Gallo Pinto con Plátanos Fritos

Oh, the life of a student is rife with lack of money and an even stronger lack of time. That is, perhaps, why I haven't updated in awhile - I haven't had time to cook anything. Or post anything. But we misses it, yes precious.

But there's always time for gallo pinto! This is the only dish I really took home with me from Costa Rica. It's breakfast done right. And really, it illustrates this blog perfectly. Rice and beans for every meal!

Now, I will not lay claim to its authenticity, but having spent a few months eating it every day for breakfast, I will say that it is prepared many different ways, and up to some interpretation by the cook. Other than the rice and beans, I think the most common ingredient in it is Lizano sauce, or "salsa lizano," which I never include for two reasons: 1) It's hard to find in Seattle (with the exception of a little Latino shop at Pike Place Market, but it's expensive there); and 2) I never really liked it much anyway. Some people put it on everything... like ketchup... but I'm not one of them. Bleh. Too sweet. Too strong.

The other common difference is that most places in Costa Rica will toss the beans in the pan before the rice, whereas I prefer to fry the rice first to get some texture and browning. But who's paying attention? I'm in the US now. Nobody here eats gallo pinto. Maybe I'll open up a food cart and sell it in little dixie cups. I think it would take off.

It's filling. It sits in your stomach and passes through your innards with the greatest of comfort and ease. And it tastes so good. Mmm, mm. Rice and beans.

If you're wondering, "gallo pinto" is pronounced, "guy'-o peen'-to," and means, "spotted rooster," in Spanish. In case you care.

Folks there usually serve it with fresh fruit (watermelon, canteloupe, mango, papaya, pineapple, grapes...), sometimes some kind of meat product (we don't need that here), sour cream (or mayonnaise, but why?), and often fried plantains. A plantain looks a lot like a banana, but it's bigger. A little more angular... and the end is pointier. Harder to peel, not that tasty raw. They grew free in the woods where I stayed in Costa Rica. Beautiful bunches of them. Cut off a bunch and hang it to ripen on the stalk. Plantains for everyone!

Once in awhile I find plantains at the store here and get them. Not too often, since they travel so far to get here, and they're rarely organic... I wish we could grow them fresh. That, and I just can't get them to taste the same as they do in Costa Rica. I fried them down there more than once, and they were lovely - sweet and lightly browned on the outside and moist on the inside. But here? Dry. Starchy. Chewy. Kind of like home fries that had been baked a little too long. Just not fun. I don't know if it's because they pick the plantains WAAAAAAAAAY before they should and they can never really develop, or if the ones they send up to the US are the rejects because we don't know the difference, or if the climate here is too dry... I don't know. I might never know.

But I made them anyway. They were OK. It doesn't really matter, if you have gallo pinto.


GALLO PINTO con PLÁTANOS FRITOS (guy'-o peen'-to con plah'-tah-noce free'-toce)
serves 2 generously

1 ripe (yellow) plantain
cooking oil
3/4 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
salt
1 1/2 tsp dried crumbled oregano
1 tsp cumin
1 cup cooked brown rice (or white rice if you want to forego a good source of fiber and protein - contact me if you want a tasty way to cook brown rice)
2/3 cup cooked black beans (or red beans)
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro leaves
~3 tbsp lime juice

1. Heat a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet over medium heat. A well-seasoned cast iron skillet will be virtually nonstick, provide unparalleled browning, and hold heat well. Meanwhile, peel your plantain and cut off any dark spots on the flesh. It should be delicately creamy pinkish on the inside. You might need a knife to peel it - those guys can be tough!

2. Oil up your pan. You should have enough oil to generously coat the bottom of the skillet, or your plantains might burn. A burnt plantain is a little bit like burnt anything else. It just tastes like carbon, and nobody likes that. Cut your plantain into little diagonal rounds (just slice down at an angle) about 1/8" thick (absolutely no thicker, and no thinner than 1/16"). Too thick, and it won't cook through. Too thin, and it will be impossible to handle. Place them around the skillet on one side and watch them smile up at you.

3. Use a fork to flip them when they're brown on one side. Just keep peeking at them until they're ready. They should look less brown than this:



4. When the second side is done, put them on a plate to wait for the gallo pinto. If your pan needs a little more oil, add some now, but it doesn't have to be much. Dump in the onions and brown them a little in the pan, stirring them with some kind of non-plastic utensil (cast iron, with its superior heating powers, will melt plastic into your food). I use wood. It's pleasant.



When the onions look like that, you can add the garlic. Work fast, because you don't want the garlic to burn. It will most likely do so if and when you turn your back. Also add a pinch of salt (how much depends on whether you cooked your rice with salt, and how much salt is in the bean liquid), your oregano and cumin, and stir quite well. You should smell it, and it should smell good.

