There are a few ways to keep cool in hot weather. In the west, we wear shorts, drink cold drinks, and blast the A/C. In Niger, they use a completely different set of tricks. The polar opposite, in fact. For starers, they cover up. Believe it or not, wearing long layers made of lightweight cotton keeps the sun’s hot rays off your skin. The flowing movement of the fabric acts like natural air conditioning. The elephants accomplish the same thing by dusting themselves with dirt. Not quite as desirable if you have somewhere nice to go. There’s one other trick to staying cool in Niger. Drinking hot tea. While it sounds like it’d make an already hot day feel like an inferno, it is the opposite. The hot liquid makes you perspire… and the tiny beads of sweat catch the slightest breeze, cooling you off. That’s what our tour guide in Tunisia told me, anyway (they do the same thing all over North Africa). All you do is splash hot water over green tea and… a …
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This summer I’ve seen almost everything. Laughter in sad moments. Tears in happy moments. Life is a bumble-all-over-the place, as it should be when temperatures screech up into the 100’s. What I haven’t seen? Purple-feathered dancing ladies. This Pineapple Horchata is certainly the closest I’ll get to this sort of carnival fun. And every summer should have a little carnival fun, don’t you think? The recipe is a cooked horchata (homemade rice drink), different from the amazing no-cook Strawberry Almond Horchata we made for our Mexican Global Table. In this drink, the Pineapple skin and core simmers with the rice and water to extract maximum flavor. Then I added extra pieces of pineapple goodness to amp up the flavor. Puree with a sprinkling of sugar and you’re done. Welcome to summer in a glass. Makes a gallon 1 pineapple 12 cups water 1 cup rice 1 cup sugar, or to taste Method: Gather your rice and pineapple. Let the sweet pineapple fragrance help you drift away to sunny Nicaragua. Once there, trim and core the …
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Today we’re taking a bite of Nicaraguan sunshine. This is the kind of sunshiny soul food that satisfies cravings. Bored cravings. Excited cravings. Lonely cravings. I’m ready for winter cravings. I miss my man cravings. I wish I could sing cravings. It’s like the fairy godmother of salads. This sunshine is magic. So what is it? Vigoron. A heaping mound of comfort, nestled on top of deep green banana leaves. This is Nicaraguan street food, designed to make your mouth happy. First comes cubes of boiled yucca, tender like a potato. On top of that sits the cabbage slaw – seasoned with zingy lime juice, fresh tomatoes, onion, a touch of jalapeno, and cilantro. It’s like… salsa and slaw mixed in the most refreshing way. Wait. Scratch that. Thanks to the happy helping of salt it’s a lot like … a margarita salad. The perfect margarita. Traditionally Vigoron is served with fried pig rinds, or chicharones. I tried this and it was fine, but I really enjoyed it with a vegan version I stumbled across at the Hispanic market down the …
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When I read that New Zealander’s love “kumara,” I wondered what this dreamy word could mean. When I found out kumara are simply a variety of New Zealand “sweet potatoes,” I was thrilled. Sweet potatoes are on my “will-eat-any-time-of-day-for-any-reason-especially-for-my-last-meal” food list. Not many foods make that cut. Today’s salad takes inspiration from New Zealand’s love of barbecue. For color I combined two kinds of sweet potatoes on the grill before tossing them with bacon, green onion, and a quick, zingy honey mustard dressing. This is grilled sweet potatoes, dressed up for a party in your mouth. P.S. Since I couldn’t get my hands on actual kumara, I used an orange fleshed sweet potato and a white fleshed sweet potato. This makes for a really pretty salad. If you do the same, be sure to watch the cooking times. Some varieties tend to cook quicker than others. P.P.S. New Zealander’s love grilled lamb, especially with rosemary. I’d highly recommend serving these kumara with our Grilled Greek-stye Lamb from back in the day. The lamb is seasoned with rosemary, …
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Hokey Pokey, it would seem, is not just a toddler’s dance. Down Under, it’s a beautiful, fluffy, yet crispy piece of confectionery delight enjoyed from New Zealand to England. Even Nigella Lawson loves a good nibble of this treat – straight out of a gift box, in the car – from time to time. Traditional recipes use golden syrup, but since I don’t have any of that, I used honey which gave the hokey pokey the most incredible, buzz-worthy flavor and just about turned me into a honey bee. Friends at my writer’s group suggested it tastes somewhat like peanut brittle without the peanut. All the tiny air holes make it crunch like a wafer, though. In my reading, I found that many people have trouble making this sweet treat, even though there are only three ingredients. As with any candy making, a good candy thermometer is a great idea, although I double checked my reading by dropping the candy into a bowl of ice water and found that to be more reliable. You’ll see. P.S. You can crumble hokey …
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Iced coffee doesn’t sound very exotic until you realize that it isn’t so much the coffee that is totally Nauru, but how they drink it. If you pull up to a roadside shack and order an iced coffee you won’t have to … … say tall, venti, or grande … worry about what syrups, double whips, or skinnies you need to specify … spend half a fortune, before tax You will, however have a choice of … … sugar or more sugar … milk or more milk … and, of course, whether you’d like your coffee in a plastic bottle or plastic tub At only 8 square miles, Nauru uses a lot of bottles, mostly for drinking water – 20,000 per month (according to the Nauru Country Study Guide by Ibp USA). That’s 240,000 bottles a year. According to the same study, about 10% of the bottles are used to sell water or iced coffee in a localized recycling effort. So, in the spirit of Nauru, if you have some extra plastic bottles or tubs (yes, tubs) …
