It has been some time since are last update, however we finally have food from our next country, Nicaragua. For that country, we made two items; fried plantains and nacatamales. The fried plantains were delicious, and simple to make. We have had them before, on occasion, just as a snack or appetizer, which is what we used them for here. There are numerous ways of doing it, however we just cut them into circles and fried them with salt in a pan full of olive oil until they are golden yellow and just starting to brown. Simple and delicious.
The nacatamales were our entree for the course. They are basically large tamales, except they are wrapped with banana leaves instead of corn husks. This gives it a very distinctive flavor that is pretty good. There were two main issues with the nacatamales. First off, it took us hours to make them. The process is long and time consuming. The other issue is that wrapping them in the banana leaves was not an easy thing to do. Many of our tamales fell apart during the boiling process, or had water seep into the mixture, making them runny. We also recommend taking the tamales out and letting them dry for a few hours; the ones we had the next day for leftovers were for the most part were drier and stayed together better. They do taste really good though, but there was just too much work involved in making them.