Solomon Islands - How I made Pacific-style Fish and Chips

When it comes to food from the Pacific islands, it seems as though all roads lead back to palu sami. As I've made palu sami twice before (once when I was blogging about Kiribati in 2009 and again when I was blogging about Fiji in 2012), I was determined to cook something else this time!  

Unfortunately, my internet searches for the Solomon Islands' national dish came to a dead end - one website even suggested the Middle Eastern Kibbeh as the national dish of the Solomon Islands, but that just didn't seem right to me!

So I improvised!  Interestingly, whilst reading my blog post about cooking palu sami as part of my research on Fiji - I'd noted how far along my cooking had come since 2009 - that I was now able to improvise and didn't feel the need to stick to the exact recipe.  Well, I guess this current recipe is a step further for me, as I'm not only improvising, but adapting one nation's dish and giving it a make-over with another nation's staple foods.

I chose Fish and chips for several reasons - mainly because all my reading suggested that, despite their love of tinned meats like corned beef and spam, people do still eat a lot of fish in the Pacific islands.  I also found out that people in Melanesia love sweet potato, so that gave me the idea of making sweet potato chips or wedges.  

Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to pay homage to the fact that the Solomon Islands were once a British territory, so my Pacific-style fish and chips is an attempt to capture the history, as well as the cuisine of this island nation.

The Sweet Potato mystery

My photo of sweet potato

When I was researching for my blog posts on Oaxaca, Mexico - I first came across the concept of the Columbian Exchange - how European contact with Central America saw the introduction of tomatoes, potatoes, chillies, chocolate and many other crops to the diets of people outside the Americas.  

Unfortunately, the other half of the exchange meant death, disease and decimation of the native American populations!  

The interesting thing about the sweet potato is that it appeared in the Pacific islands before the Columbian exchange. No-one quite knows how the sweet potato ended up in places like Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Philippines and Japan, but somehow it happened and sweet potato has been a part of the Pacific diet for more than 1,000 years!

The Ingredients

4 fish fillets

3 limes

1 bunch of spinach

4 sweet potatoes (cut into chips)

1 tomato

1 onion

1/2 tin of coconut milk

How I made the sweet potato chips

The first thing I did was to prepare the sweet potato - peeling off the reddish-coloured skin and chopping the flesh into chips or wedges.

Peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into wedges

I then parboiled the chips, before roasting them in the oven.  I did  think about deep-fat frying the chips but, in my (admittedly limited!) experience of Pacific-island cuisine, they seem to bake things more than fry them, so I thought baked sweet potato wedges would be the best option. 

Parboil the sweet potato chips . .

. . then bake them in the oven

 

How I prepared the fish and sauce mixture

I used fish fillets that had been frozen - defrosted them and marinated them for a couple of hours in lime juice, sprinkled with some rind.

Marinate the fish fillets in lime juice

I decided to also bake the fish, so put the fillets into an oven dish, in the marinade liquid, covered it with tinfoil and baked it for about twenty-five minutes, at the same time as the sweet potato was baking.  

Bake the fish for about twenty-five minutes

To prepare the ingredients for the sauce, I washed the spinach and chopped the tomato and onion.

Wash the spinach

Chop the tomato and onion

I fried the tomato and onion on a fairly high temperature, so they would make a kind of paste.

Fry the tomato and onion in a saucepan

I then added the spinach and coconut milk, bringing the mixture to the boil, before simmering for around twenty minutes.  

Add the spinach and coconut milk

The end result was really rather tasty!

Pacific-style Fish and Chips

Image credits:

All photos were taken by me on my trusty iPhone - please feel free to re-use them under the Creative Commons license: Attribution, Share Alike, Non-commercial

Quebec - How I made Poutine

It's surprising in many ways that poutine has become the dish that's most associated with Quebec. Indeed, when I was looking at the different options of things I could make to represent Quebec, I kept coming across poutine again and again.

