Meal 38: Comoros

As a small cluster of islands between Madagascar and Mozambique, Comoros offers a cuisine that's about as exotic as you'd imagine. It's situated off of Africa, but heavily influenced by the Arab, Indian, and more recently French culinary histories. This means seafood, stews, coconuts, and lots of spices in combinations that are totally trippy to Western tastebuds!

Huge thanks to Evin, Zoe, and Kayla for hosting us at their beautiful home (and well equipped kitchen!) in Oakland, CA. We had a number of old and new friends in attendance: Scott, Sylvia, Raph, Margaret, Alicia, John, Jessica, Katie, Carrie, Cass, and Graeme. We also enjoyed the company of our youngest nosher to date, Lulu, who was a very brave two year old in trying most of the food!

Langouste à la vanille | Lobster with vanilla sauce | Recipe: French, English translation

Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought of combining vanilla with seafood. But, by golly, it's pretty darn amazing.

Cooking the lobster was quite the feat to begin with. First off, the recipe leaves out the very important first step of steaming the lobster; in my naïveté I had somehow figured you just cut the thing open while still alive. Anyway, we boiled them just enough to, uh, prevent them from squirming on the cutting board, and then Scott split them in two. Sylvia stuffed them with chopped-up vanilla beans, salt, and pepper, and then we cooked them in pans until done. The splitting was good not only for getting the flavors inside, but also let us check the flesh for done-ness, so we cooked them not a moment longer than necessary.

But let's be honest, the best part of this all was the sauce. Rare is the moment in a cooking enthusiast's life when simple, well-known ingredients in novel combinations come together for a mindbendingly new creation, and that's what happened here. Melt a stick of butter, add in a few chopped-up vanilla beans, fry five minutes, remove from heat, add salt and pepper, and stir in a container of crème fraîche. It was meant for the lobster, but quite frankly was tasty on just about everything.

(A note on the beans: normally they're pretty pricy, at least $1 apiece, but Xanath Ice Cream on Valencia in San Francisco happens to sell them for less than half that: a 1/4 pound package has about 25 and retails for $10.)

M'tsolola | Green plantains with fish in coconut milk | Recipe: French, English translation

I was surprised at how tough it was to find green plantains in Berkeley. Ripe ones were no problem, but the recipe was adamant that they needed to be as green as possible. (I also could have made a mistaken assumption in the translation, but I'm pretty sure that when they call for "banane verte" they want plantains.) We had to go to four stores, and it wasn't until the Korean market on Telegraph that we found ones green enough to work.

Anyway, this dish was loaded with plantains, layered with fish and nominal vegetables. For the fish I chose tuna since it seemed to be a common one there, and rather than frying as specified, I seared it in a bit of oil. The whole mess simmered in coconut milk we made ourselves, see lower down for that process. All in all, I think this dish was OK, though I probably should have cooked the plantains longer in the beginning, they were still pretty starchy. Also, the recipe is way too much, this serves more like 20 and not the "4 to 6" the recipe says.

Ambrevades au curry | Pigeon pea curry | Recipe: French, English translation

Pigeon peas is one of those things you can find very easily in Brooklyn thanks to our large Caribbean population, but is scarce in California. As a substitute we used frozen black eyed peas, and as far as I can tell it turned out just fine. This curry is pretty darn tasty, and makes for a substantial vegan treat. Love the cardamom in there!

Achard aux legumes | Blanched vegetable salad | Recipe (scroll on page): French, English translation

In India, achar is the name for those intense little pickled things you have on the side of your meal. The concept kind of made it to Comoros, except that it's more of a tangy salad sort of thing and definitely not pickled for any length of time. There seem to be all sorts of ways to make this and ingredients to throw in. I'm pretty fond of green mango and green papaya, so we left out the cabbage in favor of these. The dressing of sauteed ginger was pretty nice!

Riz coco | Coconut rice

   Sure, we could have bought cans of coconut milk, but what's the fun in that? Homemade coconut milk is much lighter and more delicately flavorful. And a hell of a lot more work.

First Zoe pounded them with a hammer to crack them in two, then a whole team took at them with a butterknife to painstakingly extract the fruit from the shell. I then ground the flesh up in a food processor and put it in a strainer. Then we extracted the milk by pouring hot water over them, much like making coffee, and poured it back over a few more times to make it thicker.

