Mini Jibaritos

These little gluten-free sandwiches are so delicious, you will probably eat a whole plate by yourself!!

You start by making Tostones, the classic way:

Heat 3/4 cup of vegetable oil in a pan.

Peel one plantain and slice rounds that are about 1/2 inch thick (one plantain makes about 6 sandwiches).

Fry until they are golden and crisp...remove from pan and drain on a paper-towel lined plate. 

Using a "tostonera", or some sort of a press, press all the fried plantains. 

I like to make a little mix of warm water, sea salt and crushed garlic to dip the pressed plantains in, before frying them again. This infuses them with flavor and makes them extra crispy. 

Fry the plantains again until they are nice and crispy. 

Once you remove them all, and they have drained...start building your little sandwiches.  I put baby greens, sliced cherry tomatoes and shredded co-jack cheese on mine.  If you want to be ultra-Caribbean, you can mix equal parts mayonnaise and ketchup to dip them in! I like to eat them as they are.  

Green Spaghetti

This is one of our 4 year olds FAVORITE recipes.  It is spicy and creamy and two batches usually dissapear within minutes @ our house!

2 Poblano pepper
1 Serrano pepper
1 handful of cilantro
2 cloves of garlic
8 oz of Cream Cheese
8 0z of Sour Cream
2 tbsp butter
Salt to taste (sea salt works best)
Your favorite Pasta (We are G-Free, so I use RP's G-Free Pasta.  It's done in 2 minutes and tastes soooo good)

-Start boiling water for pasta, salt to taste
-Turn oven onto Broil
-Wash peppers and broil on High for 3-4 minutes on each side
-Put peppers in a large ziploc bag for 5 minutes
-Put sour cream, cream cheese, garlic and cilantro in the blender and blend until creamy
-Peel skin off of peppers, cut and place in blender (it is less spicy if you leave the seeds out, we like spicy, so I leave them in)
-Melt butter in a deep sauce pan
-While the butter melts, start making your pasta
-Pour the green sauce into your sauce pan and stir on med-high until hot (1-2 minutes)
-Drain pasta and add sauce over the top, mixing it all thoroughly with a wooden spoon




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Platanos

For those of you who already know about plantains, I don't think you need any extra information to convince you of how wonderful they are, because you probably already love them.  For those of you that don't, allow me to introduce you. 

As far as I can tell, plantains are one of the only fruits that can be eaten at all stages of ripeness.   When they are green they can be cooked and seasoned and paired with savory foods and dips. As they ripen they get softer and sweeter and are usually eaten with fried eggs, rice and beans, or used as "noodles" for a lasagna-style recipe called pastelón.

They are a great source of potassium and fiber, which help with digestion.  They are also high in Vitamins A and C.   One plantain has about 200 calories so it is a really great way to get those good calories (read: energy) into your diet.  They do not have as much sugar as bananas, but like all fruits, the sugar that they do have is easy for your body to assimilate and digest. 

The bonus for me, especially this week (as I battle the inches and inches of snow that are piling up in front of my house), they contain natural mood enhancers so they are good to eat during these winter months that have less daylight.  

Yesterday, I was in the mood for mofongo.  It is a delicious, garlicky plantain mash that is usually topped with pork cracklings.  Typically, mofongo is made from mashed fried slices of plantain.  But I decided to reduce the fat and boil the plantains (which is the way it is usually done for the Dominican Dish mangú).  While they boiled in salted water, I caramelized some onions and mashed a little bit of garlic, salt and olive oil,  in a pilón, a wooden mortar.  

 boiling plantains in salt water

Once they were soft, I added the plantains to the pilon and mashed them little by little with the garlic and salt.  Once they were all mashed, I added a little bit of the salt water that they boiled in to make the plantains moist and shaped the mixture in to round balls. We ate them with shrimp that I picked up at Whole Foods, and it was a delicious combo!  Definitely healthy comfort food.  

mofongo with shrimp

Sancocho!!

So, can I just tell you how nervous I was about cooking today? I'm usually excited about cooking ('cause I like eating), but the fact that I had a commitment to share it with others somehow made it much more serious.

Before I started, I needed to buy the ingredients. Many of the ingredients can be found at any local grocery store.  As for the plantains, culantro, yautia and ñame? Finding those could mean a trek to your nearest Latin-American specialty store.

Yautia Lila (it's not as scary as it looks!)