Despite its historical connections to France, food in Quebec seems to be fairly 'down-to-earth' and, in many ways, poutine encapsulates the different traditions of Quebec. It's also versatile enough to lend itself to other culinary traditions and these days you can get all kinds of poutines with Greek, Italian and TexMex flavours. I actually tried a real poutine when I was in Quebec, at Rimouski bus station - my poutine was Italian-style with a Bolognaise sauce.

My first experience of poutine at Rimouski bus station

With dubious origins as a 1950's late-night snack to accompany beer, poutine is now gaining a reputation as good hangover food and, if this Guardian article is to believed, Quebecois poutine is poised to take over the world!

Posh chips and gravy?  Perhaps.  All I know is that it's one of the least healthiest dishes I've made for this blog and I can only describe it as a real carb attack.  Tasty though, in a guilty pleasure kind of way. Not to mention, easy-to-make.

The ingredients

I looked at lots of different recipes when researching for this blog post, then made up my own recipe based on what I could remember and what I could get my hands on. The hardest ingredient to find was cheese curds and, unfortunately, I couldn't get my hands on any, but substituted with paneer, an Indian cheese which has a similar consistancy.  Anyway, here are the ingredients I used to make my poutine.

Ingredients for Quebecois poutine

5/6 baking potatoes
Unsalted butter
Paneer
1 onion
1 garlic clove
Worcestershire sauce
Cider vinegar
1 cup beef stock
1 cup vegetable stock
1/2 cup flour
Pork lardons

How I made Poutine

Preparation of poutine started with the potatoes, which I peeled, then sliced into chips and immersed in a bowl full of water. I then put these in the fridge for a couple of hours before coming back to finish the preparations for this dish.

I usually prepare all of the ingredients before starting to cook

The next step I took was to fry the pork lardons. To be honest, I could have done this at the end, but I thought I would be too busy with the chips and gravy, so it would be good to have one less thing to worry about.

The main challenge with poutine is timing it, so the all of the ingredients, except the cheese, are hot when they arrive on the plate.

Most traditional poutine recipes are vegetarian, but I decided to add some meat, as I wanted to have something in there that wasn't purely carbs! In a way, lardons are quite French, so I guess I was gallicising this otherwise very North American dish.

Fry the pork lardons

My next step was to prepare the gravy, which I did by first frying the onion and garlic, then adding Worcestershire sauce and Cider vinegar. I went a bit mad on the old vinegar which I wouldn't recommend as it influences the taste of the gravy. Once the onions had softened a bit, I added the beef and vegetable stock and let whole thing come to the boil.

Fry the onion and garlic in Worcestershire sauce and cider vinegar

Once the mixture had cooked for a bit (about fifteen minutes), I took them off the heat and strained the liquid into a bowl, discarding the onions. I'm not a great believer in discarding food, but I wanted to stick to the original idea of poutine. If I were making it again, however, I'd probably keep the onions and garlic in the gravy.

Strain the mixture, discarding the onions and garlic

Using the same pot, I added the butter, letting it melt before stirring in the flour. This made a kind of batter, known as a roux. Before the roux fried too much, I started stirring in the rest of the gravy mixture and whisk it, until the roux dissolved completely, thickening the gravy/sauce.

Melt the butter

Add flour to the melted butter

Mix the flour and butter to make a roux

Stir in the onion/stock mixture and whisk to make a yummy grave which looks like butterscotch

Next I deep-fat fried the potato chips, by heating half a pot of vegetable oil and putting the chips into the oil in batches. I've always wondered how to get crispy chips and now I know - you need to deep-fat fry them, drain the oil off on paper, let them cool and then fry them a second time. It's the first time I've done this and the second frying made my chips really crispy!

I was a bit disorganised in general and had no kitchen paper to drain the chips, so I resorted to good old newspaper, which is actually great at soaking up the oil - I'd recommend it, better than paper towels!

'White' chips after first deep-fat fry

Greasy spoon on newspaper

Brown chips after second deep-fat fry

Once the chips had browned, I transferred them to a plate, adding the pork lardons (cold by now, but that didn't really matter). I then took the squares of paneer out of the fridge and sprinkled these on top, before pouring over the gravy. The key to a good poutine, I guess is thin gravy, so it seeps down through the cheese and chips and also chilled cheese, so it doesn't melt immediately, but retains a rubbery consistency when the gravy is poured over the top.

