The Losses from Trade

Advertised in today's New York Times food section on-line, as part of an almost certainly multi-million-dollar product launch, is a heart-breaking example of how resource-rich countries lose tremendous economic development opportunities. Stevia is an herb native to Paraguay that is naturally very sweet. It has been used for hundreds and hundreds of years by Paraguay’s indigenous population in infusions, mate, and simply to chew. A calorie-free sweetener can be extracted from this leaf and has been commonly used in Paraguay for at least a decade if not more. Imagine the potential this has? Replace the ubiquitous cancer-causing synthesized sweeteners with a naturally occurring calorie-free sweetener. This is the sort of breakthrough product that could form the base to develop an entire food industry and development strategy in the country that is blessed with such an herb.

Ah, but this is no good, what about high fructose corn syrup? What about saccharine and sucralose and aspartame? No, Stevia was not safe for consumption, according to the FDA. No matter that it has had regulatory approval in Japan for decades with no evidence of worse side effects than synthetic sweeteners. Americans must be kept safe from the ill effects of stevia. That is, until Cargill and Coca-Cola invest in the research, product definition and design, and marketing that can assure that the economic gains from this product be captured in the U.S. Then suddenly stevia is a miracle herb that no readers of the New York Times food section can miss out on and we get Truvia: "the first great-tasting, zero-calorie natural sweetener that's a miracle of nature, not chemistry."

In the meantime China has far surpassed Paraguay as the main grower of Stevia, having had three decades to consolidate its supply links to the Japanese and Korean markets. No Paraguayan Denomination of Controlled Origin; no development of innovative marketing, product definition, logistics, packaging, and branding capacities in Paraguayan companies; no direct relationships between stevia producers and processors in Paraguay and the enormous international food processing industry that will jump all over Truvia to sweeten everything from that Odewalla sludge that gives professional women their healthy edge to the super-gulps at 7eleven that gives other women their healthy bottoms; no mention of Paraguay at all in Truvia's promotional activities.

As Paraguay yet again embraces its role as a primary product exporter, the government’s export promotion agency and ministry of commerce celebrate stevia's regulatory approval in the U.S., laud Coke and Cargills 'research and development' of Truvia, and congratulate themselves for 'accessing' an enormous market that will soon open up and produce the latest in two centuries of successive export booms that promise to save Paraguay's ever-struggling "pequeños productores" from their perpetual underdevelopment.

Obviously, exploiting the opportunities afforded by Stevia to their fullest potential would require investment, research, development, planning, and coordination that far outstrip the capacities of any of the public or private sector institutions that currently exist in Paraguay. But that is the point. Instead of using this resource as a 'hook' to attract from abroad the resources necessary to develop themselves and upgrade their capacities, these organizations have thrown themselves entirely into the arms of foreign investors and the multinational monopolies supported by US regulatory regimes. What a waste.

Breaking the food bank

I apparently had four more noteworthy meals before I left Paraguay. I'm afraid that I didn't enjoy them enough, because since I've gotten back to the U.S.--I've got to admit--I've suffered some pretty sever sticker shock: $2.50 for a bunch of organic cilantro at whole food is just absurd (granted it was whole foods but still). In Paraguay, an equivalent bunch of organic cilantro would cost 20 cents. Food prices really seem to have gone noticeably up since I have been gone. I spent more than five dollars on a single heirloom tomato! It's amazing how much it costs to feed yourself these days, and I realized how much I've been taking my time Paraguay for granted. It is easy to complain or lament the lack of certain things, like sweet peas or good avocados, but little did I realize that when I got back to the U.S. I wouldn't even be able to afford an avocado (I've seen them selling for $2.00-2.50)! I've vowed to appreciate more all of the fresh, organic, and affordable produce that is available in Paraguay. Part of it is, of course, the fact that my dollars are worth more than guaraníes (though that advantage seems to be decreasing daily) and that even my meager graduate student income puts me toward the upper end of the income distribution. Still, I'm curious if you compared the cost of food and produce, adjusting for purchasing power whether food would still not be cheaper in Paraguay. Any economists out there interested in checking this out for me? It's definitely worth knowing, because this is what Paraguayans will give up if they let the countryside get bulldozed and covered by soybean plantations. At any rate, I decided we better eat up while we are in Paraguay, because we might be on a diet of beans and rice when we get back to the U.S.

1. Salad of lima beans, sweet corn, radish, and roasted red pepper with pesto. Notice the nasturtium garnish. This was really a delicious and fresh salad, and I found corn that is actually sweet (not starchy) at the supermarket!
2. Dduk with kim chi octopus and crab stix. I used some surumi sticks that are meant for sushi in this korean inspired seafood soup. It was very good and spicy.
3. Pork soup with mung bean noodles and cilantro. I used the last bit of ecoagro pork in this soup. I boiled the bones with the meat left on it with lemon grass, ginger, garlic, and some leek scraps and pho spices for the broth. I added fish sauce and served it with cilantro and basil. However, we decided that it's time to let this basil plant go to seed, because it's getting to that bitter, woody stage that always makes me think the plant is taking its revenge on us for delaying its reproduction by manufacturing lethal, bitter poisons to kill us.
4. Mixed green salad, and cheese plate. This was made with produce from the agroshopping. A new friend, fellow fulbright scholar, and researcher of agricultural associations was visiting Paraguay from Brazil and wanted to check out the agroshopping. I was more than happy to oblige, and while we didn't have a chance to put together an elaborate meal, the weather and the opportunity was perfect for a really fresh salad and a cheese bored. I tore up some purple basil in this salad, along with arugula and two kinds of lettuce, green onion, and cherry tomatoes and dressed it with a classic vinaigrette. The cheese plate was all local cheeses and included a blue cheese, a buttery cow's-milk with black pepper, and a third on I can't remember the name of (I need to start writing these down!) but was a strong, ripened cow's-milk cheese. All three were pretty good. The blue cheese (and I'm not usually a big fan) was very creamy and pleasant flavored. The salami was also very good.

The Second Agrarian Divide?

It's amazing and in some ways puzzling to me to watch how food markets are developing in the U.S. It seems like more and more energy is being put into reconstructing the diversity, quality, and geography of traditional food systems and that there is more and more interest in consuming local produce and learning (or relearning) to consume in post-industrial (pre-industrial?) ways. Today, there were two New York times articles that inspired me to write something. One about the local wheat movement, challenging the idea that wheat can't be grown in places like New York State and that wheat ought to be a flavorless, uniform, and consistent commodity. There is a whole package of self reinforcing knowledge that must be recovered together to make such a thing possible: what varieties of wheat grow well where and in what seasons; what those variates of wheat are best used for (pasta, bread, pastries, cakes); how to bake responsively to the variable qualities of flour ground from these different wheats (to adjust the flavors and moisture instinctively to get a good result from different flours); how to enjoy and consume baked goods that aren't just white starches but where wheat and its flavors are an actual player.

Times reporter Indrani Sen writes: "It might take a while to appreciate high-quality, small-batch flours after a lifetime of eating food made with mass-produced flour. Their musky fragrances are often more pronounced, and variations in taste and texture bring a new range of complexity to baked goods, making supermarket flour seem one dimensional by comparison."

I've often thought that, in addition to ecological ways of producing food--i.e. farming methods that mimic ecological processes so that food production is environmentally sound and sustainable--there are also ecological ways of consuming food that mirror or parallel the process of growing food. After all, food is made up of living things, which are limited by their nature and their relationship to the seasons, the soil, the weather, and their relationship to other living things. I think one of the reasons that I love cooking and that am so fascinated by the world's different cuisines is because of all of the almost ecological knowledge encoded into traditional cooking. Obviously, seasonal eating and the knowledge to make the most out of each seasons products is a big piece of this. But it goes well beyond knowing what is in season and knowing what to do and how to respond to the varying qualities of the living things produced by a farm and how to break down and recombine the different components of farm products to make the most of them. French recipes, so I hear, used to stipulate whether winter or spring eggs were to be used, because of their different properties (I might have gotten the seasons wrong, but you get the point). When a cow is killed, it's different parts all have different uses, from the roasting parts, to the soup bones, to the viscera which require special care and treatment to be palatable and occasionally even delicious.

All this knowledge, and then the actual physical investments needed to grow, mill, store, and transport wheat at the local level must be recovered and put in place to make anything like a market for local wheat possible. And apparently, there is enough interest and will to make this happen. It's bizarre to me, because all of this infrastructure and knowledge existed before in the U.S.--before it was wiped out by industrial ways of producing and eating and the subsidies that have upheld and expanded this system until today in the name of development and progress. Until the 1960s, the Midwest was populated by hundreds of local breweries producing a vast variety of beers with the knowledge of german, czech, and polish immigrants, to be wiped out by bud light and other tasteless brews, and later resurrected in the 'snobbish' microbrew craze on the coasts and in cities like Portland, OR. It turns out that people--at least those with economic means--really value the way we used to produce and eat--or at least the way they imagine we used to produce and eat. What's more puzzling, is that this knowledge and this infrastructure exists (however precariously) in developing countries like Paraguay. Still, rather than strengthening, developing, and making more viable these traditional food systems, most proposed responses to the current global food crisis involve the further industrialization of agriculture and creating a food supply that people consume not because they demand it or because it is nutritious, but because its empty calories are so cheap that the diversity people actually value cannot possibly compete. Moreover, by further submitting the food supply to the very vulnerabilities of energy and input intensity that have created this crisis, such a response seems to only postpone an inevitable adjustment toward more sustainable way of producing and eating while leaving an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, environmental destruction, and culinary barrenness in its wake.


The other article was only slightly related, but was about how supermarket chains are openning smaller stores that focus on fresh food and convenience, upending "a long-running trend in the grocery business: building ever-larger stores in the belief that consumers want choice above all." Audre Martin writes: " Of course, small grocery stores have been around forever, and some old-time neighborhood markets still exist. Meanwhile, a handful of specialty retailers have proved that shoppers will flock to smaller stores if they are offered a novel experience." I've also always puzzled at why anyone shops exclusively at huge supermarkets. It strikes me as outright irrational. Produce is much more expensive, for example, at the supermarket near my old apartment in Chicago, than it is at the nearly equidistant Vietnamese small grocers on Argyle street. I never understood why chicago neighborhoods are not populated by grocers of this sort rather than by Jewel. But it turns out, people like the convenience and quality of a small store for quick shopping trips, and now supermarket companies like Tesco have discovered this and will now be the ones to profit from it.

This apparent turning back happens at a time when the monopoly of agribusiness over the food supply and the trade of food has reached alarming levels. From Monsanto's patenting of plant genetic material and the legal system's support for the privatization of life to Walmart's tremendous share in the supermarket industry, private companies have never had so much power to impose their values and profit motive on the way we eat and the way we produce our food. This has led to an illusion of diversity and a reality of stark agricultural and gastronomic monotony.


[This picture is just outside the largest fragment of Atlantic Forest left in Paraguay; the emptiness of the cleared forest and the tree stumps that dot some of the landscape give eerie testament to the extent and the newness of the destruction]

It's like food production and consumption is being pushed or pulled in opposite directions and a highly developed dualism is arising that parallels the increasing inequality of income, education, and health in the U.S. I often wonder how this could possibly play out. Can these two food systems coexist, and if so, for how long? What tensions does this imply for Americans, some of whom will increasingly get their chicken from farmer Phil and others from Phillip Morris?

