Meal 131: Panama

For the second year, we invited everyone on the block for a late-summer Nosh. Laura got a permit to close down the street, neighbors brought over tables and chairs, and everyone sat down…just in time for the very first rain of the season to arrive!

Since most of what people know about Panama is its role in transportation due to its canal, it felt appropriate to be eating this meal in a long line in the street! It was also a treat to have the Smiths over from the other side of town; we were happy to have them crash our otherwise neighbors-only event because they lived in Panama and shared stories of living in the American community there.

A big thanks to the two dozen or so neighbors who showed up, both physically as well as for fundraising. It was one of our biggest meals yet in terms of money raised.

Patacones | Twice-fried green plantains | Recipe

Green or ripe, thick or thin or even lengthwise or diced, there’s pretty much no bad way to fry a plantain. But there’s an even better way: to do it twice. Some Caribbean countries call them patacones, others tostones, and all of them start by a quick one or two minute fry, then a smash, then a longer fry to get them crispy. Unlike the other countries, the classic Panamanian way to eat them is with ketchup on the side, a habit attributed to the Americans who built and for a long time ran the Panama Canal.

I figured they’d be popular, so I made nearly one plantain’s worth per person. Even though they’re of course best straight from the fryer, I made them all a bit before dinner and kept them warm in the oven, and nobody complained. They just asked for more.

Chicheme | Sweet corn drink | Recipe

This was kinda like Caribbean bubble tea: a fairly refreshing, milky, cinnamon-y beverage, studded with toothsome kernels of dried then boiled corn. It was fine, but most guests understandably opted for beer or other more familiar refreshments.
 

Sancocho | Hen soup | Recipe

Most recipes for this mainstay of Panama call for gallina de patio, which pretty much means the post-menopausal hen that’s tottering around outside of the house. It turns out that at both Hispanic and Asian markets, you can find stewing hens in the freezer, for pretty cheap too. (Pretty sure they’re from an environment a tad less prosaic than a rural patio, but we make do with what we can.)

The predominant flavor of the soup is meant to be culantro, a close relative of cilantro with a sort of earthier flavor, but I couldn’t find it so I used plenty of cilantro instead. The soup was tasty, but I should have cooked it even longer, because old hens are really tough. Maybe this would be a good one for a pressure cooker.

Arroz con guandú | Rice with pigeon peas | Recipe

Even if you’ve never heard the name, you’ve possibly had pigeon peas in Indian food; one of the most common dishes in that cuisine is the stew-like, yellow toor dal made with the dried, hulled, split version of the legume. In the Caribbean, it’s typically eaten fresh, though up here you get it frozen when possible and otherwise canned, which we did here. All the same, it’s got a beany flavor for sure, but with a bit of almost smokiness to it. Which makes it perfect to mix with rich coconut rice, as a hearty way to fill your belly and get some nice flavor.

Flan | Custard | Recipe

Flan is a thing pretty much anywhere the Spanish colonized. Usually when a dish is that widespread, you see different varieties and regionalisms evolve, but as far as I can tell, everyone who cooks flan pretty much does it exactly the same way and hardly ever with any flavor variation: a lightly vanilla-scented egg custard with a sauce of caramelized sugar.  (The only variations I’ve seen involve differing amounts of fresh and/or canned milk products.)

I put the request out for a neighbor to help make flan, and there was some confusion and suddenly we ended up with way too much flan. (There was one or two out of the picture!) They were all made with different recipes, and all tasted pretty much the same. The only variation was Holly’s flan cake, which added some much appreciated variety.

Meal 128: Pakistan

Pakistan was, until 1947, part of India. While the intention was to create a new country for Muslims, the dividing line was in many ways arbitrary, ill-informed, or simply doomed, given that religious communities intermixed plenty. In particular, the huge state of Punjab was split in two. Then, millions of people moved across the lines in both directions (or died in the attempt) to the country that reflected their religion. Both of these factors explain why Pakistani food seems so similar to the North Indian food we know: they were once the same country — in fact, much of the Indian food in the US is Punjabi style — and many immigrants brought foods from other parts of what's now the Republic of India.

This meal fell during Ramadan, which posed both an opportunity and a challenge. I was excited to have a guiding principle, since the food after the fast is often ritualized. But the challenge was the risk of offense by indulging in all the post-fast treats without observing the fast itself. Several Muslims assured me not to worry, and in fact a Pakistani member of the US Embassy's staff in Islamabad graciously gave me plenty of advice on what to prepare. (Thank you Erin for the connection!) In addition to the below recipes, we began the meal with the traditional fast-breaking food: dates.