That's the hard part. Making the rice is, well, just like making rice, except you use this freshly extracted elixir in place of water.

Poutou | Hot sauce | Recipe: French, English translation

Couldn't be simpler. One habanero or scotch bonnet pepper, one tomato, half an onion, half a lemon, salt. I perhaps willfully misinterpreted the recipe by putting in the whole lemon instead of just its juice, but if anything the extra substance did it well. Made for a fantastic salsa of medium consistency, medium spice, and maximum flavor and happiness.

Ladu | Ground rice dessert | Recipe

After the Cameroon meal, we made a rule of not deep-frying in other people's houses, so we couldn't make the classic Comoran dessert of donass, which is how they pronounce "donuts." All else I could find was ladu, which is based off an Indian dessert. I'm not sure where things went wrong — maybe I didn't grind the rice enough, or maybe the recipe should have mentioned when to put in liquid — but this clearly wasn't what was intended. But we added plenty of coconut water to this ghee-fried broken rice, formed it into balls with powdered sugar, cardamom, and pepper, and then baked it off once all the balls were crumbling, all in an effort to salvage it. And you know what, they tasted astonishingly like popcorn, and while I wouldn't recommend this recipe, it wasn't a failure either.

As we were finishing up the meal, I just happened to check my phone, and noticed several dozen emails. I'd had the great fortune of being chosen to send an email to The Listserve, a worldwide list of tens of thousands where one member a day gets to send an email, and mine got sent during the meal! It was Laura's great idea to ask people to help us with their own country's meals as we trundle through the alphabet, and the response so far has been phenomenal! From Iceland to Peru to the Philippines, many of our upcoming meals will have the benefit of our new farflung network's contributions.

Next week, we'll be up in Anderson Island, Washington, where we hope to catch our trout for a Costa Rican meal!

Meal 37: Colombia

With coasts on the Caribbean and Pacific, and a variety of lowlands, highlands, and valleys leading all the way to the Andes, there's plenty of regional variation in much of Colombia, expressed in both in music and food. But unlike for China, where we picked representative dishes from across the country, we took a different approach with a deep dive on a traditional meal from the Paisa Region. That's because the bandeja paisa is a traditional, unitary, and utterly abundant amalgam of a good dozen ingredients, famous across the country and region.

Cooking started the day before, and ended in a frenzy of last-minute prep. Our guests tonight included three out-of-towners: Carla and Kirk from LA, and Kelly from DC. Rounding out the table were Sophie, Kambui, Anna, Elsa, Mal, and Jim.

Chicharrones | Fried pork belly | Recipe

I have made a lot of rich things in the past year, but it's kind of hard to top fat fried in its own fat. You cook pork belly in water, which softens the meat and renders out a bunch of the fat; once the water's evaporated, the extracted fat becomes the medium for deep-frying what remains. Utterly crisptacular.

Chorizo | Spiced sausage | Recipe

This was a pretty darn good chorizo. iIf you ever find yourself in Sunset Park, La Vaquita on 5th Avenue will hook you up at a good price. But what's more notable is how after a few minutes, the grill turned into an inferno, with flames so big they were licking out the sides and threatening to melt the cables running along the outside of the building. (Note to self: turn down the grill after putting on fatty sausages!) The outside was fantastically seared while the inside wasn't yet cooked, but there was so much heat lingering after I turned off the heat that ten minutes with the lid down and it was cooked through. ¡Sabroso!

Arepas de queso | Corn and cheese griddle cakes | Recipe

I'd never heard of arepas before moving to New York. Typical of Colombian and Venezuelan cuisine, they're a certain type of corn meal (nixtamalized and pre-cooked, I believe), mixed with warm water and butter, and in this case cheese. Smush 'em down, panfry 'em in more butter, and you've got a tasty treat. Not a bad idea to keep some arepa flour on hand, since this is a pretty easy-to-whip-up snack.

Plátanos horneados | Baked plantains

There's enough opportunities when cooking the world's cuisines to fry plantains that I jumped at the alternative of baking. Not only is the oil really rich and completely unnecessary on the same plate as the chicharrones, but it's also time consuming and annoying to fry all those slices. Baking plantains actually is really easy: cut and rip off the peels of the darkest, ripest plantains you can find, brush them with melted butter, and bake for about a half hour at 400 degrees. That's really it! Only regret is that I didn't buy more plantains.

