As we discussed here, Leigh and I have always entertained a secret plan to visit all the tiny countries in Europe – Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, the Vatican, and Monaco.  Last summer, we finally managed to visit one of them together, and we’ve visited TWO of them so far on this culinary adventure.  For this meal, we’re ticking off number three – Monaco!

How small is Monaco?

So small that when you draw the country border, you can pick out the cruise ship dock. (That may also be an indictment of how goddamn large cruise ships are.)

So small that Tim Traveler had a race across the country to see whether it was faster to do it on foot or by elevator.

It’s really small.

And like many small countries, the question of course, becomes – how is the cuisine of this tiny postage stamp different from that of the surrounding countries.  And as always, the answer is “not by much.”

But, it turns out there IS an acknowledged national dish – a deep-fried savory pastry filled with a mix of ricotta cheese and chard.  Now, we hate deep frying, but sometimes we can’t avoid it.  Plus, these things sounded delicious.

Just chard crunchies didn’t sound like enough for dinner, though, so we added a fish stew common to the region as a main entree.

This stew is made with cured cod, but there’s two possible ways to do that.  The very traditional way, which would have been most appropriate, would have been with “stockfish”.  This is a Scandinavian technique where fish are hung in the air to dry, with no other curing solution.   The resulting product is hard as a rock, but apparently delicious after being laboriously rehydrated.

However, we were unable to find this style of fish anywhere in Vancouver, despite a great deal of hunting.  (In part, that’s why it’s been a hot minute since the last meal.) So we settled on cod preserved the other way – in a metric ton of salt.

We’ve encountered salt cod on here before, for Croatia and Jamaica, but this is the first time I’ve bought an entire fish, and not just fillets.  I found it at a Portuguese grocery store, and when the clerk offered to cut it up for me, she slapped it on a bog standard office paper cutter. So that was neat.

To prepare the cod, you have to soak it in water for several days, changing the water frequently.  When you’re done, you have fish that is still quite salty, but is at least edible by humans.

Both the fish stew and the pastries have fairly complicated processes that involve resting times, such that we had to make ourselves a schedule to make sure everything got done roughly simultaneously.  For clarity here, I’ll just lay out one recipe then the other.

First, the fish. Once you drain off the final soak, you have to cut it into good sized pieces for frying.  This actually took quite a bit of effort, since whole fish have whole fish quantities of bones that I was trying to mostly remove, along with the skin.  This accomplished, the pieces were dredged in flour and then shoved back in the fridge.

While the fish is chilling, you make the stew.  Most of the pictures of this dish I’ve seen show an actual stew, with liquid in it.  But that’s not what we got.  After sweating some onions, garlic, and carrots, you add in chopped tomatoes and some herbs and allow the mixture to simmer for half an hour.  To my mind, “simmer” involves some amount of freestanding liquid, but there really wasn’t any, and none cooked out of the tomatoes besides the bare minimum to prevent the whole mixture from scorching.  At the end of the cook time everything had softened, but there were still discreet chunks of everything.

Once the sauce is ready, you just fry the fish pieces in olive oil, and then donk the sauce over them to serve.

On to the pastries.

The dough for the pastries is a flour and egg dough, which is kneaded to a smooth consistency and then put in the fridge to cool.

The filling consists of onions, chard, leeks, and spinach, cooked down until the onions are soft and the greens are wilted.  This is then mixed with ricotta and parmesan cheeses and an egg white.

Once the dough is chilled, you roll it out and make little pastries like ravioli or small empanadas.  As always with this sort of assembly line cooking process, some came out tidier than others.  It’s always challenging with any kind of dumpling to get the crust thin enough while not overfilling them. (Sorry not too many pictures at this point – we were pretty busy here.)

And then it’s time for deep frying. Sigh.  So tasty.  So annoying.

A bit of “misfit toys” going on here – the prettier ones were in the first batch under the towel.

The recipe for the fish said we should serve it with potatoes, so we made some of those too.  They were potatoes.

I’m getting that unenthusiastic description out of the way, because the rest of the meal turned out great! The chard ‘n’ cheese pastries were tasty and crunchy, and some of them didn’t even look completely hideous.

But the fish stew was really the standout of the meal – the tomato melange, despite not becoming all that soupy, was flavourful and delicious, and contrasted brilliantly with the salty fish.

And the best part of the meal was that we had friends to enjoy it with!

Thanks Monaco – we’ll visit you someday! Maybe for our 40th anniversary?

