Lost in Translation::Pollo al Horno con Puerros de Mantequilla

After four months of living in Spain, you would think that by now, I would have fully adjusted and settled into my new life here. But the reality of the situation is that it's taken me just that long to feel as if I've found some semblance of balance and/or normalcy. And keep in mind the operative term of "semblance" because both my definitions of normal and balance seem be in a constant state of change. In any event, for many reasons, including this period of adjustment, I've been remiss if not purposely avoidant of updating this blog. 

As you can imagine, there are lots of things that get lost in translation when one packs up their entire life and moves to a new country, and transitioning a domestic food blog to describe an international life is one of them. I have struggled here, not only with the language and from time to time, the distance from home, but the question of how to express myself in that full-on Bernadette way--complete with inappropriate levels of profanity, butter, and bourbon, whilst sharing the good, the bad, and the absurdity of my life in Spain. 

January 13. on the beach!

An American Macaroni & Cheese in Spain

What happens when, while living abroad, you make one of the most American foods ever, which happens to be the most important side dish of the dinner of the second most American holiday in existence¹, for a quantity of no less than 30 people from six different countries, in a house in the mountains, where eating, boozing [repeat and repeat], laughing, hiking, and fighting the dog for stolen turkey bones from the garbage commence for approximately a weekend? You get zero pictures of the finished product in all it's magnificent glory, and are forced to steal any photographic evidence of its cooked existence from other people's facebook albums. And contrary to what you may initially have thought, your Thanksgiving in Spain is pleasingly similar to Thanksgiving at home, with the hilarious exception of the entire "family" getting plastered and the addition of a resplendent mountain backdrop and a pool. Basically, my Thanksgiving in Spain was amahzing, but more importantly my Spanish rendition of Linda's [mommy] famous macaroni and cheese was a success!

For starters, I must talk about the Españification of this American classic, because while the Spaniards are quite fond of cheese, they are not quite so fond of variety or importing good American cheddar. And though my Spanish is still not where I want it to be three months into this adventure, I was still able to clearly communicate with the guy at the carnicería that a gub'ment cheese-looking block of mild cheddar was not hell what I was looking for.

Chickpea, Butternut Squash, & Sausage Saute (City Girl Stew)

So I'm sure you're thinking that a post about stew in the middle of summer seems strange. Especially when the above pictured "stew" resembles nothing of what it's namesake traditionally suggests. But you know, this is city girl food, so I can call it stew if I want to. Besides, I assure you the strangest thing about this recipe is that I willingly and purposefully cooked with and ate butternut squash. Which as a notoriously picky eater and self proclaimed hater of all things squash, is a pretty big deal.

But when I get an idea in my head and am craving something different, crazy things happen. Honestly, I've been curious about butternut squash for a while. Restaurants seem to love putting it in ravioli with yummy sounding sauces like browned butter with crispy sage leaves, and on more than one occasion I've felt like I might be missing out because of my wanton disdain for an entire vegetable family. I mean, we all know that zucchini and summer squash are utterly disgusting and not to be eaten unless absolutely necessary. But butternut is clearly different with it's firm texture and gorgeous orange hue. I figured it was time I start acting like a foodie, and at least give it a try.

Rooster to the Wine (Coq Au Vin)

So in 3 months, I'm packing up my best boots and poodle and moving to Spain, and 6 months ago I made Coq au Vin. That's right, 6 months ago, as in January. And I'm just posting it now, because 8 month ago I started the application process for the program that's sending me to Spain, and after that there was Thanksgiving and Christmas and Miss Xpose Prelims and Miss Xpose finals and lots and lots of boozin' and jackassery in between. Sue me.

So back in January when I tried my hand at Mastering the Art of French cooking, I learned a few things along the way, that I will now list in order of importance: 

1. Any dish the requires the presence of three bottles of alcohol is clear win-win situation. #Realtalk.

Meatless Monday: Red Quinoa with Cumin Garlic Butter

{Source;This is what my photos should look like. Obvi, I've got lots of work to do}

I would like to introduce you to my new best friend in food, quinoa. I don't know about you, but I'm way late to this particular party [which is fairly standard for me]. It's not that I've never heard of quinoa, it's been on my radar for a while, but it never really occurred to me to actually eat it until recently--and by recently I mean at least two months ago when I had some at TJ's house during one of our many pole practices. TJ and I like to pole, then booze, then eat, then pole some more. It's easy to see why we're friends, no?