Frijoles paisas | Pinto beans with pork and vegetables | Recipe

Though they were staring me in the face in the meat case at La Vaquita, I forgot to pick up ham hocks, and couldn't for the life of me find them anywhere local yesterday. So I substituted bacon, which is rarely a poor decision. In combination with the tomato-onion-cilantro mix thrown in toward the end, these beans were seriously tasty. The fact that I made them the day before surely helped, because the flavors were nicely blended and the texture very smooth.

Carne en polvo | Powdered beef | Recipe

Yep, powdered. Marinate some thinly sliced steak, simmer until done, then throw it in the food processor! Kind of a shame, I thought it tasted better as whole steak than ground to smithereens, but maybe it's an acquired taste.

Mazamorra | Hominy porridge | Recipe

This is one of those dishes where I'm not sure if I did it wrong, or if it's just something that we simply didn't like all that much. Hominy from a can, simmered in water, and chilled, and then you add milk, chunks of sugar, and guava paste. The sugar chunks and guava paste didn't really dissolve, so there was a lot of smushing on the side of the bowl. Maybe we were supposed to eat (or drink?) the hominy-milk and then nibble on the sugar and guava paste? Hm.

Chocolate caliente | Hot chocolate | Recipe

The hot chocolate, on the other hand, was a surefire winner. Get bars of chocolate specifically made for the purpose, with a higher sugar content and without milk. Melt in the pan with a bit of milk, then add more milk until it's drinking temperature. Very fortunately, I bought too much chocolate so we'll be having this again soon.

Though we dined outside, throughout the evening we played a big long playlist of Colombian music, which features a ton of variety, from cumbias to Shakira, reggaeton to waltzes. Can't wait for our Jambox to arrive, so we can enjoy more music outside.

This was our last Nosh in Brooklyn for over a month! In two weeks we'll be in the Bay Area for a meal from the islands of Comoros, which are north of Madagascar. That'll be quite the shift!

Meal 36: China

When asked over the past year which upcoming meal intimidated me the most, I'd answer "China." The most populated country in the world covers a huge variety of cuisines, virtually uncountable ingredients and cooking techniques, and tremendous extremes: it has 9,100 miles of coastline and also the point on Earth farthest from any ocean. China is a telling example of the imperfection of using the United Nations member list as a proxy for the world's cuisines. But here we are.

Thanks to the thorough consultation and guidance of Chrys Wu, who gave generously of her time and knowledge to compile the menu (and then jumped in to help with the cooking!), I think we did about as well as we could have in a single meal in terms of variety on several dimensions: pork, duck, fish, seafood, tofu; steaming, pan-frying, roasting; rice, wheat, bean noodles; and heck, we even managed to include yogurt. A huge shout-out as well to Oliver, for making the trip from DC to shop and cook and enjoy, and bringing back memories of cooking Chinese food together in high school.

Our other guests were Sam, Jenny, Ben, and Caroline. Thankfully this on-again, off-again rain gave us a respite, and we enjoyed the meal outside — which is a good thing since the house got seriously smoky when we reheated the Peking duck!

Cha | Tea

Chrys brought over some gorgeous white needle tea. It was just a bit hot out to enjoy the tea warm, so we iced it. Good decision! It was crisp but not too bitter, a nice contrast to the rich flavors we encountered throughout the meal.

Shanghai: Xiao long bao | Soup dumplings | Recipe

This is probably my single favorite dish in all of Chinese food, and so of all the dishes in the pantheon of Shanghainese cuisine, I insisted we make this one despite all the work. The day before, I made the broth, extracting the flavor from two pounds of chicken and a pound and a half of pork belly, boiling it down to a cup and a half of super-rich stock, and mixing it with gelatin. The next day, we mixed this gelled aspic with a rich, aromatic, pork-based filling, stuffed it into wheat-based dumpling skins, and steamed them until the skins got rich and glossy, and the aspic magically melted into soup. Eaten in one bite with a little splash rich Chinkiang vinegar (I like to call it the Balsamic of China due to its complexity), this explosion of textures and flavors is a fantastic appetizer.

