challenge myself with a “tour of Asia,” or full Asian meal. We started with an Asian slaw with ponzu dressing and Vietnamese spring rolls (which I forgot to take pictures of). The spring rolls were probably the most difficult thing. It took me awhile to figure out the rice papers used to wrap them then it took even longer to get the hang of wrapping it. Luckily for me, however, I had Laura with me who was used to rolling tamales. We filled the springs rolls with shrimp, lettuce, rice noodles, julienned red bell pepper, shredded carrot, and slivers of mango. The sauce was the traditional peanut sauce. For the main course I made Korean beef rice bowls. I marinated the thin slices of flank steak for about 30 minutes with fish sauce, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, brown sugar, and sesame oil. I then cut carrots into matchsticks and diced zucchini and onion. I caramelized the onions for a little bit before adding the beef then the rest of the veggies along with spinach at the very end. The meal was then served on top of a bed of rice. For dessert I made Thai iced coffee, which turned out a little better than I thought since I didn’t have the cardamom pods. Despite the first spring rolls not being rolled tight enough and the lack of cardamom, it all turned out to be delicious.

Pizza Brings the Family Together

Some of my best memories I have are the times my family all gathered in the kitchen and made pizza. My mom and I would always make the dough in the morning when we woke and let it rise throughout the day. Then, when everybody starts to get hungry, we would cut up the dough into little balls and get started. Sometimes we would each do our own small pizza and then compete to make the best one while at other times we would all work on the same pizza but at different stages, like an assembly line. My mom would roll it out and shape it then pass it on to us kids who would top it with whatever we wanted and then give it to my dad to stick it in the oven. We always had extra so we would either invite friends and family over to help us eat it or freeze the pizza before we cooked it for later. It’s been awhile since we made pizzas, however, so I decided to introduce Laura, my girlfriend, and friends to the tradition.

Laura and I made the dough at about 2 and then at 6 we called in for help and some friends showed up. We cut the dough into 4 portions, 3 for pizza and then the fourth we divided to make bread sticks. I started to pizza making and not before long everyone started have a blast and doing their own thing. The great thing about pizzas is they only take about 5 minutes in the oven to cook so by the time we are ready to put the next pizza in the first one is ready to be taken out. Also we can eat the pizza as we go! I think the only downside to making pizzas is how hot the kitchen gets from the oven being up so high.

All together we made a pizza with pesto as the base sauce, topped with sundried tomatoes and chicken, and then we put the cheese on top of that due to the tomatoes tendency to get a bitter flavor from burning and the chicken sometimes gets overly dry. We used fresh mozzarella cheese and a mixture of fresh grated parmesan, romano, and asiago for all of the pizzas. Next we made a pizza with an olive oil and garlic base for the sauce topped with our cheese then fresh basil and tomatoes slices. Our last pizza had our homemade tomato sauce, thin sliver of onion, chicken, and diced tomatoes. With the remaining dough we made about 3 breadsticks stuffed with the fresh mozzarella and about 4 regular bread sticks, each one brushed with garlic and olive oil and topped with a pinch of our grated cheeses right before going into the oven.

Everything turned out great, although the shape of the pizzas weren’t exactly perfect circles the taste more than made up for it!

It Rained! (Also, I made a cheesecake)

For my final dish, I decided to make a Chocolate Amaretto Cheesecake. My mother and sister have been making this dessert on holidays for years, and I thought it would be nice to try to make the cheesecake myself.

I have never been confident in my cooking abilities, but my sister was kind enough to supervise me and make sure I didn’t make any mistakes (that couldn’t be corrected). Our food processor was not large enough to contain all of the ingredients at once, so I had to make several smaller, messier batches and then try to mix them together and give them some consistency. After turning the kitchen into one large mess, I was finally able to start putting the cheesecake together. The “crust” on the bottom of the cake was made out of crushed Oreo cookies, and on top of the cake, several handfuls of chocolate drops were added.
Ironically, I think the most stressful part of the whole process was when I pulled the cheesecake out to cool. I was worried that I had forgotten some ingredient or that I hadn’t let the cheesecake bake for long enough, I even found myself worrying if I had let the cheesecake cool too much before placing it into the refrigerator.
In the end, the cheesecake came out fine, and it went perfect with a cup of coffee and getting to watch some overdue rain fall on the backyard.

Grace and Virginia- Expert Chefs

This past weekend was fall break. We were under the impression that the cafeteria did not open again till Wednesday morning. Grace and I decided that we would make dinner for everyone on Tuesday as our challenge cooking project.
We had our dishes and recipes picked out, but we got a rather late start. We spent more than an hour at the H.E.B. because we were completely indecisive and unfocused. Our original plan was to make the steak and potatoes dish we watched Julia Child make in class, but after we arrived at the store, we decided to buy cheaper chicken in place of the steak. After leaving the store, we had our meal plan finalized. On the menu for Tuesday's dinner: barbecue chicken, teriyaki chicken, Julia Child's Gratin potatoes, corn, garlic bread, and brownies. We did not start cooking until sometime after 5 pm.
Grace's special contribution to the dinner was the chicken. She began preparing and seasoning the chicken. My special part of the meal was the potatoes. We bought 6 potatoes, so we both got to work slicing them. I grated the Swiss cheese that goes on top of the potatoes and melted butter for them. I then went about layering, seasoning, and adding the Swiss cheese and butter to the potatoes as we had seen Julia Child do. The potatoes were placed in the oven for 30 minutes. We bought way more potatoes than we needed, so we will probably be snacking on those for awhile.
Together we made garlic bread and brownies and Shannon even made some corn for the dinner. The dinner tasted really good, perhaps that is because we had not eaten a proper meal all day and it was probably about 8 pm when we sat down to eat it.
We ended up with a lot of food leftover so Grace and I wondered through the halls looking for hungry boys. Eventually, all of the chicken, corn, bread, and brownies were gone. Try as we might, we could not get rid of all of the potatoes.

A Family Comfort Food

In all honesty, the spelling of the dish that I decided to make is unknown. But the “roljtyas” that I decided to make have been enjoyed by my family for so long that worrying about their spelling feels trivial.

I remember my grandpa telling stories about his life in the Ukraine before World War II, how he once carved his own pair of skis from the neighbor’s fence posts or how he ended up on a boat to Canada instead of Argentina, as he had planned, and he always told stories about the farm he worked on. My grandfather had grown up poor, and on a farm where food was abundant, he often tried to sneak food out and take it back home.

After being caught several times, my great grandmother, frustrated with her son always being in trouble, sewed pockets into his pants that ran all the way down the leg. This was not exactly the kind of punishment one would expect, to aid and encourage a lousy thief, but he was helping the family. As a treat for my grandpa and his siblings, some of the fruits that he brought home would go into roljtyas, their favorite dessert.

Roljtyas were a way for my grandfather to remember his family and home, and for my father, it was a way to remember my grandfather after he had died. While cooking the roljtyas, I was taken back to my childhood memories of Canada: back to when my grandfather and I would sit on the back porch snacking on the raspberry bush and sour cherries, waiting for the roljtyas to finish baking.