La Cena

We had some friends over for dinner last night - Andres, the talented chef at the Centro de Aprendizaje; Jorge; and Gerardo, another student we've met. We had hoped Omar and Adrian could come too, but they both had to get ready for tests/work tomorrow and couldn't make it.

It was fun shopping for all the ingredients at Abastos and fun to really put our kitchen to the test. (Andres deserves great thanks for lending us some yeast - levadura - which is somewhat hard to find down here.) We started with guacamole, vegetables and tortilla chips (we bought those, let's not get carried away with homemade...) and then had three kinds of pizza - chipotle chicken with caramelized white onions, chopped red onions, cilantro and quesillo (a little like mexican string cheese, that comes wrapped up like a ball of yarn); chorizo with ancho chile tomato sauce, poblanos and queso (a moist, crumbly cheese similar to feta); and ground beef with white onions, jalapeños and mozzarella. The salty, stringy quesillo actually works pretty well on pizza, and the queso is mild enough in flavor to let other flavors stand out.

It took a bit to figure out the oven's pizza-personality, and we definitely missed having our pizza stone to crisp up the crust nicely. But, starting the pies on a baking sheet then transferring them, pan-less, onto the oven rack seemed to do the trick and we both felt like it was a respectable first effort at serious cooking here. We also had jugo de jamaica, which I think we'll both miss a lot once we leave. Erica had planned to make chocolate sauce for dessert, but we were all so full after three pizzas (and extra chicken!) that nobody could manage to whip up desire even for ice cream. Ah well, another night. We did eat some churros, though, sans ice cream and chocolate sauce, which no one seemed to mind. (Churros are a delectable treat of fried dough in a stick sort of shape that is then dipped in cinnamon sugar. They can also be bought filled with things like chocolate, fruit, or cream made from sweetened condensed milk.)

Jorge snapped a bunch of pictures, so hopefully we'll grab some from him to post later. There seemed to be a certain fascination with capturing us all hard at work eating or displaying the pizzas. Besides photos, the night was also filled with instruction in informal Spanish phrases meant to help us fight better. For example, "Si me busques, me encuentras" - "If you come looking for me, you will find me..." And, "cuando quieras" - basically a rejoinder along the lines of, "I'm ready when you are." We had a great time trying them out, much to the entertainment of our guests.

The chicken might have been the star of the night! Our guests couldn't seem to get enough of it! While it was great for a pizza, some of the thighs and legs disappeared before the first pizza made it out of the oven. Maybe some of you might be interested in the recipe? It's really easy to do if you have a food processor or blender, and it is spicy and delicious.

Start with a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (we reconstituted dried chipotles then blended with water, a few cloves of garlic, about 2 tbsp of oregano, 1 tsp of cumin seeds and a little oil - if you want a thicker sauce add equal parts oil and flour then cook in a sauce pan for a few minutes). Puree the peppers and sauce with a few cloves of garlic, a quarter to a half cup of soy sauce (it's hard to over-salt chicken), about a quarter cup of olive oil and black pepper to taste. Then just coat chicken pieces liberally and let marinate for as long as you want - from a few hours to a few days - the longer you wait, the spicier the chicken will be. Once that's done, cook the chicken in the marinade at 350 for roughly an hour. That's it! Typically we leave the skin on for cooking, then discard it afterwards - I've read in reputable sources that this adds minimal fat while helping keep the chicken moist.

All the amounts seem to be extremely flexible, so you can add more liquid to stretch the peppers thinner (probably even water or stock, if you want to cut down on sodium or fat), or more peppers if you really want to heat things up.

We bought an entire chicken for last night - head, neck, feet, gizzards and all - nicely cut up by the chicken butcher. (Chicken seems to always be sold at its own stand, with beef, pork and chorizo sold together by other vendors.) I wish I had had a camera when Erica was unpacking the bag in our kitchen. She's actually killed and cleaned chickens before, but something about pulling the parts out of the bag, the surprise of what might come next, maybe, really had her going. (If I may interject here (this is Erica), I was just totally shocked to find about half the head intact and attached to part of the neck of the bird. I could see the eyes and optic nerves. In my defense, when I butchered chickens before, we took the head clean off.) I hear that the feet add a lot of flavor to stocks, so we'll try that out with the leftovers.