Meal 123: Nicaragua

I try not to knock the countries whose food we cook, but I have to admit I've generally found Central American food to be pretty boring. The Nicaraguan food we cooked mostly fits the pattern, with one huge exception: enormous, overloaded, rich nacatamales. The variety of ingredients, from raisins to olives to rice to pork, is so enshrined in each family's recipe that it's like canon; as one fourth-generation nacatamal vendor put it, "We don't innovate. We make everything step-by-step the way we were taught." Joining in our attempt to avoid innovation were Emily (and Stella!), Courtenay, Courtenay Hameister +1 Elia, Julie, David, Nancy, Sue, Kaely, Brett, and friends. Muchísimas gracias to Emily for her guidance in all things Nico — that is, Nicaraguan.

Refresco de chia con tamarindo | Tamarind-chia drink | Recipe

There's a surprisingly broad range of non-alcoholic drinks in Nicaragua. Emily brought over a premixed cebada, a barley-based drink, while I whipped this one up from scratch. Well, sorta. I bought whole tamarind pods and tried to soak and strain them, but they were super old and tough, so I cheated and used an Indian tamarind concentrate. Way easier! I put the chia on the side, because not everyone enjoys boba-like texture in their drink.

Vigorón | Yucca with slaw and pork rinds | Recipe

It's odd how sometimes a very particular combination of foods becomes a common thing, almost like someone's late night fridge raid accidentally got enshrined in the national culinary canon. In this case, it's plain boiled yucca root with a mildly tangy cabbage slaw and fried pork rinds, wrapped in a banana leaf. It didn't do too much for me, though it was fun learning to make chicharrones from scratch.

Nacatamales | Deluxe tamales |Recipe, Article

I am a huge fan of Mexican food, but I'm just not a fan of the tamales, most I've had are pretty dry and almost all corn with just a bit of some filling. The Nico version, on the other hand, is rich and just about bursting with filling.

To start, the pork is great just on its own, in a vibrant red sauce. I was stoked to find the sour oranges fresh at Providore, and since every recipe called for a different cut of meat, I went with pork shoulder because I needed the skin for the chicharrones, and the generous layer of fat for the masa. Now that's how to avoid a dry tamal, just douse the corn in lard! The third component of the tamal is all the other random stuff you fill it with: rice, potatoes, tomatoes, onion, mint, olives, prunes, raisins, peanuts, capers, and chiles. You practically clear the pantry! Then it's all assembled on top of banana leaves — which themselves contribute to the flavor and moisture — wrapped and steamed for several hours.

Oh man, I loved these! So much flavor and color, so many textures, every bite a little adventure. They're so filling that I can hardly believe that the traditional accompaniment to a nacatamal is, I kid you not, bread.

Gallopinto | Rice and beans | Recipe

Very similar to the Costa Rican version with which I'm more familiar. According to Emily, this recipe was fancy compared to typical, which should be little more than leftover plain rice and beans, stir-fried. That said, this still didn't have a ton of flavor, the tamales were way better.

Maduros en gloria | Creamy sweet plantain casserole | Recipe

In extreme contrast with the Spartan plainness of gallopinto, this dish lives up to the name that literally translates as "ripe ones in glory." The ripe ones in question are fried sweet plantains, and the glory is layers of cultured cream and sweetened salty hard cheese.

Meal 117: Myanmar

Burmese food is intense. Funky, fiery, crunchy, soupy, tangy, herby…a full meal is a real workout for your palate. It bears some resemblance to Thai food, but with more crispy bits, more turmeric, and a lot more fermentation.

It’s also a good amount of work to prepare! A birthday gift of an outdoor street-vendor-style wok was extremely well timed, as there were several smelly, splattery things to be fried up. I’m never going to claim my cooking is authentic, but as I squatted next to the wok in the driveway in the mid-afternoon mid-summer heat, I felt like my approach was a bit closer to the on-the-ground reality than my normal induction-range cooking.

I’m also super lucky that there is a Burmese market in town. I’ve sung the praises of the highly global selection at Mingala before, but man, they really came through with every last ingredient I was looking for! I was the most grateful to find the fermented tea leaves, so I wouldn’t have to ferment them myself from scratch. (Though maybe I should have, as you'll see.)