Hong Kong: Yee mein | Pan-fried noodles with shrimp and scallops | Recipe

"Should I use the same marinade for the shrimp and the scallops?" I asked Chrys. "Oh no, then everything would taste the same," she cautioned. Thus I learned an important aspect of Chinese cuisine: even if everything is ending up in the same dish, keeping flavors separate allows the individual elements to carry their own identity. What a tasty and easy-to-prepare dish: provided you've got the right sauces and noodles on hand, you can make this with pretty much any land- or sea-based protein in a matter of minutes. Tasted arguably better as leftovers the next day!

Guangzhou/Canton: Hoi sam | Sea cucumber stuffed with pork and shrimp | Recipe

Whenever I hear the term "flavorless, gelatinous delicacy," I grow skeptical. And as you can see, these sea-lubbers ain't exactly lookers, nor are they cheap. But you know what, this dish turned out well. If you think of the pork-and-shrimp filling as a hotdog, this salad-of-the-sea made for a nicely chewy but not at all tough bun of sorts.

Sichuan: La zi yu | Fish with chilies and sichuan pepper | Recipe

Though drenched in chilies and Szechuan peppercorns, this dish was somehow really pleasant and well-balanced. We started with some sea bass that I bought live in Chinatown, and filleted using the knife and the skills I picked up at Brooklyn Kitchen's Knife Skills 201 class. Oliver made the spicy base and the even spicier oil for on top, while I sliced the fish into chunks and boiled it in water, before we put it all together. Why boil the fish rather than fry it in that spicy oil? Maybe that's why the heat is manageable. Also, if you've never had a Szechuan peppercorn experience, this dish is a first-class way to experience the tangy, tingly, numby, intense flavors of this mysterious spice.

Beijing: Kao ya | Peking duck | Recipe

    Unlike fortune cookies and chow mein and General Tso's Chicken, dishes thought of as Chinese but made popular in the States, Peking Duck really is famous in China too. That said, I'm pretty sure the classic recipe isn't exactly like this one we used, which calls for — get this — using a bicycle pump to inflate the skin! Check out the video. Apparently this makes the skin looser, so that when it goes in the fridge after being scorched with a soy sauce/sherry/honey mixture, it dries out more.

Since I don't have a vertical roaster, and I avoid buying cooking equipment for single uses, we had to get creative, and Oliver had the great idea of using skewers to keep the duck propped upright. And it worked! You can see how beautifully bronzed our duck turned out. The only problem we ran into was in the reheating right before service: we had the oven up too high, and it filled the house with smoke. (Oh, and the pancakes we bought that are traditionally used as little fluffy tacos were moldy and so we tossed them. Oh well!) While we got surprisingly little meat from this five-pound bird, it was sure tasty.

Luo han zhai | Buddha's delight | Recipe

To represent the Buddhist traditions of the southern highlands, and also to insert some veggies into the meal, we made what's known in English as Buddha's Delight, a vegetarian stir-fried dish that's traditionally eaten for the new year. Taking cues from various recipes around the internet, we went a bit nuts with the varieties of fungus, including wood ear and bamboo fungus, and so it had quite the earthy flavor. We're also not positive the romaine lettuce is entirely authentic. But it was definitely flavorful and abundant.

Xinjiang: Durap | Sweetened yogurt

I'll be honest, I'm not a big fan of typical Chinese desserts. So I jumped on the opportunity to acknowledge the Uyghurs of far Western China, and make this dish of yogurt sweetened with honey and lemon juice and thinned with shaved ice. We couldn't find a recipe for durap, only descriptions, so we had to wing it. And I think it was pretty good!

I'm happy to say we ended up with surprisingly few leftovers given the abundance of this feast — our guests were eatin' champs! And now our attention turns to Colombia, where with the bandeja paisa they've managed to create that treasure that's rare and highly appreciated here in Noshlandia: a single dish that incorporates the essence of the country's cuisine. See you next week!

Meal 35: Chile

Chile has gone through a nutritional upheaval in the past half century. Whereas a few decades ago malnourishment was a worry, now their obesity levels are in the same league as the US. With flaky pastries and tasty breads, it's easy to see where the temptation lies.

