Lomo saltado: First leg on the Grand Tour

So, my son's last day of school for the summer was Friday. Months of summer stretch out before us.

Sounds great, doesn't it? It sounds great... No, not so much really. To be truthful, I doubt my parenting skills (every day). I really doubt my patience. How do I keep this five-and-a-half year old from getting bored (and worse, getting into trouble)? How do I keep from tearing my hair out? How do we keep the boy from losing all the progress he made in his Montessori school this spring? And how do I keep him from watching TV and playing video games all summer while I try to work? 

Then I got the idea. I was inspired by this Washington Post story about the Spanish-themed buffet at the Garden Cafe of the National Gallery of Art and the Joan Miro exhibit. I liked the idea of the food connecting with the exhibit. That could be cool. Each week, we have a different country as the theme: We try the food. We go to relevant exhibits. We learn about the country: the history, the geography. We use all that as a basis for regular lessons in writing, reading, math, and science. We make art in the style of the country. We listen to the music! Hey, this could be kind of fun! 

So I let my son pick the first country on our "Grand Tour." He picked Peru (where one of his teachers, Miss Rosy, is from). Eek, I thought, I know next to nothing about Peru. But now I am so incredibly happy and grateful he picked Peru. I've learned so much! What a fascinating country! When can we go? Incas, Nazca lines, a coastal desert, the root of all potatodom and all tomatodom, Machu Picchu, Andes, and the Amazonian rain forest. 

It turns out Peruvian food is at least as diverse as its landscape. Thousands of varieties of potatoes, tomato species that exist nowhere else, fish, fruit, not to mention the variety of ethnic influences on the cuisine from all over the globe. What do I pick to make and eat?

Ceviche, which may be the dish most associated with Peru, is intriguing but not necessarily a dish you want to introduce to a five-year old. Furthermore, because it requires such extreme freshness of seafood and such a deft hand with acid and spices, it didn't seem like a good place to start as a beginner. I wanted something traditional, somewhat easy, definitely Peruvian, but not so far out there I wouldn't be able to get my son to try it. A friend suggested lomo saltado, a beef stir-fry dish with fried potatoes. So I started looking into what makes the dish. From a few different sources,* I gathered these basic features of the dish:

• It's a stirfry, reflecting the fact that Peru boasts one of the larger ethnic Chinese communities outside China in the world. 
• It includes potatoes and is typically served with rice. So yes, that's two, let me say it again, two starches in one dish. 
• The main ingredients are almost always beef strips, onion, tomatoes, fried potatoes, soy sauce, and vinegar. Often included are either parsley or cilantro. Sometimes cumin is included, sometimes not.  
• Aji amarillo, a yellow Peruvian pepper is often included, but sadly I couldn't find one. 

So based on these general ideas about the dish, here's how I made it, and I must say it was pretty delicious:

Ingredients

• 1/2 bag of frozen French fries (I know, I totally cheated on this, but at least they were organic and included very few ingredients)
• 3 Tbsps vegetable oil  
• 1 lb of grass-fed stir-fry beef in thin strips
• 1 red onion, sliced thinly
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 3 tomatoes, seeded and cut into bite-size pieces
• 2-3 Tbsps soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1 Tbsp chopped parsley
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• salt and pepper

Instructions:

Before we get into the specifics, here's a general tip about any stirfry: Always make sure that all your ingredients are prepared and ready to go. Stirfrys are one kind of dish where mise en place is critical. So, assuming your ingredients are all chopped and measured and peeled and sliced and ready, here are the instructions:

1. Cook the French fries according to package instructions. 
2. Heat the oil in a wok or another thick-bottomed pot on high heat. The oil should be very hot. 
3. Add the meat to the oil (be careful about getting splattered!). Stirring quickly, let it cook for 1 minute. 
4. Add the onions to the pan. Let it cook for 2 minutes. 
5. Add the tomatoes, garlic, cumin, garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, and parsley to the wok, stir quickly and let it all cook for about 2 minutes. 
6. Taste the sauce, add more soy sauce, salt, and pepper to taste.
7. Serve the stirfried meat over the French fries with white rice on the side. Sprinkle a little fresh parsley over the top. 

Is it completely authentic? Probably not. Is it good? Oh yes. I think I just added a new dish to the dinner repertoire. (And it would probably be good with pork too.) 

* Some sources to learn more about Peruvian food are My Life in Peru, Peru Food, www.southamerica.cl, and About.com's list of traditional Peruvian dishes. 

Musing on American food, eating black bean and sweet potato tacos for Meatless Monday

The Three Sisters. Corn, beans, and squash. The three staples of many Native American diets and when planted together in a milpa, a remarkably sustainable way to raise crops. Eaten together, they form the basis of a diet that provides most of the nutrients a body needs. In a sense, these three form a universe.

Several years ago, I learned of the three sisters in Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, an excellent book that surveys much of the archaeological research about the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus. For some reason, much of the information, though no longer in doubt in the scientific community, has not made it into standard history books, leaving many with the impression that the Americas were wide open, naturally rich with game and edible plants. A garden of Eden, virgin, untouched, when in fact it was a cultivated space, designed to produce in abundance, then emptied of its people through the tragic introduction of a foreign virus. But that part of the story many know.