I have never bought yucca, yautia or ñame on my own before.  I felt really overwhelmed staring at them and trying to figure out which one to get and how to tell if they were "good".  I just picked whichever one seemed the smallest, since I had tons of veggies already and had no clue how I was going to fit all of them in my pot!

Once I got everything peeled, chopped and in the pot, it went pretty smoothly. I actually let it sit on the stove for an hour while I ran a quick errand.

Starting out...(I had to switch pots after this, cause it was getting packed!!)

An hour into the cooking process

I felt like a superstar when it was all done and I served it.  It was all delicious and hearty.  My favorite part was seeing all the colors. As a rule, I try to make sure that I eat as many colors as I can each day when it comes to fruits and veggies. It is an easy way to make sure that I am getting all the vitamins I need.  

All done! Served with a big ol' chunk of rye bread

Sancocho

(Caribbean Soup)

A-       3 quarts (12 cups) water

            1 tbsp. salt

            each of the following are coarsely chopped

1 onion, peeled

            2 tomatoes

            1 green pepper, seeded

            3 fresh culantro leaves

B-        All peeled and diced

½ lb. of yautia (I got purple, but you can get white or yellow, too)

            ½ a squash or pumpkin

            ½ lb. of potatoes

            ½ lb. of sweet potatoes

C-        Both peeled and quartered

1 large green plantain

            1 large ripe plantain

            3 chicken bouillon cubes

D-        1 tsp. salt

            ½ c. tomato sauce

1.     In a large kettle, combine ingredients included in A. Bring rapidly to a boil. Cover, reduce heat to moderate and cook for 1 hour.

2.     Wash vegetables in B and add to kettle.

3.     Rinse green plantain rapidly in salted water. Drain and add to kettle, together with ripe plantain.

4.     Add items in D. Cover and cook over moderate heat for 30 minutes.

5.     Uncover, remove pieces of green plantain, mash, turn into balls and add to kettle, boil rapidly for 1 minute. 

The Book!

Puerto Rican Cookery is the cookbook that I will be using during my little journey through the Puertorican kitchen.  I'm going to try to cook every single recipe I can, but I'm going to doctor up the recipes a little bit to try and make them healthier.  Although, I do think that when one uses the right ingredients (whole, organic and fresh), caribbean cooking can be very healthy. The problem arises when one starts to take shortcuts and adds processed foods full of sodium and fat. 

Let me warn you, the recipes in this book are NO joke...Puertorican cooking is about as gourmet as you can get. The timing, the temperature, the flavor ALL need to be perfect.  It takes a lifetime to perfect Puertorican cooking, and even though I can make white rice with the rest of them, I am definitely a novice compared to my grandmothers, my aunts and my lovely Mami Nilda (more about her later).  

Tomorrow is my official first day of trying a recipe. I'm going to try a Caribbean soup called Sancocho.  It is a flavorful soup with squash, sweet potatoes, potatoes, ñame, yautia (both root vegetables) and green and ripe plantains.  My mouth is watering already. I'll take pics and let you know how it goes.  

Why Vegetarian?

In 2003, the year I got married, my entire Milwaukee family spent Christmas in Puerto Rico. We had a wonderful time, especially because my maternal grandparents were there with us.  Abuela Isabel and Abuelo Millo were excited to be back in their homeland and share it with their grandchildren.  Also, it was the first time my brother and I took our respective (non-Puertorican) spouses to visit our family on the island.

That trip will be forever engraved in my mind and in my heart. Especially because it was the last time that my grandparents would ever go back to their native Puerto Rico.  In fact, after that trip, my grandmother endured 6 years of surgeries and treatments for her increasingly worsening diabetes that would leave her bedridden and without legs.

It was after that trip, and the events that ensued that I began to make drastic changes to my diet.  As my grandmother became increasingly ill, I began to look into Diabetes and why it seemed so prevalent in the hispanic community.

I am not a doctor, or dietician, but it doesn't take one to recognize two things: 1. many, many of our (Puertorican) people succumb to the ugliness of this disease every day and 2. diet is a huge part of controlling (and sometimes preventing) diabetes.

When I realized half of my grandparents and one of my parents had diabetes, I made the choice to start looking at my fridge as a medicine cabinet, using food as preventative medicine for diseases...one of the first choices I made in that department was the elimination of meat.

So, as I cook...I will not be using pork, chicken, turkey.  I am an ovo-lacto vegetarian, so I will be using eggs and dairy products (only organic).

I am excited to bring this spin to Puertorican cookery and I am sure the results will be delicious!