Torta Salgado

My coworker, Rocky Gilberti wanted to go home to Brooklyn for the weekend and invited me to tag along. She promised some Brazilian home cooking and I jumped at the chance.

Rocky obviously knows her way around the kitchen. She even taught me a couple kitchen tricks I'd never seen before. She showed me how lighting a candle next to onions being chopped will prevent your eyes burning... now that's a handy bit of knowledge! We were both in full lounge mode and she was dressed more for capoeira than for having her picture taken but as you can see, she was a good sport about it.

She is an art conservator originally from Belo Horizonte in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil. She let me thumb through her mother's Livro de Bruxa, or Witch's Book, a compendium of family recipes going back several generations. Evidently, her mother's copy is a green felt-covered book stuffed so full she had to wrap a belt around it to keep it all together (thus "Witch's Book"). But several years ago, she scanned every page and pieced it all together scrapbook-style as a gift to each of her children. The pages are largely in Portuguese with recipes gathered from many family members (in their individual handwriting) or clipped from newspapers from many decades. What a treasure! The recipe she had chosen for the evening was from page 120, Torta Salgado or Salted Pie.

Torta Salgado
Batter:
2 c. milk
4 eggs
12 tbsp. white flour
5 tbsp. olive oil
3 tbsp. grated hard cheese (Pecorino, Romano, or Parmesan)
Depending on the cheese used, possibly 1 tsp. salt
Blend until smooth and add 2 tsp. dry yeast

Filling:
1 large chicken breast, poached & shredded
1 med. yellow onion, chopped
1 14 oz. can hearts of palm, chopped
1 15 oz. can tomato sauce
1/2 c. frozen sweet peas
2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped

Saute the onions in some olive oil until translucent, add chicken and the liquid from the can of hearts of palm. Reduce. Add tomato sauce and frozen peas and reduce the standing liquid. Season to taste. Add chopped hearts of palm and chopped hard-boiled eggs. Pour 1/2 of the batter into an ungreased 9x13 Pyrex baking pan. Add chicken mixture into pan, distributing evenly. Cover with remaining batter. Bake at 350 degrees until done, about 30 minutes or until a poked toothpick comes clean.

The result was a light and eggy pie that tasted like rich comfort food of the first order. The hearts of palm were remarkably similar to artichokes in flavor and texture, but with a distinctly Latin flair. She conjectured that they were originally a New World replacement for an unavailable ingredient familiar to Portuguese immigrants but assured me they were absolutely indispensable for Brazilian cooking. She said this is but one of many variations of this dish. There is a ground beef version for which she would probably omit the peas. Her great aunt even made a version with large, fresh sardines.

We talked into the night about the indigenous cultures of Brazil and the fusion of cultures that is Brazil today. Her fiance, Charles, is currently in Brazil helping out finishing her parent's new home and doing a large fresco there. Even though we were both away from our respective sweeties for Valentine's Day, at least we had her marvelous cooking to comfort our pining hearts.

Alexandria, Virginia

I have been quite pleasantly surprised by the food here. And once again, I find that some of the best ethnic cuisine can be found, of all places, in strip malls. While the food in the DC area is generally expensive, in both restaurants and the grocery stores, I have found it to all be quite good.

Pho Viet Flare is a little shop serving only pho and bun (rice vermicelli noodle salad), with cha gio (egg rolls) and spring rolls. These are always my favorite. Somehow the pho is always better in a place that does only pho! I found the broth to be very good; rich and aromatic without being overly spiced. The bo vien (meatballs) were a little lackluster but the herb plate was fully loaded. Their spring rolls were fantastic! The texture was so perfect, maybe the best I've ever had. Their che (sweet bean parfait dessert) was also excellent. Something about the sweetened red beans, grassjellies, coconut milk and shaved ice come together to just complete a pho meal! Good to know I can get my fix for pho here.

My coworker Rachel Gilberti and I went to the Afgan Market Restaurant and Bakery. We both enjoyed it quite a bit. We both ordered kubedah kabob combos. I got a lamb kabob too (which was tender and quite good) but the kubedah was fantastic. Ground sirloin mixed with fresh herbs and spices rolled onto a skewer and char-grilled, served on a bed of basmati rice sprinkled with cinnamon served with a little bowl of tender garbanzo beans in an oily, spicy tomato sauce. This was served with a salad of romaine lettuce and tomato with a dressing of yogurt, tahini and lemon, and some oil-fried flatbread. It is located in a market where you can buy everything from rugs to hookahs to groceries to jewelry. They had some dumplings that looked like they'd be worth going back for too, but we were sooo stuffed when we left! They'll just have to wait until next time.

