Category: Dinner

Cooking for the refugees again this weekend. Kept it fairly simple — I had some onion & bell pepper marinade (left over from the Venezuelan roast chicken last week), that I’d cooked down and then frozen. I dumped that in a pot with some chicken, and just let it simmer for a few hours, then let it cool and pulled it off the bone — it was delicious, and so easy.

Kevin made beans, I made rice, and I tried a new recipe for corn muffins — it didn’t really brown up, but they’re pretty tasty anyway. I always stir corn (frozen or canned works fine) into my corn muffins. If I’m just making it for me, I add a good amount of green chili too.

The real experiment was the sardine recipe — next post!

Okay, so this isn’t EXACTLY a Venezuelan recipe? I was thinking that mostly volunteers have been dropping off dishes with chicken or beef or pork for the refugees (meat was requested on the sign-up sheet), and maybe they’d like some seafood for a change.

Not everyone likes seafood, of course, so I also made a chicken dish to be safe. But googling led me to believe that sardines are popular there, so I thought I’d try them.

I ended up combining two different recipes, so I’m not sure this is quite what you would get in Venezuela, but I did use their flavors, and the end result is DELICIOUS. I had a little bit to try with corn muffins, and it was SO GOOD — the flavors pair beautifully.

It’s similar to some Italian sardine dishes, I think. I don’t normally eat sardines that often, but I do love a Sri Lankan mackerel curry, and sardines are in the same ballpark, so I think I may try eating them more often. Also, did I mention, they’re really cheap? In this era of soaring grocery prices, worth noting.

The recipes I started with were:

– a Sardine Mojito (not the drink kind!) — https://steemit.com/…/recipe-mojito-sardine-step-by…

– Sopa de Pescado (fish soup)

https://thecookwaregeek.com/venezuelan-sopa-de-pescado…/

*****

Venezuelan-Style Sardine & Potato Stew
(serves 12 as a main dish, 24 as a side)

1/4 c. vegetable oil
3 onions, sliced
6 cloves garlic, chopped
3-4 potatoes, peeled and chopped
1 t. cumin powder
1/2 t. pepper
6 cans sardines packed in oil
2 14 oz. cans diced tomatoes
salt to taste

1. Heat oil in a large pan. Add onions and garlic, and stir until onions are translucent.

2. Add potatoes, cumin powder, and pepper; continue to stir until about half-way cooked (if you prefer, you can parboil the potatoes first in the microwave or on the stove, so they cook faster).

3. Add diced tomatoes, bring to a boil, cover, and lower head to medium. Cook another 10 minutes or so, until potatoes are cooked through and tomatoes are somewhat reduced.

4. Add 5 cans of sardines (reserving 1), and stir in GENTLY. Let simmer 10 minutes or so for the flavors to blend. (Add water if needed to keep from sticking.)

5. Turn into serving dish and top with last tin of sardines. Enjoy with arepas or corn muffins.

The first is beef & potato curry with cabbage sambol. The cabbage sambol, I’m pleased to report, came out just fine from the freezer — not QUITE as crisp as when it went in, but still with a good toothsome bite. I’m planning to just make a whole cabbage’s worth next time I cook Sri Lankan, and portion it out and freeze it, so I have an easy vegetable to add on busy weeknights.

Last week’s quick-pickling resulted in onions that are yummy on a bagel with cream cheese and lox; I also picked up some house-made roast beef at Carnivore Oak Park this week, and I’m planning on a nice sandwich sometime soon with the pickled onions and horseradish. Mmm…

And I’ve been feeling very cheese-bite focused recently, for some reason, so last’s night’s first dinner (followed, of course, by second dinner), was just 6-month aged Manchego cheese and these intense cherries in syrup. Lovely pairing. Bite of cheese, pop in a cherry, repeat. I’ll have a fair bit of cherry syrup left over, which should go nicely in cocktails or mocktails. Or maybe a glaze for roast pork…

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.