Our guest of honor was Kal, a previous Nosher, who was born in Afghanistan but spent a decade as a refugee in Pakistan before coming to the US. We also had Katherine, Carlo, Marsha, Robert, Chie, Lyall, Eileen, and friends.

Rooh Afza | Sweet drink

This is the fast-breaking drink of Pakistan. It's a commercial syrup that's mixed with water — what's known in British English as a squash — and much improved with lime. (Some mix it with milk.) It's was a completely unfamiliar flavor sensation, a blend of all sorts of fruits, herbs, and spices with the most recognizable note being rose. It wasn't really my thing but I can see this sugary drink being extremely quenching after a hot day with nothing touching your lips after sunrise.

Fruit chaat | Spiced fruit salad | Recipe

Some cultures have figured out that bold spices are a fantastic complement for fruit. A shake of Tajín, a Mexican blend of chili, dried lime juice and salt, perks up mango, pineapple, and just about any other fruit or raw vegetable. In Morocco, they often serve orange slices with cinnamon. And now we here have Pakistan's contribution to the genre. The blend is more complex than the others I've seen before, with elements of sour, salty, pungent, and minerally. It would certainly perk up less-than-perfect fruit, but when it's really good and in season like here, it's pretty tasty and addictive and a failsafe appetite stimulant. 

Dahi bhallay | Black gram fritters in yogurt sauce | Recipe

From a Western perspective, what's curious about this dish is how the fritters are soaked in water after frying. Why let all that great crisp go? So they can absorb the yogurt and tamarind dressing that makes them oh so tasty. This dish is quite a bit of effort with the frying, so it's not the sort of thing I'd just go about making on a weeknight, but it was a flavorsome treat.

Sai bhaji | Spinach and legume stew | Recipe

This straightforward curry is a staple of Sindh, the province of southeastern Pakistan. It's pretty straightforward to make, a stew of greens, tomatoes, a mild amount of spice, and lentils or split chickpeas. Unfortunately, I felt like what came out was kind of what went in: it was perfectly edible, but just not terribly exciting, and it's unclear to me if I did something wrong or it's simply meant to be that way. There's no doubt, however, that this is one of the most nutritious dishes I have cooked for a Nosh!

Karahi gosht | Goat simmered in tomato sauce | Recipe

This recipe calls for mutton, and in the Subcontinent, mutton means goat. (Not the meat of mature sheep, as in the UK.) I like goat, and good goat can be hard to find, so I ended up buying an entire goat from a small-scale butcher. I used two legs for this meal; the rest is in the chest freezer.

Now, to the dish. This one was a winner! A really straightforward, low effort technique — simmer the meat until it's cooked, then put in sauce stuff and let it cook until tasty. You don't even have to toast spices or do any other tedious prep, just dump and simmer. Even though it ended up more liquidy than pasty like it should have (was my yogurt too runny, or tomatoes too watery?), the flavors were excellent and bright and I oughtta make this one again.

Mutton nihari | Goat stew | Recipe

I couldn't decide which goat dish to cook, so I made both. If you're only cooking one, choose the other. The nihari was totally fine, but despite all the spices, turned out sorta plain, which was a disappointment after cooking for half a day. As with the saibhaji, I'm not sure if there was an error along the way, or that's just how it's meant to be.

Chicken sajji | Slow-roasted chicken with spiced rice | Recipe

This recipe represents Balochistan, a mostly arid province bordering Afghanistan and Iran. This dish is a whole lot more like what I know of Gulf cuisine, with the animal roasted rather than cooked in a sauce. What's more, the rice is parboiled, which is a technique I associate with Persian food. (A stickler will note that rice in biryani, a pinnacle of Indian cuisine, is similarly boiled hard until nearly done. I will rejoinder that, in fact. biryani is of Persian origin.) Anyway, I loved this. Cardamom, vinegar, dried pomegranate, and even dates all feature, and make for one scrumptious whole.

Meal 126: Oman

Out of the 193 UN members, Oman's the only one that begins with O. It sort of stands alone geopolitically, too. It's a lot lower-key than its Middle East neighbors, with neither the flashiness of other sultanates, nor the strife of some neighbors. On the other hand, Oman has a rich history given its strategic position at the mouth of the Persian Gulf: its traders plied the Indian Ocean for centuries, and it wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that it finally relinquished its claim to Zanzibar off the Tanzanian coast. In fact, limon omani, the dried lime with a hauntingly earthy tang, was the creation of Omani traders preserving fruit they bought in Malaysia on the decks of their ships. It was Laura's birthday weekend, so for the third year in a row we had the meal on the Oregon coast with friends.