For this long Memorial Day weekend, we shook things up by heading up to the Catskills. Our friend Sarah-Doe spent much of her childhood in this big, rambling structure, a former grain mill that her family converted into a home and woodworking shop, set between two streams that form part of the headwaters of the Delaware River.

photo by Kirsty Bennett

Given that we were farther from the ocean than just about any point in Chile, and the concerns of transporting fish for hours by car, we decided to pass up Chile's robust seafood opportunities and stick to safer foods. Our friends around the table were Kirsty, Saskia, Adam, Raven, Dan, Sarah-Doe, Michael, and Julia. A huge thanks to all the kitchen help, especially Kirsty for her major efforts particularly on pastry. And of course an enormous abrazo to Sarah-Doe for hosting us all!

Pisco sour | Brandy cocktail | Recipe

Chile and Peru have fought over many things, including territory and pisco. Peru claims that since the town of Pisco is in Peru, only their grape brandy may go by that name. Chile renamed a town as Pisco Elqui to nullify that argument. In any event, both countries produce a pretty similar product, but they whip it up in a cocktail somewhat differently. In Peru, a pisco sour is made with egg whites; in Chile, it appears it is not. The recipe we found had the further improvement of champagne, and it made for a powerful and refreshing potion.

Mote con huesillos | Dried peach and wheat drink | Recipe

Speaking of refreshing, this beverage, which looks like it's come straight from a different planet, is a great summertime cooler. Dried peaches are soaked in water with cinnamon overnight, then boiled with sugar, and the whole thing has some cooked grain added to it like a bizarro bubble tea. (It's supposed to be a form of dehusked whole wheat grains, but pearled barley made for a decent substitute.) We all agreed it tasted better than feared, though for those of us not used to chewing our way through a drink, it was a bit of a challenge.

Marraquetas | Double rolls | Recipe

This looks a lot like a butt, yet it had a great texture and tasted fantastice. For whatever reason this is the shape that Chileans expect their bread to be in, to the extent that specialized machines are manufactured to help bakers achieve it. Luckily I remembered to bring up some sourdough starter, which the recipe said was optional; I have no idea if that's really authentic, but gosh it helped! We tore our way through this double batch of bread, alternating between butter, pebre (see below), and butter and pebre in combination.

Pebre | Chilean salsa | Description

Apparently this comes from the Catalan word for bell pepper, but since I forgot to print out the recipe I didn't know what ingredients to buy and didn't get any peppers, sweet or otherwise. It ended up being a non-spicy salsa of tomato, chopped onion, and cilantro, and whaddya know it was still a great topping for the bread.

Porotos granados | Fresh cranberry bean stew | Recipe

There's a saying in Chile, tan Chileno como los porotos, meaning "As Chilean as beans." Although bean consumption has dropped dramatically in recent years, this dish of fresh cranberry beans with squash and corn is still a signature dish of the country's culinary repertoire. It also very well represents three foods that were enjoyed in the country long before the conquistadores arrived, and just so happens to be completely vegan. If you care to make this, I wish you luck in finding fresh cranberry beans; I was shocked and pleased to see them at Fairway.

Ensalada chilena | Tomato and onion salad | Recipe

This salad of onions, tomato, and cilantro might seem like no great shakes, but notice the technique of pouring boiling salted water on the onions to remove the sharpness. It really works!

Empanadas de pino | Ground beef empanadas | Recipe

The second half of this meal was brought to you by a really beautiful hunk of leaf lard I bought from the farmers market a while back, just sitting in my freezer for such an occasion. It makes for rich and supple pastry that, of course, gets crispy and flaky like none other. The filling was mostly meaty and savory, but with tang from the olive and a burst of sweet from raisins. Yum!

Torta de mil hojas con manjar | Thousand-layer caramel cake | Recipe (translated to English)

For dessert, we enjoyed what was seems to have been invented by a stoned teenager locked in a patisserie: layers of pie crust with dulce de leche and nuts. Rather than the very tedious, stir-for-many-hours method of making classic Chilean manjar (that's what they call their dulce de leche, which omits the vanilla that the Argentines use), I opted for the much easier and more common method of simmering cans of condensed milk. I cooked the for two hours, and lo and behold they got that brown hue, though they probably could have gone for maybe an hour longer for a richer flavor. But there was plenty of richness from the individually baked layers of pastry dough, in which we used lard instead of butter for extra crispiness. Wow. The only thing better than this cake was the leftovers the next day, when the caramel had soaked about halfway through, leading to a broader spectrum of textures.

This coming weekend we're tackling China, which is shaping up to be quite the adventure!

Photos by Laura Hadden, who's looking forward to more noshing in the countryside.

