Meal 55: Eritrea

This wedge-shaped country on the Red Sea has seen a tumultuous history, especially in the past decade and a half: colonization by Italy after the opening of the Suez Canal, being stapled to its larger neighbor Ethiopia in the 1930s when the Italians invaded there too; a thirty-year war for independence that finally ended in 1991; and since then a highly autocratic government that is intolerant of any dissent. (Oh, and a border war with Ethiopia for good measure in the late '90s.)

But how about the food? Well, frankly, it's not that different from Ethiopian, especially from the north half of that country. The berbere spice blend is a bit different, the clarified butter recipe has some modifications, but when it comes down to it, you're eating spiced stews with tangy, spongy flatbread. Since Ethiopia's coming up soon, I think we'll concentrate on food from the south of that country for the sake of contrast.

Joining us for this eat-with-your-hands Saturday night were Dan, Chelsea, Anna, David, Mia, Mike, and Raven.

Berbere | Spice blend | Recipe

I had thought berbere was a type of pepper — a rich, complex, intriguing pepper at that. But no! It's a really complex blend of spices, including two types of chili pepper (three if you include mild paprika), plus all sorts of spices and powdered aromatics.

As with so many great spice blends, you start by toasting the whole spices and grinding them. (Don't over-toast! I was waiting for the "pop" the recipe prescribed and ended up burning the first batch, so I started over. Nobody likes burnt spices.) Since I had whole cinnamon and black cardamom, I added those to the other stuff the recipe said to toast. Thank goodness for my trusty cheap little coffee grinder; my Cuisinart just isn't up to the task of grinding those hard spices.

This recipe gives you about a cup and a half of a blend that, curiously, has so much character that it could go with so many things. If you're not up for that much personality in one Mason jar, cut in half. And of course, if you don't have an ingredient on hand, substitute and improvise!

Tesmi | Spiced clarified butter | Recipe

Similar in concept to, but a bit differently flavored than, the Ethiopian niter kibbeh. Simply put, throw finely chopped onion and a few spices in melted butter, cook really slowly until the solids fall to the bottom, and strain. Boom, a flavorful and clarified milk fat that will heat much higher than butter before burning.

Keyih tibsi | Beef in quick red stew | Recipe

I've sautéed onions hundreds, maybe over a thousand, times. But never have I done it without oil! It went against my intuition to throw a bunch of beautiful, sliced red onions in the hot pan with nothing in between. Yet with no more stirring than normal sautéeing requires, they softened up nicely...but I did breathe a sigh of relief when the recipe finally let me put a bit of the clarified butter in!

Anyway, the dish was awesome. The sweet onions balanced the rich beef and the complexity of the berbere very well, and the chopped tomatoes made for a nice base. I skipped the adobo and forgot the jalapeño and still the dish had plenty of satisfying flavor. To really carry this over the top, perhaps I'd go for a slightly more tender cut of beef, but I don't feel like we lost a whole lot on that account.

Tsebhi derho | Simmered chicken | Recipe

This is probably the first recipe I've made from a textbook! I appreciated the description, particularly the part that explained that the recipe calls for twelve boiled eggs to represent the Apostles. (NB: I finally found a good recipe for hard-boiled eggs! Put eggs in single layer covered with inch of cold water. Bring to boil, cover and shut flame, wait 10 minutes, then put in ice bath for 5 minutes. Boom.)

Unlike the tibsi, a tsebhi is a slower-cooked stew. I used about two pounds of red onion in it, which helped draw out the sauce more and made for more berbere conveyance. I also cleavered the chicken into several pieces so it would go farther. Another winner!

Alicha | Simmered vegetables | Recipe

A base of cabbage, carrots, and potatoes doesn't promise the most exciting flavors, but leave it to this part of the world to find a great way to make it exciting. Who'd have expected cardamom and nutmeg?! That, plus a green chili, and parsley and basil at the end, gave these otherwise plain veggies a really interesting flavor. But let's be honest, we all just had bites of the alicha as a brief respite from the more intense meat dishes!

Injera | Sourdough sponge bread | Recipe at bottom of Djibouti page

It's the third time I've made this tangy crêpe-like staple, and I sure have the hang of it now. The only big variation is that I ended up not with teff flour, but rather whole-grain teff — which, at about 1/16 inch, is really tiny! I had to painstakingly grind it in my coffee grinder, 1/3-cup at a time, and even then I didn't get it as fine as from a mill. Don't know if it was the fresh-and-not-fully-ground teff, or something else, but wow, this was the best yet! Really easy to cook, almost never stuck back on itself when removing from the pan, and most importantly, tasty.