Next up, Mongolia!

Recipes:
Barbagiuan
Salt Cod with Tomatoes (Note that this link seems to have gone down between the time we made the recipe and did this writeup.)

I know the title’s a bit awkward, but even the UN lists this country under “M”.  What are we supposed to do?

Micronesia is another geographically enormous country like the Maldives and Marshall Islands that is almost entirely water.  It has four states, Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae, and we’re going to be making a dish from the last one.

We’ve been at this project for something like eight or nine years now, and while there were a few (much better researched) online blogs doing something similar when we started, as time has gone on, there have been more and more.  Sadly, they all seem to quote each other more than they do any actual source.

For example, while Chicken Kelaguen sounds tasty, and gets quoted all over the place as a national dish of Micronesia, I can’t find any actual evidence that this is, in fact, the case.

So instead, we’re going with a soup that I found described on several blogs from Peace Corps volunteers who actually spent time in FSM, which is made as a sharing dish for Sundays after church. Seriously – the missionaries were apparently SUPER successful in this part of the world, because there’s a LOT of overtly religious content mixed in with the recipes. (Our recipe is literally from “Grateful Ministries Micronesia.”)

After looking at the various ones I could find, we decided to go with a video that appeared to be a decent average of the available options, and had the advantage of actually listing QUANTITIES for the various ingredients.  Link at the bottom.

The basic Kosrae soup has seafood, rice and coconut milk.  If it weren’t for the coconut milk, you could call it a thin congee.   Here’s the ingredients we opted for:

The process is dead simple too. (Which means the pictures are going to be kind of boring.)  First, you cook the fish in a pot of boiling water.

Then you pull the fish out and shred it, and use the same water to cook rice.

At this point, the video got somewhat vague about times.  Do you put the fish back in NOW?  Wait for the rice to be done?  Somewhere in between?

We opted for “mostly done” on the rice, and then added in the fish, some shrimp, and some garlic and onion.

Seriously, yes – these are all just pictures of the same damn pot with some more or less opaque liquid in it. I know.

It got even MORE opaque when we tossed in the coconut milk.  Let that all heat up and thicken a little, season with salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes, and you’re done!

The light’s a little weird here – our apartment faces west, and the sun was going down, so I had to cast a shadow over the bowl to get it to come out at all.  The picture, that is – the soup itself came out great.  Rice, fish, and coconut makes for a very hearty, satisfying meal.  It was even better reheated the next day.

This was one of our simpler outings, but they don’t all have to be all day productions, and this was delicious.

Next up, a nation so small that the cruise ship dock is visible on a map of the entire country.

Recipe: Soup Kosrae

The northern part of Mexico is where the “Mex” in “Tex-Mex” comes from.  It has saguaro cactus, flour tortillas, and John Marston in act II of Read Dead Redemption.  It does NOT have Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef.  That’s Italy, and we already did that.

It also has a great deal of cattle, so for this episode we’re making the classic dish of carne asada, which literally just means “grilled beef”.  There’s a million recipes for this, so we turned to the inimitable Kenji Lopez-Alt, who did a whole pile of science to come up with his.

This means that the ingredient list was not 100% traditional.

Dried chiles – check. Citrus juices – check. Olive oil – Sure, why not? Soy sauce? Fish Sauce?

We’ve never said we’re making the traditional VERSIONS of recipes on here – just that we’re making food vaguely from the region.  And the soy sauce and fish sauce here just serve to bring out more umami in the meat.  We’ll allow it.

The actual process is quite simple. You basically shove EVERYTHING in a blender, done, now you have a salsa.

Separate out half of that to use as a topping later, and then take the other half and dump in more salt than is comfortable.  That’s your marinade.  But what are we marinating?  By going over to our nearby Whole Foods instead of the neighborhood grocer, I managed to locate skirt steak, which is a classic cut for this dish.

And with the steak marinating, it was time to go get some more hot chocolate, which you can check out over on my Instagram.  Or you could, if I were to post a link.

Once it was time to cook, we fired up the grill, and I got to once again marvel at the view from our balcony.

“But wait!”, you ask. “What’s the deal with the corn?”

I’m glad you asked me that, fictional narrative device person who is once again adequately serving their role in the construction of this essay.

For our second dish, we’re making elotes, better known as “Mexican street corn.”  It’s actually pretty simple – you grill corn until charred, and then you dip it in a savory sauce consisting of mayonnaise, salty cheese of some kind, and what ever other herbs and or seasonings you choose. It is absolutely addictive if you’ve not tried it.

