Category: Dinner

The addition of a mojo (fragrant garlic & herb vinegar & lime sauce) as a final step takes it over the top.

Pollo A La Brasa Venezolano recipe here: https://mommyshomecooking.com/easy-venezuelan-roasted…/

It’s funny how it really does help me motivate if there’s a new recipe for me to try; I guess that’s part of the ADHD thing. I am super-motivated by novelty. (It’s a good thing Kevin is willing to just make the black beans and rice for me every time, so I don’t have to trudge through that.)

The new dish this time was Venezuelan roast chicken, which I really like. I’m learning the flavors — not heavy on heat, it seems like, but lots of vinegar, lime, onion and garlic, oregano, cumin, parsley or cilantro. And they use green peppers a lot, which I don’t generally cook with (unless I’m making stuffed green peppers, which I do on occasion.)

Lots of the cooking technique is the same as what I’d normally cook, but the flavor profile is just different enough to make it interesting to me.

Pollo A La Brasa Venezolano recipe here: https://mommyshomecooking.com/easy-venezuelan-roasted…/

Step 1 for this dish was to chop up stuff, mix it, pulverize it in a food processor to make a marinade for chicken. The only tricky bit was multiplying the recipe by 6 (there are currently about 55 refugees at the station) — I had a moment when I wasn’t sure I had a big enough bowl. But it turned out I did have one giant metal bowl.

We’ve been cooking one meal about once a week for a month or so now, and I think we can mostly keep doing that through the fall. I’m hoping they can resettle these groups and get them into shelters before winter hits — if I were going to be cooking for them long-term, I imagine I’d invest in more restaurant-size cookware.

I just don’t see how it’s going to be feasible to have them still just waiting in front of the police station once Chicago gets into the really bad weather. As it is, I think they’re going to need more than one flimsy pop-up tent pretty soon.

(Again, locals, if you’d like to join the meal train, let me know, and I’ll put you in touch with the organizer.)

Gods, I love when I have a good curry on hand — makes my life so much better. Made Sri Lankan black pork curry this weekend, intensely flavored with vinegar and black pepper, and have been happily eating it paired with red cabbage sambol and a mix of red and white rice (red rice has a lower glycemic index than white, and I like the taste of the blend).

It uses quite a bit of black pepper, so I usually keep some ground (using the coffee grinder that I use as a spice grinder) on hand for this. I was out, so I ground up another batch. I love the Penzey’s Tellicherry black peppercorns flavor.

Recipes:

https://serendibkitchen.com/2021/11/06/black-pork-curry/

https://serendibkitchen.com/…/sri-lankan-red-cabbage…/

Red Cabbage Varai /
Muttaikoss Varai
(15-20 minutes, serves 8.)

Sweet, firm, rich with coconut.

8 oz. cabbage
1 medium onion, minced
2 fresh green chilies, seeded and chopped
¼ rounded tsp. ground turmeric
¼ rounded tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 rounded tsp. salt
2 T lime juice
½ cup shredded unsweetened coconut

1. Shred cabbage finely. Wash well, drain, and put into a large saucepan. Don’t worry about drying the water clinging to the cabbage—you actually want that water to help steam the cabbage.

2. Add all the other ingredients except the coconut. Cover and cook gently until cabbage is tender, stirring periodically.

3. Uncover, add coconut, stir well, and when the liquid in the pan has been absorbed by the coconut, remove from heat. Allow to cool before serving.

*****

Red Cabbage Sambol
(10-15 minutes, serves 8.)

8 oz. cabbage
1 medium onion, minced
1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
1-2 cups cherry tomatoes, chopped
juice of 2 small limes (about 2-3 Tbsp.)
1-2 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. fine salt

1. Shred cabbage finely (by hand or in food processor).

2. Add onion, coconut, tomato, lime juice, sugar, salt. Mix thoroughly.

Note: This can be served immediately, but best if allowed to sit and blend for an hour or so. It will keep in the fridge for a good week — refresh with a little extra lime juice as needed.

*****

I had some red cabbage leftover from cooking for the Venezuelan refugees (making an entire half-tray of cabbage slaw for 40 only used up half a cabbage!), so I thought it would be a good time to experiment with it a little for Sri Lankan cooking.

I’d tried using red cabbage before, in a varai, which is a lightly cooked vegetable dish, but my beautiful red cabbage turned blue-grey, thoroughly unappetizing. I was so sad.

But I went and researched, and it turns out there’s a simple fix — add some acid. Vinegar, lemon juice, lime juice will all work, and lime juice is common in our recipes, so that seemed like the natural option. I added 2 T of lime juice to the dish, and look, it’s a lovely purple now.

*****

I also thought it was worth trying cabbage in a sambol (which doesn’t have heat applied), so I just substituted it into my kale sambol recipe, which is really Roshani‘s Aunty Indranee’s kale sambol recipe, and it worked beautifully, I think.

