Week 7: Argentina

It's been said that there's no cuisine in Argentina, only beef. So this week, I did my best to throw together an Argentinean asado, the classic communal barbecue whose tradition began from the gaucho days out on the vast grassy pampas. Accordingly, I felt it imperative to find grass-fed beef, so I schlepped up to the Meat Hook in Williamsburg for the biggest single meat purchase of my life. Thankfully, the rain threatened in the forecast never materialized, so not only was the outdoor cooking not a problem, but we could all hang out on the porch.

Tonight's guests were: Liz (visiting from California), Vicky, Caroline, Ben, Nick, Bex, another Ben, and Gina. The meal is listed in the order served, but I actually had to prepare it in reverse: the dessert took five hours start to finish whereas the sausages cooked in mere minutes.

The grill

My research made it clear that the gas grill just wouldn't work. Apparently the asado is all about indirect, slow cooking, with the smoke and the distinctive glow of wood and/or lump charcoal providing the sear and the flavor. Finding the traditional quebracho (from "quebra hacha" or axe-breaker) wood seemed like a fool's errand on short notice, so I did the next best thing and got both firewood and lump charcoal (which is to say, real pieces of tree and not briquets). I built up a fire in a somewhat dilapidated old barbecue that the previous tenants left behind, and waited quite a while for it to build up and die down. Once it was manageable, I piled the wood and charcoal to one side, making a hotter and a cooler side — see how the fire is on the right here.

Chimichurri | Parsley-garlic sauce | Recipe

You could call it the pesto of Argentina, but this guy would be really angry at you for saying that. A simple yet luscious sauce that I made with parsley from the garden, and didn't make enough of. It got gobbled up. We also made a salsa criolla, which kind of resembles a Mexican salsa but with oil instead of lime. The chimichurri was way more popular.

Chorizo y morcilla | Chorizo and blood sausage

An asado begins with some faster-cooking tasty morsels. such as sausage. (I tried to get sweetbreads too, but neither Meat Hook nor the local butcher had them on hand.) I was pleasantly surprised by how many people enjoyed the blood sausage, especially spread on baguette. Cooked these on the hotter part of the grill, since a) they can take it and b) the rest was occupied by the below. I swear they tasted better than they look here.

Asado de tira | Cross-cut ribs

Grass-fed beef has a beautiful richness of flavor and needs no marinade or spice. Everything I read made it clear that to use anything but salt would be inauthentic. So these ribs, these beautiful, cross-cut, fatty, 1.5-by-24-inch strips, got nothing but some half-coarse salt before hitting the grill. They were so fatty I could barely see the meat when throwing them on, but in time the fat melted and revealed the luscious morsels of rib meat. The outside was salty and crunchy, the inside not rare but not overdone. Topped with a little chimichurri, these were just heavenly.

Secreto de cerdo | Pork skirt steak

I was looking for matambre de cerdo, (matambre = "mata hambre" or hunger-killer) translated as pork flank steak, but this is the closest I got. Couldn't have been much better! According to this account, it's called "secreto" because the butcher used to cut this piece for himself and not share with customers. What a great bit of meat for grilling: thin, fast-cooking, and wonderful with salt and just a squeeze of lemon while cooking. This lasted all of two minutes on the butcher block.

Ensalada | Salad

Between the pork and the main event, we had a simple salad of farmer's market lettuce and cucumber. Gotta have something green to cut the grease, right?

Tapa de nalga | Top round

Ta-da! This 3.5-pound piece of meat took over two hours to cook, spending most of that time off to the side. Wasn't quite done when I took it off the first time, so I threw it on top of what remained of the coals, blowing them to get their last little bits of heat out. A great piece of meat for a party, because different parts are more or less rare so everyone's happy. But no matter your doneness preference, it was rich and flavorful and so purely meaty.