Porky Paraguay

As I mentioned in my last post, I discovered an excellent source of pork and other wonderful small-farmer produce. It is ecoagro, a marketing firm for small farmers involved in the agroecology development project of Altervida, a Paraguayan environmental NGO. If you sign up, they send you a weekly product list and you can place your order by email or by phone. THey have all sorts of vegetables and herbs, citrus fruits and papaya, and even some dried goods like cornmeal sugar, brown sugar, yerba mate, beans, and animal products like paraguayan cheese, pork, and I suspect/hope they sometimes have chicken and eggs. The quality is very high and the quantity very generous (the cilantro bunches were huge), and it is not any more expensive than the supermarket. It's all organic and from small farmers, and if you order more than 50.000, they have free delivery. I really recommend this service for anyone in Asuncion. There is virtually no draw back, except perhaps that you will still need to go to the supermarket once in a while. Here is some of the stuff I made from this produce:

1. Hummus, avocado, radish, and pita. This actually was made with stuff from the agrofair. After fussing so much about how bad the avocados are in Paraguay, we actually had a run of pretty decent ones. Still less buttery and nutty than good old Hass, but much better than the weird watery ones we had been getting. The food processor my parents got me (in addition to the wok) has also made a terrific addition to my kitchen. Making hummus from garbanzos and sesame seeds is pretty quick work now
2. Olive flat bread with caprese salad. Nearly a year after planting the smuggled seeds, our nasturtiums finally bloomed. Expect to see them garnishing everything I eat for a while.
3. Fried tofu with miso sauce, and a salad of watercress, avocado, heart of palm and radish. We had tofu like this at a Japanese restaurant in Asuncion and after finding firm Japanese-style tofu at a Korean store near the municipal market, I wanted to try to recreate it. It turned out pretty good, and even better the second time (below).
4. Arugula salad with pecan dressing. At the agroshopping they had whole (shell-on) pecans, grown in paraguay, and sold pretty cheap. While I never realized what a pain in the ass it is to shell pecans, I had never enjoyed them so much either. Generally, I feel that pecans are inferior to most nuts--the walnut, almond, cashew, hazelnut, maybe even the peanut--but these were really delicious and sweet. I bought them because David always talks about his grandfather's pecan tree in Alabama, but I think I ended up enjoying them more than he did (maybe because I made him do the shelling). This arugula salad, which I dressed with pecans that I smashed in the mortar with raw garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice and topped with shaved sardo cheese was really delicious. 5. Angel hair pasta with shimeji mushrooms, roasted red pepper, and bacon. I sauteed these mushrooms from the agroshopping (I guess this post was actually mostly about an earlier trip to the agroshopping not ecoagro's delivery service) with some bacon, onion, and garlic, deglazed with some sherry, and added a container of frozen duck stock that I had. I reduced this down added some roasted red pepper and finished the sauce off with a good quantity of butter, grated cheese and chopped parsley. This was awesome.
6. Here began three meals with the ecoagro pork: Pork with dduk, kimchee and tofu. As mentioned, we found a Korean store near the market where we bought tofu, and also kimchee and little 'coins' made of glutinous rice. We had eaten something very similar to this near our apartment in somerville, and I had always wanted to reproduce it. It turned out pretty well.
7. Fried tofu with miso and beet greens; Pork with cilantro. The beet greens were also from the tops of the beets we got from ecoagro. They were excellent with the tofu and miso, very sweet and flavorful. The pork with cilantro was actually also an attempt to reproduce a dish we'd sometimes get from a chinese takeout place in somerville. You wouldn't think that stir frying cilantro like greens would work very well, but it is delicious. It was hard to get good light on this picture, but I wanted to include it because the meal turned out so good.
8. Penne and Pork with fennel, beet greens, and pecan olive pesto. This was probably the best of the meals here. The olives, ricotta cheese, and pecans made a rich and meaty pesto that stood up well to the pork, and the sweetness of the beat greens and fennel contrasted well with the saltiness of the pesto.

Wok's New, Pussycat?

So, as I mentioned, my parents made me the super-awesomely useful gift of a wok when they were in Paraguay. It's kind of weird that I've never had a wok before, because they are extremely practical cooking tools, and the variety of Asian-inspired dishes you can easily and deliciously prepare in them are also extremely practical. It's even more surprising given how often I clumsily crammed way more ingredients than comfortably fit into my medium sauté pan in boston for stir frying or to dress pasta, cursing the inadequate size of my only available cooking vessel. As it turns out, an identical cuisinart medium sauté pan was one of my only cooking vessel for the first 8 months or so in Paraguay as well. So, when I got the wok, I immediately went about seasoning it, and then I went a little wok crazy:

1. First, I tried to make smoky hot chicken stir-fried with dried red chillies and green garlic chives. I saw this on a show by an Australian chef and chinese cooking-show host, Kylie Kwong, that the 'People and Arts' channel shows down here on cable. I really like her and her show (which is unusual because food show hosts usually grate on me--perhaps it's my envy of their food super-stardom). Perhaps it was my inexperience with the wok, but this was kind of dissapointing. It wasn't bad, kind of lighter and more herbal tasting than I was craving that day--it definitely did not turn out all caramelized and beautifully browned and smoky like hers. At any rate, I think that my skills have really improved as I've used my wok more and more and maybe I should try this again. The better my results have gotten, though, the more I feel compelled to up my game. I am totally set on buying a pit stove when I get back to Boston for good next year. They sell them at the Taiwanese grocery where I bought the wok in Paraguay for only $25-$50. Hopefully they are not much more in Boston's china town (and hopefully it's not a fire-code violation or anything). It's basically bowl-shaped iron burner you connect directly to a gas tank (like a barbecue) and it lets you get the wok much, much hotter and apparently lends food a special flavor that only the 'breath of the wok' can give. I'm sure it would also cut down even more on the cooking time.

2. My second attempt was soy braised baby bock choi with sausage. They sell little dried pork sausages at the agroshopping that I think make a pretty good stand in for chinese sausage.
3. These sausages were especially good in what I would consider my first wok success: dried sausage fried rice. I don't remember any more, but I think there may have actually been shrimp in there too, in addition to eggs, beansprouts, and green onion.


4. This was kind of the tail end of the Persimmon season. We still get them at the supermarket sometimes, but they are all mushy and kind of wierdly Styrofoamy (like winter tomatoes) now.

5. Not realizing the season was over, I bought way too many not very good persimmons that sat in the fridge forever. Finally, I made this persimmon cake from them, where they worked very well. My grandmother devoured the majority of it.


6. I didn't use the wok for this Tom Ka Gai (Thai coconut chicken soup), but it did continue with the asian theme. It used up a lot of stuff we had, including some coconuts that were lying around (they don't always have them at the supermarket and so whenever they do I buy them just in case), some chicken legs and thighs that were in the freezer, and baby corn I bought on a wok-inspired whim. It may surprise you, but Paraguay actually produces a lot of lemon grass. It is a different variety than the southeast asian one, called cedrón kapi'i here, but shares many of the essential oils and the same flavor profile. The annoying part, for me, is that it is only used in tea here and not to cook with, so mostly you can only get the thin blades from the top of the plant and none of the lower, tougher stem that you use in cooking. So every time I'm in the market I examine all of the cedrón and try to get some of the coveted stem. I've had some luck a few times, like when I made this soup. But my hunt is finally over because just this week we planted two plants in our own herb garden.


7. A few times when I've been out in the field I've had really fantastic interviews, with farmers that are really enthusiastic about organic farming and their success with it. These farmers are not only extremely generous with their time and information, but sometimes even with their produce. I'm sorry I didn't get a good picture in the field, but the boiled mandioca here was from one of those farmers who brought out two very thick roots to show me how using green manure had really increased his yields. In his formerly nutrient poorer soil, he had only produced thin, fragile roots for him and his family to eat. Seeing how impressed I was, he offered the roots as a gift. The cheese here, queso paraguay, a crucial and unsubstitutable ingredient in traditional Paraguayan cooking, is also from a sugar-cane farmer whose wife makes cheese from their family's cows (though I had to purchase this one, it's a little scarcer than mandioca), and who, incidentally host a very nice peace corps volunteer with whom I had a long chat about the community.
8. These ingredients found their way into a very traditional dish of mandi'o chyryry, or fried mandioca with eggs, cheese, ham, and onion, cooked in a very untraditional wok. I promise a recipe for this and other paraguayan specialties will eventually make it on here.
9.We had a tenderloin festival a while back when I saw an Argentine cooking show where they were preparing one for beef carpaccio. I went to the butcher down the street and asked for their freshest beef tenderloin, explaining that I intended to eat it raw. He brought out a plastic-wrapped tube from the freezer, which had a decent color, but didn't really convince me. After getting some help to clean it up from youtube, it looked much better, but I chickened out in the end and, after freezing the cleaned tenderloin, I very quickly seared the outside on a cast iron pan before slicing it. Here it is served up with arugula, cherry tomatoes, capers, a lemon vinagrette, and spicy mayonaise. It was truly delicious, and aparently completely safe.
10. The next day we had another round of tenderloin, this time (slightly less) quickly seared, marinated in a mixture of soy, sugar, and sherry (I had no mirin--japanese cookign wine) and served cold with pickled onion, and chili-daikon relish. This is one of David's absolute favorite dishes. It is really delicious, flavorful, and rich, without being at all heavy.
11. Out of the leftover tenderloin and some cabbage, I threw together a quick beef teriyaki in the wok. In the back is a avocado, arrugula, and cherry tomato salad.


12. Also using the wok, I made some braised red cabbage, with lardons, orange peel, and green apple, to serve alongside the left over sundried tomato and mascarpone ravioli that had been in the freezer. This was a really excellent wintery meal for the cold weather we were having.

13. Finally, I made some orange pork, hoping to redeem my earlier attempt at smoky chile chicken. This was a little better, though the pork was a really horrible, barely edible quality. I won't be buying pork from the supermarket any more. But as future posts will attest, I have found an excellent source of really fresh organic pork grown buy small-holders and made some good pork dinners since. Notice the new rice bowls in this picture too. We were eating so much asian food that we decided it was worth getting some bowls for rice. We still need noodle bowls, but I haven't found quite the right size and shape yet.
Their is a colony of Japanese immigrants in the south of Paraguay, near Encarnacion, that grows Japanese-style, short-grain rice that is pretty good. It's texture is a little mushier than the real Japanese stuff, but it has a really good clean flavor and has been indispensable to making all of these asian-inspired dishes. I buy it at the Taiwanese grocery near the main public market in Asuncion.

Omnivore's Hundred

So, a British food blogger at Very Good Taste came up with an interesting game. He made a list of 100 items he thought every omnivore should try at least once, asked people to post it on their blog, bold the items they had tried, cross out the items they wouldn't consider trying, and link the results to his blog. While a lot of the choices would definitely make my 100, some of them definitely would not and strike me either as rather odd choices or things that I can't imagine anyone who is even remotely fond of eating wouldn't have tried already and eaten many times (e.g. catfish, poleta, calemari). Maybe I'll make my own list later. But it is a fun game, and you'll probably learn stuff about my by reading it. I can't figure out how to do strike-through on blogger, so I've put asterisks around the items I wouldn't consider trying, and I've annotated my list as I thought interesting. A quick count yields 26 items that I have not tried, and only three that I wouldn't consider trying, and in reality I probably would in certain circumstances. Chocolate and Zucchini has linked to wikipedia for the more obscure entries if you want more explanation.
At any rate, here it goes.