Satay Sarinah is an Indonesian restaurant located in the same strip mall as Pho Viet Flare. I started with the crab shomai fried dumplings. As I browsed the menu, I noticed they had Kopi Luwak on the menu. I have read about this before and had promised myself I would try it if I got the chance. Kopi Luwak is coffee made from coffee berries that have been eaten by the civet cat. The civet digests the berries but passes the coffee bean and, in the process, filters some of the harsher alkaloids from the bean. People collect the beans and the result is supposed to be the very finest cup of coffee in the world. The price reflected the labor-intensive nature of this drink ($10/cup!) but it is quite rare and thought I should take the opportunity when I had it. They made it by grinding the beans to an turkish grind, steeping it in hot water and hand filtering most of the grounds, making each cup individually. The result was a cup of full-bodied coffee like a cup of french-press, but not so strong as turkish, but with the sediment that turkish coffee has. The remarkable thing about it was that it was completely free of that final bitter note of coffee. It was strange to have a nice strong cup of coffee without that tang at the end. Like hearing the first three notes of Beethoven's 9th, and just kind of waiting for that fourth note that never comes. The caffeine was mellower too, not so jangly as it can be for me sometimes. Quite nice but worth the price? Maybe not but you gotta do it once... and truly it's not THAT much more than a latte, especially given what it is.

I moved on to the Rames village platter. Steamed jasmine rice topped with fried shallots surrounded by several bites of several things: coconut curry chicken, green beens in a spicy coconut sauce, a deep-fried hard boiled egg in a sweet chili sauce, a skewer each of beef satay and chicken satay, and some deep-fried shrimp chips, like a pork rind only shrimpier. The portions were a little modest but the attention to detail was nice, the flavors fantastic and I left with quite a nice little spice high. For dessert, I ordered the Es Campur. This is kind of an ideal dessert for me. The only thing that could have made it better was if it had been summer outside instead of 25 degrees. It is chopped rambutan, lychee, pineapple and jackfruit, cubes of grassjelly, and a hunk of young coconut all topped with shaved ice drizzled with a little condensed milk and plenty of pandan syrup. YES! Pandan is such an intriguing flavor, I can never quite wrap my mouth around it. It is made from the leaves of the Screwpine tree and used like vanilla but tastes nothing like vanilla. It tastes kind of fruity, nutty, grassy... very difficult to describe. Kind of like coconut maybe but kind of like buttery rice. Very delicate, almost floral, but earthy. It made for a delightful end to a very nice meal even if the service was kind of distracted.

Polish Cuisine in Brooklyn

My room in Alexandria, VA where I am working from had been overbooked for the Inauguration so I went to stay with coworker Anita Flejter and her husband Slawek at their place in Ridgepoint, Brooklyn. Anita is a fine art and architectural conservator and Slawek is a geologist working on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana. They are such lovely people and such gracious hosts! In addition to giving me a place to stay and lovely company, they gave me a primer in Polish cuisine that I enjoyed immensely.

Ridgepoint has a sizable Polish community and they took me to one of their favorite traditional Polish restaurants, Bona. http://bonarestaurant.com/en/ A guided tour of Polish cuisine in the Polish borough? Hell yeah! I had the sampler platter: fried pierogies (potato filled dumplings) topped with some fried onions, a grilled kielbasa (the real thing, not hot-doggy at all), and golabki, a cabbage roll stuffed with pork and rice, covered with a thin tomato sauce that tasted like a very mild demiglace. All was served with a little plate of salads: coleslaw, sauerkraut, a pickled beet salad and a red cabbage & apple slaw. Quite good. Anita gave me some of her batter-fried fish in Greek sauce, a kind of sweet and sour carrot-based marinara-looking sauce. Also good. They drank hot beer. I had a sip and it tasted like Stella Artois with some allspice/cinnamon/nutmeg on it. They said it should have had some honey and an egg yolk in it to give it body but as it was bitter cold out and the beer was warm, it was good enough!

The next night Slawek made bigos. This is a very traditional Polish dish known all over Poland that he put his own spin on. It is made with about half and half sauerkraut and fresh cabbage, although proportions vary. To this, he added onion, shredded carrots, chopped dried prunes, dried cranberries and some chopped pecans (the nuts are their own innovation). This is stewed all day or for several days, Slawek said, it keeps getting better and better. Traditionally, it is made with a meat base; bacon, kielbasa, pork, even chicken. But as Anita is vegetarian, Slawek and I just added some grilled chopped kielbasa to ours before serving. I liked this dish alot. A stick to your ribs winter dish that soothes the soul. Real farm-style comfort food. The kind of thing you hope is waiting for you when you come in from the cold. Interestingly, I had just been reading about making lacto-fermented sauerkraut a few days before ( http://boingboing.net/2009/01/12/making-sauerkraut-is.html ). I will definitely be trying this out once I get back to my kitchen!

Thank you Anita & Slawek!