So why bring this up in a blog about food? Because food is one of the most immediate and powerful ways to experience and transmit culture. Recipes are handed down from generation to generation, telling us about our history: Who made this? How did he or she make it? What was the time and place like when this was made? Also, many people identify a sense of self and a sense of home through the foods they eat, through the smells that suffuse their kitchens reminding them of their grandmothers and other family perhaps long gone. And regardless of how much we experiment with foods from other cultures and are able to enjoy and appreciate them, when we need comfort and a sense of home, we make what we know, or we adapt the new to our old traditions.

America is and is not new to me. I have now lived here most of my life and I became a U.S. citizen in December of last year, but my family hails from the North, and I lived many formative years in Sweden. Most of my relatives still live in Iceland, Finland, and Sweden. That is the culture I was raised in. In those places, I feel history in the curve of a hill and the particular green shades of springtime. But America is my new home, and part of my search to connect with this place and feel as deeply attached to it is to explore local foods.

Sadly, however, it seems that the ancient foodways of this area of the Americas are not well known. Most traditional Southern foods (and yes, Virginia is southern) seem to have been brought over from Europe and Africa and adapted to local conditions--not a bad thing, simply not reflective of what natives ate here prior to the arrival of Europeans (and in many respects familiar to me). I think to understand more about what native Americans ate, you have to look farther south. In my case, I look to Mexico, because knowledge of traditional foods and practice with ancient cooking techniques seem strong there. Of course, I suspect this is only the beginning of my exploration of American food.

For tonight's dinner, I was inspired by a recipe by Brady Evans from Kalle Bergman's Honest Cooking magazine, but I had some local conditions I needed to adapt to (the tortillas in my freezer were too small to make burritos for one) and I wanted to play my own riff on the combination of sweet potatoes and black beans. This recipe features two of the three sisters, corn and beans (I can't bring myself to figure out what to do with my last remaining winter squash yet).

Black Bean and Sweet Potato Tacos
These have three main components: beans, sweet potatoes, and chile sauce.

For the beans:
1 cup dried black beans
4-5 cups water
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 large onion, chopped (you will use the rest for the sweet potatoes)
1 cup crushed canned tomatoes
1 Tbsp cumin
1 Tbsp coriander
salt to taste

For the sweet potatoes:
2 medium sweet potatoes, 1/2 inch dice
1/2 large onion, chopped
2 Tbsp olive oil
salt to taste

For the chile sauce:
3 dried Ancho chiles (break them open and clean out the seeds)
1 medium onion, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 cup canned crushed tomatoes
1 cup (or more) water
1 Tbsp dried oregano

To serve:
10 small corn tortillas

1 avocado, sliced into cubes

pepitas (toasted would be lovely, but I didn't have time to try it)
queso fresco, crumbled

1. Pick over the beans and rinse them (sometimes dried beans can have small rocks or other debris). Boil in plain water (do NOT add salt or they will never soften) for 60-90 minutes (test after about a hour to determine if they are soft enough for you; they should maintain their integrity, but not be crunchy or hard). Set aside.
2. Make the sauce: In a dry frying pan over medium heat (I used my trusty iron skillet of course), place your dry chiles and let them toast for a while. Turn them over from time to time until they blister a bit.
3. Add two tablespoons olive oil to the pan with your chiles. When the oil has heated a bit, add your chopped onions. Let them cook low and slow with the chiles until they start to brown and caramelize a bit (adding some sweetness to your sauce). Then add garlic and let it become fragrant (but don't let it burn). Finally, add about a cup of water to the pan.
4. Scrape the chiles, onion, garlic, and water out of the pan (set it aside for later) and into a blender or food processor and buzz until smooth. Add about a cup of crushed tomato. You can add more water if the consistency is too thick.
5. Put the mixture into a small saucepan, add one tablespoon oregano, about a half tablespoon of salt (or more or less to taste) and let it bubble slowly on low heat while you work on the sweet potatoes and beans. Note that this mixture will be a bit bitter on its own, but will balance the sweetness of the sweet potatoes nicely.
6. Add two tablespoons olive oil to the same frying pan you toasted the chiles in. Let the oil heat up, then add the onions. Cook them until they are translucent and then add the sweet potatoes. Let these cook on slow heat, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are soft and the onions are slightly browned. Add salt to taste and set aside (or keep warm).
7. For the beans, add two tablespoons olive oil to another pan and fry the onions until they are slightly browned (I wanted to try using shallots, but alas, onions is what I had). Then add beans to the pan (be sure to drain them first; you can set aside the bean liquor for another use, such as for a soup, if you like). Add a  cup of crushed tomato, 1 tablespoon cumin, and 1 tablespoon coriander, and maybe a clove of crushed garlic if you like. Let the beans cook until most of the liquid evaporates and salt to taste.

Now, you have your components: tortillas (heat according to package instructions--yes I use packaged tortillas because I still don't know how to make them), beans, sweet potatoes, chile sauce, avocado, pepitas, and queso fresco. Set all these out in separate bowls to let people assemble tacos to their own tastes. These are a nice hearty meal for a Meatless Monday.