1. Venison (I would actually replace this with elk on my 100. I had elk once in vermont and once in Montreal and both times it was really delicious)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros (i've noticed these a lot on T.V. lately, and apparently producers think these are some form of scrambled eggs. They are actually fried eggs with a tomato or chile sauce. They are ok, but not great I much prefer a breakfast taco or quesadilla).
4. Steak tartare (not yet, but I'm now very fond of beef carpaccio, so I'm willing to give it a shot)
5. Crocodile (I've had Aligator but not croc)
6. Black pudding (delicious as part of a hangover-curing, artery-clogging irish breakfast; much more commenly known as morcilla, or blood sausage, some of David and my favorite parrillada fare)
7. Cheese fondue (I've had it in Switzerland!/if I see one more reference to this as dated or a blast for the '70s past I am really going to kill someone)
8. Carp (Better than you'd think. Whole fried carp chinese style is really good)
9. Borscht (I prefer the polish style, clear borscht with little tortellini-like dumplings). I've been dreaming of it since I went to a Polish restaurant near my friends apartment in Brooklyn a couple years ago. In fact, I found a recipe a few days ago and was going to try it out)
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho (anyone who reads this blog can attest to my obsession)
13. PB&J sandwich (not a big fan)
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (a french, washed-rind cows-milk cheese. I picked some up from Copone's once. If I recall it was pretty could, kind of caramely, but would definately not make my top 100 in the cheese category)
17. Black truffle (I don't know if it was just too subtle or a poor execution, but truffles did not make a big impression on me)
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes (not a big fan of the fruit wines I've had)
19. Steamed pork buns (I love these and miss them so much that I'm considering trying my hand at them)
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes (someday I will have a garden full of these)
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras (mostly in paté; I still want to try an honest to goodness dish made of foie gras)
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese (It's not bad, actually)
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (I guess I would try this, but I don't see much point)
27. Dulce de leche (I come from the land of Dulce de Leche--speaking of which, I'm really tired of Argentina getting sole credit for lots of things that are also typical of paraguay: yerba mate (it's called ilex paraguayensis for pete's sake), empanadas, and if that weren't enough they even steal credit for things that are unambiguously Paraguayan like chipa)
28. Oysters (I love them)
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda (aparently an Italian fondue-like dish)
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl (I don't really think the sourdough bowl in necessary)
33. Salted lassi (I got this one by mistake once, and I got to say, I thought it was disgusting)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (I've had them each separately (sorry mom) does that count?_
37. Clotted cream tea (Also my favorite. Tealuxe in Boston has great crumpets with clotted cream and strawberry jam and a fantastic tea selection)
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O ( i'd really rather have the vodka straight)
39. Gumbo ( I really hate okra, even in gumbo)
40. Oxtail (very common on my dinner table growing up. I love it in puchero and in pasta sauce)
41. Curried goat (I love goat curry, one reason for my secret plan to become a goat farmer)
42. Whole insects (I'd try them, I guess, but I wouldn't go out of my way to)
43. Phaal (apparently the hottest curry dish you can order at an indian restaurant. I know what I'm getting next time I visit Devon Ave. in Chicago)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more (there is a funny story about this and our unexpectedly large dinner bill the first week we were in Paraguay a year ago).
46. *Fugu* (this is that Japanese pufferfish dish. I can't imagine it's delicious enough to be worth even a small risk of death)
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel (I've recently discovered that eel is common in rural Paraguay, and on my last stint of field work had many a bowl of deliriously delicious eel soup)
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut (They really are quite good)
50. Sea urchin (I had some at Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo)
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi (very sour)
53. Abalone ( I don't believe I've had any)
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (But I've actually been on a fast-food boycott since I saw supersize me. It has been almost five years since I've had anything from an unambigously fast-food chain ('casual dining' such as Chile's not included)--my mom beats me though. Once when I was like in third grade she had a terrible hamburger at the Mcdonald's in the Field Museum in Chicago and vowed she would never eat fast food again. We all thought she was crazy (really), but it has been probably 20 years since she has eaten anything from a fast food restaurant besides KFC--my parents are loco for KFC, but even that they only have like once a year).
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini (I hate gin, and until several years ago, I didn't like olives either)
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. *Poutine* (This is a quebequeois specialty of french fries topped with cheese curds and brown gravy; it's not so much that I wouldn't consider trying this; i just can't imagine that I'd enjoy it that much)
60. Carob chips (I really don't know how this made the list. Unless your allergic to chocolate, there is no point)
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads (They come grilled a lot in Paraguay as molleja. I used to hate them, but I can stomach them now)
63. Kaolin (this is a kind of clay; I certainly wouldn't object to trying it, but would probably only do so in conjunction with some highly alkaline food like acorns or something that required its neutralizing properties).
64. Currywurst
65. Durian (I'm definitely intrigued after all the press this stinky southeast asian fruit has recieved)
66. Frogs’ legs (I can't remember if I've ever had these; if I did, they didn't make a big impression)
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake (I've had all of these, in fact, and, as long as the cinnemon is kept far, far away from them, I love these kinds of fried pastries).
68. Haggis (why not?)
69. Fried plantain (I got a taste for these when I was in Haiti for a summer teaching music)
70. *Chitterlings, or andouillette* (I just know that I wouldn't like these. I have such a history of disappointing experience with cow entrails that I don't really want to explore the possibilities of porcine viscera)
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini (I don't believe I've had them together)
73. Louche absinthe (not yet, but it's on my list)
74. Gjetost, or brunost (If someone offered, I would definitely try this Swedish whey cheese. But, odd-looking as it is, I don't think I'd try it on my own)
75. Roadkill (do people actually eat this? really? I thought that was a mean-spirited, classist joke. I guess it depends on the circumstances though)
76. Baijiu (an extremely potent, apparently fowl-tasting chinese liquor distilled from sorghum. I'm not opposed, but I'm a little past wild nights of drunkenness (usually)).
77. Hostess Fruit Pie (again, not sure how this made the list)
78. Snail (see No. 89 'Horse')
79. Lapsang souchong (a pine-smoked, chinese tea. I tried some at tea-luxe. It is very smoky, good for crisp weather)
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky (we just found some of these chocolote-covered cookie sticks at a Korean store in Asuncion)
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. (someday . . .)
85. Kobe beef (not yet, but some japanese restaurants in asuncion advertise kobe-style beef)
86. Hare (I've had rabit, and like it a lot, but I've never had an honest-to-goodness wild hare)
87. Goulash
88. Flowers (you'll notice in my future posts that nasturtium garnishes will become ubiquitous as our plants FINALLY started to bloom)
89. Horse (When I was in Switzerland. Me and a chinese-american friend tried to explain to our bemused Swiss hosts how it was strange and a little uncomfortable for Americans to eat Horse. However, it was our turn for bemusement when the Swiss shrieked "You guys eat that?" in disgust when we decided to order to the snails.
90. Criollo chocolate (not sure what this is)
91. Spam (It really doesn't taste bad, but I don't think this is a can't miss. It's pretty much represents all that is wrong with the food industry)
92. Soft shell crab (I think soft-shell crabs are kind of insect-like, and disturbing. With all the other delicious crabs out there, I'd leave this one off the list).
93. Rose harissa (I've had harissa but not Rose Harissa. But if it is made with rosewater, I probably wouldn't like it. They make meringue with rose water here, and I think it makes everything taste like old ladies' makeup)
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox (I think I blogged about this, but I'm always amazed by how much better this is in New York)
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Move Over Chicago, A Cambridge Boy's in Town

An article I wrote and published at upsidedownworld, a Latin American news website.

Belated blogging

Well . . . it's certainly been a long time. I had an intense couple months of fieldwork, which was followed by an intensive month of writing and my first academic conference. All this went well, but I'm afraid let this blog slide. While I haven't been blogging in the last months, I have not stopped cooking, and think I'll just spend the next few posts catching you all up on what I've been eating. The last post that I had planned is actually from when my parents were visiting Paraguay. We did a lot of cooking and eating, not unlike when they would visit me in Boston.

1. One of Asunción's must visit restaurants is Bar San Roque. It is actually Asuncion's oldest restaurant and has been open more than 100 years. We (re)discovered it when I was little and my sister was going through a phase of obsessively repeating words she thought sounded cool. We were deciding where to go for dinner, someone had suggested Bar San Roque, and Alice started an endless chant of "Bar San Roque, Bar San Roque . . . " until my parents relented. While she didn't actually want to go there, we have her craziness to thank for discovering one of our favorite restaurants in the whole world. The menu has some German influence, but San Roque has some of the best traditional Paraguayan food in Asuncion (of course the best traditional food is home cooked and in the countryside). Pictured here are the only things that a first time visitor should even consider ordering: Asado a la olla ( beef short ribs that have been boiled and then browned in there own rendered fat), and Bife Koguã (steaks cooked in a sauce with tomatoes, green and red peppers, onions, and cilantro, topped off with poached eggs). They make a good chipa guazú (a sort of corn and cheese soufflé), milanesa de surubí (breaded fried fillets of a delicious local river fish), and bife de lomito con cebollas (pan-grilled tenderloin with grilled onions). If you make it to Bar San Roque, you should definitely not pass up a style of Pilsen Chopp (draft of the excellent local pilsner-style beer). For some reason, the beer taste better here than anywhere else in town (ask for a manija grande de chopp).

2. We also went to a german festival at the local German club. After living in northeast Wisconsin for four years during college, I can't say I was impressed with the food. But it was cool to see them making split pea soup in these huge cauldrons.