And once everything was cooked, dinner was served!

OK look – at this point, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to ANYONE that Mexican food is delicious, right? Mexican food is delicious. We all know that.

So lets take a second and think about the immigrants FROM Mexico, and everywhere else in the world who are being actively terrorized all across the US at the moment. Leigh and I are fortunate enough to have made our way to Canada and achieved citizenship, but that’s a direct result of our privilege, and we try very hard not to forget that.

Every time you sit down for a quiet, undisturbed meal, try to allow a thought for those who CAN’T do so without worrying that there will be a pounding at the door from the current US administration’s jackbooted Gestapo.

Do what you can to help, but the absolute, absolute minimum you can do is not turn away.

Even on a stupid blog about two idiots making dinner.

Next time, the Federated States of Micronesia.

Recipes:
Carne Asada
Elotes

For our second Mexican meal, we’re making a representative dish of the state of Jalisco.  Jalisco is a state on the west coast of Mexico which is home to so many of the things that the world associates with Mexico that there is even a saying: “Jalisco IS Mexico.”  Mariachi, sombreros, and tequila all trace their origins to Jalisco.

And Leigh would know Tequila – she has a masters degree in the subject, issued directly from Tommy’s Bar in San Francisco.  There may also have been tequila involved in our acquisition of the “fnerk.com” domain name.

But let’s talk about food.  Specifically, we’re going to be making the rich stew known as birria, which has definitely had a moment recently as folks north of the border discovered that it’s really, really good in tacos.

We’re going for the more old school version, which is a straight ahead stew served with rice. First off we have to make our adobo.  The recipe I found called for four different kinds of dried chilis, but since it didn’t include arbol chiles, which are the chili most closely associated with Jalisco, I added some of those too.  Why not?

Upper left is cascabel, and then from left to right we have arbol, morita, guajilo, and ancho chiles.  The preparation of all these darlings is less complicated than for Oaxaca.  Each one gets toasted for about two minutes in a dry pan, and then they’re boiled together in a pot with some garlic for about ten minutes.

At this point, the apartment is ALREADY starting to smell pretty darn good.  Into the blender goes the whole pot, along with some seasonings like cumin and oregano.

Birria is traditionally made with goat or lamb, but any meat that needs long cooking will work well.  (Dover sole birria is not a good idea.)  We went with lamb, so the next step was to just mix up the lamb and the adobo and shove the whole thing in the fridge for 24 hours to marinate.

After a day, this pan gets tightly covered with foil, and then goes in to roast for 3 hours.  And if we though our apartment smelled good when we were just toasting the chiles… man, by the time this was done cooking, I don’t think I ever wanted it to smell like anything else.

Let’s chop up some raw white onion, make rice, toast up some tortillas…

…and there’s just one more critical thing to do.

(yes,  it’s on the floor.  I needed a neutral background for the picture, and our table is the same color as the bottle.)

We’ve mentioned Heisenbooze on this blog before – alcohol that’s been around for so long that it’s clearly either amazing or disastrous, but you don’t know which until you open the bottle and collapse the wavefunction.  Research indicates that this particular tequila maker was good and then bad, and is now possibly good again, but this bottle was likely from right before good turned to bad the first time.

I dunno – it tasted pretty good to me.  Lots of vanilla and oak.

Leigh was driven home by a work colleague who had car trouble when she got here, so we had a third for dinner. That’s good for US, in that we love company, but bad for YOU, because when we have company, I always forget to take as many pictures as I should.

So here’s our “completed meal” photo, with perhaps less of the stew left than would have made for a better shot.

But I do. not. care. what the pictures looked like, because dear god – this was a meal to die for.  We have a big bag of chiles in the pantry now, and we WILL be making this again. Smoky, spicy, and delicious.

We also made a relatively modern dessert (from the ’90s or so) which also has its origins in Jalisco, Bionicos.

Bionicos is not complicated – it’s a mix of fruit chopped into relatively small pieces, and doused in a sauce made of condensed milk, sour cream, and sometimes yogurt.  This is then covered with crunchy bits like coconut, granola, and nuts. We decided to go with a mix of mango, pineapple, strawberry, and papaya.

What’s not to like here? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, that’s what.

This meal was absolutely stonkers.

Next up, el norte.  After all, lots of planets have an el norte. (Yes, I know I just recently made that joke.  No one’s forcing you to read this, mom.)