But before I continue, allow me to wear my "health educator" hat for a moment. Did you know that quinoa [pronounced keen-wah] is considered a super food? Quinoa is an ancient "grain" [it's not actually a grain, but is closely related to beets, spinach and tumbleweeds] that is high in complete protein, meaning in includes all nine essential amino acids. It's also a good source of fiber, manganese, magnesium, folate, and phosphorus, vitamin E, iron, and selenium--which according to various resources may be especially valuable for people who suffer from  migraines, diabetes, atherosclerosis, and weight control issues. That's pretty damn super.

Spiced Butter Pork Ribs. Oh yes I did!

Oh yes I did, rub pork in spiced butter. AND WHAT, Paula?! I made these months ago and Chef Marcus Samuelsson made me do it! It was glorious and I would do it again, the same time next year! I only regret that I never got around to using the remaining spiced butter, before it started growing mold. For shame! I'll do better next time. Mark my words!

So I've had this Marcus Samuelsson cookbook since grad school, but up until recently never really sat down with it and read its recipes. As I am coming to terms with my very real obsession with food, I'm starting to look at all my food literature differently. I'm realizing that a cookbook, is like a good novel. One that you should read over and over again. I've also realized that my food literature collection was really lacking, hence my request for Mastering the Art of French cooking for Christmas. I figured if a whiny writer with a passing interest in food could master Julia's recipes and parley her story into a half amusing/half annoying movie, the very least I could do was verse myself in the classics. I mean I eventually want to get paid to talk about and/or cook food, because that sounds a f**k of a lot better than going back and forth with grantees about their freakin' TPS final reports. And while collecting recipes from a bazillion different food blogs is fun, it just doesn't satisfy the soul in the way that reading a book of recipes does.

I'm sure you can relate.

Maple Bacon Biscuits

Here we go with the cute food again. Damn that Adrianna! For the record, I cooked these biscuits exactly 2 1/2 months ago. Don't ask me what I was doing with my time in between then and now, because I surely couldn't tell you, though I know for a fact that lots of bourbon was involved. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of this post following my lambasting of our nation's favorite diabetic, butter loving, cigarette smoking, foul-mouthed grandmother. But I wouldn't advocate eating biscuits like these, or of any variety really, more than two or three times a year. This sort of indulgence, in addition to the labor that goes into to making good biscuits, lands them squarely in the "special occasions category". I'll step off my soapbox now, as my hands are covered in butter and bacon grease, and I'm hungry. #damnitfeelsgoodtobeagangsta

While the details of the last few months seem some what hazy, I can tell you that on one lovely and lazy Sunday morning in November, I woke up and decided to make these maple bacon biscuits. And what a glorious Sunday morning it was!

Salt "Crusted" Leg of Lamb

Leave it to me to blog about the star of my family's Christmas dinner four weeks after the fact. But considering the fact that when I showed up at my mom's house two days before Christmas she didn't even have a tree, hence making my super extra last minute christmas eve shopping that didn't even get started till after 3pm due to a shortage of vehicles and competing interests, even more ridiculous than necessary, I guess you shouldn't be all that surprised. True story.

But really, it wouldn't really be a true "Nigerian Last name" family Christmas without a ridiculous amount of last minute scrambling, although this year we really out did ourselves. For the first time in our family history, we literally put up all the Christmas decorations, tree included, on December 24th. Additionally, my mother decided to instill a new tradition of each one of us bringing/cooking a new dish we've never made or shared with the family before. Hence this dabble into bread making for me, a pomegranate guacamole [not pictured, my bad] courtesy of my six years younger and six inch taller sister [really God? REALLY THOUGH? *tart face*] ridiculously delicious vegan collard greens [also not pictured, when, ever, will I learn that as a food blogger, I'm supposed to document all eatings at all times?] from big sister, and a turkey day repeat, by adamant request, of German Apple Cake from my mom [I think I tweeted this pic]. Hence, the reason for that hammer and nails on the kitchen table as I'm chopping herbs, in case you were wondering, is because my mom was in full decorating and/or fixing things mode while I was prepping the lamb, and everything had to be done in one night.

