Eating Around the World - Peru

Often, when I start planning our weekly international menu, I search "National dish of ___" as a starting point. When I found out that the national dish of Peru was ceviche, a spicy raw fish dish, "cooked" only by marinating a bit in lime juice, I was skeptical. Surely, we could find something more accessible to the kids. The more I looked, the more I realized ceviche was actually probably our best option. It certainly would be easier to procure and prepare than guinea pig.

So, after reading about the safety of raw fish, I followed the recipe and then let it marinate a good hour. As dinner approached, I tentatively tried a bite... and found the chewy texture singularly unappealing. Maybe I tried the wrong kind of fish. Maybe I'm just a midwestern girl with an unsophisticated palate. I do, for example, greatly prefer Korean kimbap to Japanese sushi - largely because kimbap doesn't involve any raw fish.

Anyway, when Collin walked in the door, he echoed my concern. So I threw the whole bowl into a hot skillet for a minute or two, and cooked it just until the fish started to taste flakier than chewier. That flash in the pan made a huge difference, even if it softened the vegetables a little more than was desirable.

I served the ceviche in cups made from corn tortillas, baked in a muffin tin. I just sprayed the muffin tin with oil, pushed in a warm corn tortilla (or two halves, since mine were largely broken), sprayed them with oil again and baked them about 10 minutes. They weren't perfect, but they made an otherwise not-so-kid-friendly dish fun to eat. We had roasted sweet potatoes on the side, as well as popcorn. 

Popcorn? As a side? Well, yes.

A common accompaniment to ceviche is toasted corn kernels called cancha. From what I gather, it's kind of like corn nuts, and kind of like the popcorn kernels that fail to pop. I didn't have the right kind of corn, but I did have this beautiful Indian flint corn I grew last summer. It pops, but leaves a lot of partially-popped kernels in the bottom. So, I popped a big bowl of half rainbow corn, half conventional popcorn, and separated out puffy from the crunchy kernels. The rainbow corn tastes a lot better toasted than conventional popcorn, but I'm sure the texture is still pretty different than Peruvian cancha.

So, in the end, we had both kinds of popcorn for dinner, and it was a fun, if unusual, side dish.

Toward the end of the meal, Jenny pulled the whole bowl of popcorn over to her place, and ate handful after handful. Popcorn for dinner was just fine with her!

For dessert, I made arroz con leche, or rice pudding. I followed this recipe, except I used a can of evaporated milk for part of the milk, and then filled the measuring cup the rest of the way with whole milk. One cup of dry rice makes quite a large pot of rice pudding, and I might have made a half batch if I'd known how large it would end up.

Collin loves rice pudding, and it's one of those things he's always asking me to make and I never make enough to satisfy him. So, before digging in, he had to take a moment to inhale the sweet smell of milky rice topped with cinnamon and cloves.

After that, he shared a bite with Eliza. She quickly realized it was THE BEST THING SHE HAD EVER TASTED. Then it was all Collin could do to get a mouthful in between sharing with Eliza, and keeping her hands out of the bowl at the same time.

She does look pretty adorable with a rice pudding mustache.

Eating Around the World - Brazil

This is going to be short and sweet. The national dish of Brazil is Feijoada (Pronounced fey-zhoo-ah-dah, but said kind of fast so it all runs together). It's a pork and black bean stew, eaten with rice and served alongside greens. It's straightforward, easy, and delicious! You can even cook it in a slow cooker, and anticipate the deliciousness all day. Here's the recipe. I served it with a fresh kale salad, dressed with an orange balsamic dressing, tossed with sun dried tomatoes, dried cranberries, and almonds, and topped with orange wedges. Boom. Done.

Eliza found the tender pork pieces irresistible. She's a total omnivore.

Eating Around the World - Argentina

Argentina. It's a huge country, with breathtaking scenery and varied landscapes. From frigid Patagonia to tall mountains ranges, to the grasslands of the pampas. I think Argentina was one of the countries we studied this year that I knew least about, and one that has now moved a lot higher on my list of places I'd love to visit. But, one thing I knew before this week was that Argentina was famous for its beef, and that we'd have to have asado for our meal.

Beef is expensive, and we almost had pork instead. In fact, we hardly ever eat beef at home, although we like it a lot. But just in time, chuck roast went on sale at the grocery. That's far from the choicest cut, but we rolled with it, serving it alongside a large array of grilled vegetables. We had grilled eggplant, zucchini, peppers, and mushrooms with our beef, and it was delicious.

Of course, we doused every bite of meat or vegetables in chimichurri sauce. Or, to be more accurate, Collin and I did. The girls each tried a little dollop, and begged not to have to finish it. Chimichurri sauce is a bit spicy, and a lot green, so I didn't really expect the girls to enjoy it. But I loved it! It really was a perfect grilling condiment.

It was a beautiful evening, so we ate our asado as a picnic in the back yard.

Eliza loved the picnic, because she could crawl around and steal food off everyone's plates. The girls certainly didn't protest when she took their peppers or zucchini away.

Dessert was the best! We had alfajores, which are tender buttery sandwich cookies, filled with dulce de leche, and sprinkled with powdered sugar. It would not be an exaggeration to say this was one of my top favorite new recipes from our whole geographical culinary adventures this year. Each element is familiar, but together they're just about perfect. 

Honorable mention does have to go to this dessert, however. I saw these chocolate and dulce de leche cups mentioned in a roundup of Argentine food, and they looked amazing. On closer inspection, however, I didn't see anything to say that these were actually an Argentine recipe. But it was too delicious to ignore, so I tried it out on another night. And it was marvelous. A lot like the inside of a truffle, actually. And so easy to make, especially if you simplify the instructions and simply melt dark chocolate chips right into the cream and milk in the microwave. Argentine or not, you should definitely try this one.

Eating Around the World - Antarctica

This week we spent learning about Antarctica, and just in time for our weekly geographic meal, we got a spring snow shower. I'm all for making the atmosphere realistic, but I was also glad not to have a picnic outdoors as Collin suggested.

Antarctica doesn't have much of a distinctive cuisine, but we did our best. This page from Cool Antarctica had the most helpful information, as well as a recipe for these sledging biscuits. They... weren't very good. But the girls loved them (they love anything in the bread family), and I'm sure they taste a lot better after a long hard haul in sub-zero temperatures.

I briefly thought about making pemmican, but it sounded both expensive and unappetizing, so we had a small bag of beef jerky, along with cheese and butter atop our sledging biscuits. For our main course, we had penguin stew, which on other days would be known locally as chicken noodle soup. I did steer clear of fresh vegetables for the evening, which would be hard to come by on the South Pole.

 

And for dessert, we had glacier ice cream. This was vanilla ice cream that I layered with blue raspberry jello, and from a culinary standpoint, it wasn't a home run. I'd like to try it again with a thick blue raspberry syrup rather than gelatin, because the jello did weird texture things when frozen. I was trying to get the swirled look of an Antarctic iceberg, which do look good enough to eat.

We enjoyed our iceberg ice cream in floats with blue soda pop. The only uncaffinated blue soda I found happened to be coconut flavored, which worked strangely well with our iceberg ice cream, even if the flavor was far more tropical than polar.

Cheers! And here's to leaving the frigid temperatures for some warmer climates, both in our geography study and as spring comes to stay in Indiana.