[Sca-cooks] [Sca-Cooks] To 10 pantry items
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sun Aug 5 14:57:51 PDT 2007
On Aug 5, 2007, at 4:59 PM, Adele de Maisieres wrote:
>> The only time I've ever heard a major complaint [...] (as opposed
>> to the ill-informed who just knee-jerk
>> repeat the xenophobe mantra, "rotten fish" over and over again
>> without ever coming within a mile of it),
>>
>
>
> Oh, don't get me started on that kind of attitude, Adamantius.
Okay. But do you feel I am inadequately opinionated on this subject
already? I was trying to be polite! ;-)
On a tangential note, my wife and I discovered yesterday that the
local South American bakery (bakeries, of course, being shops that
make and sell stuff to go with really good coffee; this place seems
to focus on Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru) have greatly increased their
product line for hot food of a non-baked variety (their baked goods
are lovely, too). We went in and pointed at objects that looked
interesting, but whose identity we could mostly only speculate on. I
recognized a few of them, but nothing turned out to be made from
bullfrog noses: the most terrifying thing was the morcilla, which is
a blood sausage, here made with rice, pork -- meat and blood, that
is, and seasoned, apparently with cloves, and then, when cooked, cut
into sections and sauced with a sweet yellow pepper sauce. Dzayumn!
Equally scary, because it could have been anything up to and
including a fried baby head, for all I knew, was what turned out to
be a variant on many cultures' papas rellenas. To some people this is
a smallish fritter made with mashed potato and a ground beef filling,
but this was half a potato (red-skinned, slightly waxy and sweet)
with the pulp scooped out, stuffed with what appeared to be a chunky
beef, rice, and sofrito stew (rumors on websites suggest it really
should be oxtail stew; this might have been brisket, but it was
killer rich), all dipped or rolled in a thick coating of mashed-
potato batter (lots of egg yolk) and deep-fried until golden and crispy.
I think Ceandra enjoyed having the experience many people have when
they go for dim sum: I'll have one of those, and one of those, and
one of those, and is that too much food? Well, okay, I'll have one of
those, too. Oh, and one of those. I came all this way, I can't leave
without one of those, can I? (I think she's ballooned up to about 108
pounds.) After several additions, our total came to about $14, until
she who must be obeyed decided she wanted to try the chicken stew
(genuine fowl), which came plated with a small portion of salad,
rice, beans, and, mysteriously, to us, a small piece of corn on the
cob. Now the bill was an unprecedented $17.
We finally left with our mountainous bag of food (we'd done a lot of
walking in the morning and were tired), having been enthusiastic but
unsuccessful in our bid to spend all of a $20 bill. Hmmm. We didn't
try the tamale-like objects. Maybe next time.
I wonder if we got anything fermented...
Adamantius
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