About a week after moving into this neighborhood, I saw one of the neighbors returning to her home from her consult at the clinic and searching diligently along the sides of the path while she walked. As I watched, she reached down and started pulling greens from the ground. I hurried over as she was wrapping them up in the front of her shirt to carry them to her house, to ask what she had found. It’s called Verdolaga she told me … its a weed that grows abundantly in the ditches and roadsides.
The Mango Sauce from the Stuffed Chicken recipe inspired these Empanadas de Aselgar. Since April, when I learned to make pie crust, I have made a point of keeping a zip-lock baggie in the refrigerator with enough crust for a full pie just in case of an emergency craving for something in crust. (Hasn’t that ever happened to you?). This was definitely such an occasion.
Access to abundant inexpensive mangoes is as good a reason to live in the jungle as any! I first saw this recipe in Ben’s “What’s Cooking” Blog and saved it to adapt to my tastes and ingredient availability.
The other night I had a pound of fresh ground beef in the refrigerator and a yen for spaghetti and meatballs, so I started hunting through my recipe file for a meatball recipe that sounded right. Once again, a recipe from The Chef from World Wide Recipes came to my attention (he puts out an excellent free daily recipe e-zine that I can heartily recommend) … it didn’t look complicated and I had most of the ingredients, so I decided to make it.
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Many many years ago, when John and I were still in university and meeting other students from all over the world, we were invited to dinner at a good friend’s house, and his roomate had cooked up this fantastic curry of ground beef and potatoes. I was overwhelmed by the excellent curry flavor that was much different from the curry powder that was commonly used in my neighborhood (if one used curry at all in small towns in New Brunswick!) and I looked for years to find a recipe that would duplicate the flavor of that dish. As soon as I saw this recipe, I believed that it was the one I have been looking for.
I brought a couple of small cans of corned beef hash back from Canada with me for just this type of dish. I didn’t follow a particular recipe … I just combined all the ingredients of the basic ‘corned beef hash ‘n eggs’ breakfast.
I had this dish for the first time when we went to visit Guatemalan friends the other day. Doris made the dish the way her grandmother always did, by using the meat of a freshly killed patio hen. I was thrilled when she offered to write down the recipe for me.
This is one of my favorite fast meals to prepare. One can create a full meal from freezer to table in less than 30 minutes.
This was another recipe that I came back with from my Canada trip. A fast and easy dessert … and really really yummy!
Even though gardening has not been one of my successes, I keep at it and if its true that persistence pays off, then I will eventually fill my mostly empty garden beds with a bounty of lush organic vegetables. The temperatures here in the rain forest are great for gardening, as they are for insects and fungus, which compete with me for the green part of everything. I was therefore quite proud that one of my swiss chard changelings actually survived into adulthood. I call it a “changeling” because the package of seeds said they were “swiss chard”, and I thought they were a red variety until the hump of a beet started showing above the soil!
Roast Beef was one of those foods that was always served on Sundays in our home, with the leftovers served in various creative ways over the following week. On the weekend that Herb and Marg joined us, Mom picked up a roast beef so that we could enjoy this family tradition together.
I realized shortly after arriving at Mom’s place that I have never learned to make pie crust! Mom is an incredible pie maker and has filled my life with fantastic pies made from a variety of fantastic fillings like apple (always Dad’s favorite with a slab of old cheddar cheese), berry (throughout my growing years my August 1st birthday was always celebrated with swimming, boating, water skiing, beach combing, exploring AND a big fish chowder feed on a deserted Fundy Isle, and finished off with a giant blueberry/raspberry pie with candles), mincemeat (often using the deer meat that the men would bring home after the fall hunt), rhubarb (that seemed to grow wild everywhere in my youth) and of course pumpkin (always always always served for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners). As I took to my own kitchen in Calgary, this hole in my culinary education wasn’t too evident as I could always pick up a totally fine frozen crust at the local grocery. Here in the jungle, however, we live in an “if you want it, make it yourself” world, so I thought that this time with Mom would be a perfect time to learn to make pie crust. (I should add here that none of my subsequent batches of pastry have turned out looking as good as this first one, and I am convinced it is because of that great rolling mat!)
I’ve found ways around most of the ingredient shortages here in the jungle, but I still haven’t found a suitable substitute for my favorite Canadian winter breakfast … a cooked multi-grain cereal sprinkled with some wholesome whole grain crunchy cereal and topped with vanilla flavored rice milk. If you can eat bananas, they would make an excellent addition.
Since I had brought several pounds of ramon flour with me to introduce it to fellow Canadian cooks, one of the first things I decided to bake at Mom’s place was ramon bread.
I’ve just returned from a month in New Brunswick, Canada, where I was visiting with Mom and celebrating her 80th birthday with her. During the month, I made a point of learning several recipes that captured my attention when they were served. The first that I am going to blog about was prepared and served by my sister-in-law, Kathleen in Boston on my way north. She told me that she invented the dish one night when she had limited ingredients, time and energy. Kath uses a can (or 2)of Mexican Stewed Tomatoes, a product that we can’t buy here, even given our proximity to Mexico. I had forseen this difficulty when planning the duplication of the recipe here, so brought with me the can label, complete with ingredients list (minus quantities), enabling me to build the flavorful stewed tomatoes from scratch. I am going to henceforth call it “Jungle Stewed Tomatoes”, since I feel I have reinvented it here in the jungle.
I couldn’t decide which of these luscious banana desserts to make … however, since I am experiencing an overabundance of bananas, I decided I was in a perfect position to just go ahead and make them both! They are called (from left), Baked Banana Crumble and Banana Crisp (Platanitos Horneados).
“As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai concluded in an article on cookbooks in contemporary India, “cookbooks appear to belong to the literature of exile, of nostalgia and loss.” Our recipes represent our often unsuccessful attempts to relive the past, to recover lost comforts or reclaim a forgotten heritage. We take them with us into foreign lands. We pass them on to our friends and children. We share them with strangers. The foods of our pasts are the most elemental artifacts of who we are: who our parents and friends and lovers were and are, where we have been and where we ended up, what we treasure, what we disdain, what fuels our endeavors, what comforts, what sustains. So powerful is food as an expression of the self that we even orchestrate favorite meals for those we execute. We want to honor at least that much of the worst criminal. Good food. Finally.”
Patty Kirk, from “Starting from Scratch“