Recipes from Oman are shockingly hard to find online. Everything I cooked came from the book Food of Oman. I link to websites that have adapted versions of the recipes from this book where I can find them.

Chips Oman

Chips Oman is a commercial product with a strong devotion, apparently popular as a flavor and crunch factor in sandwiches as well as a snack. It's potato chips covered in a spice blend which features that limon omani as well as chili, salt, and a few supporting actors. I forgot to bring potato chips to the coast, so instead we had them on Juanita's tortilla chips, which was pretty darn good.

Mchicha Wa Nazi | Coconut creamed spinach | Recipe

This dish tastes like it's straight from East Africa, with little to no mainland-Omani reinterpretation. Yet it's a good thing: the mild flavor and creaminess makes for a good contrast with the bold flavors of the rest of the meal.

Marak dal | Spiced red lentils | Recipe

I originally decided to make this as a consolation to the vegetarians, but everyone agreed that this was a winner, with the flavors of this dish far richer and more complex than expected from a big lump of lentils. I think the process of cooking lentils separately from the onions and potatoes, and then combining them, leads to more distinct textures and flavors. Of course, all those spices sure help too.

Zanzibari biryani

Biryani, a richly spiced rice-and-meat dish that probably originated in India, one of my favorite dishes to eat, and one of the most challenging to make. Everything's cooked separately, and then somehow at the end you're supposed to assemble it so the rice stays perfectly fluffy while intermingled with the sauces and chunks of meats and the rest.

In this case, the cooking is even more complicated than I'd experienced before: the chicken is boiled and then pan-fried before being mixed into the richly spiced sauce, while the rice goes through an extra scenting with saffron-infused rosewater. But somehow the assembly came together, and all those spices — the clove that makes it Zanzibari, plus with cardamom and much more — along with the fresh lime and cilantro and crispy onions, made this by far the best biryani I've made, and one of the best I've ever tasted. If you are eager to make a biryani, and can get your hands on the cookbook, by all means do.

Sticky date pudding

Sticky toffee pudding is a British treat made with dates and covered in a sinful sauce of brown sugar and butter. It only stands to reason that a place that grows dates would make its own variant. This one was a little more cake-like, as you can see it was baked as a solid cake and then doused in sauce. Certainly not a classic birthday cake, but really tasty and incredibly moist.

Meal 125: Niger

Niger is Nigeria's much lesser known northern neighbor. To reduce the inevitable confusion, its English pronunciation imitates the French: nee-ZHEHR, and the demonym is Nigerien, with only that second E providing the needed distinction. It's a Sahel nation, meaning it's in the transition zone between the Sahara and the tropical West African coast. Mercy Corps, our fundraising beneficiary, does a lot of work in Niger, including both emergency food relief and helping farmers improve their long-term resilience. Joining us for the meal were Kal, Douglas, Annette, Eric, Robin, Cara and friends. We were also honored to welcome Issa, a recent refugee from Chad, which has a somewhat similar cuisine, so he very kindly pointed out which dishes worked and didn't.

Sugar peanuts | Recipe (scroll down)

Pour peanuts into a pan, stir in a bunch of sugar and some water, and bake until the water evaporates and you're left with caramelized peanuts. What an easy snack to make! It's a great start to a meal.

Masa | Yeasted rice pancakes | Recipe

I can't imagine how tedious it would be to make this dish without an electric blender to grind soaked raw rice into a batter, but I tip my hat in salute to the (most likely) women who've been doing it a long time, because the result is really tasty and satisfying. The yeast gives a little tang and volume, and the rice is thick enough that once the outside of the pancake gets crisp from the griddle, the inside is still soft, so it's got a lot of texture and flavor going on. Issa said it reminded him a whole lot of the ones he ate growing up!

Greens with handmade couscous

I can't find the recipe I used to make this, but I wouldn't recommend it anyway. While it instructive to make couscous from scratch from millet flour, it took a long time and a lot of work and the result was hardly distinguishable from a decent pre-made couscous. Enough people talk about the wonder of fresh-made couscous that I have to figure it was some failure on my part. And anyway, once mixed with the greens, it was just kinda dry and disappointing. As Issa said, "I'm not really sure what you were trying to do here."

Mo & dungiri | Rice and black-eyed peas | Recipe

This dish is a great way to fill up, and on its own it's not terribly flavorful. The real star of the show is the peanut-bouillon spice powder in the recipe, which frankly went great on everything in the meal.