Garlic Parmesan Top Knots

Let's talk about cute food. Now if you know me well, or in any capacity really, than you probably know that"cute" is probably the last word I would use to describe food. As far as I'm usually concerned, guys who are attractive, but missing that oh so important x factor and/or look like 12 year old boys are cute. Puppies are cute. Some babies are cute. [Yeah, I said it!] But food...food is flavor, and texture, and color, and plating and all things awesome, but generally not cute.

Or so I thought. 

That darn Adrianna over at A Cozy Kitchen, she's turned me onto the wold of cute food. Maple bacon pancakes, biscuits of the same name, scones, crostinis, sandwiches, glitter nails, you name it! This girl knows her food, loves glitter, and knows how to cute things up. I kind of love her. Hence these garlic knots.  There's  garlic, and, Parmesan and butter, oh glorious butter, #yum. They're chock full o' cracked wheat and made with wheat flour which makes them good for you, #awesome. But it wasn't until I was tying the dough into double knots that I realized how cute they are. Too f**kin' cute! #bonuspoints

Meatless Monday: Purple Cabbage & Green Onion Slaw

So Thanksgivng has come and gone, and if your holiday was anything like mine, then you're probably wishing you had packed more macaroni and cheese and ham in your "to go" Tupperware while simultaneously regretting your decision to eat half your body weight in meat, mac n cheese, stuffing and 3 types of cakes during the last 72 hours.  And you may or may not have eaten the skin off of half the turkey all by yourself. I plead the fifth!

If there's one thing I've learned in my 25ish years of Thanksgiving gluttony, it's how to pace myself so that I don't overeat to the point of hating myself and everything around me. Why it took me that long to learn that lesson is beyond me. However, it's also taken me 25 or so years to learn that when it comes to the holidays, and Thanksgiving especially, that I am inevitably and unabashedly going to eat nothing but meat, cheese, bread and sugar, for at least 3 consecutive days. It's just a fact of life.

When did that happen?!

You know how you take a break from blogging one day, and 21 days later you still haven't blogged? What about when you go on weekend trips, and start off taking pictures of everything with the intention of blogging about your trip, but then you drink 6 or so mimosas at brunch and fear that you're too drunk to safely handle your expensive camera, thus taking 0 pictures after the first few hours of said boozy brunch? How about when you share your absurd 30 before 30 list, and want to talk about some of the progress you've made only to have very little photographic evidence of such progress? And don't even get me started on the back log of recipes to blog about. No really, don't get me started, there aren't that many recipes backlogged, I've been suffering from serious foodie's block. Add to all of these things a big move and new roommates and what you've got is ME!

But you know how it goes, some days you feel like a nut, and some days you feel like drinking a bottle of wine with your new roommate. ¡Salud! There is much to be said about change, especially when it's change for the better, but why talk when I can show. If you will, here's my life in pictures, I promise some of these things I will get around to blogging about it...eventually.

Finally trying the famous Woodberry Kitchen for big sister's birthday. It lives up to all the hype and then some. I must return!

Meatless Monday: Chickpea Patties with Yogurt Sauce

Chick Pea Patties. They're kind of self explanatory, right? Ok, they're really not, but it seems my creative writing skills seem to be on hiatus at the moment. So sadly, I have no quippy vignette about my life, no cynical musings about the state of our society, no absurd commentary on why I think veganism is quite possibly a cult--I got nothing for you.

Well except for these chickpea patties, of course. And while they were in fact quite tasty, I could never suggest that they are adequate meat replacement, in the way several recipes that I came across during my research called for. I mean, c'mon, veggieheads! Pulverized chickpeas formed into a patty form and served between two pieces of bread does not a burger make. That's just a slap in the face to all the sacrificial cows and corresponding meatheads who reaped the delicious benefits of their sacrifice! I'm just sayin.

