Meal 129: Palau

Palau is another one of those low-population island countries in the vast Pacific. We've discovered along the way that the traditional foods tend to be quite straightforward, and that recipes are quite hard to come by, as often the cooking is more defined as a way to put things together rather than a set of instructions and ingredients to follow. Once again I ended up figuring out what, if not now, to cook by scrolling through Facebook groups. 

Joining us on this probably inaccurate adventure through this gorgeous country's food were Christina, Nancy, Dale, Mary K,aren, Mark, Jeff, Carla, and friends.

Koroke | Croquettes | Based on this recipe

There's a strong Japanese influence in the modern food scene in Palau, due both to the occupation of much of the 20th century, and the p0pularity of Palau as a vacation destination for Japanese tourists. While following the classic Japanese croquette style of breading filling with tempura batter and then panko, the filling is a bit of a variation with purple taro and cabbage in addition to ground pork.

Ukaeb | Crab with coconut cream | Recipe

A very straightforward combination. The crabs I bought were very slim on meat, so we used the shells mostly for decoration, with most of the meat coming from a can I thankfully thought to buy.

Beldakl | Fish in broth | Recipe

I found this one tough to figure out and have no idea how well I executed it, but at its core it's a sort of fish soup with aromatic leafy greens and vegetables. My research indicated that it often has a fruit that's similar to starfruit, but I couldn't even find that, let alone the titiml leaf that was called for. I did my best with green onions, which was probably a travesty, but it tasted fine.

Taro

As we've seen time and again from this part of the world, taro is an extremely popular tuber. This time I boiled it. As always, if you're preparing it, wear gloves to avoid the tiny crystals irritating your skin.

Aiskater | Frozen starch dessert |Recipe

This seemed like it would be fun, but the contents froze very firmly to the cup, so there was no way to pull it out like a popsicle as we expected. When it softened a bit we managed to taste some with a spoon, and it tasted about how you'd expect sweetened, frozen cornstarch slurry to taste: fine, a bit refreshing, but at least to me not something to crave.

Meal 116: Morocco

I love spices. I love meats cooked with sweet flavors. I love Moroccan food. This was one of our very most anticipated meals, and I went pretty overboard with all the dishes and condiments. But with all the meats and flavors, how could I have cut back? The house smelled fantastic, we all got super full, and there was so much food going on that I even left one whole dish uncooked to be enjoyed later. Thank goodness for mint tea that helped our digestion.

Our guests for a lovely summer evening were Andrew, Laura, Craig, Laura, Tennessee, Alley, Amos, Nik, Deena, Bengt, Tim, Kristine, Haley and Mary.

Baghrir | Pancakes | Recipe

A semolina-heavy pancake that puffs up quite similarly to an American-style pancake, but this one you don't flip over. We had it with two toppings: goat cheese with honey (yumm) and fermented butter (yumm to some).

Smen | Fermented butter | Article

I've read that in some families, it's tradition to bury a container of smen when a daughter is born, to be unearthed and eaten for her wedding. By comparison, the version I made hung out in my cupboard for about a month. Even still, it had a distinctive, but not unpleasant, funkiness, which made for a really intense sensation in combination with all that butterfat. If you're intrigued, read the article! And if you make some, enjoy it with those pancakes.

Harira | Lentil stew | Recipe

This stew is classically made with lamb, but I went the vegan route due to some guests' dietary needs, as well as the abundance of meat on offer in other dishes. We hardly missed the meat, as it was plenty rich in terms of flavor, heft, and mouthfeel, but also bright with fresh herbs and a squeeze of lemon. A great simple, healthy dish for a cold evening.

Seafood bisteeya | Savory seafood pie | Recipe

Bisteeya is Morocco's contribution to that great list of foods that includes empanadas, pierogi, bao, and börek best summarized as savory pies. The crust is fillo dough, the filling is typically based around poultry, and it's topped off with powdered sugar. Sugar with chicken? You bet.

Anyway, as with the harira, to make the meal more accessible to more people I went with this seafood-based version. I made the rookie mistake of not defrosting the fillo overnight, and my rushed method led to the sheets breaking in half. Worry not, because I just made two smaller ones.

In the rush of all the cooking and the huge excess of food, I didn't end up baking off these pies for the dinner. But my goodness, they were so delicious later! Also, they freeze really well, just throw them straight into the oven without defrosting.

Couscous | Preparation

That little pasta's really easy to cook, right? Just a bit of boiling water, a few minutes, and ready to go? Sure, but how about adding a lot more effort and an hour more for a moderately improved texture? If you want to do it right, which involves three separate rounds of steaming interspersed with breaking up clumps by hand, then follow the link above. The cool thing is that this is efficient with energy and stovetop space: you do it right on top of the tagine!