Recipes:
Jalsico style Birria
Bionicos

By my count, this should be about our 110th country, give or take. I don’t have an exact count for a few reasons.  We didn’t start this blog until “Bosnia,” although at some point I will go back and transfer the old pictures off of Facebook. We also haven’t been consistent with our naming conventions – why “East Timor” but also “Côte d’Ivoire?”  Why “Korea, North?”

Just… shut up, OK?  That’s why.

Point being that we’ve done a LOT of meals at this point.  And a number of countries have had food cultures so diverse and extensive that we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do just one meal.  China got five.  India got four. Italy and Indonesia each got 3, and France got 2.  Again, no science to it, that’s just how we decided to do it.

But as we get into the second half of the alphabet, there’s not too many left that are screaming to be split up.  I’m pretty sure we aren’t going to get four meals out of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.  So with this meal we’re starting on what may be our last multi-meal country, Mexico.

And we’re using the same highly scientific process that we’ve used up to this point of “half-assing some research” to determine precisely which regions and meals will be represented.  We’re aware that what you get at “Mexican Restaurants” in the U.S. and Canada is largely “Tex-Mex” cuisine, which is a very specific (and delicious!) fusion of influences from Northern Mexico, but also Texas.

We’re going to try to stick with more specifically Mexican influences for these three meals, and the three regions we’re going to attempt to highlight are Oaxaca, Jalisco, and “vaguely north.”  Lots of planets have a North.

For Oaxaca, we’re going to make a single item. One sauce.

That’s right – we’re not even going to make the meat for this one.  Just buying a rotisserie chicken and pouring our sauce over it along with a side of rice and beans.  (Technically, we’re “making” the rice and beans, but that’s so little effort it doesn’t count.)

How can we justify this little effort?  Let me cut and paste the ingredient list for this single recipe, shall I?

• 78 grams chilhuacle negro chiles
• 38 grams pasilla chiles
• 27 grams guajillo chiles
• 1/2 ripe plantain
• 2 Roma tomatoes
• 2 medium tomatillos
• 1/4 large white onion
• 2 garlic cloves
• 3 tablespoons lard
• 2 tablespoons almonds
• 1 tablespoon peanuts
• 1 piece cinnamon
• 2 whole cloves
• 1 whole star anise
• 1/2 teaspoon allspice berries
• 1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon pumpkin seeds
• 1 tablespoon raisins
• 1 tablespoon sesame seeds (plus more for serving)
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon oregano
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 corn tortillas
• 5 cups chicken stock
• 4 teaspoons kosher salt
• 67 grams Mexican chocolate

That’s right – we’re making one of the most complicated sauces in all of global cuisine, black Mole.

Step 1 – roast the chiles.  Wait – it’s the dead of winter!  How can we grill…

…oh wait, we live in Vancouver.

Honestly, this is still probably the  step we did the least well.  Martinez’s recipe (I had to look up how to properly punctuate that) stresses carbonizing the peppers on the grill and then washing and rehydrating them to remove the burnt flavor, but comments I’ve read since then disagree with this approach, and suggest it would have been better to pull them off a little sooner in the first place.

Before:

After:

These were then washed and then left to soak in boiling water for an hour, which was intended to remove as many of the acrid notes as possible.  While the grill was still hot, we tossed on half a ripe plantain, which, hilariously, attempted to escape from its skin over the course of 20 minutes.

Note that the blackened skin on the left is empty – it contained the roasted plantain on the right when we started.

OK, what other prep do we need to do?  We need to blacken our veg.  I did this on a cast iron skillet, as instructed, but in future I might just haul out the blowtorch.

Need to toast a couple of corn tortillas, too.

The only other prep is to put all the ingredients in bowls so we can add them in the right sequence for the next steps.

First up, melt the lard.  Then in with the almonds, peanuts, cinnamon, cloves, anise, allspice, peppercorns, and pumpkin seeds.

Next, raisins, sesame seeds, cumin, thyme, oregano, and bay leaves.

Once those have had a chance to toast a bit, in with almost everything else: chiles, plantain, veg, tortillas (yes, straight into the sauce), stock, and salt.

This gets simmered for an hour or so, then the whole mess goes into the food processor.

Once it’s all blended, you transfer it BACK to the pot with some more lard and then cook it for another ten minutes. When it’s finished, you turn off the heat and then stir in the chocolate.

And that’s it!  A bit gritty, since we weren’t using an honest to god blender, but the color is beautiful.