3. One night when we didn't feel like going out I made a quick lima bean soup. I browned some bacon and a left over pork bone I had in the freezer (I believe it was left over from the tofu with pork and long beans), added some diced turnips and potatoes, onions and garlic, and deglazed with some sherry, covered with water and closed the pressure cooker. After maybe 15 minutes i added the fresh (but starchy paraguayan) lima beans, and softened them for another 15 minutes. I believe the green was fresh thyme. It was really delicious

4. I also had some chicken livers left over from something, and had been wanting to make chopped liver since I saw Ina Garten make it. I thought it was really good, but extremely rich. It was also one of the first meals I prepared with the awesome gift my parents gifted me: a food processor. I'll write more about the processor later, but I've got to say, it's been really useful. I've never been a food processor person, since until now I haven't undertaken many cooking tasks that a blender can't handle. But since I'm making so much from scratch here (e.g. tahini, falafel) it has come in really handy.
5. A different night we used purchases from the agroshopping and the mercado 4 (the largest public market in Asuncion) to make Surubí en papillote, with miso and shimeji mushrooms. Next to the fish is my mothers excellent asparagus risotto. Cooking fish in parchment paper is easy and delicious, and the result is light and very flavorful. I believe in addition to miso, mushrooms, and fish, these parchments had bean sprouts, carrots, green onion, ginger, pepper, and the white wine pictured here. I'm afraid I can't remember the name of the wine, but I would give it my highest recommendation. This particular bottle had sat for who knows how many years in probably the worst place imaginable for wine storage: above the refrigerator in the kitchen, where the heat irregularly ejected by the fridge and the stove did its best to spoil it. Then, it was moved outdoors and stored alternatively next to the stove and the grill for the better part of this year. By the time we actually opened it, the cork was as dry and crumbly, and we opened it only for lack of anything else to drink. Despite having been through wine hell, it was actually pretty good. A little too sweet, perhaps, but not bad.
6. The best meal we had was sun-dried tomato and mascarpone ravioli with tomato braised shortribs and sausages. I made the filling out of ground sun-dried tomatoes, mascarpone and sardo cheese, roasted red pepper, and rosemary. My mother made the sauce (I never get it to turn out as good) and probably the best pasta I've ever had in my life. The ravioli turned out perfect, they were pillowy and light with just the right texture.
7. The timing of my parents visit coincided with my Birthday. We had a big barbeque with all my relatives, and David made this really beautiful and excellent cake for me. It was just the kind of cake I like, not too sweet. He's actually much better at baking than I am.
8.Here is a very traditional lunch of puchero con bori bori. I promise that I am still working on a whole series of posts that will turn dinner bell into the go-to website for Paraguayan recipes, but until then, I'll post pictures and descriptions of some of the outstanding meals we have. It's actually kind of ironic. I've always hated when I'm looking for a really obscure recipe and I find a website that describes, pictures, or otherwise mentions some dish but gives no effort a providing a recipe. Now I am guilty of it myself. But I've decided this website and a potential Paraguayan cookbook are going to be my side project while I do my Fulbright year here. At any rate, puchero (in Paraguay) is basically a beef bone soup (made with neck bones, oxtail, and or short ribs) with boiled vegetables (at home we usually had carrots, potatoes, squash, and cabbage). Here you can see some of the meet and boiled vegetables served with a watercress salad (a traditional accompaniment) and the broth served with bori bori, which are dumplings made from cornmeal and cheese.
9. Another fruit that was in season around this time was "grosella" (to the right in the picture) It took me a while to figure out what this was. In the stands of the supermarket and farmers market they always looked really pretty, and I had tried and liked grosella juice before. But I couldn't imagine what it was or how it was used. But, guessing it would be juicy and taste sort of like a berry, I went ahead and bought some, assuming that I could identify on the internet. but when I examined and sampled one, I discovered that it was basically a flower bud and tasted as much, dry and kind of sour. Furthermore, my internet sleuthing was thwarted by the fact that "grosella" actually means current in standard Spanish and I couldn't find anything that seemed close to what I purchased. Finally, on a website talking about an agricultural diversification development project in Paraguay I found the scientific name, did a second search for that, and discovered that the fruit in question was actually quite familiar to me. It was the calyx of the roselle flower most commonly used to make the Mexican refreshment agua de jamaica, sometimes served hot as "hibiscus tea" in the U.S.
I knew that it was a member of the hibiscus family, but having only seen the flowers dried, I imagined that they looked more like this.
At any rate, I ended up substituting the hibiscus flowers for the cranberries in a recipe for cranberry sauce with kumquats (which were also in season and abundant). I think the sauce turned out ok, and it was meant to be served with

9. Roast ducks. But I think these particular ducks had sat in our grocer's freezer for a bit too long. While the duck itself tasted fine, the sauce definitely tasted 'off' after I added the duck pan drippings that had been de-glazed with some red wine. After having gone through all the trouble of identifying the roselle flowers and then making the sauce, I was kind of annoyed--I think especially because this was mine and my mom's birthday lunch. But then, I'm not sure if I like kumquats either. They seem like such a good citrusy idea, but in reallity, they are all pith and are kind of bitter. Maybe I just needed to add a lot more sugar. The nurse who comes to help take care of my grandmother nearly fainted when we told her how much the ducks cost, and she said she could get us live ones for much cheaper next time. I'll probably take her up on it.

El hormiguero del mundo

David and I are making a second attempt to use our limited garden space productively. Of the the 20-some heirloom tomato and poblano pepper seeds we planted, only one plant survived to reach maturity, and--as mentioned earlier--it produced only two fruits before it was defeated by illness. Of the dozen nasturtium seeds we planted, only two germinated and ants killed one of these. The other plant has grown large, but to date has produced only three flowers. I'm hoping we'll have more luck with our winter crop. We ripped up a small section of grass (to my mother's temp0rary horror) to plant a couple of rows of garden peas. The results were immediately promising, as they beat their 8-10 day germination time by 5-6 days. But no sooner had they reached two inches than those damned leaf cutter ants marched in and began decapitating our little seedlings. So far they have only gotten to three or four of them, but there is no stopping them if their set on ruining our plot. The most infuriating part is that they seem to cut the pea sprouts down just for spite. They just leave the leaves to rot next to the decapitated stem. They just can't stand to see something growing, and these mycoculturalists of the insect world have quickly gone from objects of amazement and wonder to objects of intense hatred. But I'm still hoping they will spare my peas. I am really excited to introduce my family to the wonders of fresh sweet peas, and to make at least a few meals where I don't have to be worried about the treason of Paraguay's starch peas. In the meantime, we have been enjoying some seasonal fruits and vegetables from the supermarket in our meals.

1. Heirloom Tomato Salad with China Rose Radishes and Avocado. This salad would have been amazing, had it not been for the avocado. Add avocado to the list of produce of puzzlingly inferior quality in paraguay (currently populated by peas and tomatoes). This had to be the worst avocado of my life. Avocados here tend to be flavorless and watery, but this one had a distinct foul bitterness and a vague rancid nut flavor. It was just horrible and enough to make me give up on Paraguayan avocados. But I keep buying them, because everytime I go to the supermarket they look slightly different in shape, color, and texture. Sometimes completely spherical, sometimes longer and recently even pear shaped, sometimes lighter green sometimes darker, sometimes smooth, sometimes rougher. It's maddening because each time I see a new shape I think, "this is it; this is the one," only to be dissapointed all over again. Well, I have one more in my fridge now, so we'll give it one more shot. But these beautiful radishes were an unexpected discovery. I bought them because they looked unusual, especially compared to the typically very conventional produce carried by our supermarket, but I didn't expect to like them very much. I thought they would be more like daikon than like salad radishes. But they are excellently spicy and sharp and reveal gorgeous patterns when cut into thin slices. After some internet searching I concluded our new find was a 'china rose' radish. We've been using them a lot in salads in the last few weeks. 2. Falafel with Tahini. This was a bit of a chore, but well worth it. There is an excellent brand of pita bread here, which (when reheated) is soft inside and crispy and chewy on the outside. I used NYtimes food writer Mark Bittman's recipe, and it turned out really well--though I would not suggest using a blender for this recipe. I ended up not having parsley the night I decided to make this, so I used watercress instead and it turned out fine. I also made some tahini by grinding up seseame seeds with oil in the blender and mixing it with plain yogurt, garlic, mint, and some green onion. I served it with some more radishes and green onion. For dessert we had another seasonal item, persimmons. They appeared a couple months ago and were such a persistent offering in the supermarket that I finally gave in and tried one. They are really delicious and sweet with an almost brown-sugar or maple syrup kind of flavor. We have been eating them a lot for dessert after lunch and dinner.
3. A closeup
4. Tofu Miso Soup with spinach. I've mentioned that the tofu here is excellent. I had a chance to go to the agroshopping and buy some from my favorite stand, which i believe is from a Taiwanese farm. The tofu was creamy and dense with an excellent clean flavor.
5. Yard-long beans with spicy ground pork and tofu. I promised this would make a reprise. It was good, but I had to use miso instead of black beans (hey fermented soy is fermented soy, right?) and I didn't put enough spice into this one, I think. But it was still good, and I like long beans much better than green beans; they have less water and a more concentrated, greener flavor.
6. Yogurt cheese with fresh herbs and olive oil. This was an elegant light dinner with some pita bread and the salad pictured below. I made the cheese from some homemade yogurt, strained in cheese cloth over night, rolled it in mint and basil, and drizzle it with olive oil and black pepper. It is garnished with nasturtium leaves.
6. Spinach salad with toasted almonds and spiced persimmons. This is one of the best salads I've ever made. I dressed it with lime juice, honey, toasted ground cumin and coriander, and olive oil, and sprinkled the persimmon with ground hot chile. It was perfect.

Back to Boston

So I found out today that I have been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to do research in Paraguay for 2008-2009. This is really great news for my research, because I was starting to get really worried that I was very short on time and now I will be able to extend my project and look at how different peasant organizations are reacting to the cannibalistic spread of the soybean industry. This probably means I'll be going back to the U.S. a little sooner than I expected, and I'll be back in Paraguay a lot sooner. All this back and forth is getting to be a bit much, but I certainly am not about to complain. But I figure I should catch up on my blogging about the meals I cooked in Boston before its time to go back again.

In the last few weeks before my sublet ran out, I took advantage of having the kitchen and made some pretty good meals.

1. This was not one of them: Curried Pumpkin soup. It was an extreme convenience meal. Preparation consisted of me dumping a can of pumpkin left behind by the former subletter of my room in beacon hill into a pot with a can of coconut milk, half a jar of red curry paste, and half a box of chicken broth. I threw in some left over canned tomatoes too, and topped it off with chopped cilantro. My roommate said it "tasted like curry sauce." I can't say that it was the most delicious thing I made while in Boston, but it fed me in less than 10 minutes, used up some leftover ingredients, and let me get back to work really quick as I was preparing my colloquium. And I wouldn't say it was 'bad.'2. This was followed, however, by one of the best meals I've cooked in a long time. Rum braised beef short rib with roasted butternut squash.
I have been meaning to do a big long, ranty post about how much I hate butternut squash. With all the tremendous, delicious diversity of squash that exists in the world and in its native American habitat, the butternut squash has somehow gained a regrettable culinary hegemony. Do a search for squash soup, winter vegetable stew, squash gnocchi, squash risotto--what you will--and you'll observe how the butternut, the bully of the squash world, has marginalized its more delicious and beautiful brothers into shameful obscurity. It's watery, flavorless flesh, smooth, pale skin, and industrial uniformity recalls alarmist cold war depictions of communist consumer autocracy. Yet, it is the capitalist forces of Safeway or Super Stop and Shop and some industrial-scale farm in California or Texas, rather than Big Brother, that has perfected blandness and obliterated choice. How could anyone pass up the turban squashs's explosive colors, the oddness of the hubbard and kabocha squashes, the elegance of the fairytale pumpkin and golden nugget squash, the buttercup squash's rustic charm, and the rich, creamy, even caramely, flesh they harbor for such a miserly vegetable as the butter nut squash? I'll never know. But . . . having just read the omnivores dilemma and being as I am, deeply concerned with agricultural sustainability, I decided that I would try to eat more locally while I was in Boston, and at whole foods (the only supermarket in the vicinity of the room I was renting) the butternut squash and the beets were about the only local produce available. The butternut squash's shortcomings aside, its shape did make for a nice presentation here, and this meal was delicious. I was very sad to have eaten such a delicious meal by myself. But as it was the middle of a very busy week, I couldn't find a dinner guest.
3. I had many guests at another memorable meal: "mussels two ways." In keeping with my desire to eat more locally, I steamed up two heaping bowls of new england mussels, one with tomato broth, olives, and Spanish chorizo, and another with leaks, cream and lemon zest. Mussels are my go to dinner party dish, because they are quick, cheap (at least in Boston) and delicious as long as they are fresh. They make a great impression without much work or expense. These took a little more work than I bargained for, as they were particularly dirty and bearded [cheap, quick, dirty and bearded . . . doesn't sound like the makings for a dinner party], but I put my friend Roberto to work cleaning as I get everything else ready. Luckily the crowd was a relaxed one with no hurry [despite appearances], and when it was ready we worked our leisurely way to the bottom of both bowls as well as many bottles of wine. I hope there will be lots more meals like this with these friends when I eventually get back to Boston.
4. This meal was meant for David while he was in town, but I didn't get to cooking it until the very last day that I was in my sublet kitchen. It's the second installment of squid ink pasta I promised long ago: black linguine with smoked salmon, capers, leeks and cream. The salmon and capers together were a bit salty, but still a good use of squid ink pasta, I think.
The last meal I made before returning to Paraguay was with my friend melanie. I believe this was tilapia, with cream and roasted poblano chile rajas. On the side was balsamic glazed brussel sprouts with caramelized shallots. This is one of my favorite fish recipes. The roasted peppers have a smoky, sweet, and entirely unique flavor that marries perfectly with the cream and fish.