5. Add the rice. Mix it well with the onions and garlic, then spread it out to cover the pan bottom and leave it alone for a few minutes.If you keep messing with it, it will stick and make your pan difficult to clean.



You can take this time to chop your cilantro. Use more or less depending on how much you like it. I didn't like it at first, but now I'm addicted. Cilantro makes everything taste south-of-the-border.



6. Turn your rice after a couple of minutes. It should be browning a bit. Do this a few times to ensure even, light browning. When it's ready, it should look a little like this:



7. Add the beans. Spoon them in with a little liquid. Not too much. But some. You want to coat the rice so it's not hard on the teeth from the frying. Mix them in and leave it alone for a minute, to let the beans heat up. Turn it a time or two, but don't cook it very long or it will dry out the starchy bean liquid.



8. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the cilantro. Splash in some fresh lime juice (adjust to taste) and stir that in as well. Get it out of the pan and onto a plate as soon as possible, or the lime will degrade on the hot metal and just taste like something warm and sour and not fresh. Garnish with some more cilantro, and serve with your plantains and sour cream. ¡Buen provecho!

PROS: appetizing, filling, great source of protein and fiber, wonderful warm and savory way to start the day, deeeelicious!
CONS: plantains just aren't the same here in the USA

I should note that I don't ever measure anything in this recipe, I just sorta put down what I think I put in. So don't fret about measurements if you think it needs a little more of this or a little less of that. Taste it and see. That's the only way to make it to your liking! Also, I often put in some chopped up bell pepper with the onion. I didn't have it on hand, so I didn't put it in. It's more authentic, but honestly, I like it better without.

You can clean your cast iron pan by putting a little bit of cooking oil in it after all the food is out, scraping off anything that may have stuck with the utensil you were cooking with, and wiping the inside clean with a paper towel. It should look mildly shiny with no food bits. That's all - no water, no soap, no salt, no sand. Pretty easy.

Gingered Sugar Cookies

Recently, I got this oven thermometer. Not that there was anything wrong with how my stuff was coming out, but you know, I wanted perfection. So I started using it... and lo and behold, it said my oven was 10 degrees too hot.

For the past eight? months since I got the thing, I've been baking stuff 10 degrees cooler, suffering cookies that spread too much, cakes that take 15 minutes longer than they should, and pie crusts that don't really brown.

I just figured it out. I happen to be slow.

The oven thermometer now lives next to the oven rather than in it. I baked cookies for the first time in a long time at the assigned temperature, and they came out NORMAL! Well, not just normal... but tasty. Tasty, and perfect. Mmm. Perfect cookies.


GINGERED SUGAR COOKIES
from Baking Illustrated by the editors of Cook's Illustrated magazine

2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 cup butter (2 sticks), softened
1 cup sugar
1 tbsp light brown sugar
1 large egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 tbsp finely chopped crystallized ginger

1. Preheat your oven to 375°F. Put the racks in the two middlest positions (so you can bake two sheets at once). Cover two cookie sheets with parchment paper. You could also grease them, but that's messy and annoying. Unless you have nonstick cookie sheets... in which case, you don't need to do anything. Except throw them out and get real ones.

2. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and set it aside. Chuck the 1/2 cup sugar and ginger in a blender or food processor and whir away until it's all mixed and kinda looks like wet sand. Well, wet clear sand. Put it in a wide-mouthed bowl. It should look like this.

3. Cream the butter with the sugar and brown sugar for a few minutes until it gets kinda billowy, yet uniform... you'll know. Add the egg, vanilla, and crystallized ginger and beat some more, until it's smooth and creamy looking. Like this.



4. Add the dry ingredients and mix just until it's combined, but no longer. I don't need to tell you that the longer you beat flour and baking soda into something wet, the more the gluten develops in the flour (causing tough chewiness) and the more the bubblies are knocked right out of the baking powder, rendering it... rather useless. So be kind to your cookie dough.

5. Roll them into balls about 1 1/2 inches in diameter, and coat them with the sugar. You should have 24. If you don't, well you're obviously useless at measuring. Place them 12 to a cookie sheet, spaced a couple inches apart. Flatten them to half their original height, using something flat, such as the bottom of a drinking glass.



6. Bake for 15-18 minutes, one sheet above the other, until the edges of the cookies are set and they're slightly golden brown. If you're a doting cookiewife (or whatever you are), you'd switch the baking sheets quickly halfway through baking and rotate them 180° to avoid oven hotspot damage. In other words: uneven baking. Uneven baking makes me cross. My cookies came out pretty perfect though.

I guess cookies can only really reflect their cookiewife.

