This is What I Do

Hmmmm - don't know if I can claim éxito, but I can claim much improvement on the tortilla front . I did some combing of various Internet recipes and then just decided to combine them all with my own desire to use butter (as opposed to lard, shortening or oil) as the fat and ended up with some pretty tasty whole wheat tortillas. When I whipped them up yesterday I was super excited about this - I ate one (or two) right out of the skillet with butter and they were perfect. The sun was shining in my kitchen window where I look out at beautiful Caribbean flowers and hear the pool pump (yes, my husband is an Entry Level Officer and we have a pool - don't blame us, we just showed up and there it was) and wind chimes (always blowing with the nice sea breeze even though we are about two miles from the water). Life was good. I wasn't rushing. I had plenty of time to make the short walk over to the boys' school to pick them up. I was singing happy songs in my head.

Then I reheated the tortillas for dinner and they were nice, but had dried out a little bit. This was to be expected - fresh tortillas are always better right off the skillet. Today I reheated one in the microwave with a wet towel. While I normally strongly disagree with heating tortillas in the microwave, it can be done if you wrap them in a damp towel. This actually softened up the tortillas quite a bit - I'm glad I tried it. We have about 6 left - that's how I'll reheat the rest of them too. They were tasty, but on day two they left me feeling a little disappointed.

Sometimes, in these cooking adventures, I feel completely satisfied with my creation - like yesterday around 11:00 AM. Other times, I feel like, "Ya cool. So what. I made tortillas. Last year I was helping people not commit suicide." I have been on a bit of a high the past couple of weeks. I feel like somehow I am finding my voice and my space; as a trailing partner, even with the most supportive of employed partners, you tend to have your career (and perhaps more) sidelined. It's not all bad by any means. I never dreamed of being a stay-at-home mom, but I wouldn't trade all of the time I have had with my boys in the past year (we reached our one year FS anniversary this week). In DC and here in Santo Domingo, we have had free reign of millions of adventures. In our family, I am the one who has ended up knowing how to navigate our new cities. And I can't imagine giving up the opportunity to live abroad. But, at the same time, I wonder if making tortillas is my best me. Perhaps I should be doing something more productive. Maybe I should be making more of an attempt to return to my professional life in some form.

The very recent truth is…and this is a reality that is, for some reason, difficult for me to admit…I actually really, really love my non-professional life (whatever that means). Making tortillas gives me great joy. I'm trying to remind myself to admit to the great happiness I feel with what I am doing now and not get hung up on what I believed would make me happy when we started this journey. Life is so teeming with unpredictability - especially in the Foreign Service - what an opportunity for reinvention. So, with my apparently successful bid at making a likeable tortilla, I am reminded of the need to embrace the wide-open space ahead, spoon in hand and possibly a dash of reinvention here and there. These things make me happy. My life is good. I make tortillas.

Oh, and if you want to make some too - here's how.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all purpose flour (I used bleached because (1) that is what most of the flour is here and (2) it has a lower gluten content which I read is good for tortillas, but really, who knows)
  
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
  
• ½ cup soft or melted butter
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 ½ cups warm water
• 1 ½ tsp baking powder
  

Mix everything together. Pull off plum-sized chunks and roll into balls. Heat a non-stick skillet over medium heat. Roll out the first dough ball onto a floured surface - get it as thin as you can without tearing it. Using your fingers or a spray bottle, slightly dampen the top of the flattened dough. Place the raw tortilla, damp side down, into the skillet. Use a spray bottle or your fingers to spray a little bit of water on the up side of the tortilla. When the tortilla starts to bubble, turn it over using tongs. Roll out the next tortilla while you are waiting for this one to cook. When it looks done (a few golden brown spots), place in a basket lined with a dish towel and keep covered. Repeat the steps above until all the tortillas are done.

Mastering the Art of Dominican Cooking

Here's where I admit that it would probably be a tragedy to live here two years and never learn how to cook Dominican food. But, here's also where I don't lie - if I were in India or Italy or Thailand I would perhaps never leave the kitchen…well, okay I kind of don't do that anyway, but for different reasons. Anyway, I would be like Julia Child and her French cuisine and spend every moment making sure that I returned to the US under the banner of Best Gringa Cook of All Things Indian (Italian or Thai) in the World. Here I'm like, "Okay, rice, beans, green plantains. Got it." But seriously, it would just be lame to not master these dishes whether I adore them or not. And, like I have said before, I don't exactly dislike Dominican food, I just don't find it to be especially interesting.

