Banane Pézé (Fried Plantains)

Haiti calls it Banane Pézé (pronounced bahn-ahn pay-zay). Spanish-speaking countries around the Caribbean call it Tostones. But for English-speakers, it's just fried plantains.

For those of you who aren't so familiar with Afro-Caribbean or Latin American foods, plantains are a relative of the bananas we eat as fruit, or Cavendish bananas. But plantains have a lot more starch than Cavendish bananas and are not eaten raw. In Haitian cuisine, it's as popular of a side dish as potatoes are to Americans.

In stores, you might see them looking deep green, or yellow, or yellowish with black splotches. This correlates with the plantains' ripeness and sweetness. When they're unripe and green, they're super starchy and not very flavorful. When they start going black, they're overripe and get too sweet for me to handle. A good yellow is my ideal.

Growing up, I'd have boiled plantains with almost every dinner. But once in a while, at some Thanksgivings, my aunt would make banane pézé. So making this as a side dish for some friends' Thanksgiving dinner party definitely brought back some memories.

It's a really simple recipe. First, wash and peel the plantain. The easiest way to peel it is to chop off the stem and end, cut a shallow slit from end to end, and pull off the peel and any lingering strands. Chop the plantain into 1-inch rounds.

In some good frying oil (grapeseed, sunflower, peanut, etc), fry each piece of plantain until it's just barely golden brown on each side. When they're golden, remove them from the skillet and let them cool for a minute. Keep the oil hot, you're not done yet.

When they're cool enough to handle, flatten them. A lot of Haitian families have a complicated piece of hardware for the sole purpose of making banane pézé. It's basically 2 pieces of wood connected by a hinge. I just used some wax paper and 2 cheap wooden coasters.

Return the flatten plantain pieces to the oil and fry on each side until they've turned golden-brown. When they're done, remove them from the pan, dry them on some paper towels, and season with salt and pepper.

Serve fresh and hot.

Cranberry Almond Quinoa

Recipe Source: Experimenting

Recipe Result: Tasty side dish, would make it again

My mom's really into health food. When I was in high school, she used to buy books by Dr. Andrew Weil all about natural healing foods and whole foods and such. That being said, she can get kind of obnoxious about eating only organic meat and produce. For example:

The scene, Downtown Whole Foods market, produce aisle.

Mom: "I want to buy some strawberries... can't find any."

Me: "There's a huge display of them right here. You're holding a box of them."

Mom: "They're not organic."

Me: "Mom... this is Whole Foods. Pretty much anything they sell comes from a reputable grower. It doesn't have to be organic to be good."

Mom: "Still... I want organic only."

Me: "But..."

Mom: "Do you want to eat pesticides?"

But she is kind of ahead of the curve when it comes to the new "trendy" health foods. When I home in 2006, she introduced me to quinoa. It cooks a lot like rice, and it has a considerable amount of protein for a plant. Buuuut, by itself it's kind of bitter and unexciting. So I did a little googling to see what else people have been doing with quinoa, and I decided to experiment with sweeter flavor additives: dried cranberries and sliced roasted almonds.

Ingredients:

- 1.5 Tbsp olive oil

- 1/4 cup finely diced sweet yellow onion

- 3 Tbsp dried cranberries (unsweetened)

- 3 Tbsp sliced roasted almonds

- 1 cup dry plain quinoa

- 2 cups water

- 1 dash garlic powder

- Salt & pepper, to taste.

Procedure:

1. In a small stainless steel saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat (but not so hot that it makes the oil shimmer and smoke). Saute the onions until they start to go translucent, but not brown.

2. Add the cranberries and almonds, stir, and let it heat up for a minute or 2. Then add the dry quinoa, and stir to coat all the grains in the oil. Let it heat up for a minute.

3. Add the water, turn the heat to high and bring the pot to a boil. Add the garlic powder, salt and pepper, and stir well. It's a good idea to taste the liquid, because that's how the quinoa will ultimately taste like. Once it's up to a good boil, turn the heat as low as possible, cover the pot, and let it sit for 8-10 minutes.