Boon | Coffee | Procedure

Coffee was discovered as a wild bush in adjacent Ethiopia. In both countries, it's traditional hospitality to roast, grind, and brew coffee for guests, starting from scratch with the green beans. Given that we didn't have the traditional equipment on hand, including an earthenware vessel with a horsehair filter, we improvised. The beans toasted slowly in the pan on the stove, gradually turning tan and then darker brown. Mike and Dan took turns pounding the toasted beans in the mortar and pestle until they were ground "well enough," and then we boiled the coffee with a bit of cardamom. We then strained into cups, and enjoyed, and wondered if we'd ever get to sleep what with all that caffeine.

All the while, we had whole lumps of frankincense — resin from a particular kind of tree, as it turns out — smoldering on coals, which made for quite the heady scent.

Big thanks to Raven for all the help making this, and for that photo at lower-right!

Himbasha | Spiced bread | Recipe

With all the rich smells and flavors from the coffee, this gentle bread is a perfect contrast. Picture focaccia, with a bit less oil, and the addition of some honey and spices. It was lovely with coffee, and also made for a great breakfast snack the next morning.

We're zooming across the African continent for our next meal, to another small and autocratic yet even lesser-known country, Equatorial Guinea.

Photos by Laura Hadden, who likes negotiating incense prices.

Meal 54: El Salvador

After a three-week trip to India, where our senses were entranced with spices, I was afraid that Salvadorean food would prove mild and uninteresting. While it's true that pupusas are a pretty straightforward food, I was surprised by the creative combination of ingredients, such as aged cheese in dessert, cloves in a soup, and coriander seed in a drink. While the food of this small, dense, Pacific-facing nation shares most of its base ingredients with its Latin American neighbors, a few of the ingredients — namely, morro seeds and loroco flowers — are very particular. I had to ask around at about a half a dozen markets in Sunset Park before I finally was pointed to yet another market with a Mexican flag in front...that had them! The clue was that it was down the street from a Salvadorean restaurant.

Joining us for this first nosh of the year were all couples: Jessica and Alex, Kate and Jason, Michelle and JJ, and Clara and Jesse.

Horchata | Spiced grain drink | Recipe (Spanish)

You've probably encountered horchata as an opaque, milky-white, moderately gritty, cinnamony drink at a Mexican restaurant. Turns out this drink, whose name derives from the Latin word for "barley," has all sorts of variations around the Hispanic world, with pretty much the only thing in common being a starchy base with spices.

The Salvadorean variety is quite distinctive; as you can see in the above photo it has many components, all of which are toasted and ground individually. On the bottom is morro seed, which comes from a very-hard-to-crack fruit. Next come cocoa, nutmeg, peanuts, coriander seed, cinnamon, allspice, sesame seeds, and finally rice flour. This is then mixed with water, allowed to sit for a bit, and strained before sweetening, chilling and drinking.

The flavor is notably more complex and earthier than a Mexican horchata, or at least the kinds I've had; it's mostly the depth and richness from the morro seeds but you also appreciate the complex interplay of so many spices you rarely see at the same time.

Sopa de patas | Hoof and tripe stew | Recipe

I'm not quite sure what Salvadoreños do with the rest of the cow, because this stew, using some of the most humble parts of the animal, is just about the only beef-based recipe I came across. (If you're familiar with the cuisine of this part of the world, you may know this type of dish as mondongo.) As with so many dishes made of odd parts, it's a long and slow process to cook the hooves long enough that the cartilage and other stuff simply falls off the bones. Between this and the sprinkling of tripe, you don't actually end up with much protein to chew on; what really makes this soup is the rich broth and the variety of vegetables that populates it. That, and the relajo spice mix; in my homemade version, I might have used a bit too much clove and not enough of the other ingredients like chili and sesame seed, but I liked it!

Pupusas | Stuffed corn tortillas | Recipes: pupusas and pork filling

The pupusa is certainly the best known Salvadorean food in the US. It uses the same lime-treated corn that's used for tortillas, but instead of being pressed really thin, it's stuffed with a filling, pressed a little thicker, and then griddled for a few minutes. We made two types. Queso con loroco was a mix of melty and hard cheese with a particular type of edible flower bud. Chicharron, or fried pork, was made from a pork butt (aka pernil) that I cooked very slowly on the stovetop with a bit of tomato sauce (see below); when it was fork-tender I shredded it, cooked it until it started frying itself, mixed in a bit more sauce, and ran it through the meat grinder.