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Ok. So even in the summer I crave french fries. But I don’t crave heating up a big pot of oil inside the house. There’s a solution: grilled fries. The fine people of Nauru love their fries. While most of them enjoy deep-fried fries, we covered that with Belgium Pommes Frites. So, inspired by their island setting – where the fine people of Nauru love to grill – I thought it’d be fun to try grilled fries. And it was fun. In my research I found several ways to make these, including boiling the potatoes and then slicing (again, who wants to heat up the house with a big pot of bubbling water? Not me!). I decided to try something different. Something simpler. I crossed my fingers, shut my eyes, and hoped against hope that it would work. And it did. Here is how I did it. Serves up to 5 Ingredients: 5 large yukon gold potatoes, washed vegetable oil salt & pepper Method: First, find the largest yukon gold potatoes you can. You can …
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If you wake up in Nepal, chances are you’ll be eating Dhal Baht. In fact, you’ll probably also eat Dhal Bhat as the sun bobs below the horizon. Nothing wrong with eating the same dish twice in one day. There’s a beautiful simplicity in waking up and knowing that, as certain as the sun will circle the sky, there will be Dhal Bhat. Ah, yes. There’s something to be said for consistency. And for not having to make quite so many decisions during the day. I’m not sure what in my life is that certain. Perhaps my daily cups of tea. All day long I drink glass after glass of the stuff. This fancy name simply means lentils, split peas, or other pulses (dhal) with rice (baht), but each bite reveals so much more. This might as well be the national dish of Nepal. While rice doesn’t grow well in the mountains, this is a dish from the valleys. The seasonings in Dhal vary widely, but most commonly this soup-of-sorts contains tomato, turmeric, ginger, onion, and garlic. …
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No matter where you live in this great, glorious world, you know someone with a mega sweet tooth. Someone who can’t get enough of the sugary, fingerlickin’ foods. This person can’t be trusted with a cookie jar and – I’m here to tell you right now – they most certainly can’t be trusted alone with a platter of Besan Burfi. And, really, can you blame them? Besan Burfi, popular throughout Nepal and India, tastes a little like sugar cookie dough… a little like a dreamy pistachio flower … and a lot like, well, happiness. The “fudge” is made with ghee, chickpea flour and sugar. Every bite is an outrageous crunch of crystalized goodness. When topped off with a smattering of cardamom and pistachios, you’ll find these make for a rich and irresistible snack. A snack, in fact, that makes you repeat to yourself “curiouser and curiouser.” So come on down the rabbit hole. Never mind that this “fudge” is made with besan, a.k.a chickpea flour. That sounds entirely too healthy and … beany. Trust me. This turns …
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Sometimes life throws us some pretty major “boulders” – huge, overwhelming problems we can’t seem to solve, let alone nudge out of the way. In Namibia, you can find a lot of these boulders, literally. Strangely out of proportion, these massive stones perch atop bald, widswept vistas. I like to think of these formiddable boulders as mangoes. Yes, mangoes. Something that, if given enough time, will soften and sweeten and delight you. Why can’t all problems be this way? Today’s recipe combines three beloved Namibian ingredients: mangoes, ginger, chili pepper flakes. The resulting chutney tastes great with meats, veggies, breads… you name it. It’s quite sweet, vinegary, and mildly spicy. You can add fresh minced chili peppers to increase the heat to sweat-inducing levels, if you’d like. Makes 1 quart Ingredients: 4 cups cubed mango 1/2 cup white wine vinegar 1 cup sugar (less if your mangoes are very sweet) 1 small onion, chopped 1 tsp fresh ginger 1/2 tsp red chili pepper flakes (or more to taste) 1/2 tsp mustard seed (I had …
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Let’s just call this the dessert of indecision. My mom likes to say that doing the right thing is as “clear as day.” But here’s the thing: some problems are confusing. Even after an all night stresser, I can’t figure everything out. Am I capable of writing a book? Should I wear heels to a picnic wedding? Is it better to help an old lady cross the street, or maybe I should just drive her wherever she needs to go? For every question, part of the solution is clear, but generally there’s a murky area, filled with unknowns. For example, will my book be a book about food, babies, or … astrophysics? Will the ground be hard at the picnic wedding? If so, great, but then.. are my heels unwearable, covered with cobwebs, from years of neglect? Does the old lady even need my help? Why do I assume she does? What does that say about me? Variables make everything more confusing. When this happens, only time will tell what the right answer is, like clarity revealing itself …
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If we can’t open our hearts to the “weird” things in life, we’re not living fully. The girl who wears rain boots in the snow. The man that studies a bustling ant hill for an hour. The child that dips her scrambled eggs in molasses (Ava did this yesterday). These people all have one thing in common: they see the world through a different lens. Their world has no limitations. Wouldn’t it be glorious if a salad could change how you see the world? If one bite could take away all your preconceived notions and open your mind to the new, the exciting, and – let’s just be honest – the weird? Today we’re going beyond watery diner salads, sporting browning lettuce, one measly crouton, a white-washed tomato, and a solitary red onion ring. (Thank goodness) Instead we’re loading our chopsticks with fresh, spicy ginger, salty fish sauce, fried lentils and chickpeas, chickpea flour, peanuts cabbage… and… and… so much happy goodness. This is a bouquet of flavor that sounds more … quirky.. than it really is. This Burmese salad is extremely …
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