I suppose if I were from the region and grew up with couscous made this way, I'd appreciate it being done right. But frankly, I didn't feel like the improvement was worth all the effort. Unless somehow we messed up.

Lamb with prunes | Recipe

As far as I'm concerned, this is the Platonic ideal of Moroccan food. Rich meat, sweet fruit, haunting spices, and a long slow simmer combine to make the sort of food that you just can't stop eating. I'm practically smelling the dish as I type. You should cook it so you can smell it too. Make a lot, freeze the leftovers, and enjoy them many times.

Chicken tagine with preserved lemon and olives | Recipe

This dish covers the other direction of Moroccan meats: brighter and tangy. The meal will still be great if you make it with fresh lemons, but it just won't convey the appropriate depth and intrigue unless you use preserved lemons. (I anticipated the meal several months prior, and made them myself from Meyer lemons from my parents' tree. It takes like five minutes to make them, but you do have to wait at least a few weeks for them to mature.)

Vegetable tagine with tfaya | Stewed vegetables with caramelized onion and raisins | Recipes: Tagine andsauce

We made this the vegetarian way, and it was still quite tasty. Make sure to cut the veggies big enough that they hold up, both for presentation and texture.

The real star of the dish was the topping. It has nearly as much of that rich savory-sweet-aromatic as the lamb tagine, but to me the real high point is the floral note from the sprinkle of orange blossom water at the end. I'd really better make this tfaya again.

Khobs kesra | Bread | Recipe

It looks pretty, but was kind of disappointing, just not very flavorful and a weak crumb. I'm going to assume it was our own failure, but all the same I'd maybe seek out a different recipe, or just buy the fluffiest pita you can find.

Harissa | Spicy paste | Recipe

There are many harissa recipes in English, but it's worth running this obnoxious all-caps Courier-font French one through Google Translate for this one. The secret is the mint, which adds a lovely second sort of tingle to the predominant fiery chili one. (Also, consider cutting this recipe in half or even a quarter, unless you plan on going through a lot of it in a month or two.

Ghoriba | Almond cookies cake | Recipe

An accident that turned out great! These are intended to be cookies, but when we put everything together the batter was just too slack. So instead of dolloping

Meal 114: Mozambique

Wherever the Portuguese colonized, the exchange of ingredients and dishes was intense. Mozambique's spicy grilled chicken spread throughout the empire, becoming beloved from Lisbon to Goa, while bread is still baked everywhere throughout the Southern African country. I was also struck by how, even though the country is halfway around the world, this was one of the easiest meals to shop for, as every ingredient is available at a standard American supermarket. This was our second Nosh at Laura's parents' place on Anderson Island in Washington's South Puget Sound. Friends from around the island joined the table.

Pão | Rolls | Recipe

A fairly simple, moderately crusty, hamburger-bun-sized roll with a generous dusting of flour. If I'd had access to a wood-burning oven I imagine there'd have been a nice faintly smoky flavor, but as it was these were nice enough. There were many varieties of the recipe, and on a whim I went with the one that has you make a sponge with a bit of molasses before building up the bulk of the dough. We enjoyed them, but frankly I probably could have let them rise a tad longer (perhaps an extra 20 minutes after shaping), and the insides were a tad bit gummy so I should have baked them an extra few minutes.

Salada de abacate e pêssago | Avocado and peach salad

It surprised me to learn that stone fruit from deciduous trees, like peaches, can grow in tropical climates. What's more, it turns out that peaches pair quite nicely with avocados. Especially with the help of a little lemon juice, there's a nice blend of flavors and textures. I don't have a recipe to link to since I threw this together at the last minute based on what I kind of remembered from other recipes, and then right before serving I decided to toss on top some cooked shrimp left over from the matapa.

Molho de piri-piri | Hot sauce

Piri-piri is the name of a particularly fiery small chili pepper also known as the African bird's eye chili. It's best known as the core ingredient of a hot sauce of the same name. While there are as many recipes as people who make it, I followed the basic instructions at the bottom of the matapa recipe: chili, lemon, garlic, olive oil, and salt. It's an infinitely flexible sauce, just add more or less of any ingredient as you like.

I was kicking myself because I bought powdered piri-piri pepper in South Africa with the express purpose of using it for this meal, but left it right by the front door at home. But I used plain ol' cayenne pepper, and it worked great, which bodes well for everyday home cooks.