I wouldn't call these pupusas the most beautiful or successful thing I've every made. I probably got the water proportion in the dough wrong which led to cracking edges, and they were honestly pretty bland. Maybe I didn't use enough filling but I was already failing at keeping the filling fully inside. Hmph.

Salsa roja | Tomato sauce | Recipe

This simple tomato sauce, on the other hand, was quite tasty. I made it with summer-ripe tomatos I'd cached away in the freezer. It would have been preferable to use a food mill to make it smooth. Absent that, I used my immersion blender, which was convenient but incorporated more air and hence turned the sauce a bit more orange.

Curtido | Cabbage slaw | Recipe

This is the universal Salvadorean condiment, a simple shred of cabbage and carrots seasoned with vinegar and allowed to ferment slightly. It would probably have been rather tastier had I made some homemade pineapple vinegar as is apparently very common; as it was, my substitute attempt with apple cider vinegar fell a bit flat.

Oh, notice also the dollop of cream on that plate. Crema salvadoreña is about as thick as a soured cream could be and still be pourable, and it has a rich and almost funky culture flavor.

Quesadilla | Aged-cheese poundcake | Recipe

Quesadilla is a portmanteau, a mashup of the words queso (cheese) and tortilla. And as there are two types of tortilla — the Mexican flatbread and the Spanish baked omelette — there's a quesadilla that corresponds to each. The former is, of course, essentially the Mexican version of a grilled cheese sandwich. But the latter, which is enjoyed in El Salvador, is in fact a dessert that closely resembles a poundcake, except with cultured cream as well as an aged cheese that closely resembles parmesan in flavor. Despite its status as a dessert, it's not very sweet, and in fact the savoriness and saltiness of the cheese comes through quite clearly.

We're traveling next week, but the weekend after we're zooming to the Red Sea for Eritrean food!

Meal 53: Egypt

For 12 millennia, people in what's now Egypt have successfully built civilizations around agriculture in a virtually rain-free desert environment. While there's plenty of evidence that they grew fruits and vegetables, the annual cycle of the Nile's flooding made it much easier to grow plants that could thrive on their own in properly inundated soil — which means grains and legumes were much easier than relatively more fickle fruits and vegetables. So, it should be no surprise that our meal was very carb-heavy! (Vegetarian and nearly vegan, too.)

Joining us for our starch-fueled adventure were Shazna, Ron, Nadia, Jessica, Sophie, Angad, Melanie, and Catherine.

Ful medames | Fava bean stew | Recipe

It's apparently a common saying that ful medames is "the rich man's breakfast, the shopkeeper's lunch, and the poor man's dinner." Ful is a popular food around the Middle East, but it's really a core part of the Egyptian diet.

It's made from fava beans, and the same inner skin that makes it a very labor-intensive vegetable to eat fresh renders it a particularly long-cooking dried legume. In fact, I soaked it for twelve hours in warm water with vinegar, then simmered it for four or five hours, and I still think it could have cooked longer to be more tender. No wonder a lot of people buy the cooked beans in a can and then gussy them up for serving. It was tough to find a good recipe that started from dried beans.

As far as the seasoning, there are many approaches, all of them delicious. I tried a pretty straightforward version, eliminating the tahini from the recipe, and going a little heavier on the garlic.

Aish badali | Whole wheat flatbread | Recipe

The perfect accompaniment for this mushy, tangy, rich dish is a fluffy, toasty, lightly nutty loaf of what is possibly the world's oldest form of bread. (Maybe this is what the Israelites were trying to bake when they fled from Pharaoh, and what we now memorialize as matzo?) The standard Arabic word for bread is khubz, but in Egypt they call it aish, the word for "life." It's heavily subsidized, and its quality and availability remains a major political issue.

Happily, this is one of the easier breads to make, and also pretty healthy given that it's made entirely out of whole wheat. What's fun is that it only takes a few minutes to bake, puffing up rather dramatically in an oven as hot as you can make it. Unfortunately, mine tops out at around 500°F, which isn't hot enough to shock the crust so that you get the classic pocket.