(To address the Burma/Myanmar confusion: according to the BBC, they're essentially the common and literary version of saying the same word: "B" and "M" are both voiced consonants made with closed lips, for instance. The former is both the British colonial name as well as the democracy movement's preferred name, while the latter was instituted by the military junta and codified via its UN membership.)

It was a loverly summer evening so we enjoyed it outside with Pat, Debbie, Jeff, Denise, Chelsea, Al, Pan, Quinn, Lisa, Trish, Douglas, Kristen and friends.

Mohinga | Breakfast fish noodle soup | Recipe

The phrase “breakfast of champions” is overused, but a bowl of this rich, intense stuff is a pretty powerful way to get a day going — I certainly wouldn’t have conceived of it as a breakfast food were I not told it was. Yet this was a dinner, not a breakfast, but I cooked it anyway because pretty much everyone says it's the national dish.

You make a base from simmered catfish, aromatics like ginger and lemongrass, and shrimp paste, and then when it’s time for soup you simmer some of that paste with fish stock and then throw in some noodles. (I left out banana stem because I couldn't find any, and frankly I've never knowingly had it so I'm not sure what if anything we missed.) But arguably the best part is the crispy topping and tangy lime on top — I made beans and shallots, but there's a whole sub-cuisine just of of toppings you could do!

There's no question that there's a number of ingredients and several steps involved in making these soupy noodles. But if you're inspired and have the time, it's a great blend of flavors and textures.

Ohn-No Khao Swè | Coconut chicken noodle soup | Recipe

A different sort of noodle soup, more similar to Thai, with egg noodles and a coconut-curry base. (Though some Burmese might say that it's the Thai who got this dish from them and renamed it "khao soi"!)

Yes, I made two noodle soups. But they're so different! And I'm so glad I didn't let the first one get in the way of making this second one. It's a totally different type, with toothsome egg-wheat rather than soft rice noodles, and a rich, creamy, and subtler flavor rather than the much more punch-in-the-face mohinga. You could definitely make this with ingredients available at any Western supermarket: if you can't find gram flour just use a bit of wheat flour (preferably pan-toasted), and if you can't even find Asian egg noodles, any egg noodle (even the dry kind) would make for a decent substitute. In any event, I hope I remember this next time I'm jonesing for a chicken noodle soup with a twist, because it's pretty easy to make yet so satisfying to eat.

Pork curry | Recipe

Even after nearly 120 meals, I'm still finding novel cooking techniques. In this case, it's to separate the juice and the solids of the aromatics (onion, garlic, ginger) by blending and straining, using the liquid for simmering the meat, while separately frying the solids. For a curry, this has few seasonings — really, the only spices are turmeric and chili — and also requires quite a bit of attention to avoid browning the solids. I've never met a dish made with pork shoulder I didn't like, and this one was for sure tasty with that caramel-y depth from solid-sauteeing, though it didn't bring quite enough punch to make me want to make it again.

Lahpet thoke | Tea leaf salad | Recipe

If you’ve had the tea leaf salad at a place like Burma Superstar in San Francisco, with intriguingly tangy strands mixed in with cabbage and crunchy beans, apparently you were served the Westerner-friendly version. From what I’m led to understand, a true tea leaf salad in Myanmar is deconstructed, with a little pile of spicy, fermented tea leaves in the middle and surrounded by all sorts of other things to mix in.

Maybe I’ll stick to the Westernized version. The pre-prepared tea leaves were insanely intense: sour, spicy, and ferment-y in equal proportions. They were also were like spinach in how they make the back of your teeth feel. Really, it was more like an intense condiment than a salad. If anyone’s feeling adventurous, I’ve got one extra packet of these leaves that we didn’t end up opening… Though we didn't save you any of the crunchy fried-bean mix, that stuff was MSG-licious and went a long way in overcoming that intense tea-leaf flavor.

Many thanks to Emily for the advice on what to cook and buy!

Meal 110: Mexico

Just like other great cuisines like Chinese and French, there's plenty of regional variety in Mexico's food. And just like rice with Chinese and bread with French food, there's a ubiquitous starch tying it all together, in this case tortillas. This meal's menu is an attempt at a sample of regional foods, all while trying to get good variety at the table. From the oven-baked, olivey-sauced huachinango a la veracruzana representing the Caribbean coast's fish and heavy colonial influence, to the annatto-coated and banana-leaf-enrobed cochinita pibil demonstrating the Yucatan's tropical direction, to a beefy salad called salpicón that reflects the livestock and temperature of the North, this meal drew from the many reaches of the country.