PROS: soft, sweet, flavorful, round, have a nice gingery crisp exterior
CONS: not enough ginger...


I'm sorry I haven't been posting. But that's OK, because I'll venture a bet that no one's waiting up for it anyway. I've been baking, but usually I only have time to a) bake or b) blog... and if I blog, I won't have baked anything, because I wouldn't have had time, so the post would be dreadfully empty. If I bake, I get to eat something delicious. So there you are. But I sacrificed an hour of sleep tonight to tell you about last week's cookies... so feel honored.

Next up... cupcakes :-)

Rundown

There was this place in the coastal town of Cahuita, Costa Rica called Restaurante Miss Edith. They made a dish they called "Rondon" (more commonly known as "rundown") with white fish and starchy vegetables. I ate it. It was delicious. More on Miss Edith's later, though.

Rundown is a Caribbean dish referring to coconut milk that's been cooked down until all the water evaporates and the custard separates from the oil. Other stuff is cooked into it at this point, like onions and thyme and chiles, maybe some fish... I don't know why it's called rundown. Actually, that's kind of low on my list of things that I care about.

Anyway, I wanted to make this dish that I remember eating... so from a photograph, my spotty memory, and a few online references, Robert and I concocted this.

Oh, and you might be able to use canned coconut milk, but... I'm sure it's inferior. Or maybe I just like doing things the hard way. No, I'm pretty sure mine is the right way. :)


RUNDOWN

2 large, fresh, mature coconuts full of water (you should hear lots of sloshing when you shake them)
water
3 lbs root/starchy vegetables (yuca, potato, green plantain, taro, carrot, etc), peeled and chopped into 1" chunks
1-2 lb filleted white fish (cod, rockfish/snapper, or mackerel)
1/4 cup lime juice
1 habañero
1 large yellow or red onion
2 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
4-5 sprigs fresh thyme
salt
pepper
2 tbsp lime juice

1. Break open the coconuts over a bowl (catch all that good coconut water!). This can be done by hitting them repeatedly with the back of a large knife along the equator. Be careful. Coconuts can be tough to crack elegantly. Strain the water through four layers of cheesecloth to get all the dirt and hairs out. It should look pleasant. Like this:

2. Now for the fun part... crack each coconut half into several pieces. Remove the whites from the shell. There will still be a hard skin over it - a vegetable peeler pulled toward your hand does the trick for removing it. Make sure you know how to use a vegetable peeler this way. Don't sue me if you shave off your skin.

3. Chop up all the white bits into manageable pieces for the blender, and chuck them in. You should blend in at least 4 batches - coconut is extremely fibrous and it will burn out your blender's motor if you're not careful. Add some of the coconut water to assist in blending (if you need more, just add regular water), and be patient. Once the coconut is all shredded by the blender, there should be a milky liquid in there. Surprise! It's coconut milk. Squeeze the shredded coconut, wrapped in cheesecloth, over a bowl. You should end up with some of this:



...and some of this:



Save the beautiful shredded coconut for something else. Dry it out in the toaster oven for easy storage, or freeze it. Once it's dried, you can mix it with brown sugar and toast it in a heavy skillet. Makes great ice cream topping. But that's neither here nor there.

4. You should have about 3 cups of coconut milk. Simmer it, uncovered, in a wide saute pan or wide saucepan for about an hour to an hour and a half. In the meantime, place the fish on a plate with the lime juice to sit until it's ready for the pan. Then prepare your starchy vegetables. Boil them for a good long while, until they're falling-apart soft. At this point, your coconut mixture should be almost ready.



5. Seed and mince the habañero. Wear gloves - I cannot stress this enough. This is a potent pepper with potent oil. If it gets on your hands, it is very tough to wash off and if you so much as think about touching your eyes, picking your nose, or licking your fingers, you will pay dearly. So just be careful.





6. Slice up the onion. Add this, along with the garlic, chile, and thyme, to the simmering coconut milk. Cook for about 20 minutes, until the onion is soft and translucent. Season to taste with salt and pepper.



7. Dump in the boiled starchy vegetables, taking care to submerge as much as possible. Add the fish on top. If it is not in the liquid, make space for it. You just don't want it on the bottom of the pan, because then it just gets smushed by everything else.



8. Simmer the rundown with the fish in it for about 20 minutes, taking care that the fish is sumberged. This keeps it from toughening. Give it a shake or a gentle stir every so often to keep everything from scorching.



9. When the fish is tender and the liquid is thick, give it more lime juice. It's ready for eatin'. What a treat.

PROS: so Caribbean, so full of flavor and delicious...
CONS: well, if you don't like coconut... this isn't for you.

This is a reasonable approximation of what I remember eating at Miss Edith's. In any case, it's an awesome way to eat your fish.