Victory for Paraguayan Democracy!

Today we woke up in a new country. The opposition’s land-slide victory in Paraguay’s general elections will end the Colorado Party's 61-year hold on power. It was almost surreal last night, to hear the candidates one by one concede victory to Fernando Lugo only three hours after the poles closed. Blanca Ovelar, the Colorado Candidate, appeared on T.V. in the deserted party headquarters to declare that opposition candidate Fernando Lugo's 10-point lead "irreversible" and that she would do nothing to steal his victory. After what seemed like an ungracious, foot-dragging delay, Nicanor Duarte Frutos, the current president, appeared before the press gathered in the conference room at the presidential mansion, and declared the transition would be a peaceful one.

This comes after months of despicable smear campaigns the likes of which the U.S. has not known, reports of vote buying, discovery of voter registries that had thousands of dead people on them, and rumors of other assorted fraud attempts and conspiracy theories about how the election would be rigged and assassination plots would be hatched—months of news that generally cast doubt on the possibilities for a change in government. Some of these reports seemed far fetched, however, that the government was preparing massive fraud, would otherwise intervene in the results to prevent a transition, or would perhaps just refuse to give up power, were not at all outside the realm of possibility and imagination. In a poll by La Nación, a Paraguayan daily, 88% of respondents thought that the ruling party could potentially interfere with a change of power.

I can only conclude that the opposition's victory was so large that it exceeded the Colorado's capacity for fraud at the polls, and that the upwelling of support and celebration so substantial that the ruling party could not stomach the discontent, violence, and chaos that ignoring or overturning the popular will would have provoked. The scene that unfolded last night before the monument that holds the remains of Paraguay’s national heroes in downtown Asunción was one for the history books. The crowd of thousands that gathered to celebrate the opening of a new chapter in Paraguayan history looked much like the other crowds that have marked this countries flawed political history: the throngs that materialized after the 1989 overthrow of dictator Alfredo Stroessner, the March Massacre protests that followed Vice President Luis Argaña’s Assassination and held off ex-general (and 2008 retrograde Presidential Candidate) Lino Oviedo’s coup attempt, and the massive peasant protests that—for better or for worse—prevented the privatization and pilfering of state property and enterprise. Only, the ambivalence and ambiguity that loomed above the heads of these earlier crowds was absent last night. A process that began by replacing dictatorship with “Stroessnerism without Stroessner” and a flawed regime that has gone by a variety of labels (from the relatively succinct “Competitive Authoritarianism” to the rather cumbersome “Sustained Civil-Military Control without Democracy”) ended in the fall of a once monolithic power and the conclusive expression of the popular will.

It will be very difficult and probably impossible for this government to live up to the enormous expectations generated by the historic defeat of the ruling party. But I really do believe the defeat matters on its own. Yesterday, Paraguayans lived in a country where it was impossible for the Colorado Party to lose an election; where, in order to secure employment, you needed to join the ruling party; where the state served the private interests of its managers and employees at the expense of the public good, where corruption was so rampant that holding any ambition was pointless. Today, while much of this may continue to be true for quite a long time, people no longer believe it is inevitable. As people begin to imagine Paraguay as a more democratic country and to see themselves as democratic citizens, their conception of the actions and behaviors that best serve their interests can change. I really believe that what we imagine ourselves to be part of and how we imagine the workings of society has a hold of its own on the political and economic realities we perceive and how we choose to respond to them. The possibility of electoral defeat introduces new kinds of strategic uncertainty into politics for political parties, politicians, and interest groups, and this uncertainty potentially opens up stretches of political space and opportunity for groups long excluded from the exercise of power. Nothing about this is inevitable. While I do feel the election results are an unambiguous good, much depends on how the mess of political and social actors respond to the uncertainty created by this shake-up, how the game to use this uncertainty to serve the different private, group, and public interests of these actors plays out, and how far the outcomes of this game goes toward creating more inclusive institutions and relationships.

The opposition's celebration last night in front of the Panteón de los Héroes in downtown Asunción. Photo: ABC Color

Eternal Winter, the Sequal

So I spend two extremely productive, extremely cold months in Boston from the end of January to the end of March. I had a very successful first colloquium (thesis proposal) and made lots of progress. They just happened to be the coldest months of the year, and just as it was going to get warmer, it was time for me to go back to Paraguay. I wasn't complaining then (and I'm not really complaining now either) because I was looking forward to some beautiful late summer days and cool evenings. Unfortunately, fall came right on time in Paraguay, because after not so much as a couple nice weeks, a cold (and wet) front moved in. Only days after I gratefully stored the three sweaters I had been rotating for the last two months in Boston, I had to dig through my wardrobe to pull them out again.

All the cold weather is weighing me down, literally. I think I gained a lot of weight in Boston, mostly because I ate a lot of unnecessary meals when I was bored and tired of doing work, and especially because I ate all of these meals at the selection of fastish-food places in the vicinity of campus. But it didn't help that when I made time to cook, I found myself craving wintry comfort foods. But there is nothing like eating rich stews and roasts, and creamy, starchy root vegetables in a warm cosy room while the snow is falling outside. I was hoping to slim down by eating lots of fresh salads and summer fair, but the way it is working out, it looks like I am destined to live two years of my life in constant winter. I'm going to have to find a way to work off the extra calories.

Some of the meals I made in Boston were really spectacular. Unfortunately, the pictures of the two best meals I made the whole time I was there stayed behind withe the camera I forgot there, but I luckily saved most of them on my computer before I came back. So you'll have to take my word for it until manage to get a hold of them. In the meantime here are the rest

1. This was a masaman curry with beef, yukon gold potatoes, and eggplant.

2. Rosemary split pea soup with pancetta and cream. This soup would have been awesome, except we just took so much longer for the peas to totally soften than the package said that I finally gave up and we ate them with slighly more 'texture' than I prefer. It was still really good though.
3. Stir-fried tempeh with kim chee and sesame. This was awesome. I love kimchee in stir fry or with noodles. Because it's a fermented mixture of usually cabage, chilies, and dried shrimp it adds lots of complex flavors with just one ingredient, lending acidity, freshness, meatiness (or 'unami,' if you will), spicyness, and saltiness to any dish.
4. Roast chicken with mashed potatoes

5. Winter vegetable stew. I used this as a filling for a pot pie once, it was awesome. It was a very fast and satisfying with some rice, but is a much more special meal if you throw crust on it.
6. Tofu and green beans with spicy black-bean-ground-pork sauce. I think this will be making a reprise soon, as I got some really excellent tofu and some yard-long beans from the farmers market this week. I guess this is kind of a combination of ma po tofu and szechuan green beans, perhaps not traditional, but it was really good.
7. A closeup.
8. Pizza with spanish chorizo and mushrooms. I made this to make use of a block of mozzarella cheese an earlier tenant had left behind in the fridge in the apartment where I was subletting a room. Unfortunately, it was fat free mozzarella. I really want to know whose idea this was, and how they can possibly continue to sell it. It really was more of a stand-in for cheese, having perhaps some of its visual and physical properties, but absolutely none of its culinary properties. It melted more like plastic than like cheese and didn't taste far off either.

8. Caprese salad. My first meal upon returning to Paraguay and my only taste of summer. Of something like 20 heirloom tomato seedlings we managed to sprout, only one grew to a full plant. That plant only managed to produce two fruits before it succumbed to a particularly virulent case of virticulum wilt. It looks like it might pull through, but I don't know if any of the little green tomatoes will grow and ripen before it gets too cold.

As I was getting ready to head back to the states and I got very engrossed in my thesis proposal, I definitely indulged in some convenience meals. Normally I really hate doing this, because I really enjoy cooking, and if I don't have time to do any, it means that I am not really taking any sort of break from work all day. But, in this case, it was nice to feel really productive in my research. Plus, since it was the tale end of the summer holiday in Paraguay, my cousins and their friends were having nightly beer sessions around the pool, and I would join in, share a beer, and offer some of our dinner before heading in to do more work or to sleep--so I did get a little bit of social time.

Here are the nachos we made. Very quick and the ultimate in convenience food. We don't make them often because I really doesn't seem healthy, but once in a while to save you some work. I'm really glad they have tortilla chips at the supermarket now. When me and my sisters tried to make guacamole one Christmas, we had to serve it with crackers because there was nothing remotely like a tortilla chip in the country. But, I'm still considering smuggling an avocado tree into the country. They only grow reed avocados in Paraguay. They are really big and bland. The flesh is watery and slightly bitter, rather than buttery and creamy like the Hass avocados we get in the U.S. People think of avocado as a fruit here, and mash it with milk and sugar as a desert and are kind of grossed out by the idea of putting it in a salad or eating it as a vegetable. At any rate, they make really terrible guacamole, but weren't so bad chopped up along with some shredded chicken and homemade salsa for these nachos.
The next night we made some chicken quesadillas, using flour tortillas from the supermarket (Paraguay is getting so cosmopolitan). We managed to use up the rest of the chicken and the last of the leftover cheese from the christmas-time pizzeada here.
Then I made some hummus. While I actually had to make it completely from scratch (including the tahini) this still turned out to be a really fast and convenient meal. I just blended some sesame seeds with some oil, before adding the garbanzo beans which I had pressure cooked and the rest of the ingredients to the blender. It came out perfect, and along with the excellent and fluffy pita bread from the supermarket, and a watercress and roasted red pepper salad, we had an awesome and fresh dinner in less than half an hour (beat that Rachel Ray!)
I did manage to cook one really excellent, and rather labor intensive meal before taking off for the U.S:
squid-ink fettuccine with cuttlefish, yard-long beans, and yellow curry sauce.
We found the squid-ink pasta at the supermarket, imported form Uruguay, and the cuttlefish frozen from Argentina. We had to make everything else from scratch, which meant grinding the spices and making the curry mixture, and making the coconut milk from whole coconuts. It was really excellent. Squid-ink pasta has a really unique and sort of sweet and savory flavor and is also really visually striking. I think it is kind of intimidating to work with, because you don't want to just through a standard sauce on it. I wanted to pair it with flavors that could stand up well, and was really pleased with this. The coconut's richness and the aromatic spices worked really well with the pasta's flavor, the sweetness of the cuttlefish, and the freshness and crunch of the beans. This was a good meal (and a nice picture for a change--click on it to see it the large version), so much so that you can look forward to another installment of squid-ink fettuccine. I was in Somerville on super Tuesday to place my vote, and Capone's just happened to have squid-ink pasta that day. I'm trying to plan a special meal around it.