We had a pretty full house, with friends including Alondra, Derek, Jen, Quinn, Katia, Sarah, Estel, Julie, Levi, Kaely, Brett, and Mayra and family.

Tortillas

These humble corn flatbreads are a battleground of authenticity, at least in my world. When I pronounce the name with the best Mexican accent I can muster, with a trilled R and a slight affrication on the LL, Laura critiques me for putting on airs. (Don’t even get us started on the pronunciation of bruschetta.) And I’d blithely figured that homemade tortillas would be far more “authentic” than store-bought, until I read this fascinating article making the point that most people in Mexico buy their tortillas out of the house, so in many ways doing the same would best replicate how people eat today.

But, darnit, homemade tortillas just taste better, so we made them. In a nod to practicality and acknowledging the reality of how most tortillas are made in the Mexican kitchen, we used the ubiquitous Maseca flour rather than seeking the more flavorful, rarer, and far more expensive freshly-nixtamalized masa. We got a mini tortilleria going in the kitchen for an hour, passing from mixing to balling to pressing to toasting on the griddle. They were simply delicious.

Salpicón | Shredded beef salad | Recipe

Just as with the Southwest and West Texas across the border, cattle is king in the north of Mexico, so I went about looking for beef recipes from this region. The search ended when I arrived at this dish of cold shredded beef with citrus, onion, scallion, cilantro, and chilies, kind of like a bizarro land-lubber ceviche where the base ingredient is cooked forever rather than not at all. Then again, there was also cheese, so maybe this metaphor falls apart.

Anyway, this was a really yummy dish. If you've got the time, it'd make for a great potluck dish: easy to scale, interesting enough to raise an eyebrow, tasty enough to satisfy, and no need to reheat. What with how hot it is in that part of the world, it being cold is perhaps the best part.

Birria tatemada | Roasted goat | Recipe

Birria comes in two variations. The more common one is as a rich soup, but since this was a meal built to have an abundance of bites on a plate, I went for the roasted version, known as tatemada from a native word related to roasting, one of the treasures of the state of Jalisco. I do not regret the decision.

Usually I decide what dishes to cook for these meals, but sometimes the dishes find me. For the Mauritania meal I had bought and defrosted two goat legs, but it became evident that that was one leg too many, even for a crowd of 15. The day after that meal I got to researching how goat would work into a Mexican meal, and this dish soon showed itself to be the obvious choice.

The overnight marinade is a beautiful blend of worlds: toasted dried chilies and allspice from the New World, and cloves, oregano, and cumin from the old. From there, it's as simple as roasting until the meat is falling apart, perfect for its role as party food.

Mole verde de pollo | Green mole with chicken | Recipe

The name comes from either the Spanish moler, to grind, or the native word molcajete for the three-legged stone bowl in which ingredients are traditionally ground. The “seven moles of Oaxaca” are thoroughly codified, and I chose this one for two reasons: to demonstrate how not all moles are made with chocolate, and to represent the tomatillo, an important if lesser-used native vegetable. (Yes, it's actually a fruit, I know that.) In fact, I used the last of these tart green fruits from the collection I froze the prior summer. (Confusingly, the recipe calls for "tomate verde," or green tomato, but rest assured that it's tomatillos you should use.) Pumpkin seeds add some thickness and texture when tossed with the tomatillos in the blender, which is way easier than grinding in the traditional way. Even though I forgot to add the cactus thanks to all the commotion in the kitchen, and the ingredients and technique are fairly simple, this was a tastier dish than I expected. Once this year's tomatillos come in, I very well might make this again.

Cochinita pibil | Annatto-rubbed roast pork | Recipe

If the Yucatan Peninsula had a national dish, I’m pretty sure this would be it. (A heads-up from a friend though: apparently it’s considered a breakfast food there, so don’t expect to find it for lunch or dinner!)

