Sunday, October 2, 2011

Worldwide Kitchen - Cater to the Equator


The next stop on the Alphabet cruise around the globe is Ecuador, which literally means "Equator". For the geographically challenged, it is coastal country in South America. The planning phase for the letter "E" was succinct but wearisome. Only a small handful of countries start with "E", so it was fairly easy to narrow it down to Ecuador, Egypt and Ethiopia. The decision was tough, so I peeked into the future and looked at what some of our future countries might be. Since we will be hitting the Middle East and Africa on several other occasions, we chose Ecuador.

Unlike the last few countries, which had giant recipe repositories online, Ecuador failed to land us a nice one-stop shop for ideas. We had to find and combine several websites to come up with our menu du jour. Having too many websites bookmarked can cause havoc, which I will explain later...


The cuisine of Ecuador varies by which part of the country you're in. If you're not on the coast, you are munching on pork, beef and your pet guinea pigs. Yes, it's true. Well, they aren't pets down there apparently... "Mom, Dad, have you seen Hamlet? Hey, what's for dinner?" In any event, I had an itching for seafood, so we chose the coastal menu, and avoided the pet stores.

Talk about getting out of one's comfort zone. We decided to challenge ourselves because we are getting so damn good at messing up chicken and cake, and we chose to do a Ceviche de Pescado. Ceviche is fish, usually sea bass, tilapia or shrimp, and it is cooked with lime juice. You heard me right! The acid in the lime juice cooks the fish, and no heat gets near this protein. Sometimes you see chefs on the Food Network make it, or you may find it in fine eating establishments, which means you won't find it in Cedar Rapids. But here we were... Mister and Mrs. Chefpants trying to out-do Emeril and Gordon Ramsey. We also went with an Ecuadorian beet salad, as well as llapingachos, which are cheesy potato cakes, and finally a dessert called flan (custard).

Shopping: We actually did a preemptive strike on the grocery store to see what we had to choose for our fish. We wanted the sea bass, but tilapia was a close second. The HyVee had tilapia, but we struck out on the angry sea bass (with lasers attached to their heads). With that in mind, we could finish building our menu. When we finally went shopping several days later, it was the same day as the feast itself. We wanted guaranteed freshness with our seafood, and the Fishmonger at HyVee assured us that Sunday was when they would get in a fresh batch of fishies.

Most of the ingredients for the menu were easy to come by. The ceviche called for tilapia, tomatoes, peppers, onions and a crapload of limes (crapload = 20). The potato cakes included potatoes (duh), Muenster cheese, scallions and annatto oil. Annatto what??? Fuhget about it... Since there was no way on earth to find this, we looked up how to whip up your own version. All you need to do is add paprika to canola oil and let it get all nice and emulsified. It gives the oil a rich, peppery aroma, while turning it red. Voila! The rest of the ingredients were par for the course, including beets, carrots, eggs, and various spices, juices and oils.

Prep: Three words... Mis en place. Yah, it's French. It means "things in place". In our kitchen, it means chopping and dicing the crap out of everything before it gets cooked. We have become prep gurus, whirling dervishes with knives, cutting boards and food processors. I am the Surgeon General and Lauri is Jackie the Ripper. Together we make Vince from Slapchop want to slap himself with some shamwow towels.

But before we get the hardware out, we reflect on past guffaws and decide to cook the dessert early and get it out of the way. The flan was a piece of cake, errrr, not literally of course. Condensed milk, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla and rum. Mix it up, throw in cooking dish, top with nutmeg, and throw it in the oven. The most difficult part was caramelizing the sugar to put on the bottom of the dish. It hardened very rapidly and was not easy to spread.

Once the flan was cooking away, we got out the cutting boards and knives. Everything else on the menu required small cut dicing and bite-size chunks. I took on the tilapia, which had to be diced into small cubes. With it being fresh seafood, I had to work fast and get the stuff back in the fridge ASAP. Then it was time to dice up the peppers, onions, shallots and beets. The carrots in the recipe had to be cooked, and we purchased raw carrots, so out comes the steamer. Peeled the carrots, steamed them, then cut 'em up.

As Lauri, the axe-wielding contessa had the situation in hand with the veggies, it was time for me to start peeling potatoes. I don't like peeling potatoes. Peeling potatoes just sucks. Especially those little bitchy Yukon gold ones. The skin is thin and slippery. You can't freaking hold onto them with one hand and peel with another as they keep slipping all over the place. It's like peeling a wet bar of soap. I was fearful of losing my fingers, or at the very least, knuckle-skin. However, I was fortunate and no blood was shed.

Cooking: Now that we had our "mis en place," it was time to cook. I then noticed something awry in reading over our internet recipes. There were two sites bookmarked for Ceviche. One said to soak the fish for one hour (if the fish is steamed first), and the other said for four hours (if raw). Our recipe called for raw fish, and we wanted to do it right, so we had to get that fish soaking in lime juice and wait out the remaining four hours. Not so fast, my friends. That was only the beginning of the problems, as the ingredient list reflected bits and pieces from BOTH websites! Ooops. This is what happens when the old lady is writing down ingredients after having too many Bud Light Limes out in the sun. So we were missing some things, and we bought stuff we didn't need. What the hell am I going to do with all this celery? We have no recipes with celery, so Lauri is going to take it to work and put peanut butter on it. We were also missing Serrano peppers. Since we had time, I hustled back to the store and $.13 cents poorer, came home with three tiny peppers.

Okay, so now we are set. We combined the fish chunks with about 4 cups of lime juice. We bought some limes, but we also bought a bottle of real lime juice to supplement. Then we tossed in some chopped parsley and topped it off with the Serrano peppers (sliced, of course). The rest of the already ready already ingredients were put in bowls, plastic-wrapped and stowed in the refrigger-ator.