Koshari | Rice, pasta, and lentils with tomato sauce and crisp-fried onions | Recipe

This explosion of complex sugars is Egypt's national dish. In fact, it's been credited with fueling the recent revolution. So how do you bring a taste of Tahrir to your table?

Start with a layer of little pasta — elbow macaroni is OK but even better are quarter-inch-long tubes sometimes seen as ditalini. On top of that put rice (a relative newcomer to Egypt, cultivated since the 7th century) which has been steamed with previously-cooked and lightly fried brown lentils. Then put a layer of vermicelli, essentially little pieces of super-thin pasta, which has been fried and then boiled. Pour on a moderate helping of a basic vinegar-garlic-tomato sauce (way late in the game as a New World food!). Cover generously with paper-thin onion slices fried to within a whisper of burnt. Then top off with a salsa of fresh tomato, raw garlic, vinegar, and more cumin than you probably realized you could actually cook with.

I'm pretty sure that in the time it took me to write that paragraph, you'd have wolfed down half your bowl. It's such an oddly compelling dish, a mutt of starch and tang which laps at your taste buds and nuzzles contently in your stomach. Not surprisingly, given all the steps that go into making all the parts of the dish, koshari is rarely made in the Egyptian home, as it's cheap enough to eat out anyway.

Whom should we thank for this dish? It may surprise you to know that the British are generally given credit for having brought a similarly-named rice-and-lentil combination from India, apparently because it's something they could reliably eat without getting food poisoning!

Quick-pickled eggplant | Recipe

Fresh veggies played a secondary role in ancient Egypt, and the same is true in the modern one too. The most appropriate would have been molokhiya, a leafy green that's bizarrely translated as "Jew's Mallow," and makes for a stew that's goopier than okra. But that wouldn't have worked with koshari, so I went with this good-looking quick-pickle recipe for eggplant. Now, I wasn't able to get the sort of really skinny and small eggplant they call for, Italian eggplant was the best I could do. All in all the dish was underwhelming, and also a little offputting — any guess why the garlic turned blue when stuffed inside the eggplant?!?

Shai | Mint tea

Now, tea is a much more recent phenomenon in Egypt than most of these other staples, but deeply incorporated into life all the same. It's often steeped with mint. Both very strong and relatively mild versions of tea are brewed; I guess we kinda ended up in the middle.

Umm ali | Puff-pastry bread pudding with nuts | Recipe

Why this dessert is called "Ali's Mother" is a matter of debate. But there's no denying that this was one tasty end to the meal. For all the richness, with puff pastry, condensed milk, three types of nuts and coconut, it was pleasingly not too sweet, with no added sugar other than that in the condensed milk. (I even used just milk rather than cream as called for, and we didn't miss any of the extra richness.)

In terms of awesomeness to effort, this is one of the highest ranking desserts yet for United Noshes! Really, provided that you plan ahead — or are a culinary savant and happen to have ingredients on hand — it takes little effort to whip it up, and even less to clean because your guests will be licking the dish.

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And that does it for United Noshes in 2012! It's been our first full calendar year, with 34 Noshes in five cities, over $9,600 raised (bringing us to over $12,300 total) for World Food Program USA, and a few hundred prior friends, friends-of-friends, and new friends served. We're soon heading off for a three-week trip to India over the holidays, where I fully expect to buy tons of spices and pack my already overburdened spice collection to overflowing.

Happy holidays and New Year! May it be filled with good cheer, and of course great food.

Meal 52: Ecuador

Ecuador is kind of on the small side — a bit larger than the UK, a bit smaller than Nevada — but its borders contain three distinct zones: seaside, Andes, and Amazon. Hence, there's quite a lot of variety in the foods available. (There's also Galápagos way out in the Pacific, but we're not eating any of their rare wildlife.)

Some of the major themes are shared with its Andean neighbors: abundant potatoes, warming foods, and the ubiquitous Inca Kola, which tastes like bubble gum and packs a caffeinated punch. (Spike it with Pisco like we did!) I was surprised to see a lot of annatto, aka achiote, a seed that gushes a saffron-like orange hue when heated in oil. Pretty much everything we had was that color.

Our guests were Kelly, Sarah-Doe, Jon (who just flew in from California and came straight from the airport), Tennessee, Jen, and Kathryn, who's half-Ecuadorian and helped with the menu and prep!

