Wood Fire Food

Pupusas. Please, if you're ever in Honduras (or I would imagine most countries in Latin America) eat some pupusas. From what I could tell, this was some sort of thick, cornmeal based masterpiece filled with beans and heaven in the form of yogurt-y sour cream. We ate them everyday at a little street vendor near where we stayed, and they were great every time, and with a little cabbage salad and hot sauce, (peppers, onions, water, and vinegar fermenting in what looked to be an old gasoline can) even better.

Cerdo y Yucca. Pork and Yucca- so limey and perfect you almost don't know what you were eating. Watching Marianne cook this pork I was dumbfounded. All she did was take it out of a bin and thrown it on the griddle with just a bit of oil. All of the flavor came straight from the marinade. The Yucca, which if you've never had it, is kind of a starchy, rooty vegetable, but with more of a chewy texture than a potato, was great as well. Cooked perfectly tender all the way through with a little crisp on the outside. Served with spicy pico de gallo.

Anything and Fresh Avocados. What could one possibly put with avocados that you couldn't make work to at least some degree? Salads, tacos, sausage, tortillas, we ate them all with avocados in Honduras, but I think my favorite was just fresh flour tortillas with lime and avocado. Just the color alone of the flesh of these beautiful fruits was enough to make me fall in love, but the taste- well that was something completely different than what we get at HEB here in Texas.

Forever spoiled by fresh fruits and pupusas

Progressive dinner? I say yes.

The plan last night was hors d'oeuvres at Alex's house, dinner at mine, and dessert at the home of a few very pretty ladies that for some reason let us hang out with them. Until yesterday I had never heard of such a thing as this, but I decided to play along with their foolish food games, but a feast it became.

The night began with cocktails and a few figgy selections: 1) some sort of prosciutto, feta, fruit, and cracker ensemble and 2) my favorite, caramelized figs with goat cheese on toasted crackers. It was perfect. Applause to Alex for something that never would have crossed my mind; this one is most certainly stored away in my to-be-cooked database. The martinis weren't so bad either..

Now for dinner. Cherry-glazed lamb chops, mashed sweet potatoes, ricotta-stuffed tomatoes with truffle oil, and sauteed white asparagus. Besides the asparagus, all were new dishes for me, which is usually not the goal when cooking for eight hungry friends with moderate expectations. I basically followed a recipe for the meat, not sticking directly to in, but then again not straying too far in any other direction. There was only one goal in mind while making the sweet potatoes- infuse as much butter and heavy cream into these delicious, orange rooty things as humanly possible. Can you ever go wrong with that? I will always argue that you cannot. One stick of butter and a few cups of cream later and we all left feeling just a bit fatter. Mission accomplished.

My favorite dish of the night (not because it was necessarily the best, but because I couldn't find anything exactly like it on the Internet) was the stuffed tomatoes. Seeing as how I had never stuffed a tomato with, well anything, this was again new territory for me. Ten beautiful roma tomatoes in hand, I cut just the top off and scooped out the inside, making room for what were the really important things: 1 cup ricotta, 1 cup herby/garlicky bread crumbs, 4 teaspoons truffle oil, 2 egg yolks. I did my best to stuff the tomatoes with as much of this goodness as I could without eating a majority of it in the process. After baking and filling house with that very unmistakeable smell of truffles (mind you it already smelled like a heaven full of butter, lamb chops, and cherry preserves) they were finished. Easy and quite tasty. I did my best to quickly present it, and dinner was served.

What would a good meal be without a great dessert? My answer is nothing. This isn't exactly my forte, so I won't go into details (because I don't know them) about what our good friend Katherine made but I can tell you that dessert #1 was a great, middle-eastern spicy coffee cake thing, and dessert #2 was Death By Chocolate, which was, well, death by chocolate.

Progressive dinner again? I say yes to that as well.