Three day relay: El Salvadoran pupusas

Ok, we know we said we were going to choose simple recipes now that having a baby has made our lives a whole lot more complicated. We meant it at the time, we really did. Then El Salvador and its national dish of pupusas, and a desire to ‘do it right’, hit us simultaneously.

A pupusa is a stuffed cornmeal flatbread, usually served with curtido (a sort of pickled cabbage slaw). We chose a recipe that offered us the chance to cook pupusas the way Curly and his abuelita (granny) would have done. We don’t know who Curly and his grandmother are, but we do know that the stuffing combo of cheese, chicharrón (pork) and refried beans sounded good to us. So, in an epic three-day, tag-teaming relay, we made curtido, chicharrón and pupusa dough from scratch. Oh, and we figured we might as well make our own El Salvador-style refried beans, too. How? Read on…

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More chicken and rice – this time with seeds: Guatemalan pepián

Firstly, for those following the turmeric woes that accompanied our Christmas Islander dish, we’re happy to report that Vanish is capable of miracles and both items of potentially ruined clothing were saved. Hurrah! #notanad

But now for our latest meal: Guatemalan pepián. Yet another incarnation of chicken and rice, this dish is a typical street food from Guatemala. Having made it, our opinion is that we wouldn’t want to be in a street stall faffing around with all the necessary components, so all power to the Guatemalans.

This dish was also a blast from the past for Miranda, due to the inclusion of a vegetable known as guisquil, chayote, chow chow, mirliton squash or (as is the case in Australia) choko. Of course the Australian name ends with an o! It’s native to Central America and rarely seen in the UK, but widely grown in Australia and NZ. Miranda remembers a childhood of eating them after they’d been boiled to oblivion and sprinkled with black pepper. Fortunately, our multicultural locale enabled us to get hold of one for the pepián – the recipe for which we found thanks to a feature in the Guardian by Guatemalan Rudy Girón. We weren’t, unfortunately, able to source one of the chillies, so we’ll put the traditional requirements below and discuss our substitutes afterwards.

Turmeric and breastfeeding don’t mix: Christmas Islander ayam panggang

If you read our last post, you might recall that we hadn’t yet chosen between Guatemala or Christmas Island for our next culinary journey. Each country’s national dish is a version of chicken, chilli and rice, but Ash decided we should start with Christmas Island’s coconut-heavy ayam panggang, in the spirit of getting it over with. As such, we’ve now made it through our list of ‘catch up’ countries, so the order of our future posts will be more geographically logical.

Christmas Island is a tiny Australian territory in the Indian Ocean with a population of less than 1500. It’s not far from Indonesia and its cuisine is therefore strongly influenced by South East Asian flavours. Once again, we are grateful to Travel by Stove for doing the (considerable) legwork for this recipe so that we, in our perpetual state of sleep deprivation, didn’t have to.

Benefiting from batch cooking: Belizean stew chicken with rice and beans

Batch cooking is our survival technique at the moment. Food and nutrition are important to us and we didn’t want a baby to get in the way of healthy, home-cooked meals, so we’ve been cooking a lot of stews and chillies and the like, which we then have in the freezer and eat on rotation. This also means we eat a lot of rice, partly because it is a good accompaniment to the sorts of meals we’ve been making and partly because it’s quick and easy to cook (if you don’t have a microwave rice cooker, get one. Seriously. #notanad).

Belize’s national dish of stew chicken with rice and beans, therefore, fit very neatly into our food prep routine! We initially weren’t going to bother with the rice and beans and were just going to make plain rice (Ash was particularly fine with this due to the coconut in the rice), but we decided to go all in.

Redefining easy: Cocos Island ayam begana

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are an Australian territory with a population of just over 600. Unsurprisingly, there aren’t loads of traditional recipes to be found online from a nation so small! In fact, a search for ‘Cocos Island national dish’ brings up… nothing. Nothing, that is, except the findings of Travel by Stove, who cooked around the world long before we did and did the investigative and interpretative grunt work for this particular recipe way back in 2012. So yes, we’ve taken a lazy approach to research this time, but let’s face it: we often do. And it fits in nicely with our new ‘keep it simple’ approach.