The Pig & the Goat Pizza

So a pig and a goat walk into a bar....and wouldn't you know I googled pig and goat bar jokes and came up with nothing remotely funny? I suppose that doesn't matter because this pizza itself fills the void of a good raunchy joke any day. Besides, is it even appropriate to make a raunchy joke when talking about food? This isn't a rhetorical question, someone really needs to answer that question for me.

Even if I could somehow come up with a funny pig and a goat in a bar joke, it wouldn't apply here because the pig was the sacrificial swine that pretty much makes this pizza worth eating in its entirety [let me be clear, pizza is always worth eating in general, but not always in its entirety by 1 person in 1 night]  so the goat would've been on his own, therefore ensuring whatever joke could result would most certainly be too raunchy for a food blog. So I guess I just answered my own question. Rauchy jokes+food=no bueno.

Ginger Lime Chicken and the Past Days of Summer

Say it ain't so, the last days of summer are upon us. *Can we have a collective a moment of silence in observance of the passing of this cherished season.* Dear summer, I'm sure going to miss you, especially since I squandered most of the season of the sun literally running around like a chicken with my head cut off, toeing the line of sanity and reason, having little time rest nor blog. 'Till the next time we meet, I shall be waiting, and I'll be ready.

Anon.

As you would imagine, all things involving ginger and citrus=good summer eats. Throw in a copious amount of pestle-ground black pepper, as I am prone to do, and what you end up with is the start of something wonderful, and the perfect grilled chicken for a hot summer's day picnic the Reggae Wine Festival. 

Meatless Monday: Roasted Pepper & Onion Pizza

Do you know what I love about pizza? Well aside from the obvious reasons [cheese, crust, CHEESE]. It's the fact you can make a pizza with just about anything so long as you have a some form of crust and bountiful cheese [do you see a pattern here?]. Seeing as how pizza has been a recurring theme on this here blog, it should come as no surprise that I've created yet another pie of epic deliciousness, and literally with everything that was inside my refrigerator which somehow turned out to be vegetarian.

Really it all started with some green peppers that I bought at the farmers market and then forgot about, even though they had been sitting in plain sight for a whole week. Well it's not so much that I forgot about them, as that I had no time to cook, what with all the simultaneous car shopping and apartment hunting that was wreaking havoc on my life for a few weeks.

Meatless Monday: Fire Roasted Corn Salad

S U M M E R T I M E

and the livin' is easy....

If only that were true. I love summer, but even if the livin' were easy, it would still most certainly be busy, almost to the point of absurdity, especially for a sun worshiper like me. You see, during late fall through early spring, I suffer from a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder, otherwise known as the I hate everyone and everything because the sun went down at 4:30pm and I have to walk home and then walk the poodle when it's 25 degrees outside not counting the windchill, it's too cold to anything fun and tomatoes are out of season, when the EFF is it going to be summer again?! blues.  Then, after I spend the better half of a year wishing for summer, it finally arrives, and before you can say sunscreen, I'm practically running around outside waving my hands over my head, shouting Ke$ha lyrics at strangers because THIS PLACE'S ABOUT TO BLOW-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH  it's summer! During the 90 glorious days in which sunshine pours from the heavens in copious quantities, I make it my personal mission to eat, drink, laugh, splash, and frolic my way into summer bliss at any and every given opportunity. Yes, it's that serious.

So I decided that the epicurean-focused portion of my quest for summertime bliss could not and would not be complete without a fabulous picnic at the Reggae Wine Festival. That's right, reggae bands+wine+bougie picnic=Awesome. Naturally, I felt that my fabulous picnic spread would be nothing less than uncivilized without a fantastic summer salad, and thought it nothing less than divine intervention when I came across a video of Chef Marcus Samuelsson making a roasted corn salad, and then found the perfect recipe from Williams-Sonoma.