Chips

Chips + lardons

Chips + lardons + cheese

Chips + lardons + cheese + gravy = poutine

The gravy was yummy - I was a bit worried about the colour, but more than one recipe stated that it should look like butterscotch, so I guess my gravy was fine. It certainly tasted good - a warm and filling dish on a cold winter's day!

Quebecois poutine

Image credits:

All images were taken by me on my trusty Canon EOS 1100D.  Feel free to re-use these images with the Creative commons license:

- Attribution (especially to this blog post)
- Non-commercial
- Share alike

Oaxaca - How I made Mole Negro

You can learn a lot about another culture by preparing one of their traditional dishes.  Latin American food has more or less caught on in other parts of the world and most of us will have tried fajitas or burritos at some point.  In fact, I've even made enchiladas before, when I was blogging about Honduras, last year in March.

For Oaxaca, I wanted to try something more ambitious so, after some research, I settled on one of Mexico's most complicated dishes, Mole Negro.  I'd only ever heard of mole (pronounced mo-ley) in US movies and TV series, usually mentioned by a homesick Mexican character!  My main challenge was to conceptualise 'mole' - I had no idea (and I'm still not 100% sure) what a mole should look like, or taste like . . what's its texture should be.

I'll mention at this point that I don't think I was entirely successful at conceptualising/making a mole so, if you're looking for a perfect guide to mole-making, you should probably look away now!  The difference between what I'm doing in this blog and what others do in more 'foodie' blogs is that I'm learning about the culture of the place I'm blogging about, rather than expecting perfect results.  The learning experience is the result, if that makes sense?

Mexican ingredients

Dried Mexican chillies

Mole has a lot of ingredients, usually around 25 different things go into a mole sauce.  It was important for me to put the right kind of chillies in my mole, so I travelled around London trying to source as many authentic Mexican ingredients as I could find.  

My first stop was the Casa Mexico in Bethnal Green but, unfortunately, this shop was closed, even though it should have been open, according to information I found online.  I can't really recommend this shop because of this, although others have given it good reviews.  

Not to worry - wasted journey to Bethnal Green, but I was able to hop down to Borough Market at London Bridge, which is a great place to pick up all kinds of speciality foods.  For my Mexican ingredients I went to the Cool Chile Company and I'd highly recommend this for London readers who are searching for Mexican ingredients.  

Profiting from the Columbian Exchange

Four kinds of chilli

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned the Columbian Exchange which saw new foods from the Americas spreading to Europe and beyond.  My experience making mole involved three traditional Mexican ingredients; chilli, chocolate and tomatillos.  

The chillies were dried and I managed to get my hands on four different types: Guajillo, Mulato, Chipotle and Pasilla.  Most of my experience with chillies to date has involved fresh chillies and it was quite an interesting experience to cook with these dried Mexican chillies, as I got a new sense of the texture of chillies - the fact that they can have nutty, smoky or fruity tastes, rather than simply being hot and spicy.  The texture of the dried chillies was a little bit like worn leather, but they also reminded me, bizarrely, of my youth, when my grandfather would give me dulse, a kind of dried seaweed which is popular with older people in Ireland. 

It's hard to believe there was ever a time when we didn't consume chocolate (believed to come from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word xocolatl - xococ = bitter and atl = water).  I'm a big fan of chocolate, although it's only as an adult that I've tasted 'real' chocolate, the bitter Latin American kind that is best served as a drink or sauce.  I love cooking with chocolate and I was happy to find delicious Mexican chocolate at the Cool Chile Company. I think my mole tasted more of chocolate than anything else - perhaps I went a bit overboard!

Real Mexican chocolate

This was also my first time to prepare tomatillos and I'm still fascinated by this fruit which, although it looks a bit like a tomato, it has a different taste and is surrounded by paper-thin leaves, which you need to remove before cooking.  I like cooking new things, so I was excited about my first experience of tomatillos and I look forward to preparing them again some time in the future.