Navidad Tamalera

So since this was David's tropical Christmas in, and if I'm not mistaken his first Christmas away from the U.S. and away from his family, we decided we would adopt his family's Mexican Christmas tradition of making Tamales. This is no small commitment in Paraguay, where to my knowledge the Mexican population is limited to one NGO employee who is married to a Paraguayan. No masa or maseca is available in Paraguay so we had to do the whole process entirely from scratch. My mother brought us some powdered lime (cal) from the Mexican store in the U.S., and we proceeded to do everything ourselves from gathering the banana leaves, to making the nixtamal and grinding the masa, to cooking the filling and forming the tamales. Here it is, all documented. David wanted to be sure we didn't miss a single step of his tamalero exploits.


Well, they don't sell packages of dried corn husks in Paraguay, but luckily the place is silly with banana trees. Here is David harvesting some leaves from a small banana tree in my cousins' yard.
Rinsing the corn

Cooking the corn in the lime-water.
The result of cooking the corn in the lime-water. According to the instructions we were following, at this point, they the corn was supposed to swell up and its hulls are supposed to sort of dissolve into a slimy mess, leaving the white kernel of nixtamal behind. We must have been using a not appropriate variety of corn, because nothing remotely like that happened. We went on as though everything was fine though, because what else were we going to do? I'm not sure what went wrong, but the end result did not suffer for it.
Grinding the corn in the molino. This was quite a process. We ended up attaching the mill to a bench and working as a team. One of us would sit on the bench to weigh it down and load the corn in the hopper while the other one would grind away until he was too tired. Then we would switch, and so on until the entire vat of corn was ground.
The ground nixtamal.

The large cube of tamal dough that resulted from mixing the masa with lard and some broth.

Since the rest of Christmas dinner consisted of various kinds of pork, including this little guy (who turned out to be delicious slow roasted on the grill)




We decided to go with untraditional chicken as the filling for our tamales. Here is the chicken cooking in a broth. Incidentally 'with giblets' in Paraguay includes not just the gizzards, and liver and neck as in the U.S., but also the heart, the feet, and the head!While the chicken was cooking, David was making the chile sauce from dried chiles I had brought from the U.S. fur just such a special occasion. Here is the cooked shredded chicken mixed with the chile suace.


Here are all the tamal fixings ready to go, and the tortillera that my mom also brought from me from the U.S.Setting up the tamales in a make-shift steamer.


and finally serving them up at the dinner table.


The happy customers.


David claimed that these were the best tamales he had ever eaten and that the entire process of making them from scratch is worthwhile. Not having had nearly as many tamales as he has, I couldn't vouch for their authenticity. I can say that everyone really liked them a lot, which was a big relief. I think we both would have been disappointed if, after working so hard (the entire process took about two days), people weren't really crazy about them. But my family, which never really liked tamales before, said they were great, and my relatives liked them so much that they enthusiastically helped out when we used up the leftover masa in a goodbye party before my trip back to Boston.

Pesto Party

Ah, I remember summer like it was only a few weeks ago, and in fact it was only a few weeks ago that I was enjoying the best fruits of summer in Paraguay. In January in particular there are really amazing pineapples, melons, and mangoes. If you think you are a fan of pineapple--or if you think you are not for the matter--you really ought to go to paraguay. I have never anywhere in my life tasted such amazingly juicy, sweet, and perfect pineapple as in
Paraguay. It has absolutely nothing in common with the sour cardboard that passes for pineapple in the U.S.

In December, David, having missed out on the pesto season in the U.S., made me purchase five huge bunches of basil. The resulting pesto was too much to possibly use before it went bad so we had a week or two where everyday we tried to find some use for it. Utlmately we did have to throw some out, but here are some of the meals we made from it:

Pesto crusted with leeks, yard-long beens and ginger. It was so long ago now, i don't remember too many details, but I really love yard-long beans and am really happy they are available at the agro-shopping in Paraguay. They are denser and less watery than green beans and seem to have a more concentrated, greener flavor.
This gnocchi with asparagus, oyster mushrooms, and pesto was really excellent. Mushrooms have been available pretty regularly at the agrofair and sometimes even at the supermarket, which is a very recent and big development. Until very recently, only canned or jarred mushrooms were available in Paraguay.
We also made this pizza out of some dough we had frozen, fresh mozzarella and some of the best tomatoes I've found in paraguay, and, of course, pesto instead of tomato sauce. There is fresh arrugula on top. We actually made some much better and more attractive pizzas during my families Christmas visit, we didn't take any pictures.

Fire, Fire! My Beets!

Sorry again for the delay. I have been back in Boston for a couple of weeks now, focusing much more on trying to make sense of my thesis research and forge a new direction than on cooking and blogging. But I have managed to cook a few nice meals, including really fantastic mussels and clams marinier, which unfortunately I could not photograph, because my camera didn't have any batteries. I really need a new camera, one that you can recharge. Keeping mine supplied with batteries has been a whole ordeal which has interfered with my blogging. There has been lots of meals I haven't photographed in the last months because I had no batteries or because the recharger was broken, and then there has been other times that I couldn't load my pictures onto my computer because the camera had no batteries. I took virtually no pictures on my second trip to Japan because I had no batteries. I don't know if that's a good enough excuse, but it really is the main reasons I've been less diligent about posting in the last months.
At any rate, one of the more notable meals I recently cooked was at my friends' Abby and Sam's house. It was actually the day I had arrived in Boston from Paraguay, and, as they have played host to me before on my brief and tardily announced trips to Boston, I wanted to offer to cook them dinner partially by way of thanks. They gladly accepted, and before I set off to look at apartments in Porter Square and Beacon Hill (where I did in fact find my current residence), I hurriedly scoured the rather extravagant shelves of Savenor's market for something from which I could throw dinner together after returning from my frigid hunt. Despite having been transported from the tropical splendor of Paraguay to the gray, icy, darkness of Boston in less than a day, I was already craving wintery comfort food. I spotted some duck sausage and settled on making a meal from fettuccine with duck sausage, wild mushrooms, and radicchio and a warm salad of roasted beats and shallots with lemon and goat cheese.

While I think the meal certainly showed Abby and Sam the extent of my burning gratitude, I think they would probably have preferred a nice thank you card. Suffice it to say that I did, without a doubt, the stupidest, most embarrassing thing that I have ever done in the kitchen--and mind you I have been cooking since I was probably seven or eight and starting cooking whole meals in high school. The beets were taking a longer time than I had anticipated and so I had to keep checking them and finally, in frustration, I turned the temperature up to 500 degrees hoping that a few minutes of intense roasting would finish them off while I finalized the rest of the meal. Well, it did nearly finish off beets along with the occupants of the whole building, because, minutes after I turned up the heat, the oven started billowing foul-smelling black smoke that quickly filled the whole apartment. As it turned out, I had inadvertently left the oven mitt inside the oven beneath the roasting pan after returning the beets to the oven and turning the heat up. I must stay that such things really are well made, because rather than bursting into flames in the 500 degree oven, the hot pad simply blackened and smoldered, and it ceased to exude any smoke as soon as I extracted it from the oven with a pair of tongs and ran it under cold water.

As Abby, Sam and I desperately tried to vent the smoke out of the house by creating as much of an icy draft as possible, we noticed the flashing red lights outside.


Literally less than five minutes after we noticed the first bits of smoke, the Cambridge fire department arrived at the apartment with two trucks and a full team of firemen ready to kick some serious ass. The neighbors had smelled the smoke and called in the emergency thinking that plumbing work done earlier that day had provoked an electrical fire or something like that. By the time the firemen were there, the smoke was all gone, and everything was under control, but we had to sheepishly explain that 'we' had left an oven mitt in the oven and apologize for the false alarm. While I walked away from this meal with a great deal more confidence in oven mitts and my local fire department, I was deeply embarrassed and shaken, and I don't think I'll try cooking a meal after international travel again.

In the end, nothing was ruined, and the beet salad and pasta were both pretty good. I left the skins on the beets which gives them a roastier potato-like quality,


and, while the pasta was good, I think it need to be a little saucier. The bitter radicchio contrasted well with the richness of the duck, but it would have been better if I had made the effort to get a bottle of sweet vermouth, as I had originally planned, to reduce as part of the sauce to give it some sweetness as well.

Okonomiyucky

So . . . [I think I am finally give into my desire to start every post I've ever composed with the word 'so'] I have of a lot of catching up to do after my long absence from this blog--an absence that even my tech-not-so-savvy mother called 'shameful.' But this is not that post. I promise I will write all about my second trip to Japan, my family's visit to Paraguay for Christmas,
and the other meals I've cooked soon. But It is just too late tonight for such a marathon of writing and excruciatingly slow picture uploading. Instead, I'll just relate my improvised attempts to introduce Japanese culture to my household in a country that is as far from Japan--geographically, culturally, demographically, gastronomically--as you can possibly get.

Tonight, after watching a chance broadcast of memoirs of a geisha, I attempted (mostly unsuccesfully) to make Okonomiyaki. Granted, this was not a well thought out and planned attempt to carefully recreate the meals I had in Tokyo as much as it was a desperate attempt to scrape together dinner from the ingredients in a refrigerator left bare after the Christmas and new years holidays. But still, most of my meals are just as improvised. I had plenty of okonomiyaki's mainstay: cabbage, and despite its four-month repose in my vegetable bin (seriously) it was still light, fresh, and sweet. Besides that, I had only red bell pepper, and onion. I also lacked bonito flakes and the seaweed powder we sprinkled on top (is it kombu?), but I figured if I had the essentials, I could successfully create the main idea of okonomiyaki and my tastebuds and memory would forgive the absence of these embellishments. I made the sauce from ketchup following some instructions on the internet, using Paraguayan molasses (miel de caña) in stead of sugar and fish sauce in stead of Worcestershire sauce and it actually turned out remarkably similar to what they use in Japan.
The recipe I found online for the actual okonomiyaki was decidedly less accurate. I was suspicious after seeing that it required an entire cup of flour, but was too lazy to find another recipe and figured I could adjust the consistency. Despite its promising appearance, pre-flip, they came out extremely doughy, heavy, and gloopy, not a pleasant combination, especially when topped off with barbecue sauce and mayonnaise, as these Japanese griddlecakes are intended to be eaten. I put a lot less flour in the second one, and it turned out a lot lighter and tastier, but still not quite right. And with the first attempt having settled at the bottom of my stomach like a bottle of elmer's, it was hard to appreciate the improvement.
In addition to a recipe of dubious authenticity, I was working with a pan that lost its non-stick properties long ago and whose wide lip made it impossible to wield the spatula with sufficient leverage to flip the pancakes without turning them into an unsightly cabbage hash. While this was one of my least successful meals in a while, it wasn't so bad as a first attempt, especially given the circumstances. If I give it another try, I think that some ground pork or shrimp would definitely improve the results, and even less flour.