Meatless Monday: City Girl Coleslaw

¡Sin mayonesa, por favor! In addition to, "Si, soy Americana, y yo no voté por George Bush" and "¿Donde está el baño?" I am absolutely certain that these will be the most important words of my Spanish lexicon to ensure both a smooth and happy transition transition to my future life in Spain. You see, the Spanish are really into mayonnaise, and for as long as I've been alive,  I have harbored a pure and unadulterated hatred toward mayonnaise that was the cause of many b!tch fits/food tantrums in my childhood. In an outright defiance of the expectations of the maturation of the palate from infancy to adulthood, it seems that my disdain for this condiment has actually gotten worse. No longer can my taste buds ignore the presence and rancid taste of mayonnaise in classic dishes like coleslaw and potato salad. No more will I subject myself to forcibly ingesting portabello sandwiches that would otherwise be perfect had they not been smeared with "garlic aoli" because the owners of Soup's On refuse to make a yogurt based garlic spread per my telepathically demanded, though never verbally submitted requests. NO MORE! Today this city girl takes a stand! Today, I declare my war on mayonnaise! Whose with me?!

Now that I've amassed an army formidable enough to take on the evil mayonnaise empire, the first matter of business is this 1000% awesome, though hardly original, mayonnaise-free coleslaw, fit for city girls and mayonnaise haters alike. 

Pan Roasted Dijon Chicken

Chicken. Oh how I don't hate it, but don't love it either. I'm kinda on the fence about chicken, which obviously flies in the face of the ridiculous stereotypes that revolve around black people and chicken. Now before you start inching your cursor closer to that little "x" in the corner of your screen, I promise I'm not about to launch into some rant about racial stereotypes or race relations. I'm hardly motivated nor smart enough to write such a rant in a sensical manner, especially not after the two glasses of wine I just had with dinner.  I would just like to state for the record that the stereotype annoys me because as far as I can tell from the absurd amount of food focused television that I watch (and DVR), chicken is universally popular amongst most meat-eating cultures, and I'm utterly flabbergasted as to how we got singled out for it in such a ridiculous way. And that's all I have to say about that. 

My problem with chicken is that I suck at cooking it. It's not that I don't know what I'm doing, it's just that I find myself making chicken dishes with the same flavor profiles over and over and OVER. This redundancy is largely due to my lack of natural creativity as well as my absurd level of pickyness that's so ridiculous in fact, that I'm amazed I can even call myself a foodie. However, in recognition of my shortcomings, I have increasingly turned to others by way of food blog stalking and a subscription to Food & Wine magazine for culinary inspiration. Which is where this dish comes along. And for the record, it was amazing. 

Samba Churrasco!

I'm back from the rabbit hole! Man oh man, what a rabbit hole it was, and oh em gee am I glad to be back.  I'm still hopelessly behind on my Harry Potter progress as I'm only about 1/3 through book 4...le fret! I'm seriously worried that I won't get through all these books in time to see the movie while it's still in theaters. Not because I'm a slow reader, but because my summer is about to go from crazy to ape $hit, due to the fact that  both of my sisters and 3 out my 5 closest friends decided to be born in late summer, and I'll be a bit preoccupied with dinners, mojitos, and awesomeness. Eh..I'm sure I'll find a way to make it work. Speaking of birthdays, I have yet another friend, whom though is not one of the fab five, also happens to be a summer baby, and celebrates his day with a big Brazilian barbecue. Some of you may remember my first experience with churrasco last summer, which was life changing. So as you can imagine, I was all too happy to celebrate with my friend Max David yet again, as well as eat half my body weight in grilled meats. 

Crème Brûlèe French Toast

I am, for obvious reasons, a huge advocate for international travel. Sure it's expensive, the flights are long and uncomfortable, and the cluster-f***k that is the world we live in has made getting through airport security less like a mildly annoying, yet necessary evil, to more like an aggravated assault and invasion of privacy with a dash of sexual harassment thrown in for good measure. The logistics of travel undoubtedly suck, but these minor inconveniences--well minor being a relative term depending on the strength of the U.S. dollar--are by and large worth the rewards received for purposely experiencing a piece of the world outside of home. There's only one aspect of travel that I find to be almost unbearable, and that is of course, the return home.