Tukasu | Lamb in date sauce | Recipe

I cooked just about the same dish for Mali, but it was so good I couldn't help doing it again. I love lamb, I love dates, and I love spices, and it turns out the three of them together with some vegetables to make a rich sauce is a super winner. The only major change from last time is that I left out the steamed bread balls, because there was quite enough starch from the rest of the meal.

Fruit salad

Used what tropical fruits were good at the market: pineapple, blood orange, and mango.

Meal 119: Nepal

The core of Nepalese food can be summed up in one very simply named dish: daal bhat, meaning "legumes [and] rice." Along with tarkari — a spiced dish we'd probably call a curry — and achar (pickles), this is the dish that many people in Nepal eat pretty much every single day. Fortunately, there's variety to be found in the type and preparation of the dal and the tarkari, and a wide variety of achars can bring all sorts of flavors. Characteristically, I tried to capture as much of that variety as possible with two daals, three tarkaris, and four achars! Now, Nepal is a geographically and ethnically diverse country, ranging from river plains to the highest mountain in the world, and with a whole wide variety of distinct cultures (Nepali is the home language of less than half of the population.). Accordingly, there are indeed other kinds of foods eaten, such as a variety of grilled meats, and perhaps most famously dumplings.

We took advantage of fine weather for a late-September outdoor meal. It was convenient that we could use the new outdoor wok burner, because we needed all the cooking devices we could get to cook so many dishes. Apologies in advance about the photos, our good camera was being repaired so we had to rely on an iPhone in far less than ideal lighting conditions!

Momo | Dumplings | Recipes: chicken momo, sauce

Pretty similar to dumplings you see in many Asian countries, though rather than the half-moon shape typical of potstickers, they're made into round purses and also tend to have more filling per piece. There are at least as many filling recipes as there are people who make momo, ranging across just about every type of meat and vegetable you can find in the area; we chose to go with a chicken version to accommodate dietary preferences. Frankly, vegetables made up the bulk of the filling anyway, and I'm glad we had a milder meat so the flavor of the curry and the electric zing of the Szechuan peppercorn could come through.

Daal | Legume stew | Recipes: black gram, pigeon peas

Daal is a whole lot more than that kinda soupy yellow thing you push to the side in favor of the tastier stuff at the Indian restaurant. (Well, at least that's what I tend to do with it.) There's a whole lot of lentils, peas, and beans that can be gently simmered — more often than not they're split, so the cooking time is reduced —and flavored into a protein-packed stew that's just begging to be paired with rice. Amidst a whole lot of options, I chose the pigeon-pea version, rahar ko daal, because it's apparently the "king of daals" in Nepal, and maas ko daal made with what's known as black gram because it looked pretty and seemed to offer a richer flavor.

I was a bit surprised to find that I preferred the more pedestrian-seeming pigeon-pea one, which had a brighter flavor with warm spice from the cinnamon and cumin. The dark one was fine too, but I felt like it was a bit too heavy, perhaps if it had a personality I'd call it "brooding." (To be fair, I didn't have the jimbu herb the recipe called for, but since it's in the same family as onion I don't think my concern would have been addressed).

Tarkari | Vegetable curry | Recipes: mustard green, bottle gourd

Nepali vegetable curries aren't quite as richly spiced as many Indian ones, rather the flavors of the individual spices seem to me to come through more: the maple-like nuttiness of fenugreek, the sharp whiff of mustard oil, the zing of the Szechuan peppercorn. It's a nice contrast with the more harmonious flavors of the daal, and crisp or firm vegetables like the bottle gourd also make for a flavor contrast.

Achar | Pickles |ginger, onion, tomato, gundruk

I shoulda thought to start the achars earlier. I knew that some of them take a good long while to get all good and funky, yet I really didn't get to it until a few days before. Fortunately, there was plenty I still could do, and jars from the store took care of the rest.

The ginger achar was not only the tastiest and most versatile, but the recipe ends with perhaps one of the best declarations I've read in a recipe: "This is the best thing to eat during lazy hours." The gundruk was really intense and funky, I only made it because I shockingly found a container of this salty, fermented, dried vegetable at the store, and whoo-boy, that's a bold one. Tomato achar is a really nice one that's found throughout the Subcontinent but surprisingly hasn't made its way onto restaurant tables like mint and coriander chutneys. I think the condiment, which is like a chunkier, more spiced, less sweet version of ketchup, would go over well.

Kaju barfi | Cashew fudge | Recipe

A lovely, gentle way to end an intense meal after all those spices and textures. A just-barely-holding-together fudge of ground cashews with a judicious dosing of cardamom.