Today I set out to buy a Dominican cookbook. This experience was so…Dominican. Dominicans are, by and large, friendly. This does not, however, negate a fact of life here - everything is done with a certain level of attitude. Dominicans seem to be best at sticking it to each other, but they don't sugar coat things for you just because you're a foreigner (unless you're in the Zona Colonial - where all of a sudden you can pay with dollars and eat wrap sandwiches all while speaking your apparently flawless Spanish). Typically, if you ask for directions you'll most likely get, "Pa'lla" and a pointed finger. People will roll their eyes at you (the teenager, in-your-face kinda' way) if you ask for a receipt. It is not unheard of for cashiers to tell you tough luck to paying your phone bill because if you don't have correct change down to the peso I have no time for you. Evidently, the same attitude can be applied to recipes. I ended up using the favorite Dominican dish mofongo as my cookbook meter.

Here's a translation of the recipe pictured below:

Ingredients:
8 fried plantains, green
1 ¼ fried pork rinds or Chicharrones (fried pork rinds) well toasted
salt to taste

Preparation: Mash the fried plantains and the chicharrones in the same pilón (wooden mortar and pestle) you used for the garlic, add salt and a little bit of oil.

Serves 6.
Now, I know exactly what mofongo looks like so I could figure this out, but seriously, what if you were making this recipe in say, Muncie, Indiana? You would be like, green bananas? Pork rinds? Mortar and pestle?!! So, I figured I would just go to my best FS friend Amazon.com and order up a nice Dominican cookbook in English. It turns out that there are a couple of English language Dominican cookbooks out there! However, they have less than stellar feedback. Apparently, non-Dominicans had trouble figuring out the recipes. Go figure.

But, I am not giving up. It's my new commitment. Once a week, until I get bored, I will make one Dominican dish. I have already mastered tostones - fried green plantains. Maybe I'll whip up a batch tomorrow. Then, on to mofongo.

Jugo de China

There was a point in my life, I clearly remember, when I considered fresh squeezed orange juice to be a luxury. That was probably way back four months ago when oranges cost me around $2 per pound and were only good for a brief period between, I don't know, January and April. Actually, I can't remember how much oranges used to cost me. I wonder what that means? But, I do remember that two good-sized Valencias yielded one small juice glass of product - a tragedy in vitamin C really.

Last summer I bought my husband a small juicer because, after visiting a friend's in-laws in Utah and having fresh-squeezed OJ for breakfast every morning, I got this crazy idea that providing him with this liquid gold would be a very special way to tell him how much I love him. He was happy with the juicer and religiously juiced himself a big glass of OJ every morning (my thoughtfulness did not include actual labor on my part). However, after about a month I realized we were spending four times as much on OJ and I nixed the juicer-every-day calendar for the very-special-day system. He relented. He had no choice of course. An unfortunate fallout of our new FS life is that I do all the shopping - it's so 1950s.

Then, then, then we moved to a tropical paradise where oranges are perfect in every way, year round and only cost about $2 per 10 lb bag (yes, that's right, 20 cents per pound)! I just wish people from home could really know what it's like to have fresh juice every single morning. Am I right that most Americans do not drink fresh-squeezed juice every morning? It's something special. You save it for that graduation brunch or Valentine's breakfast in bed - and even then you buy juice that someone else has freshly squeezed. Or, maybe I have just lived years in juice ignorance while all of my loved ones were happily juicing away their dollars, but not me - we were carton OJ drinkers.

Either way - here, now we drink fresh OJ and it is one of those things that I so much do not know how I will ever do without. We are going home to Austin for R&R in July and I am already planning how much I will have to work out so I can eat breakfast tacos, guilt-free every morning - my mom lives within walking distance from Taco Shack so, you know, could be a new running route. But anyway, for all the wonderfully perfect food moments I will have in Austin, I know that every morning I will have this empty little place in my heart for the sweet nectar that coulda' been.

For you edification - Dominicans call orange juice jugo de china. In most of the Spanish speaking world, it's jugo de naranja and in Spain zumo de naranja. I thought this was strange and had very little luck getting to the bottom of it until I found this article. Now, I didn't do anything to try to verify this information and it could be completely false, but it looks good to me so I plan to perpetuate it as fact when the topic comes up. If you come across a better explanation please feel free to let me know.