Simple appeared to be the name of the game with ayam (chicken) begana, which is a Cocos Malay dish. A fairly short list of ingredients, no overly complicated processes and a quick cooking time were just what we were after. Ash turned his nose up at the coconut, but beggars can’t be choosers and this was the only recipe we had. We decided to make it on Maundy Thursday, not because it’s anything to do with Easter but because we figured that with both of us at home for the following four days, we might actually manage to write a blog about it.

How did we get on? Find out after the recipe…

Holy mole: Mexican chicken and chorizo in an almond mole

We’ve been wanting to cook a Mexican dish for a long while. It didn’t seem right to do so, however, without the company of our Mexican cuisine-loving friends (who cook Mexican food for us on a regular basis), and what with the whole disastrous renovations/new baby situation, we haven’t really felt in a position to host a dinner party. Hosting one with a seven-week-old in a particularly fussy phase may seem an odd choice as well, but we figured that we need to keep living our lives even with the presence of our infant interloper. Besides, what are friends for if not to forgive a little culinary chaos?

We love Mexican food, but have never been a fan of mole, so when we saw that mole is Mexico’s national dish, our hearts sunk a little. Why couldn’t it be burritos, or tacos? However, it turns out that we’d been a little confused about what mole actually means. We thought it was only ever a chocolatey sauce served with meat, but that is mole poblano (the most common mole to be served outside of Mexico). The term mole is more generic and simply refers to a sauce that typically contains a fruit, a nut, chilli and spices (not necessarily chocolate).

Beans for three: Bosnian prebranac

Our last post was on 21 January, and in it we mentioned the domestic chaos that had been caused by some disastrous renovation works. Well, that’s still ongoing, but three days after that post, something else happened to throw Good Food on Bad Plates HQ into disarray: the birth of our son! Any parent will know that looking after a newborn does not lend itself to cooking elaborate meals, which is why we’ve been a little quiet lately. It’s also why GFoBP may take a slightly different turn for a while: so far, we’ve aimed to cook the national dish from each country, and sometimes that has involved hours of work. We hope you’ll forgive us if occasionally we choose a simpler traditional recipe if the national dish is too complicated for our sleep-deprived brains.

That’s exactly what we’ve done for our Bosnian dish, although actually not for that reason. The national dish of Bosnia and Herzegovina is ćevapi, a sort of lamb and beef kebab/sausage thing, but we made a version of that for Serbia, so we didn’t want to make it again. We were therefore very pleased to find a nice simple recipe for prebranac, or Balkan baked beans, on the ever-reliable Global Table Adventure. We made it for supper on Friday, after we’d been out for lunch and didn’t want a huge evening meal.

Prebranac

Ingredients
2 tins butter beans, drained
2 medium onions, chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp flour
Salt
Pepper
Possibly a splash of water
Bread, to serve

Method
1. Preheat oven to 205C.
2. Heat the oil in an ovenproof dish over medium heat.
3. Add onion and cook until golden (don’t rush this – you want them to be nice and caramelised).
4. Add the garlic, paprika, flour, salt and pepper. Cook for a few minutes until the spices are fragrant. (Depending on your pan, you may need to add a splash of water here to deglaze and prevent it all from sticking and burning.)
5. Add the beans and stir to combine.
6. Bake uncovered until crusty on top, about 15 minutes (a bit more if you’ve added water).
7. Serve with crusty or toasted bread
Serves 2 (plus a third, indirectly!) as a light meal

Well, it doesn’t get much easier than this, not least because all the ingredients are things we’d have in stock anyway. It also took less than half an hour from start to finish, which is the sort of thing you want with a new baby! It’s not a big, or particularly full, meal – it would actually work well as a side dish too – but is perfect as a light supper. Although there aren’t many ingredients, the sweet onions pair nicely with the slight bitterness of the paprika to really pep up the beans. The original recipe didn’t include the water, but wed’d have ended up with a burnt mess without it – it might depend on what pan you use (ours wasn’t non-stick which may have had an impact).

We’ll be back as soon as the boss baby lets us!