Mofongo

My book club usually themes our dinners around that month’s book, so this month’s selection, ‘The Bad Girl’ by Mario Vargas Llosa, was great (for dinner themes; as a book it was merely okay) because it took place in Peru, Cuba, Paris, Japan, Spain, and London. I chose the Latin American route and made rice, black beans, and vegetarian mofongo, which is a Caribbean dish made of fried plantains mashed with lots of garlic.

Here are the ingredients, which include jasmine rice (in our big H-Mart bag), onion, garlic, black beans which have been soaking for 24 hours, green plantains, canola oil, olive oil, cilantro and vegetable stock:

the ingredients

Here is the supper, which when actually eaten at the multinational book club dinner party was accompanied by quiche, scones and croissants baked by my cohorts, sadly not photographed but I assure you they were both beautiful and delicious. Details of my contribution follow!

mofongo!

The rice:

Self-explanatory. Rice cooker, rice, water. Pow. Rice.

The black beans:

After soaking for 24 hours or so, I simmered the black beans in the water they had been soaking in, with a chopped onion and 4 chopped cloves of garlic that I sauteed in the pot first. I added lots of cilantro, cumin and cayenne towards the end, then after the beans were soft I let a lot of the water evaporate off until it had kind of a thick saucy consistency. They got a little burnt because right before the dinner party I turned them on to thicken more, then wandered off to talk to Rachel. I thought I had left them on low but no, they were on high. So there is a slightly singed taste but I think they are still delicious.

The mofongo:

Apparently I am now Puerto Rican in spirit because my thumb is still stained from peeling those plantains, and my Puerto Rican co-worker says that the stain of the plantain is the physical manifestation of the Puerto Rican identity. So I spent about 45 minutes peeling the six plaintains, then cut them into chunks and pan-fried them, adding 6 cloves of garlic towards the end. When they were no longer burning hot, I added some olive oil and mashed them up in a bowl using a potato masher. In theory they were supposed to get to the consistency of mashed potatoes, but that was not really happening. I added a little of the veg stock but I didn’t want to change the flavor too much so I left well enough alone and we just ate them chunky. I think next time I might just leave them in the fried chunks; they were pretty awesome that way.

And finally for your viewing pleasure here is a banana butterscotch chocolate upside-down cake that Rachel made last night. I don’t know the details of the creation process*. This cake did result in a highly dramatic breakfast for me this morning, as some of the butterscotch leaked onto the oven floor apparently, and when I turned on the oven to warm up my breakfast quiche, a quite large fire resulted. Luckily it was contained in the oven and easily extinguished via our handy kitchen fire extinguisher (Thank you Mr. Landlord! I would not have thought of owning one of those.) so nobody was burned to a crisp. I did not get to eat my breakfast quiche though, as it became both smoky and covered in fire extinguisher foam. Sad.

the cake was worth the fire

* Update: Rachel got the recipe for the cake at http://montcarte.umbrela.com/2010/05/17/chocolate-caramel-banana-upside-down-cake/ – I take issue at their referring to the butter and brown sugar mixture as caramel, when it is in fact butterscotch, but otherwise I totally approve of their recipe-ing skills. Go Montreal!

Posted by Melina.