Meal 34: Chad

Chad spans the three S's of the heart of Africa: the Sahara desert in the north, the arid Sahel in the middle, and the wetter savanna to the south. Or put into culinary terms, this extent is why we see both dates and peanuts factor into this meal.

However, on the heels of the generically-named Central African Republic, Chad's another country that poses some online searching problems, at least in English. To wit, I was looking for advice on cooking the staple grain of that country, but a search for [chad millet] turns up a doctor with that name in Louisiana. Fortunately, French provides a nice opportunity for disambiguation: they spell it Tchad, and as far as I could tell, nobody goes by that name.

Chad's going through a rough time right now: the food crisis in the Sahel has made food scarce and expensive across much of the middle of the country, and unfortunately the World Food Program is predicting a looming humanitarian disaster. They're hoping to help 1.2 million people in Chad alone — now would be an excellent time to consider helping before the situation turns from "extreme" to "famine." Our guests' generous donations tonight, after matching, will enable WFP to provide 1,000 meals.

Tonight's guests included Matt Green, a nosher with a mission: to walk every single street of New York City. Check him out! We also welcomed Matt's friend Jason, Laura's psychogeography professor Rachel and classmates Alex, Grayson, and Gabi, and Bradley and Jenny. Although Chadians are relatively big meat-eaters, we kept this meal pescatarian.

Karkanji | Hibiscus drink | Recipe (translated to English)

Along with the traditional Chadian welcome of sweet green tea, dates and peanuts (according to this page), we served this super-refreshing drink made of steeped hibiscus flowers (aka sorrel, or jamaica in Spanish). With ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, this tasted downright Christmassy. All the ingredients are so pungent that I made two batches from the same base of stuff, I just added more sugar and water and steeped it again.

Sauce koumragan | Sorrel leaf sauce | Recipe (translated to English)

I was planning on making a dish with okra, but when I happened upon bunches of sorrel at the farmer's market, I had to let fate sway me. The full-circle nature of this is just too good: use the flowers for the drink, and the leaves for the dish! I modified the recipe to be vegetarian: I upped the onions and added tomatoes in place of meat, and used porcini bouillon cubes (hey, it's what I had on hand) in place of veal bouillon. Turned out pretty tasty!

Mulukhiya | Recipe (translated to English)

Whatever goopiness we missed from skipping okra, this one made up for in abundance. This plant is sometimes known as mallow, in fact its mucilaginous properties are what they used to lean on to make marshmallows before they discovered more convenient ways to make sugar goop together in a fluffy manner. It was kind of hard to get beyond the texture because the dish itself wasn't terribly flavorful, despite the exotic smoked fish which added surprisingly little. I know we'll encounter this vegetable again as we go through Arab lands so I hope to improve on my mallowmaking.

Courgettes avec des arachides | Squash with peanuts | Recipe

Seems so simple, with nothing more than salt to flavor it, but this mix of squash (or in this case zucchini) and peanuts is really tasty: both peanuts and summer squash are mildly sweet, and the mushy and crunchy play off each other well. If you choose to make this, note that the five-to-ten-minutes for sauteeing until soft is wildly optimistic, I budgeted 20 to 30 minutes and used it all.

Boule | Millet ball | Recipe

Another African country, another fufu derivation! In Chad the staple grain is millet, though it was tough to find instruction on how to actually prepare it. I finally found this one that advised putting a little wheat flour in, and that probably helped it thicken up. Following instructions, we pressed the mush into lightly greased bowls and inverted them to eat from.

Jus de fruit | Fruit shakes | Recipe

Pretty straightforward and tasty, we made them with both mango and papaya. Even better with some rum.

Fangasso | Fluffy beignets | Recipe

A rather common name for these crispy, airy concoctions is pets de nonne, or "nun's farts." I'd never quite made anything this way before; from the initial instruction of melting butter in water it was all an unfamiliar approach, but I'll be darned, once batter hit oil, these things puffed up and got all lovely. The one modification I made was to cook them in palm oil, hopefully it was something like you'd get on the street in N'Djamena.

And that does it for our stretch of six African countries in eight meals! We take a break next weekend, followed by a trip to the Catskills where we'll cook Chile.

All photos by Laura Hadden who, after the guests went home, accidentally ate the beignet batter thinking it was boulet.