While traditionally made with a baby pig, hence the name, it’s more common to use a hunk of tougher pig, such as shoulder. A generous coating of a deep red annatto, garlic, and citrus rub penetrates the meat overnight and then through the course of a long, slow roast on the grill, with banana leaves holding in the flavor and generating steam. Both because I’m an overachiever and ran out of cooking space, I did this one on the grill, with lump charcoal and mesquite chunks. The result is irresistible for any carnivore: meat tender enough to pick apart with your fingers, with a tangy flavor that runs all the way through, and of course that smokiness from the grill dancing with a slight musky flavor from the banana leaves. Assuming you’ve got the time to make it — and it’s definitely worth making in the oven if you don’t have the equipment or the will to grill — taco night will never be the same.

Huachinango a la veracruzana | Snapper in tomato sauce | Recipe

On a group trip to Mexico in high school, we went to a nicer restaurant one night. Orders got mixed up and our dean of students ended up with my order of huachinango a la veracruzana. Upon discovery of the error, Dean Dean (yes, he was Mr. Dean) refused to give me my dish, claiming that he liked it so much he couldn’t stand to give it up.

What dish could cause an authority figure to swindle a student? A baked dish of snapper in a sauce of tomatoes, capers, olives, chilies, and herbs. The Caribbean coast is where the Spanish launched their conquest of what’s now Mexico, leaving a legacy of a local cuisine with a higher degree of European influence, hence several ingredients that are more often seen in the Mediterranean.

Snapper’s both an environmentally iffy choice and wasn’t available when I was looking, and the fishmonger accidentally sold the somewhat similar rockfish I’d ordered, so I ended up with a black cod. What an unexpectedly great substitute this flaky yet soft fish made, melting in the mouth along with that tangy, almost marinara-like sauce.

Arroz a la mexicana | Tomato rice | Recipe

Either this recipe, or my preparation, failed. Perhaps it was the fault of the “sauté then simmer” function of my rice cooker, but it came out pretty flavorless and quite mushy. To be safe, look for another recipe, and make sure to do this one on the stovetop.

Frijoles de la olla | Black beans |Recipe

I made these with the classic recipe, and it turned out just right: beans that are tender yet retain their shape, and with enough flavor to stay interesting but not so much that they overpower. If you can find epazote, a sort of razor-toothed herb that’s somewhere between mint and basil with an earthy overtone, it adds a subtle depth and apparently also improves the beans’ digestibility.

Agua de tamarindo | Tamarind drink | Recipe

You’ve likely seen them: those big, pale brown pods, some of which are broken, exposing haphazard strings coated in a darker brown goop. Maybe you’ve even tasted one and recoiled from the tartness. Well, with some hot water and a lot of sugar, you can turn tamarind into a tasty, refreshing drink. Also works great as a mixer for margaritas!

Flan | Custard | Recipe

One of the region’s preferred desserts is torta de tres leches, “three milks cake,” made with a can each of evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, and light cream. Another is flan, that cold, jiggly custard with a caramel sauce, just as they enjoy in Spain and France. So what a delight to see that you could make a tres leches flan!

The hardest part of the recipe is making and pouring the caramel, it requires particular attention to avoid burning the sugar or yourself. The second hardest part is setting up a bain marie for even cooking in the oven. Other than that it's as simple as opening cans and blending the contents. The result is a flan that’s thicker and milkier than the traditional custard. It was a hit!

Meal 107: Marshall Islands

For centuries, the fate of this Micronesian island group has been entirely subject to the machinations of much greater powers. Its very name, after an English explorer, was consecrated in maps by French and Russian explorers. It's been a territory of Spain, Germany, Japan, and the US. It saw major battle and deprivation in World War II, and was the site of enormous nuclear tests with all the destruction and long-term consequences you'd expect, and many displaced Marshallese who haven't moved to Arkansas (true story!) now live crammed on an island nicknamed the "ghetto of the Pacific." The Republic of the Marshall Islands is now an independent nation in "free association" with the United States, yet its future is very much out of its hands, as climate change now threatens to wipe these low-lying nations off the map in a way that war and nuclear testing couldn't. As you might expect from all this outside influence, the cuisine has absorbed some ingredients from elsewhere, but there still is plenty of food there that's stayed true to the place. It proved quite a challenge to figure out what to cook, since there aren't any Marshallese cookbooks or food blogs I could find, which is why you will see some of these recipes on discussion sites and other random places. This was actually a really fun one to research, as I learned a lot about life on these islands along the way.

Guests included Stephanie, Anna, Julie, Amanda, Terry, Geo, Bonnie, Audrey, and friends.