4. After about 8-10 minutes, lift the lid and give it a stir to make sure it's all cooked through. A good indicator that it's done is that the little thread-like things are separated from the grains. When you see it, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Ratatouille [Attempt #1, sorta]

Recipe Source: n/a
Recipe Result: Good flavor, nice and light, but texture was kind of compromised by going overboard with the dried herbs

I say "Attempt #1, sorta" because I've tried this a couple of times and a couple of different ways, but never really documented it. What is ratatouille, aside from a great Pixar movie? It's a traditional eggplant and squash dish of southern France, or Provence. A friend and I got to spend a couple of days in Avignon and the food there was amazing, and for a little while after that trip I tried to recreate some of those flavors on my own.

In the process, I realized Provençal cuisine really reminds me of my mom's Haitian cooking. It's country/peasant-style cooking (compared to what everyone think of with French cuisine), and it relies heavily on tomatoes, onions/shallots, garlic, and good herbs. A lot of it is relatively slow-cooked meat + veggie dishes that warm you up inside and are deeply satisfying, kind of like a good bowl of chili. One important ingredient of Provençal food is anchovies. It sounds kind of weird at first, and by themselves they just taste fishy and salty. But when sautéed in oil, it adds a really nice depth of flavor to your dish. It's kind of like how fish sauce works in Thai food.

This time, I chose not to follow a cookbook or online recipe and tried to take an intuitive approach to it. One big difference between the standard recipe and my way was that I sliced up my zucchini into really thin rounds, (half-rounds for the eggplant to match the zucchini slice sizes). Traditionally you cut everything into cubes so everything is the same size, but I just wanted the end result to look more interesting.

I mean, doesn't this look more fun to put on your fork than some lame-ass centimeter cube? Not to mention that cutting the eggplant this way made it a lot easier to salt it, in order to draw out the moisture and make it easier to sauté. Look at those slices sweating after just 20 min.


One thing I realized I neglected upon finishing was that it could have been a lot more tomato-ey. I thought a heaping tablespoon of tomato paste with the cooking liquid would be nice and subtle but sufficient. It tasted good in the end, but it didn't taste like what I remember from Avignon. I'll add in some tomato puree or whole ripe tomatoes the next time. Also, next time I'll ease up on the herbes de Provence. I ended up putting in so much that the pieces of dried rosemary were messing with the texture of the veggies.


You can find my full recipe after the jump. Try it out, and please do leave a comment to let me know how it worked out for you.

Tarka Dal (Spiced Lentils) [Attempt #1]

Recipe source: http://www.punjabi-recipes.com/recipes/174.aspx

Recipe result: Success

I eat meat, and I'm damn proud of it. But at the same time, I'm a firm believer in a balanced diet. So when stuff myself on TX barbecue one day, I try to balance it out with a night or two of eating vegetarian-ish. Lentils are perfect for those meals; they cook pretty quickly, and they're relatively hearty and high in protein.

Some minor alterations to the recipe:

1) I don't have a pressure cooker. So I put the lentils and water in a regular stainless steel pot, brought it to a boil, lowered the heat to medium and put the lid on for about 10 minutes.
2) I don't have ghee (clarified butter), so I just used a tablespoon of vegetable oil.
3) I forgot to add turmeric to the water when I boiled the lentils, so I just added the turmeric to the oil around the same time as the minced ginger and garlic.
4) The writer basically decided to let the reader figure out on his/her own what to do with the hing (asafoetida). I learned a while ago that in Indian cooking, a small pinch of asafoetida is the first thing you put into the hot oil. It doens't add anything to the flavor or aroma of the finished product, but word on the street is that asafoetida has antiflatulent properties. So, it's up to your discretion.
5) Similar to the asafoetida, the writer preferred to shroud the end use of the lime juice in total mystery. I just cut it out completely.

Aside from these, I followed the recipe as given.

My ingredient list:
1.5 cups of Masoor dal (pink lentils)
4 cups of water
about 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
pinch of asafoetida (optional)
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp black mustard seeds
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 medium yellow onion (about 3" in diameter), finely diced
1 Tbsp garam masala
2 vine-ripe tomatoes, blanched, peeled, seeded and diced
Salt to taste

Yields 5 or 6 servings.

Aside from a couple of items from the original ingredient list being overlooked, it was a straight-forward recipe and the end result turned out great. I guess the lesson learned this time is that lentils are surprisingly simple to work with. Basically, boil them and toss them into whatever you want to flavor them with.