None of the recipes for this dish pay the slightest attention to the chicken.  “Serve over chicken” is how it’s usually described.  So given that, we just got a rotisserie chicken from the neighborhood grocery store.  A little rice and beans, a bag of corn tortillas, some Mexican beer, and here’s the final spread:

Pretty, innit?

In terms of flavor, it’s obvious what the GOAL was.  You could definitely taste the rich complexity of the sauce.  But… I think we did burn the chiles a bit too much.  I see the approach this recipe was going for, but I think I would have preferred having a bit less burned flavor to try to wash back out.  Still – this sauce is a BEAR, and I’m proud of us for even attempting it.

Next up, Jalisco! Home of tequila!

And probably also food, we’ll have to look into that.

Recipe:
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1023509-mole-negro

When I was in grad school…

No not for the Physics degree, before that.

No not the previous one either, the one before THAT.

Dear lord, I’ve spent way too much time in college.

At any rate, ONE of the times I was in grad school, I had a fellow member of my cohort who was from Mauritius.  She said that she used to have trouble at immigration control, because the country was so tiny that it sometimes didn’t appear on their list.

“I’m from Mauritius.”

“Mauritania?”

“No, Mauritius?”

“You’re from Mauritania?”

…sigh “Yes, I’m from Mauritania.”

“C’mon in!”

This was obviously a different time.

Speaking of different times, at different times, Mauritius was occupied by the Dutch, the French, the British, and was visited by the Arabs and Portuguese.  There’s no evidence Zheng He ever went there, but sure, why not – let’s say he did too.

Suffice it to say, the food culture of this island is quite diverse.  In terms of the national dish, the one that comes up the most often as a candidate is a lentil filled flatbread called dhol puri. And since flatbread by itself is kinda boring, we’re going to make another dish called sausage rougaille.  Rougaille is a tomato based sauce that is quite common on Mauritius, and putting sausage in it is a good way to get some protein in there.

I found a website which appears to be written by an expat, so we’ll go with her recipes.

First, the flatbread.  You take channa dal (split yellow lentils) and boil them.  How long?

“Until mushy”.

Oh dear – it’s THAT kind of recipe is it?  Ugh. Fine. How about an hour?  That seemed to work.

Once the peas are properly mushy, you blend them with some tumeric, salt, and cumin seeds to make a paste.

You also make a basic flour and water dough and leave that to rest a bit. But the interesting thing there is that you use the bean water to mix with the flour.

Once the dough’s had a chance to rest, you fill it with the chick pea mixture.

That gets sealed into balls, and those are rolled super thin for cooking.

Cooking couldn’t be simpler – just grill on both sides for a few minutes each.  One thing the video I watched stressed, however, is that every time you flip one of these things over, you should brush it with a little oil.  I suspect a lot of the flatbreads we made for our Indian meal would have gone better if I had heeded this instruction – it really did make a difference in keeping them soft.

OK, what shall we eat WITH these breads?  Rougaille turns out to be fairly straightforward.  First you sweat some onions with thyme, coriander seed, curry leaves, ginger and garlic pastes, and… peppercones?

You know what, my French isn’t any better.

This actually smelled pretty amazing all by itself.

To this, you add tomato puree and diced tomatoes.  The recipe actually called for a specific brand of tomato puree, but we definitely don’t have that one at our local Save On.  So I just pureed a can of basic “diced, no extra salt.”

And in it all went to simmer down.

Speaking of specific brands, I DEFINITELY didn’t have the specific brand of honey chicken sausages the author was asking for, so I just got some bog standard mechanically separated chicken wieners.

I shouldn’t be so dismissive – these things smelled pretty good while they were being browned.  A little color imparted, they were chopped into short segments and chucked into the tomato sauce to finish cooking, and that was the dish!

Here’s the whole meal, with some white rice to fill it out.

This is one of those things where showing everything separate isn’t really an honest picture of what the meal is like.  Here’s a better idea:

That looks more like a nice tasty home cooked meal.  And it was!

The tomato sauce, in particular, was REALY good, from all the seasoning.  The chicken wieners punched surprisingly above their weight, and the bread had a great texture for scooping it all up.  In terms of flavor, the bread was a bit dull, but it’s nothing a bit more salt wouldn’t have probably fixed.

Mauritania, I’m sorry, Mauritius, really has some tasty food – we’d certainly be down to try some more at some point.

Next time, the start of what we suspect is the final country we’ll be breaking into multiple meals!

Recipes:
Sausage Rougaille
Dholl Puri