Yesterday's attempt at yakiudon fared much better. The noodles I purchased in one of asuncion's ambiguously asian shops (this one had mostly Chinese products but also a big bulk bag of Japanese rice and a smattering of southeast asian goods) did not turn out to be udon, despite the equally ambiguously Asian saleswoman's affirmation in this regard. The result was still very tasty, with thin slices of beef, cabbage, green onion, and red pepper along with the fried noodles.

I now have something like my own kitchen, be it a partial and partially furnished one, in the quincho, or the covered outdoor grilling area where there is also a stove and a newly purchased refrigerator. We've been investing in the minimum necessary kitchen accoutrements: kitchen towels, tupperware, a dish rack, a salad spinner. The latter has got to be one of the single most useful kitchen accessories; I use it every day to dry salad greens and fresh herbs and it far more efficient than the towel or paper towel alternative, which is time-consuming and cumbersome, and always leaves your greens soggy and makes your dressing watery. Salad spinners are pretty exotic in Paraguay, however: there were only two units, both on display in the store and everyone who has seen it has looked at it quizzically and asked what it is for. Moving into the quincho kitchen also instigated a daily covert knife war. At night I would go to my Tia Silvia's kitchen and take the sharpest chopping knife (which incidentally was too dull to cut a tomato before david sharpened it) to make dinner with. Then, each morning, my aunt would sneak to the quincho and steel it back while we were asleep. Since then, we bought our own extremely cheap chopping knife from the supermarket and my cousin's wife made gift of a second one after hearing about the knife wars. To make the kitchen fully functional we'd need to get a microwave and a toaster oven, but in the meantime we just walk over to my Aunts's kitchen if we need to heat something. Despite our incomplete kitchen I've managed some pretty good meals.


1. Tofu salad with carrots radishes and thai-style dressing. We discovered what might count as Asunción's china town the other day on the outskirts of the largest public market. Just outside the market's labyrinth of clothing, electronics, crafts, produce, meat, medicinal herb, hardware, and just-about-anything-you-can-imagine vendors are a strip of Chinese restaurants and grocery stores. I have been told there are a cluster of Korean restaurants and shops as well, but they are harder to find because they are unmarked mom and pop affairs. At any rate, the tofu bought was actually made in Paraguay and was really delicious. It was not as firm as we are used to in the U.S. which made it kind of a mess to brown, but it had a really good flavor and was really creamy. We would eat tofu at least twice a month in Boston, so I'm glad we won't have to go without it here. It would be kind of ridiculous too, given the amount of soybeans produced in Paraguay.


2. Rosemary roasted chicken and sautéed radishes with mustard-chive sauce with mashed potatoes. This was a really great meal. After seasoning with salt and pepper, I slid some some garlic and rosemary leaves under the skin of a few chicken quarters and pan seared them until the skin was nice and crispy. They went into the oven to finish while I made their mashed potato bed and sauteed some radishes we got from the market in butter and olive oil with garlic and green onion, followed by a deglazing and short steaming with dry vermouth, and finished off with some brown mustard. The skin was perfectly crisp and the flesh juicy and succulent.

3. Mostacciole al pesto with baby lima beans, smoked bacon, and zucchini. The difference between fresh versus dried vegetables in Paraguay as opposed to the U.S. is quickly becoming the bane of my kitchen. Ironically, after the sweetcorn and pea mishaps, I was prepared for the 'fresh' lima beans I purchased from the supermarkets refrigerator case to take at least 30 minutes of boiling to transform their starchy toughness into buttery creaminess, and felt very clever indeed for not falling prey to the freshness ruse of Paraguayan vegetables for a third time. And so, after browning the garlic and smoked bacon with the lima beans, I deglazed with some vermouth and added enough chicken broth to cook the beans. Unfortunately, they cooked very unevenly, and my judgment that they were done was based on what turned out to be a very unrepresentative sample. So while some of the beans were creamy and buttery, others were unpleasantly crunchy and raw tasting. It made me really mad, because I made a very deliberate attempt to avoid this pitfall, and because this meal would have been absolutely perfect had the lima beans been done right. The flavor and texture of the few beans that were cooked paired perfectly with the richness and smokiness of the bacon, and the freshness of the zucchini and pesto.

4. Ingredients for roasted pork spring rolls. I brought back some spring roll wrappers from Boston because all of the other ingredients to make them are available here, maybe the wrappers too if we look in the Korean shops (but I really doubt it). After going through all the trouble of bringing thai basil seeds here (none of which sprouted incidentally) I realized that the variety of basil in Paraguay has remarkably similar strong liquorish flavor and is a more than acceptable stand in. I marinated a couple of pork loins in garlic, fish sauce, pepper, sugar, and a little olive oil and roasted them in the oven. As stinky and offensive as fish sauce smells--and really isn't rotting fish a flavor that most of us would think to avoid rather than add to our dinner--it adds a really wonderful savory quality to anything you add it to. I think it makes a great marinade for this reason, I read somewhere about how anchovies are actually a secret ingredient for many chefs and that they find their way into some unexpected dishes for similar reasons.


5. Roasted pork springrolls with peanut sauce. When you get these at a Vietnamese restaurant they are usually filled with rice vermicelli, but instead we fill them with julienned carrots, green onion, and bean sprouts, in addition to fresh basil, mint, and cilantro . Generally, I think that trying to be as authentic as possible in recreating the cuisine of other cultures yields the best results. But I'm never a fan of starch-filled starch, and I really think that filling them with julienned vegetables is an improvement. They are even lighter and fresher tasting this way. It also helped that, instead of the miserly bits of leathery pork that you sometimes get, we used tender slices of rosy-pink pork tenderloin.


6. Vietnamese sandwiches made from the leftovers. We had the leftover pork in some sandwiches with some grapes and peaches. The fruit has been really excellent. David discovered that the pears here rival Harry and David of Christmas-time fame. I never would have bought them, because besides the box my mother will get for Christmas, I've always found pears to be a rather joyless fruit. But these are juicy and sweet, and have a firm but yielding texture and are just slightly gritty. It's strange though, because the pears from Argentina and Chile (the likely source of these pears) that make it to the U.S. are usually tough and flavorless, or slimy and pasty.

7. An extremely improvised soup au pistou. I made this to use up the last of the zucchini and the pesto. It was definitely not bad given how I unplanned it was and that it was missing some of the principle ingredients.


8. At long last my first real caprese salad in a very long time. At the agroshopping I discovered that someone, specifically a cooperative of Japanese farmers, had beat me in introducing the wonders of heirloom tomatoes to Paraguay. They only had one variety however, and it except for one lumpy one that we quickly seized, you wouldn't necessarily know that they weren't just really sweet, juicy, and meaty regular tomatoes. After purchasing them, we went directly to the cheese stand and picked up some fresh mozzarella. I see some more pizza in our future. Also a lot more pesto. David made me buy an absurd amount of basil from which we made an absurd amount of pesto. I guess we are just making up for missing out on nearly the whole summer and fall in the U.S.


9. Arugula and watercress salad with heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil mustard dressing. The arugula and the watercress are really wonderful here, much sharper and spicier than in the U.S. The dressing was good, but owes its odd color to the fact that the only vinegar I had was a small bottle of watery balsamic.


10. Classic leek and potato soup. Another improvised meal, but a good one. My mom made this a lot when we were growing up and I happened to have all the ingredients on hand. I forgot that I still had a piece of smoked bacon or I would have added that too.

Back in El Jardín del Mundo

El Jardín del Mundo feels more like el Horno del Mundo right now. I got back to Paraguay on monday night and was immediately greeted by the perfume of coconut flowers in the heavy, humid air that very quickly become associated with this place for anyone who has lived here here. I haven't been here very often in winter, so it was strange to arrive in July last time. The feeling coming off the plane was much more familiar and comforting, and it was so nice to escape Boston just as the crisp clear days and beautiful fall colors were ending and the miserly days of late autumn were about to begin. The nights here have been amazing. I love nights that are warm and humid enough to feel tropical and breezy but still not sticky or uncomfortable. The days, however, have already become unbearable, reaching an unimaginable 117F degrees in certain parts of the city, yesterday, and summer is still ahead of us. In January the city empties as anyone with the means goes to the beach in Argentina, or Brazil, or at least to the nearby lake town of San Bernardino.

To my great chagrin, none of the aforementioned heirloom seeds sprouted in our backyard garden, allegedly because the ground has been too hot, though I suspect poor agronomic technique. I think there may be time to take a second shot at it, and perhaps the seeds I gave to my cousins fared better. I will have my heirloom tomatoes!

I booked the cheapest itinerary I could find back to Paraguay for the dates that I needed. Unfortunately, this involved flying into La Guardia on Saturday afternoon from Boston and leaving JFK for Sao Paulo early on Sunday morning. Heavy luggage, despite its name, is not really made for lugging all around New York and surrounding burroughs. This all turned out very well for me, however, and would have been glad to have done it even if it hadn't saved me any money at all, because I got to stay the night at my friend Pat's house. Pat and I met what now seems like many years ago when we both did a semester of study abroad in Argentina, and we have been pretty admirable about staying in touch since, at least about seeing each other a couple times a year, if not at actually talking or writing often. Pat and his roommate Sasha checked out Dinner Bell on occasion, and I've promised them many meals that have never materialized. This quick visit, dictated by the market for international travel, seemed a perfect opportunity to make good on my offer.

Pat and I stepped outside of his Brooklyn apartment about 20 minutes before closing time for the variety of food shops and specialty grocers that populate the storefronts, a bit concerned that we'd missed the boat. Before those 20 minutes had elapsed, we were able to visit a first-rate fish shop, patisserie/boulangerie, wineshop, meat market, and produce stand, assembling all of the necessary ingredients for an awesome seafood stew. Here are the assorted vegetables along with a slice of pancetta.


Having assembled said ingredients in less than 20 minutes, I was left with something less than what is required for a classic bouillabaisse. Furthermore, after consulting a recipe, it seemed to me that the steps required for bouillabaisse were entirely excessive, particularly considering that I didn't even have the pages of ingredients required. Surely something more delicious could be made with less voulez-vous. So I hesitated for a while, deciding what other brand of seafood stew should form the basis of my creation. I was thinking of the Cioppino recipes I've seen on the food network and the amazing Mexican sopa de mariscos that I had eaten in Puerto Vallarta/approximated with Rick Bayless's recipes. The main dilemma was what to do with the whole octopus we had purchased from the fish market.