Galinha á cafreal | Spicy grilled chicken | Recipe

The recipe's simple enough to write in a tweet: break apart a chicken; marinate with oil, salt, pepper, and piri-piri sauce; grill; baste every so often; eat. You can spatchcock the chicken, which looks super impressive but takes a good while to cook (keep your thermometer handy and check that thigh joint); for faster grilling, use pieces.

My friends, this was just delicious. Thanks to a few hours of marinating, plus being cooked just about whole, it was so succulent. The hot sauce contributed a fantastic medley of flavors, and the long cooking led it to caramelize a bit and just wow.

Matapa | Greens and ground peanuts with prawns | Recipe

I've made a lot of African green sauce. Until now, it's been tolerable at best. This time it was so good people were taking home leftovers.

The most notable difference was that instead of using frozen cassava leaves, I used fresh kale. The cassava leaves from the African market come in a solid block, and are bitter and dry. Having never seen or tasted the fresh version, I don't know how much of that is the nature of the leaves and how much was the consequence of being shipped frozen from another continent.

Anyway, this preparation, with fresh greens, was really pretty good. The most clever part is making a broth from the shrimp shells, which you then use to cook the blended kale before adding the ground peanuts. Make sure to have a food processor on hand, doing the pureeing and grinding with a blender is really tedious as I discovered.

Bolo polana | Cashew and potato cake | Recipe

This is the first potato-based dessert I've ever seen! It works, and is rich and tasty, but man, is it dense. And between the cashew, butter, and all those egg yolks, it's quite a fatty marvel. This would work plenty well as a gluten-free cake, the flour in the recipe is an almost insignificant amount and could surely be replaced by any GF flour. Note that it took way longer than the specified 30–45 minutes for the middle of this cake to cook through for me.

Vinho | Wine

If you're a Mozambican wealthy enough to afford it, you might have a taste for Portuguese wine. So that's what we drank. Otherwise, (decent light) beer and (apparently low-quality) rum are the preferred alcoholic drinks.

Meal 111: Micronesia

At 1 million square miles with only 100,000-ish people, the Federated States of Micronesia is both huge and tiny. (Obviously, almost all of that square mileage is ocean.) As with much of the rest of the Pacific islands, the traditional bland starches and simply cooked fish aren't the most stimulating cuisine. Micronesians have swung the pendulum far to the other side, with some really intense and novel uses of imported flavors. (Read below for what they do with ramen and Kool-Aid.)

There's precious little about Micronesian cuisine online. The two most useful sources I found were a few posts from this teacher's blog for traditional foods, and this astonishing account of some of the uses of modern foods on the island of Chuuk.

Along for the adventure were Emily, Jens, Molly, Will, Caitlin, Trish, Amy, Jordana, David, Michele, Emily, and guests.

Ramen snack | "Recipe"

When I first saw that a common snack in Micronesia is dry ramen with its seasoning packet plus Kool-Aid, I thought it might have just been one person's crazy idea. But I read plenty more about the abundance of Kool-Aid, especially consumed in dry form, well, we had to try it. We tried various combinations: pork ramen with cherry Kool-Aid was best, and shrimp with tropical fruit was definitely the worst.

Kosrae soup

The island of Kosrae, where our friend Nathan did Peace Corps, is famous, at least throughout Micronesia, for its Sunday Soup. Below is a recipe, as given by LeiviaChenisa Situl in response to a Facebook post of Nathan's. You'll note from the photo that I included crab, because I saw clarified elsewhere that shellfish would work, and the crab was fresh at the market. Despite the simplicity, it was really quite flavorful.

Simple recipe. Boil your h2o first,bring up to boil then add the fish more better with bone for flavor for about 10-15 minutes and take fish out,make sure no bones in the stock and add on your uncooked rice cook all the way till rice cook and add on onions and salt and pepper and the last thing is coconut milk.

Recipe

Half pot Fill 3/4 of the pot Fish- half fish or any meat 2 can coconut milk 1 onion salt n pepper with taste

Yapese taro salad

Picture a mayonnaise-based potato salad, but instead of potatoes, it's chunks of boiled purple taro. Pretty tasty, and the taro has a fun texture.

Rohtamah and kon | Pounded taro and pounded breadfruit with coconut milk | Description

The pounded taro with sugar and coconut milk, not pictured, was fine. The pounded breadfruit, pictured before being covered with coconut milk, was not. Never having had fresh breadfruit, I don't know if the overwhelmind blandness and mouth-drying texture came from being deep-frozen and potentially mishandled en route, or if breadfruit really is that unappealing. In any event, no more frozen breadfruit for me.

Sukusuk | Pounded banana with coconut milk

Straightforward and tasty, though yes, it's yet another mushy thing covered in coconut milk. The banana leaf made for a little variety in presentation.

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.