The rest of the stuff was pretty easy to put together. We had the cold beet salad to throw together, and since it was also supposed to be chilled, we could toss that together and shelf it along with the ceviche. And we certainly had time, with about three and a half hours to wait for the ceviche to cook. Since the veggies for the salad were already chopped up, we were good to go. Salad done--time for a drink or three.

The only thing left to cook was the llapingachos (potato cakes). With about 45 minutes left to go on the ceviche, I had started the boiling pot of salty water for the taters. I cut them up into small pieces and threw 'em in the pot when the water was at a rolling boil. 20 minutes later, I mashed them up, threw in two cups of Muenster cheese, along with some scallions and made a nice gooey, gloppy mess of cheesy potato goodness. I then made little patties out of the mixture and got them ready for frying.

Speaking of frying, this particular recipe called for annatto oil, which you can't really find in stores. As I mentioned earlier, we found that you could substitute annatto oil with regular canola oil and just add paprika to it as it's heating up.


With about 15 minutes left on the fish, it was time to start frying the potato cakes up. Thank the Ecuadorian lords of wax paper as I tried prying the formed cakes from the surface. It was like unsticking your tongue from a frozen flagpole. If you read my blog on Armenia, you will remember the struggles we, I should say "I" had with trying to fry mashed potatoes. Again, I was tormented by smashed potatoes as they refused to cooperate with me.


Everything was perfect up until now. Our timings in having things done were spot on. Our prep work was impeccable. Our final challenge was to fry up these cakes and somehow not screw it up. The oil was hot and we were ready to drop spud. The cakes went down into the hot pan, and started sizzling. When it was time to flip, I took the spatula and eased it underneath the first cake. What happened next made me want to light my hair on fire... How dare these chucklehead potato cakes ruin the day! The bottom of the cake stuck to the spatula, and as I prepared to flip, I ripped the bottom off the cake and the rest of this potato pain in the asscake globbed into an oily pile of misery. I started sweating as the nightmarish flashbacks of Armenia took hold of my brain. How can this be???

I remained calm (Lauri will beg to differ). I then took most of the oil out of the non-stick pan and tried frying the next batch with very little oil. Thankfully, this yielded success, as the cakes browned without getting soggy with oil.

By the time I got all the cakes fried up, it was time to go fishing. We took the lime-soaked tilapia out, rinsed with cold water, then re-juiced it with fresh lime juice and mixed the peppers, onions, tomatoes, shallots and parsley together. Done. The dish looked just like the picture on the internets. :) The fish was firm, white, and looked good.

Eating: Since the flan and beet salad was already done, and the ceviche was ready to be harvested, all we really had left to do was plate the potato cakes and then take photos.


Neither Lauri or myself have ever had ceviche, so it was a Life Cereal commercial for the first minute or two... "You eat it." "No, you eat it." "Hey, give it to Mikey, Mikey likes it!" So we both tried a bite at the same time. It was actually very good! And more importantly, not raw!

We plated everything together and it was gorgeous. The ceviche was picture perfect and delicious. There was no fishy smell or oceanic flavor at all. The acid from the lime juice eliminated the tuna-can stench, and cooked the tilapia to flaky perfection. The lime and veggies were the perfect accompaniment and the dish was hugely successful. Typically, you would eat this with crackers, corn nuts or popcorn. No, seriously... you heard me right.

The beet salad was light and tasty, again with a citrus base, although this one was lemon juice. This simple sauce, along with some oil, salt and pepper was just what the doctor ordered. Once again, victory over the unknown and untested was enjoyed. Considering I'm not a beet fan, this was a huge win for Lauri, as she is a beetnik, and she had to pull my strings to get me to eat this esoteric vegetable.

Ahhh, the potato pain in the ass cakes. These were a lot of work and aggravation, but damn, they turned out good. Fried mashed potatoes loaded with cheese and scallions... Need I say more? Once I corrected the oil distribution, it was sweet sailing the rest of the way. By the way, I'm going to lobby for Muenster cheese as being the most underrated cheese in existence. More flavorful than provolone and mozzarella, but not quite as sharp and pungent as cheddar. It's a perfect combination of both spectrums of cheesehood.


And finally, the flan. Ahhh, nothing like a good creamy, custardy cup of artery-clogging deliciousness. Flan is basically the same thing as custard, made with eggs, vanilla, sugar, and condensed milk. Throw in a little coconut rum, and you have a party. The flan turned out great, especially if you love sugar. I think every hummingbird and housefly within 100 miles was trying to break in to get a piece of this action. Every chunk of this cloying and creamy toothsome treat had caramelized sugar on the bottom and sugar-cinnamon on top. Two bites were enough to keep Augustus Gloop satisfied, so after about one and a half bites, I was done.


All in all, a very successful South American-themed dinner. Ecuador was challenging in both the search for good recipes and pushing us out of our comfort zone. If it wasn't for this crazy worldwide cuisine project, we probably never would have attempted to make or even eat ceviche. Heck, neither one of us has ever had it, so it was a leap of faith to create this dish as well as consume it. Eat your heart out, Iron Chefs!

I think we are getting pretty good at this--after only five letters, we have certainly made strides in our culinary proficiencies. Cooking 2-3 things simultaneously is no longer an anxiety-laced challenge that leaves us in an exasperated heap of misery calling out for pizza delivery.

Of course now that I say that, perhaps we are setting ourselves up for an EPIC FAIL on future countries? Oui, oui? Yah I said it... F is for FRANCE, and hopefully not for FAIL...