I’m going to make a pork curry next, and I think both of these would be terrific accompaniments for that. I’ve portioned some out into storage bags and put them in the freezer — I’m curious to see if they’ll freeze well. I suspect the fresh tomatoes will get a little sad, and if I were actually going to make a batch of cabbage sambol for freezing, I’d wait to chop and add the tomatoes as a last step after thawing the sambol.

But aside from that, I *think* this may work okay, in which case, it’d be a great way to make it easier for me to get some nice fibrous veggies into me — I like lots of vegetable dishes, but I get lazy about cooking them, and will often default to just a meat curry and rice or bread. (These are also really cheap dishes, which is particularly nice now that the price of groceries has gone up so much…)

If I can make a big batch of cabbage and freeze it (maybe portioning it out), I think it might make it easy to grab and add on nights when I’ve made a curry? We’ll see how it does freezing — I’m not sure how long give it for a good test, though. Will a day or two be enough, or should I give it a week or a month?

Recipes in next post!

Despite my doughy arepas, I did end up fairly pleased with what I dropped off to the refugees on Saturday; I think it’s a pretty classic Venezuelan meal.

Clockwise from top left: roasted sweet potatoes, pulled pork topped with cotija cheese, pickled red onions, arepas, cabbage & carrot slaw, chicken & avocado salad, black beans, served with tizana (fruit with juice). I just wish I’d had some hot sauce on hand to send along for them’s that like it hot.

There are various Venezuelan restaurants in Chicago — now I want to go eat at one of them, and see how all this is SUPPOSED to taste. I’ve had arepas before, but long enough ago that I don’t really remember the texture.

So, I was a little anxious about trying to make arepas, and rightly so, I think — it’s not that they’re particularly difficult (if you can make pancakes, you can make arepas), but doing them well? I’m pretty sure mine were more doughy and dense than is ideal — they didn’t puff up the way they should have.

In my defense, I bought the wrong flour (you’re supposed to use masarepa, and I accidentally bought masa harina, and I found a substitute where you take out 1/2 c. of masa harina and put in 1/4 c. each of coconut flour and gluten-free flour), which probably had an effect. I want to try again, using the right flour, and paying a little more attention to getting the texture of the dough right (it’s a precise balance between too dry and too wet).

But oh well, the first time is often awful. At least these were edible, even if the Venezuelan refugees may have been laughing at my beginner efforts.

Cooking for the refugees this weekend, I made a Venezuelan slaw to go with the pulled pork and arepas. It’s funny — it’s only in recent years that I’ve gotten to actually like this kind of thing, but now I think it makes the sandwich so much better. Although admittedly, this was a little mild for my tastes — I’d punch up the lime juice AND add a hefty dose of green chili.

This is the recipe I used, but I bet you can find better ones: https://food52.com/…/14115-black-bean-arepas-with…

It is awfully pretty, though!

One of the suggested fillings for Venezuelan arepas is sweet potato, which seems to be typically sliced and then just sautéed on the stovetop until cooked. That takes a while stirring, though, especially if you’re cooking in bulk for a large crowd.

I ended up roasting them instead (toss in olive oil, salt and pepper, spread on a foil-lined sheet pan and roast at 400F in a pre-heated oven for about 15 minutes), which freed up my time to cook other things while they were going — when making large quantities (this is 8 sweet potatoes), roasting is a huge boon to efficiency.

One of the things I learned when working on the Sri Lankan cookbooks is that relatively few of our dishes involve roasting, which makes sense if you think about it — in a tropical country, even if you had an oven (which a lot of village folks didn’t, I suspect), you wouldn’t want to run it at high heat for very long! So pan-frying makes sense.

And the result is a little different, of course, so I can’t claim this is completely authentic to Venezuelan cuisine, but hopefully it’s close enough for happy taste buds. I thought it was delicious, and a really excellent pairing for the pulled pork. My kids still don’t like sweet potatoes, which bewilders me — I’ll convert them someday, though!

Reina Pepiada is a Venezuelan chicken salad traditionally served with arepas — apparently the name means ‘queen with beautiful curves,’ so that’s nice.

It’s a pretty typical chicken salad, I think, except that it includes mashed avocado, which gives a creamy lusciousness to it overall. It comes together quickly — poach the chicken in water for 20 minutes, let cool and shred it (you can do it with two forks or your hands, but I think it’s easiest in the food processor in a few short pulses — just don’t overdo). Combine with diced red onion, mayo, lime juice, avocado, parsley, salt and pepper to taste.

I’m not sure if it’s okay to sit around for long, even chilled — I’d worry that the avocado would start browning, though perhaps the lime juice is enough to keep that from happening? I didn’t want to risk it, so I prepped through to the avocado and cilantro last night, and then finished it just before taking it over to the refugees. I thought it was pretty yummy — would make it again for a party. Though I’d add hot sauce next time! I tried it on white bread too, and it was tasty!

Recipe: https://www.foodnetwork.com/…/reina-pepiada-arepas…

Seen here stuffed in a mini arepa, just the right size for a snack for me. We increased the recipe, so this was 4 lbs. of chicken thighs for $20. You can make it with breast if you prefer, of course; I just usually use thighs because they’re more flavorful and moist.