Cooking Lessons


I like food.  I like Puerto Rican food.  My friend Kezia also likes food.  And, being Puerto Rican, she knows how to cook Puerto Rican food.  So, a few weeks ago, we started a Thursday night tradition of a cooking lesson followed by a movie.  With any lucky, by the end of this semester, I’ll be able to make all my favorite foods without her watching over my shoulder to make sure I don’t screw up. 

For last night’s adventure (churrasco with yellow rice and tostones), I remembered to bring my camera so I could document each step of the process. 

It started with this array of ingredients.


First step was the rice.  We dumped some of the seasonings into a pot and heated them up, then added water, and when that got hot, we added the rice.



That cooked for a while, and meanwhile we set our meat to marinating and got started on our tostones.  Tostones, for those that don’t know, are fried green plantains.  We discovered when we got home that our plantains had ripened a little bit too much and turned yellow, so we ended up with something closer to maduras (fried yellow (ripe and sweet) plantains), but we still followed the process to make tostones. 

Step one: cut up the plantain.



Step two: fry those puppies. 



Step three: Smoosh them.

Step four: Fry them again!  (Healthy, right?) 




The last thing we made was churrasco, which in Puerto Rico always refers to skirt steak.  We marinated the meat in Kezia’s signature blend of flavors (vinegar, olive oil, pepper, Adobo, and garlic), then fried it up in a pan with some onions. 

All that resulted in this finished product.  Yum! 




Time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor while watching a movie!  (This week: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief).  

Last week, we made mofongo, which is my absolute favorite Puerto Rican dish, made from mashed plantains with garlic and olive oil.  Since I didn’t post about it, here's a picture from that night too. 



I’m not sure what’s next on our list of things to learn…habichuelas and white rice, perhaps, and maybe meat seasoned a different way.  And I’m sure we’ll repeat things a few times so that I Inow I can make them without reminders from my teacher.  J  Hopefully by the time I’m home this summer, I’ll be whipping up mofongo and churrasco right and left.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cambodia: Reflections and Highlights

Image
I was really excited to visit Cambodia for a few days and hit up Angkor Wat and the other temples in the area.  Cambodia felt like my kind of adventure--and I can’t even really say why.  But I was excited.  I was excited for our hotel there--a full-out boutique hotel (not a hostel), with AC, a swimming pool, breakfast included, and airport pick-up for free--which cost us a scant $20 per night.  And we’d read about a lot of great tours we could take with local guides.  Flying in and flying out, this leg of the trip would be a breeze, and hopefully everything would be as cheap as the hotel.   The Mango Rain Boutique Hotel Our flight to Cambodia was unlike any other I’ve ever been on.  There were only about 20 of us on the flight--which would not have been strange, except it was, because we were on a full-size plane that could have seated 200.  The 20 of us were mostly grouped together towards the back of the plane.  Second impressive thing was that as soon as the plane got to al
Read more

DI Globals 2016: A Tale of Two Teams

Image
For the past 3 years, I have acted as a team manager for Destination Imagination at my school in Guatemala, and each year, my team has earned a trip to Global Finals in Knoxville, Tennessee.  This school year, I was blessed to manage the exact same team I had last year—the Aguaguates, the most wonderful group of kids any DI team manager could wish for.  This group, all 7 th graders this year, has everything needed to not only excel at DI, but also make a team manager’s job almost unnecessary.  They have amazing team chemistry, and they understand the importance of teamwork.  They’re crazy creative and hilarious and amazing actors when they get on stage.  They push themselves to improve their performances.  They know what they need to get done for DI, and they create their own practice schedules.  In short, they are a DI dream team, not to mention really, really great people .  This year though, I took one look at the school calendar and decided that if the team qualified for Glob
Read more

Yearly Update: The Journey to 30

Image
Over a year has passed since my last “update.”  And the year I was 29, despite the fact that I lived close to home rather than abroad, was anything but boring, so there’s no real reason for the lack of blog posts.   The year I was 29, I survived what may have been my most difficult year of teaching yet.  Many overseas teachers say, “Teaching in the States is so much different than teaching abroad.  You’ll see.  That’s why I went overseas; I’d never go back to teaching in the States.  It’s just...too much.”  Well, they’re not wrong.  I admit, I thought that with five years teaching experience under my belt, my first year in the US, my first year at the high school level, would go rather smoothly.  While in a sense it did (no concerns about the quality of my work from administration or complaints from parents), it was mentally and emotionally very taxing.  Even this year, my 2nd back in the States, I’m still adjusting to and coming to terms with the fact that as a US teacher, I wil
Read more