Gelato con dulce de leche | Gelato with sweet caramelized milk syrup | Recipes: gelato; dulce de leche

Caramelization is one of the most wonderful accidents of science. It took like four hours, with skimming skins of milk and a lot of very slow cooking, to make the golden goop for which Argentina is famous. I paired it with Argentinean gelato, which is a little lighter than most frozen desserts: cream to milk is in a two-to-one ratio whereas normal ice cream is the opposite. The ice cream wasn't quite frozen solid and the dulce de leche was too thin, but nobody seemed to care. Rich milky products with sugar are a sure winner. And in this case, the milk was from (wait for it) grass-fed cows from Milk Thistle Farm, so it was extra delicious.

Oh, and on top of all of this there was plenty of excellent Argentinean wine brought by our guests. Rich and spicy malbec and bonarda grapes balanced the primal meat flavors very well. Next stop next week is all the way over to Armenia -- we're heading back to yogurt-land.

Laura and I agree that this was our favorite meal yet for pure flavor excitement. And although we're shocked there's no leftover meat, we do still have a cup of dulce de leche.

Week 6: Antigua and Barbuda

Our first Caribbean country! With so many little islands with a lot of culinary and cultural overlap, I'm trying to pick out what's really distinctive about the cuisine of each.

My prep-work was made really easy this time: I found the recipes for the entire meal on just one page! Big thanks to Cordy for that, especially the photos which helped me make sure I did it right.

This was our first meal on a weeknight, thanks to Irene. Our guest of honor was Ed, better known as the NYC Nomad — for the last year and a half he's been staying in a different neighborhood of New York each week, and this week he's camping in our backyard. Our other guests were Lauren, Cory, Elsa, Jess, and Laura's friend Laura.

Ducana | Sweet potato and coconut dumpling

While fungee (cornmeal mash) seems to be the classic Antiguan starch, it's so similar to the fufu/cou-cou/funji of so many other Caribbean and West African countries that I was happy to discover a legit alternative. Ducana also served the role of both starch and dessert — with sugar, spices, and raisins.

After last week's lesson I opened the coconut without a problem. I'd found banana leaves at the Western Beef (what a weird name for a grocery store), so I tried making the dumplings the traditional way, but they were super leaky so I mixed old and new by wrapping them in leaves and then in foil. Turned out great!

Saltfish | Bacalao in tomato sauce

It seems that saltfish is the accompaniment par excellence for ducana. It shouldn't be a surprise based on the name, but my god the fish as packaged had a lot of salt in it. After soaking the fish all day, the water was so saturated that there was a pile of salt at the bottom of the bowl. The dish turned out nice and surprisingly balanced: the aromatic veggies and sweet tomato sauce were good foils for the salty, flaky fish. (Kinda crazy that given the island's stature in the middle of nice warm waters presumably full of wonderful fish, they import preserved fish from thousands of miles away.

Chop up | Spinach and zucchini

A basic dish of boiled spinach and squash, some nice greenery to lighten up the heavier stuff. Also served with some steamed pumpkin.

Antigua Kiss | Recipe

We also try to drink appropriately for each country. Lauren did some assiduous research and found this drink. Tastes kinda like a melted popsicle, so who am I to complain?

All in all, pretty good! I could even see making the saltfish again, although the ducana was pretty intensely sweet to make on a regular basis.

We're off next weekend due to Labor Day travels. The next meal is Argentina — good thing I own a grill.

Unexpected Caribbean flavor

Today was supposed to be our sixth meal, Antigua & Barbuda. But we got a very different taste of the Caribbean this weekend, thanks to Hurricane Tropical Storm Irene. We've postponed the meal to Wednesday. But this weekend was not without its culinary adventures. Check out the "hurricake" that Laura made with our friend Kirsty, who evacuated Greenpoint and stayed with us.

Week 5: Angola

What's stewed and tasty and red all over? Angolan food! Just about everything tonight was drenched in highly saturated, boldly colored, and distinctly strong and nutty-tasting red palm oil.