Ceviche de pescado | Fish ceviche | Recipe

Ceviche is surely the most famous seafood dish of South America, and the Ecuadorian version does it great justice. I especially like it because of just how lime-y it is: you first "cook" the fish in one batch of fresh lime juice, then rinse it off and make a second marinade with yet more. That makes it so the marinade has a good but not overpowering fishy flavor. But the craziest part of the Ecuadorian ceviche is that it is commonly eaten with...popcorn! It sounds crazy but makes total sense: the dry puffs with their slightly sweet and nutty flavor provide the perfect foil for the wet, tangy, and fishy flavor of the ceviche.

As far as making the ceviche itself, it's extremely important to start with the freshest fish possible. So I went to Sunset Park's Chinatown and got a live tilapia and a live striped bass. Even though they came to four pounds at the store, once I filleted them (thanks, Knife Skills 201 class!), I had only a pound of flesh left even though the recipe calls for two. I kept going with the full recipe and am glad I did: while it wasn't exactly overflowing with fish, there were plenty of tasty morsels amongst the other bits. (For what it's worth, I couldn't tell the difference between bites of the two fish so you might as well go with the cheaper one.) And, of course, the popcorn helped it all go farther! A single recipe with half the fish provided enough for an appetizer for 8.

Aji criollo | Rustic hot salsa | Recipe

The recipe calls this a hot sauce but it's really more like a Mexican salsa — it doesn't have tomatoes or limes, just chilies, scallions, and cilantro, but it is veggie-rich and is more to be scooped on than applied in dabs.

Locro de papa | Potato and cheese soup | Recipe

I love spices, the way that complex combinations of flavors build together and take over your senses. But sometimes it's just better to cook simply and carefully, letting the inherent characters of the ingredients shine through. This soup, made of little more than onions, potatoes, cheese, cilantro, and a splash of milk is a wonderful reminder of the value and delight of basic ingredients. Though I gotta say the zip and zing from the aji goes well too!

Llapingachos con salsa de maní | Potato-cheese fritters with peanut sauce | Recipe

 

This recipe has almost the same ingredients as above — pretty much the only addition is peanuts for the sauce — but it's amazing what a different dish it turns out to be. Now, I way overcomplicated this one, by using a food strainer attachment for the Kitchen-Aid (score from raiding my parents' basement over Thanksgiving! I also got a meat grinder and a shredder!!) to rice the potatoes, but wow the texture turned out all lovely and fluffy. Note that you want your batter cold and your griddle very hot and sufficiently oiled to make sure the crispy part stays on the potato rather than the griddle.

Not kidding that when I asked Kathryn what to serve with these, she suggested potatoes. (Yes, she knows that's funny.) Also, apparently in her family they just call these tortillas. I did fry up a few chorizos for the meat-eaters, which were surprisingly tasty. (Got them at La Vaquita on 5th Ave in Sunset Park, for the curious.)

Empanada de queso | Cheese and scallion empanada | Recipe

 

We've had some odd ingredients in our Nosh desserts — cornstarch pudding for Afghanistan, lard in the Chilean pastry, even that sweetened and chilled kidney bean soup for Dominican Republic — but it took until the E's to have onions! These empanadas, for which Kathryn channeled her grandmother to roll, stuff, and deep-fry, are filled mostly with cheese but with just enough scallion to give that fresh sharpness. The rustic dusting of granulated sugar leaves no doubt that this is a dessert, and the hot, crispy dough sure contributed to the feeling, but that scallion, well, it's a touch of daring genius.

Canelazo | Spiced, spiked punch | Recipe

What a tasty, and therefore dangerous, number! Nothing more than a few spices and juices, it's really simple to make (though of course I overcomplicated things a bit with fresh-squeezing the orange juice), and so warming and tasty. Very luckily I was able to find Ecuadorian aguardiente. Unlike its anise-flavored and better-known Colombian cousin, it tastes pure as a rich, unfiltered sugarcane, kind of the brown-sugar sibling of cachaça. And it is definitely much more smooth and agreeable than the over-the-top website of its manufacturer.

This meal was also the start of a new tradition, streaming radio from the country! JC Radio La Bruja from Quito had quite the Saturday night mix going.

Next meal takes us back to the Middle East, with Egypt!

Meal 51: Dominican Republic

Another Thanksgiving weekend, another nosh in San Francisco!  To go with the gorgeous weather, the calendar aligned on Dominican Republic, the second-largest country of the Caribbean. While the Bay Area is no stranger to foods from Spanish-speaking lands, there's few Caribbeans around, so these dishes made for something more of a novelty here than they would have been in Dominican-immigrant-heavy New York.