Banana coconut balls

I couldn't find a recipe other than vague mentions that this was a thing, so I simply mashed up some bananas with some sugar and coconut, and sprinkled more coconut on top. As far as I can tell this was roughly how it's supposed to be, and it tastes like you'd imagine: sweet, mushy, with the coconut holding it together.

Sashimi | Recipe

Raw tuna. With onions. In...mayonnaise. Sounds gross, but actually tastes pretty darn good. The soft, fatty, slightly sweet and tangy mayo, the buttery and crumbly tuna, and the crisp and lightly pungent onion is the sort of thing you can really snack on while drinking a beer.

Roast pork | Recipe

Pork is a pre-colonial fixture in Polynesia, and the traditional way to cook it is in an earth oven: dig a hole, line it with rocks, build a fire to heat up the rocks, let it die down, put leaf-wrapped meat on it, and bury it for several hours to let it cook through slowly. Now, I couldn't exactly go digging such a hole in our backyard, so I did this on the grill, and used a soy sauce and brown sugar marinade since that seems like the sort of thing that would go on. Only challenge was I couldn't find charcoal at the store, so I used straight up mesquite chunks. I don't know if it was supposed to turn out so smoky, but my goodness this beautiful, "barked" hunk of flesh turned out tasty.

Grilled fish

While Polynesian markets are spare in Portland (I know of just one), in the vicinity of SFO there's a gaggle of them. I happened to be in the Bay Area for work a few days before the meal with a bit of time on my hands and a rental car before heading home, so I stuffed my backpack with taro leaves and some other ingredients. Those leaves ended up wrapping some fish (I think I used mahi mahi) which I also threw on the grill.

Breadfruit

I'm done with breadfruit, or at least the frozen chunks. They're just bland, dry, and mealy, with an unappetizing bit of crust, when I roast them as suggested. I hope to get my hands on a fresh breadfruit at some point, to see if that's really what it's like, or if I'm just making a mockery of this common food.

Rice-banke | Pumpkin rice |Recipe

Rice isn't a traditional food of Polynesia, but thanks to Asian influence (in the Marshall Islands' case, most likely the time as a Japanese colony), it's become quite popular. This dish, with steamed pumpkin and coconut milk, is one gloopy concoction, with a real stick-to-your-ribs aspect.

Pandan coconut ice cream | Recipe

Readers of previous posts will be familiar with my description of pandan leaf as the "vanilla of Southeast Asia," and this nutty-green leaf also flavors dishes across Oceania. (They also use the fruit of the tree for food, but good luck finding that in the US.) I'm not sure how common pandan ice cream actually is, but it's sure tasty, especially when you avoid artificial pandan extract (sold in Asian markets) and take five minutes to make your own with the leaves (also sold in Asian markets). Anyone who knows a vegan knows that coconut milk is a successful dairy substitute for ice cream; mixed with dairy, it takes on a more complex mouthfeel. This was a tasty one that went so quickly we forgot to take a picture!

Meal 103: Malaysia

It turns out there's a subtle but important distinction between "Malaysian" and "Malay." The latter refers to an ethnic group and their language; the former is the name of a country composed of many ethnicities of whom the Malay are but the largest. There are large populations of both Chinese and South Asian origin, as well as indigenous groups. And naturally, all of them, plus the English and Dutch colonizers, have sprinkled their spices and poured their sauces into an extremely tasty, and surprisingly deep, melting pot. Indeed, the hardest part of this meal was choosing just a few dishes from the pantheon of dishes to represent the country.

This meal was very popular, so we tried out a two-table arrangement for the first time. We were fortunate to have two Malaysians in our midst: Robert, a forester from Borneo learning from his counterparts in Oregon, and Christina, the mom of our dear friend Laura, who was there with her husband Craig. Also present: Will, Caitlin, Laura, Jill and her husband, our realtors Scott and John, Dede and Chris, and Robyn, Miles, and Aliza.

Teh tarik | Black tea with condensed milk

Brew some black tea (the cheap crumbly kind, not the fancy leafy type; normal stuff in a teabag is fine), mix it with a lot of condensed milk, and pour it in a thin stream back and forth between heat-resistent pitchers — after all, "tarik" means "pull," which is what you're doing. The milky-sweet tea will cool off to drinking temperature as you pour it back and forth, and get all wonderfully frothy. Yum.