This was the first meal that required venturing out of my normal shopping sphere. I found the red palm oil, palmnut concentrate, and cassava flour for the meal at an African market at Franklin and Fulton, which had very few items I'd ever seen before, but will probably get familiar with over the next few years — given the fact that the ingredients came from Ghana, I wouldn't be surprised if the food all along the West African coast was pretty similar in terms of base ingredients.

Today's guests featured Laura's friends and classmates from school, Iva, Nathan, and Flonia (and her boyfriend Diem), as well as Jessica and Kendal.

So, let's get cooking!

Muamba de Galinha | Chicken in palmnut sauce | Recipe

Chicken with tomatoes, pumpkin, and okra, fried in that red palm oil and thickened with palmnut concentrate. Rich, just a bit spicy, and pretty darn yummy. A very respectable and tasty national dish, with abundant leftovers.

Fumbua | Greens with palm oil and peanut | Recipe

I love recipes that give some background and not just instructions, so cooking this dish was a delight. But perhaps more importantly, it turned out really darn well. I never would have thought of mixing rich greens with a peanut sauce, but now that I have, I recommend you try it too someday. Compared to the palmnut, peanuts seem so light!

Palm Oil Beans | Recipe

I like the lady who sells beans and grains at our local Sunday farmers market. Today she was spinning poi when I showed up, and she helped me find my way to the red merlot beans, so called because their taste is smooth as wine. I won't disagree: these beans were tasty, and took very well to the dousing of palm oil they received at the end.

Funje | Cassava flour porridge | Recipe

Any recipe that requires you to sit on the floor is worth trying once, right? Now I can say I've poured grain into a towel-wrapped pot of just-boiled water, and held it steady with my feet while pounding it with an oar. Well, if I ever do it again, I'll wear socks and long pants, because it splatters! It really looked pretty unappetizing, but such a rich set of dishes does well for a bland, highly absorbent starch. We were all surprised when we ended up going for seconds of funje. (Interesting note: this is also the staple starch of our next country, Antigua and Barbuda, they call it by the same name but use corn instead of cassava.)

Cocada Amarela | Yellow coconut pudding | Recipe

This one really didn't turn out right. Our thermometer seems to not work (boiling liquid registered at about 180°), so we couldn't judge when it got to the right temperature, and then the recipe had me have the heat too high when I added the yolks so it all curdled. Oh well. It's still kind of yummy when you combine fresh coconut, sugar, and egg yolks. And we all enjoyed it when Nathan, who just came back from six months in Micronesia, schooled us on how to crack a coconut.

Excluding dessert, it was quite a success. Even the vegans had a decent meal of it, since I left the salt fish out of the greens. Angolan music was streaming (which sounds a lot like Brazilian music, not surprising given colonial history), beer and wine was flowing, and some very friendly cats happily nosed around the table.

We're crossing the Atlantic to the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda next week.

Week 4: Andorra

Andorra's cuisine is built around the sorts of things that go well in its high mountainous environment: meat and winter-hardy vegetables in stews. In other words, exactly the wrong thing for a humid New York summer. But the weather tried its best to comply: it's been raining sheets all day.

Precious little of neighboring France or Spain's spectacular culinary traditions rubbed off on mountain-ringed Andorra over the centuries. The food is, dare I say it, pretty bland: you won't find any seasoning beyond salt and pepper in these recipes. The stew didn't even have a bay leaf.

Not surprisingly, then, it's little wonder I had a tough time finding good recipes for real Andorran food. My journeys took me to two primary places: Andorra's tourism website, and the sites of others who felt compelled to cook Andorran food, including two others who are doing their own alphabetical gastronomical world joints. So, word up to My Hungry Tum and Global Table Adventure!

What the food lacked in pizzaz, the company made up for in preciousness: our dear friends Jens and Molly, who moved away to Portland last year, were back in town and came to dinner. We also enjoyed the company of Padraig, Sophie, Mike, Kate, and Gina.