Mi Panadería

This week I undertook several baking projects. Baking is becoming a new thing of mine - for better or worse I guess. I love cookies and I enjoy baking with friends as a kind of social thing…I don't dislike baking. But, it has really always been more Jeremy's thing. This is true for one simple reason - Jeremy likes to stick to the "rules" and I like to make up my own. Cooking was my thing, baking his. This started to change when our youngest was born. I took some time off from work and started cooking more - we spent less time cooking together. Then, I just started baking more. Now, with Vilma doing more and more of the cooking (she knows very little about baking), I tend to do the baking. It's my specialty now…I guess. I am finding it much more experimental here than I did at home. That's good. It means I get to make things up and try out new ideas. I used to have a subscription to Cook's Illustrated , but gave it up a long time ago because (1) it was very light on the veg options and (2) I never had time to cook any of the recipes. Now I realize - HEY! I should restart my subscription.

Some Foreign Service friends of ours gave us Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day before we left for post. I had already been baking some of the bread using the recipes the authors have available on line, but once I had the book in my hands I found myself reading and studying the recipes and trying to find ways to perfect them given the difference in product quality and climate here. I have found that the humidity greatly affects the outcome of most baked goods - especially bread, biscuits and muffins. I have already written about my adventures in hunting down unbleached and whole wheat flours, but even though that is no longer a problem, I am still baffled by things like brown sugar, coconut and chocolate (the DR is a major exporter of these products, but they are just not quite the same here). However, I can say, despite continued confusion in some areas, my bread production seems to be smooth sailing. I have now purchased enough oven stones to turn my oven into quite the panadería and was able to easily bake seven fresh loaves for an Embassy bake sale benefiting the US Embassy Haiti FSN (Foreign Service Nationals) Relief Fund.

One area of experimentation that is still in process is my tortilla production. I have been using a recipe that I got from my mother-in-law when we lived in Japan and first started making our own tortillas. Somehow here though, it just isn't turning out correctly. Don't get me wrong - flat bread that you put things on is pretty much food of the gods around here, so I can't mess up too badly. But, they are still not perfect and therefore, I have work to do. The biggest problem is that they're turning out too bready - they puff on the skillet, but instead of getting chewy, they kind of get more like Naan (which I have made here too). I was doing a little research today and I think I may need to change flours. This totally cracks me up because the zeal with which I hunted down unbleached flour was only perhaps matched by the fanaticism of Dominican baseball lovers. Seriously - do not come between me and my unbleached flour! The tortilla problem, I think, is that the gluten content in the unbleached flour is too high. But, I don't want to just use that baby powder looking dust they sell here…perhaps I can mix whole wheat? Split the difference - decrease the gluten content slightly on the batch, but go for at least a hint of healthfulness by adding the whole wheat? I sound scientific here, but trust me, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Remember - I use Wikipedia and say things with conviction - that's pretty much it.

Hmmmm…gotta' go - I have pizza to make - hoping it doesn't turn out like crackers because I ran out of yeast when mixing up the dough and I was too lazy to get dressed and go get more. Stay tuned for a final tortilla update - too bad I can't offer a taste test.

Spices Anyone?

Maybe I am completely ignorant, but when I saw MSG on the shelf in the spice aisle I was totally taken aback. Do they have this on shelves at home? Maybe it's just the fact that it's labeled as "100% Seasoning." I mean, really, really? Anything could be labeled "seasoning." I seriously do not recall ever seeing this on the shelf at home. Perhaps it's something to research a little more during R&R.

That actually gets me thinking. One of the best things about being abroad is the way in which you start seeing the world around you again, for the first time. You notice things you don't notice at home because you have no choice - everything looks different. For this reason, I have always felt like being abroad enables me to live more, or at least be more mindful of my tiny little place in the grand scheme of things. DR has been a kind of mid-range culture shock for me. I speak Spanish and every single second of every single day I am so happy that's the case. The Spanish here is abbreviated and slurred and fast, but it's still Spanish. I enrolled my boys in school, I converse with Vilma about every topic under the Sun, I go to the store, I order pizza and I can even tell you off if I really, really have to (although it's not my preferred method of handling a situation). In short, I have been able to make my life work and the adjustments I do have to make seem more doable because language is not as big of an issue. For this reason, I worry sometimes that I will quickly become less mindful and begin to just make assumptions about my surroundings. It may already be happening - Motorcycles swerving the wrong way down a one way street? No problem! Negotiating the price of a pineapple? Bring it on! Two hours to pay the phone bill? Old hat I say! But, poco a poco, when all this starts to seem normal then what? A dash of MSG to spice up my life?