Nasi lemak | Coconut rice with garnishes | Recipe

This dish is hugely popular in several countries in the area, and Malaysia claims it as a national dish. It can be eaten anytime, hot or room temperature, and usually for breakfast. The name means "fat rice," referring to the rich coconut milk in which the rice is cooked, but this dish is much more than that. While there are many variations, we made the classic: a spicy sambal with tiny anchovies, and toppings of plain fried anchovies, peanuts, and cucumber to accompany. 

It made for a great appetizer, an introduction to the rich coconut and spicy sambal flavors we'd encounter throughout the meal. The crispy garnishes were fun nibbles between more substantial bites while listening to a room of sixteen people introduce themselves.

Christine’s curries

Christine made two curries: one in the style of the South Asian population, the other more of a Nyonya (Chinese) variety. She can't find the recipes. Oh well, they were tasty!

Sarawak laksa | Seafood and chicken soup | Recipe

Laksa is a hugely popular dish in Malaysia and Singapore from Peranakan cuisine, the food of the descendants of Chinese migrants. While there are dozens of varieties, based around either coconut milk or a sour broth or both, what they all have in common is being a complex, usually spicy noodle soup.

The version I cooked is from Sarawak, the most westerly state on Malaysian Borneo. Peninsular Malaysia, the part between Thailand and Singapore, gets most of the attention and has most of the population. But the majority of the country's land mass lies across the South China Sea in East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. The rich red color comes from both chilies and that near-ubiquitous shrimp paste block known as belacan, and it's a hybrid laksa in two ways: it's got both coconut and sour elements, and it features both seafood and meat.

Most Malaysians would start a laksa from a store-bought sambal paste, but given my habit I made it all from scratch. Yet despite the dozen-plus ingredients in the sambal and all herbs and meats and whatnot, I found the flavors of the soup to be fairly flat. Not bad, but just a disappointment. Was it me, or the recipe? I don't know, but I won't be making it exactly this way again.

Char kway teow | Seafood and sausage noodle stir fry

I can’t decide whether this dish is more fun to make or to eat. It’s a whole lot of work to do it from scratch, to make the sambal, prepare all the various seafood, and get all the ingredients strategically positioned. But it’s that last few minutes of a fast-moving sequence that makes this one of the most entertaining dishes I’ve ever made: start with lard, stir fry garlic and sausage, add seafood and just barely cook, throw in noodles and sauce, push the stuff to the side, add more lard, crack in eggs, roughly scramble them into the noodles, throw in that sambal you worked to hard on, and finish with bean sprouts. All that in the span of just a few minutes! It’s intense and rewarding and smells amazing.

Oh, and it tastes great too. I’m writing this as I return from two weeks in Southeast Asia, where I tried three different attempts at this dish, in Singapore and Indonesia. I’m not sure whether Malaysians just have a better style or if this recipe in particular is fantastic, but I missed the char on the noodles, the richness of the spicy-fishy sambal, the sweetness of the Chinese sausage. Maybe the difference comes down to the lard, which those halal eateries didn’t use? Dunno, but I have some sambal left over and I’m gonna make this again soon.

Agar agar gula melaka | Palm sugar and coconut jelly

You’d think I’d have learned from the Borneo starch disaster that tapioca is not an appropriate substitute for palm sago, but no. My attempt at making a boiled dessert requiring the latter turned out to be a gloppy, tasteless mess, and was useless except for fueling my backyard compost. Thankfully, I have absorbed another lesson, which is to make dessert first, especially if it needs time to chill, so I had time to change course, and desperately searched for more Malaysian desserts.

I hit upon the Southeast Asian answer to Jell-O, and by a stroke of luck I had all the ingredients. Coconut milk was no problem as I’d bought a huge can, and I happened to have palm sugar left over from a previous meal. The agar agar, like gelatin but derived from seaweed, came from a molecular gastronomy kit Laura gave me two birthdays ago. Ten minutes later and this sweet and creamy dessert was sitting in the fridge, on its way to Jiggletown.

It was a hit! In fact, it probably went over better than my original choice would have. Being fairly intense with all that sugar and richness, a small square was enough for most, a godsend after such a big meal. Except for Aliza, who couldn’t get enough of it, and after eating several portions took the leftovers home.