Pa de Pagès amb Tomàquet | Rustic loaf rubbed with tomato and garlic | Recipe (in Spanish)

I wanted to learn what kind of bread they eat in Andorra, which took me nowhere. So I searched for "Catalan bread," since Andorra shares a language and a culture with Catalonia so I figured that'd be close enough. But, all you get when searching for that is Pa amb Tomàquet, the famous tomato-rubbed bread. Nice, and yummy, but what do they actually rub that tomato on? A search for [catalan bread -tomato] yielded the answer: Pa de Pagès. I was thrilled to learn that it's a sort of sourdough with a "mother dough" that can be made overnight, and doesn't rely on spontaneous environmental yeast. (Given our proximity to the Gowanus Canal and a major expressway, I shudder to think of what that would be.)

As you can see, the bread turned out quite beautifully, a shocker given that I used the recipe in Spanish and converted all the weights to volume. It didn't get as crunchy on the crust as I'd have liked, but that's probably because I didn't have the wooden banetón to bake it in and had to make do with what I had. But who really cares, because once rubbed with garlic and tomato and drizzled with olive oil, it made quite a nice appetizer.

Escudella | Stew | Recipe 1, Recipe 2

How lucky I am to be a few minutes' bike ride from a great butcher, because this recipe put them through their paces. Veal bones? Black pudding? Ham hocks? No problem! In terms of calorie-loading, it's a no-holds-barred stew, with at least four different animals (depending on what went into the sausages) and three grains (or four, if you include beans). But what a lost opportunity for flavor! How I wish I could have roasted the veal bones to bring out their flavor, or drop in a bouquet garni to freshen up the stock. Oh well. It still turned out ok, although all the meat was, strangely, the same color pink. Apparently every church in Andorra cooks up a huge pot of this on some saint's day in January, and gives it out to all comers, so keep that in mind if you're ever in the area.

Trinxat | Cabbage and potato pancake | Recipe

I definitely didn't do this one very well, but even still I wonder how much potential it has. Essentially, boil the cabbage and potato into submission, mash 'em up, fry up a bit of fatty pork, and make big ol' pancakes out of them. I've never been good at things that fill a whole pan and require flipping (all my attempts at omelets magically become scrambles toward the end), and as you can see by the mounding mess, this was no exception. I guess the dish was OK, since most of it got eaten, but it could have done with some more spices and maybe an egg.

Espinacs amb Panses i Pinyons | Spinach with raising and pine nuts | Recipe

I've enjoyed this dish ever since I first tasted it in Seville. Really easy, and you get a lot of flavor out of just three ingredients. Try it sometime soon, it's a fun alternative to yet another veggie sauteed with garlic.

Coques amb Pinyons | Pine nut pastry | Recipe

Sugar, butter, eggs, what's not to like? It even looks good! Eh. Maybe I messed it up, maybe I didn't cook it long enough, maybe I messed up the weight conversion on the sugar. I saw so many breathless articles of excitement over this Iberian take on pizza, which is done both sweet and savory, but in the end of the day it was fine but nothing great. Might have the last bit for breakfast.

Oh, it was sure nice to have a meal that goes with wine! Andorran wine is either non-existent or not available in the US, so we went for some nice Spanish reds instead. Bierzo is hundreds of miles away from Andorra, but their fruity and deep reds go nicely with a meaty stew. That went along a bit better than our attempt to find Catalan music on Spotify, which was pretty much either brass bands or covers of American/English pop tunes.

Thanks to the rain, this was our first indoor meal, which was a bit of a challenge, but thankfully our couch is sectional so we just moved the chaise part out of the way to expand the table. And now we know that for indoor meals, our limit is pretty solid at a total of nine.

Next is we head a bit under 4,000 miles south to Angola. Should be quite the contrast!