Tag Archives: pork

Food Country: Russia

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Our next stop on our global conquest of food is mother Russia. Home to two of my favorite things, pirogi and vodka. And while I would love to have a global drink conquest as well, for now we are sticking with food. The food we chose from Russia is pelmeni, which is a meat filled pirogi. The good thing about cooking this was we learned the basic steps to make virtually any filled pasta, although these are more moon shaped than, say, ravioli (but the basic concept is the same).

Back in the kitchens of the USSR

Food Country: Nicaragua

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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.

Read on, you crazy diamond!

Burma/Myanmar

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Burmese (or Myanmaran?) fried pork curry =’ed delicious.

It took a long time to make, mostly because of the simmering for an hour part, and Cory didn’t exaaaaaactly understand my way of measuring rice* so he put a tiny bit too little, resulting in slightly al dente rice; but the only other downside was that turmeric turns things yellow. But, it IS curry, so we should have expected that. The only advice I can give you is that if you try this dish, use dark utensils and pots/pans because anything else will become a yellow version of what it once was. Just to show you; we used a wooden spoon to stir… now THIS is our spoon (with reference normal spoon):

Anyway, the most awesome part of this dish to me was that it was curry, but not made-from-cubes-bought-from-the-store-curry. I always love when you can make something like that from scratch. As I said, it is delicious and you should all try it.

*My way of measuring rice is not by using measuring cups and so on. That is too much work for me. Also, I know the secret Asian way, taught to me by my ex-roommate Marisa, who learned it from her mother, who is a very cute and traditional Thai woman. The secret is this: put however much rice you want to be cooked in the pot or rice cooker, make sure it is evenly distributed in the pan, and simply add as much water as comes to the first joint of your pointer finger when you touch the tip of it to the top of the rice. In other words, add some water, completely covering the rice. When you have about an inch over top of the rice level, you can measure with your pointer finger from the top of the water to the top of the rice, and if it is ever so slightly above the first bend in your finger, then it is perfect. (Cory’s problem was that he tried this and put too little, so it was just barely touching that joint… and well, the rice was hard in the middle.)

It may sound weird, but it works and I pride myself on being an expert rice and water ratio measurer.

Also, it works nicely when you want a non-conventional measuring of rice to cook, because the directions for rice are almost always in full or half cup quantities…. and the water is usually 1 1/2 cups or something per cup of rice.. I just hate math and feel that it might get confusing when you wanted to do a different amount than that. Anyway, my rice rant is over. Go eat delicious food.