Thanks to the kind folks at Hattery, I had a big kitchen to discover the intriguing Dominican way of cooking, which was just, well, different. I used a grand total of one onion with none of that going into the stew, scrubbed every cube of meat with lime halves, and boiled rice at full hilt rather than gently simmering. And that's not even mentioning the oddness of a dessert built around kidney beans.

Around the table are Jon, Bryan, Alley, Suj, Drew, Greg, Emily, Shilpi, and my mom and dad! It was great to catch up with three friends in town from Portland, and of course to share the joy with my parents, cousin, and future cousin-in-law.

Sancocho de siete carnes | Seven-meat stew | Recipe

Can you even name seven meats? Well, it's kinda cheating since there are actually four types of pork (cubes, ribs, ham hocks, and longaniza sausage), plus beef, chicken, and goat. This is a truly rustic stew, with little more than meats plus some whole chunks of vegetables. The trick is putting in the longer-cooking items first, and gradually building up the pot, and getting a good longaniza since that's where the spices will come from.

The result was a really satisfying stew, with tender and flavorful chunks of meat and a sauce worth spooning on top of everything. Given the fun textures of the different root vegetables, it's worth making the effort to find them, especially the true yam, which isn't the same as a sweet potato. If you make this recipe, just be sure to give yourself plenty of prep time, it takes longer than you think to scrub each and every piece of meat! Or if you don't, at least take away the lesson to cut whole ears of corn into rounds, it's a fun addition and much more dramatic than tossing in individual kernels.

Guandules con coco | Pigeon peas in coconut milk | Recipe

Pigeon peas don't seem like much more than pale little lumps when dry, but once cooked they exhibit a rich caramel color and an unexpected smoky taste. They're often served in rice, much like rice and beans, but there's more you can do. This vegetarian preparation uses coconut milk and squash to give a more tropical feel. I'm kicking myself for neglecting to eat the final version, but reports are that even the carnivores thought this was a good dish.

Arroz blanco | White rice | Recipe

The goal with Dominican rice is to get concón, layers of crispiness mixed in with loose, fluffy kernels. Well, I got the loose and fluffy part all right, but nothing approaching crispy. Maybe I didn't let the oil sear the bottom of the pot long enough, or maybe that huge pot was just too big to deal with. Anyway, the rice was plenty fine, and served valiantly to sop up the sauce.

Jugo de tamarindo | Tamarind juice | Recipe

No photo, but imagine a pitcher full of brown liquid and you're set. This recipe is for if you've thought ahead. If you're like me, and you're starting from whole tamarind pods, first peel them (don't need to be obsessive over getting every last bit of peel), cover with water at about six times the volume of the nuts, bring to boil, and simmer for 15 minutes. Place a chinois or strainer over a bowl, dump the pot into the strainer, and use a wooden spoon to press the pulp onto the edges until the pulp is all squeezed through and into the bowl and only the seeds remain which you then throw out. Mix sugar into the still-warm juice, chill, enjoy the distinctive tang. For a really good time, make a cavarindo: half tamarind juice, half cava. (Watch out, it'll foam up like a root beer float!)

Habichuelas con dulce | Sweet bean soup | Recipe

A chilled soup made of pureed kidney beans and chunks of sweet potato doesn't exactly sound like dessert, but we were all pleasantly surprised by how tasty this inventive dish is. With evaporated and coconut milks, it's got a nice but not excessive milky richness, and the spices make it feel vaguely Christmasy. If you're adventurous, it's worth trying!

Ponche de ron | Egg nog | Recipe

One of the few scenes from the Jetsons I remember is the Christmas special, in which Rosie the Robot creates egg nog by mixing one egg and one "nog." Well, two decades later, I've finally made it — or, at least, the Dominican version — and while I can affirm that egg nog indeed has eggs, the "nog" part of it is a bit more complicated, in this case three types of milk plus sugar and spices, all cooked over a bain marie. But gosh it was tasty, not unctuous like the stuff in a carton, but really smooth sippin', and just the right density to warmly embrace the rum and make you forget you've eaten too much and shouldn't put any more in your belly.

So that does it for the D's! Next weekend we head due south to Ecuador. Thanks again to the kind folks at the Hattery for opening their space to us!