Caffe Milano

You can't live here long without realizing that Santo Domingo is an exercise in contradictions - the lazy island vibe in the middle of a bustling metropolis, a city brimming with workers going about selling their trade coupled with an often fiery disposition that in the US would send buyers running for the door, the stark poverty of a four year-old hand outstretched, begging for ten pesos at the window of the Lexus driving fashionista.

Caffe Milano (Avenida Tiradentes, Naco), the location of our last date night, somehow made these contradictions, and the volatility of the city seem more vivid. The food was excellent - they specialize in a wide array of Italian inspired fare including pizzas, meats, salads and pastas. The service was the best we have had here so far. We had a couple of perfect glasses of red wine (after simply ordering the house red, we meant to ask about the name, but forgot). The dessert (la bomba de chocolate) was an absolute work of culinary ostentation, if not art or perfection of flavor. The restaurant is open air in the middle and the walls are draped in white. All of the lighting is dim and blue. It vaguely makes you feel like you're in Express for Men, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's fun. It's like a club. There's even a DJ.

So, here we sat in the middle of this swanky place, surrounded by the most chic members of Dominican society overwhelmingly aware of the imbalance of it all. This nation has a long history that is not unlike the surf that surrounds it - a waxing and waning between independence and occupation, democracy and totalitarianism (or worse). The scale at Caffe Milano was tipped in favor of its patrons - overwhelmingly white, wealthy, visado (with US tourist visas that is) and worldly. The side we see most days is not these things. It was striking. It is still striking. It has left me wondering if the rich and the poor remember the volatility of their positions in the history of things here and feel daily that it would only take one coup d'état, one brand new Constitution or even one surprise earthquake to send things flip-flopping back the other way. I find I want to learn more and wish I could find a class on Dominican identity - perhaps a good honest book would do the trick…or at least shed a bit more insight.

Sautédita de Atún

My comfort food here may end up popping up in unlikely places. Like usual, Vilma told me she could make, "blah, blah, blah" and I, with a smile responded, "Sure. That would be good." The problem I am finding is not that I don't understand the words she's using - it's that I don't know what the dishes are. She doesn't speak English, so there is not really a way to give a reverse example. But, imagine she did and I said I was going to make muffins (which I did the other day). Muffins were a completely foreign concept to her. She kept saying, "We call those little cakes." And I was like, "Well, it's not really cake because that would be cupcakes." Anyway, as I have said before, I am moving towards just trusting her and realizing that I will probably like what she makes whether I know before hand what it is going to be or not.

Sometimes, I not only like what she makes, I am bowled over by how incredibly perfect the food on my plate is. You know how when something really, really nice happens you feel that event, or the emotions of it, like a cozy place in your heart for the rest of the day? You just feel at peace and present with what is. And, I'm not talking about something spectacular like winning the lottery or learning you got a great new job. I'm talking about the one line at the end of a movie that just perfectly captures the scene or the gentle guidance you hear one of your children give the other when you're in the other room. That kinda' stuff.

That's comfort food…OMG…I may have just invented those books that already exist (those Chicken Soup for the Soul books). I think it's funny when that happens - makes originality seem so over-rated. Anyway, Vilma made something the other day that filled my belly and my soul. It was the most random food, served up in the most random way, completely on the fly, but at that moment I was like, "Heaven has come to my kitchen!" As always, Vilma doesn't use recipes and I didn't watch her make this, but here is my best guess on how one could recreate Sautédita de Atún.

Ingredients:

• Two medium sized potatoes cut into French fries
• One small red onion cut into small wedges
• Two Roma tomatoes cut into wedges
• One handful fresh flat-leaf parsley chopped - as garnish
• One can chunk tuna in oil

The Steps:

Fry the French fries in a skillet with oil. This was actually the most amazing step to me because I know you have to get the oil just right to prevent sticking. These French fries were perfectly golden and crispy without being burned. In a separate skillet, sauté the other ingredients (except the parsley). Add salt and pepper to taste and a dash of paprika (we use Spanish paprika). Toss in the French fries and garnish with parsley. Serve alongside rice.