There are two ways to cook octopus, the fast but difficult way and the slow but easy way. The former involves dropping in the octopus last after the other ingredients are done and cooking it only very briefly. Any longer than a minute and it gets tough as leather. The problem is that octopus is also tough when it is still raw as well, so it's hard to know if you have undershot or overshot the very narrow window. The latter method involves cooking the octopus for 1-2 hours in the oven, allowing the extended exposure to the high temperature to soften the proteins and the braising liquid to penetrate the octopus resulting in a very agreeable texture and lots of flavor. You could always try option 1 and opt for method 2 in the case that you overcook it, except that we were making mussels and clams and shrimp in addition to octopus and they would be awful after cooking for so long. The other problem with octopus is that it lets out a tremendous amount of water as it cooks, and this could have thrown all the proportions off if I'd used method number 1. Of course, I could have blanched the octopus in a different pot until it was done, and chopped and added it to the rest of the ingredients, but then I would not have taken advantage of all of the flavorful octopus juice (seriously, it was good).

So . . . after what probably seemed like too long to my hosts/diners I decided that I would puree the vegetables and tomatoes and fry them into a paste, as to form the base for any variety of Mexican soups, and after deglazing with a bit of white wine, I would add the uncooked octopus and put it into the 450 oven for and hour and a half. In the meantime I made a roasted red bell pepper rouille, and threw the sliced potatoes in with the octopus after an hour. When it came out, the octopus was nearly done and a nice broth had formed from the cooking liquid and the paste. In went the clams, shrimp, and mussels on top of the stove. Topped off with a crouton and some of the red bell pepper rouille, it was ready to go.




I've made many a seafood soup in my day, but this was exceptionally good. In large part due to the ingredients we had, but the slow braise gave the octopus a perfect texture, and most of all, made a broth more flavorful than any other seafood stew I've made (or perhaps even tasted).



Desert was an assortment of offerings, including butterscotch pudding, pumpkin cheesecake, a sour cherry tart (it had some ridiculous French name that I can't recall now, but something like floucantie) and a chocolate soufflé. The tart and the soufflé were my favorite, but the cheesecake was not bad considering my aversion to pumpkin pie spices.


We had quite a bit of wine and even headed out briefly down the street to one of my friends' favorite beer bars. I at least got a taste of Halloween before leaving the country for a place that knows very little of jack-o-lanterns. It was the perfect way to spend the night before I left the U.S.


I arrived in Paraguay just in time for David's birthday. He has been bugging me for months that he wanted a strawberry cake. We had a slice of one at the expoferia where the producers of Paraguay's agricultural and manufactured goods come together to promote their products each year, and where a small-farmers' association was selling cake made from their strawberries. Admittedly, it was delicious, but David wanted me to buy one for my little niece's birthday even though the lady behind the counter clearly said that kids prefer dulce de leche cakes. At any rate, I knew I'd be in trouble if I didn't produce a strawberry cake for his birthday. Unfortunately, the bakery shop we always go to said they weren't making them anymore because strawberries were out of season (not entirely true, but perhaps they are too expensive in late season to make a cake without a prior order). Rather than losing an entire afternoon running around the entire city in 100-plus degree heat and potentially still coming up short, I decided that I would just make the cake myself. I went to the supermarket and very quickly found all of the ingredients necessary, including two cake pans that I was told I could not return if I found that I already had cake pans at home.

While not the most beautiful cake I've ever seen or made (and much less attractive than the ones you get a bake shops in Asunción), it was very tasty and a close enough approximation to David's dream cake that he was happy. It had mashed strawberries in the cake batter and was filled with strawberries and whipped cream inside and out.


We didn't actually get to eating the cake until the day after his birthday, because the night of his birthday I took him out for Japanese food. It was not bad considering that these particular sushi chefs and cooks were working so far from home, and, while it was hard to appreciate after having been in Japan so recently, it was a nice birthday dinner for David who after four months here was probably ready for something a little different. I'm curious to go back and try the meat dishes--beef being something also highly appreciated and well prepared by the Japanese but much more abundant in Paraguay than tuna or snapper (or than in Japan). So the next night we gathered my family for cake and a bilingual version of happy birthday.


Here is David blowing out the candle:

Kitchen Squatter

So it has been two months since I've had a kitchen that I could in any sense call my own. It's been four months since I had a kitchen that I could call entirely my own. So its been hard to do a lot of cooking, which means I've been ordering out and eating out way more than I like and spending way too much money to feed myself. But, I have made really good progress on my thesis proposal while I've been in Boston, and I suppose its worth it so that someday I can say I am no longer a student. Putting a thesis together is such a long and thankless process. It really is like Sisyphus and the boulder. Every time you write a new proposal and expend the enormous effort it takes to address whatever set of critiques you received on the last version, or accommodate new evidence, or place the study in relevant theoretical framework, it just creates new problems and new critiques and you have to do it again, and again, and again with no end. This has been the last year of my life, and, while I can say that I am definitely much closer to having a viable thesis project than I was a year ago, the work is very repetitive and it is hard to ever feel you have accomplished anything. Not feeling any sense of accomplishment is not so good for motivation. I think that is one reason that I like cooking so much. It is not unlike other creative projects like writing a novel or a song or making a sculpture, but instead of requiring enormous of sacrifice and patience, it is instantly gratifying. Even the most elaborate meals and dinner parties I've hosted have been planned at most a week in advance. I plan my weeknight dinners in front of the fridge and produce something really satisfying in an hour or so. Cooking gives me an opportunity to exercise my creativity, solve problems, and concentrate on something that gives immediate results. I think it is really therapeutic for someone like me, who has been investing in an uncertain future for years and has years to wait before making good on that investment, to have some part of each day where I feel so productive and useful. I noticed this especially during the few times that I have been able to cook in the last weeks. I hadn't realized how much I missed the familiar sequence of cooking's physical tasks: chopping the vegetables, frying the aromatics, browning the protein, adding the vegetables, seasoning with salt, deglazing the pan, adjusting the heat, stirring, finishing with fresh herbs; all of this has a logical and deeply comforting flow.

I stopped in Chicago to see my family for a few days on my way back from Japan last month. My mom made me an early thanksgiving dinner, since I'll be in Paraguay at the end of November. I've only ever missed thanksgiving once, and that was when I was doing my study abroad in Argentina. Being from a food-obsessed family, I would say that thanksgiving is probably the most important holiday for us, though any holiday is easily made into an excuse to do some serious cooking. I really love thanksgiving, I think it is the best American tradition (leaving aside the idealized vision it provides of Native Americans' relationship to their colonial intruders). No other holiday is more completely about family and sharing with those that mean most to you. I think it is really wonderful that we all get a day off work and school to do what we ought to do every day. Plus, my mom makes a pretty phenomenal turkey, actually two turkeys and either a pork or beef roast too, along with homemade dinner rolls that people demand year after year and pear and apple tarts made with homemade puff pastry. Each year, my tia Mai makes better mashed potatoes and mashed sweet potatoes than I've ever tasted elsewhere and homemade mayonnaise to dress the sandwiches we make from the leftover turkey after getting back from day-after-thanksgiving shopping. Somehow, I didn't manage to get any pictures of the thanksgiving rehearsal my mom held for me, but it was very good. I'll have to plan thanksgiving for David and I and my family in Paraguay. It will be fun to cook my own thanksgiving dinner and to share these traditions with my extended family, but I know it will be a little sad to celebrate where the holiday doesn't have the same meaning.

I did take a picture of another meal we cooked while I was in Chicago to take care of my Mexican fix. I have way too much luggage to take back with me to Paraguay, but I'm still thinking I should buy a bag of Maseca to be able to make tortillas there. Either that, or I'm going to have to learn to make my own masa from raw corn, because there is really no mexican food to speak of (or to eat) in Paraguay. Don't tell the agricultural inspection service, but I took some poblano, jalapeño, tomatillo, and epazote seeds with me, and David supposedly planted some in the garden. I couldn't go a whole year without any mexican food. This dinner will have to tide me over until the plants start to bear fruit: steak tacos with homemade corn tortillas and homemade salsa, guacamole, and black bean salad.

I've been staying with one of David's friends and fellow clarinetists, Kristian, since I've been back in town. It's pretty far from any supermarkets though, but I managed to carry back some groceries on the T a few times and make some good meals. I made a pretty good African peanut stew that didn't get photographed unfortunately. But Kristian and his brother were pretty impressed, so you don't have to take my word that it was pretty good.

I did get a picture of this linguine with spicy sausage and tomato sauce. It was a good quick meal that used up the leftover ingredients from the African peanut stew.
Yesterday, I had my friend Melanie over for dinner and had a lot of fun cooking and drinking way too much of Kristian's dad's "Three-Buck Chuck." That small step up from Carlo Rossi makes all the difference. We quickly concluded that it was well worth all three of those bucks. After putting away for bottles between the three of us, we engaged in a bought unsuccessful intercontinental 'drunk dialing' unfortunately neither David nor our French friend Vincent answered their phone.

Dinner was wholewheat noodles with browned tofu, broccoli rabe, crimini mushrooms, and peanut sauce. Melanie said she was amazed at what can be done with a few ingredients. It was pretty good considering how improvised it was. I was just going to serve it with rice, but all we could find was super fancy rice at more than $10 for a small jar at Savenor's market in Beacon Hill where we stopped on our way to the T station. The noodles were even better I think, and the bitterness of the broccoli rabe was matched perfectly by the deeply toasted garlic and tempered by sweet and creamy peanut sauce.
Here is the basic recipe:

1 lbs. fresh wholewheat or buckwheat noodles
1 package firm tofu (you could also use chicken, but I think the flavor and texture of tofu are perfect in this).
6 cloves of garlic sliced thinly
Good Soy Sauce (I like San-J organic tamari or shoyu)
1 bunch broccoli rabe, chopped
1/3 cup dry white wine (old sour wine works well, because the sauce needs the acidity)
1 cup sliced mushrooms (shitakes, oyster, shimeji or other wild mushrooms would be good)
1/3-1/2 cup chunky 'natural' peanut better (the kind that separates when it sits and has no sugar)
1/2-1 cup reserved pasta cooking water
small bunch cilantro

Cut the tofu to desired size (I like larger rectangles) and brown well in some peanut oil. It browns much better if you don't move the pieces around at all until they are ready to flip. Once they are browned add a few table spoons of soy sauce (3). Set aside. Wipe out the pan and brown the garlic in some more peanut oil. Don't let it burn, but let it get a deep toasty golden. Add the mushrooms season with salt and saute until the mushrooms have released their liquids and it has evaporated. Add the broccoli rabe, and stir fry over very high heat, deglaze with the white wine and cover the saucepan to let the broccoli rabe steam until it is tender, take off the heat and add the tofu back in. Meanwhile cook the noodles in salted water. When you are ready to serve, add the peanut better to the broccoli rabe tofu mixture and add enough of the pasta cooking water to make a sauce of creamy consistency, it should not be too watery but if it is too thick it won't coat the noodles and other ingredients either. Toss with the noodles and garnish with chopped cilantro. I think I will experiment with adding some sugar to the peanut sauce if I make this again.

Here are Melanie and Kristian ready to pounce.
We also had a dessert course of a single cheese. I forget the name (I have to remember to save cheese labels so I can post my reviews!) but it was a great value. It was only $5 but a very tasty, soft french cows milk wrapped in chestnut leaves. It had a very creamy almost liquidy texture at room temperature, and a buttery flavor that was good with lingenberry jam as for dessert.
A timer shot of Melanie and I.