Tomatillos

The recipe

I looked at a lot of mole recipes when I was researching this dish - each one seemed to be more complicated than the last and I was surprised to learn that it would take at least five hours to prepare this dish!  I eventually settled on a recipe from La Cocina de Nathan, which seemed marginally less complicated than the others and I enjoyed Nathan's amusing approach to cooking.  I didn't blacken the tortillas, as he suggested and I also adapted this recipe to suit my own needs.  

Here are the ingredients that I used (I've included the Zapotec words, where I could find them):

For the stock:

Ingredients for Mole Negro

2 chicken breasts - pechuga de pollo/buyu

2 chicken legs - pierna de pollo/buyu

1 bell pepper - pimiento morron

2 onions - cebollas

garlic - ajo

4 tomatoes - tomates/bichooxhe

cumin - comino

3 bay leaves - hojas de laurel

chicken stock - caldo de pollo

Chillies - Chiles/Guiiña

Mulatto chillies - chiles mulatos 
Pasilla chillies - chiles pasillas - pasilla means 'little raisin' and this chilli has a fruity flavour
Guajillo chillies - chiles guajillos
Chipotle chillies - chiles chipotles - chipotle means 'smoked chilli' in Nahuatl language

Other ingredients

Best to prepare the ingredients before cooking

5 tomatillos - tomatillos
1 plantain - plátano/biduaa
2 slices of bread - pan
sesame seeds - semillas de sésamo
handful of peanuts - cacahuetes
handful of raisins - pasas de uva
1 cinnamon stick - rama de canela
black peppercorns - granos de pimienta negra
3 cloves - clavos de olor
chocolate - chocolate/dxuladi (the Zapotec word was also borrowed from Nahuatl language)
corn tortillas - tortillas de maiz/gueta

Making the mole

It wasn't that difficult to actually make the mole - just complicated and time-consuming, there is a lot to remember.

Basically you start by boiling the chicken in water and adding all of the vegetables and other ingredients to make a chicken stock.  I boiled the chicken and vegetables for around 1.5 hours, after which I put the chicken aside and added some of the stock to my mole.  I think this is probably where I went a little bit wrong - as I was trying not to add too much stock, my mole ended up being more of a paste than a liquid.  If I was making this dish again, I would add all of the stock to the other mole ingredients.

Boil the chicken

And the vegetables

Put the cooked chicken to one side

For the other mole ingredients, it's just a matter of frying everything - plantain, tomatillos, half the tomatos, one of the onions, spices, nuts, seeds, raisins and chillies. Once all of the ingredients had been fried (and this took a bit of time), I put the fried chillies and raisins into a pot, covered them with stock and boiled them for about twenty minutes.

Plantain

Peanuts, peppercorn and cinnamon

Fried chillies releasing their oils and flavours

Fried bread, of the French variety

Fried tomatillos, onion and tomatoes

Sesame seeds

Peanuts, raisins and cinnamon

After that, I blitzed all of the ingredients (except the chicken and chocolate) in my food processor, adding some stock (but not enough) to create a kind of mole paste.  I then put the paste in a saucepan and added the chocolate, bringing this to the boil before simmering for about half an hour.

Chillies and spices in chicken stock

Blitzing the ingredients in my food processor

Heat the mole paste in a frying pan

Add chocolate

Finally, I heated the corn tortillas, put the chicken on top and added my mole paste. This should really have been a proper sauce, but I didn't make it liquidy enough and should have put all of the stock and other ingredients into the food processor in batches.

Mole Negro with chicken and corn tortillas

Nevertheless, it was a fairly tasty meal and I ended up with lots of mole paste which I've been eating on toast ever since - yum yum!

Chicken with mole sauce

Image credits:

All images were taken by me on my trusty Canon EOS 1100D.  Feel free to re-use these images with the Creative commons license:

- Attribution

- Non-commercial

- Share alike