2 ripe plantains(Large bananas are an acceptable substitute)
1 teaspoonalmond extract
2 tablespoonscoconut oil
1/2 cupalmond flour
1/2 cupunbleached flour
2 cupsoatmeal
1 teaspoonbaking powder
1 cupgrated coconut
1 cupgolden raisins
3 apples, peeled and chopped
1cup crushed pineapple
Preparation Method
Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease two one-dozen muffin tins. Place plantains, milk, eggs, coconut oil, and almond extract in blender. Process until smooth. Pour into mixing bowl. Separately, mix almond flour, unbleached flours, and baking power. Add coconut, raisins, crushed pineapple and chopped apples to egg, milk, and plantain mix. Add flour combo. Mix thoroughly. Place half cup batter into each muffin cup. Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes.
Click on link for my version of Geoffrey Holder’s roast.
Port of Spain, the capital of the Trinidad Tobago island nation, is a blur in my mind. I was there in my early twenties. That was the first time I left Brazil. I was terribly disappointed that rather choosing tMilwaukee, Wisconsin, as base camp, my employer, the Westinghouse Teaching Corporation, decided that the Caribbean as the best place to train prospective Peace Corps Brazil volunteers Fool that I was, I did not think that little islands near small Spanish speaking countries were sufficiently different from coastal northeastern Brazil where I lived the time. I wanted a big change, not another day at the beach. Luckily, the friend with whom I traveled had family in Belem do Para, at the edge of the Amazon. She invited to stay with them for a couple of days before flying to Port of Spain. It was then that I begin to discover my own country. Other discoveries would follow.
In Belem, I saw Native Brazilians for the first time. In my profound ignorance, I assumed they were Asian. It never occurred to me that Marajo Island, where a pre-Columbian civilization flourished between 400 BCE and 1600 CE, was a skip and a hope away. I made no effort to go to the Goeldi Museum which houses splendid Marajoara artifacts. Whatever did I do with myself amid such cultural wealth? I visited with my hosts, walked around in the daily drizzle that falls daily at the edge of the Amazonia. I ate crimson acaijuice with manioc flour, tasted a few of the myriad of flavors of ice cream made with tropical fruit and gazed at the glorious examples of the florid architecture made possible by the Rubber Boom .
I must have been singularly unobservant to keep no clear memory of Port of Spain. Tere I was, a stranger in paradise, wondering blindly amid crowds that included descendants of African, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Syrian, Lebanese and Tamil immigrants. All that I remember clearly is having ordered the wrong to go with red snapper. By comparison, the couple of months I spent in Charlotte Amalie left a more lasting impression. I was aware that Blackbeard’s Castle—formerly Skytsborg Tower–and Forth Christians were remnants of a Dutch and Dano-Norwegian past. What I missed entirely, was the Saint Thomas Synagogue, the second-oldest in American soil. I also missed any evidence of Camille Pisarro’s presence in Saint Thomas. Many years later, after I saw his paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, his connection with Charlotte Amalie came as a surprise. It am not sure whether he attended the local synagogue. His father, a Portuguese Jew, broke with Jewish tradition when he married his uncle’s widow. In the ensuing scandal, the Pisarros were banned from worshiping at the synagogue and their four children declared illegitimate. It took twelve years for the Beth Din to relent. By then Camille Pisarro was on his way France where eventually chose art over commerce.
In Charlotte Amalie I saw none of Pisarro’s luscious paintings of food. I frequented no Sephardic households and consequently missed out on an introduction to Sephardic-Caribbean cuisine. The cooking staff hired by Westinghouse was from Guadeloupe. Its repertoire was heavy on French classics. I recall, particularly, the chef’s splendid Canard a l’Orange. Meals I had at a local restaurant were not memorable except for conch, a delicacy previously unknown to me. Many years later, after I moved to Fargo, North Dakota, I discovered Caribbean cuisine through GEOFFREY HOLDER’S CARIBBEAN COOKBOOK. A spicy roast recipe from that cookbook would become one of my dinner party specialties after I moved to West Virginia. My circle of friends included college students from India, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Morocco, and Paraguay. Few of us ate pork and some did not eat beef. Other than that, we had many recipes in common. When met for monthly for potluck dinners, we astonished each other with dishes that replicated themselves in distant parts of the world. For example, pasteis, meat or cheese turnovers popular at Brazilian celebrations, were identical to Indian samosas and not all that different from Syrian sfiha. Iranians, Pakistani, Paraguayans all made rice dishes not that different than those we Brazilians enjoyed. The world seemed much cozier then, at least around the dinner table.
I’ve used Geoffrey Holder’s recipes more often after I settled for good in a small town that is only a couple of hours to Washington, DC. That makes the Kennedy Center part of our neighborhood if one thinks in big city terms. That is not too long a distance to travel for capital entertainment. That is how I was able to see Geoffrey Holder dance in a performance of “Kismet.” Eartha Kitt was one of the principals, but the enormously tall–6’6” tall—and supremely graceful Holder stole the show. , Today he is better known for his Seven-Up—the Uncola–commercials and his film appearances as Baron Samedi in “Live and Let Die,” as Punjab in “Annie,” and as Nelson in Eddie Murphy’s “Boomerang.” He had many other talents, such as choreography, painting, photography and writing. I remember him as a marvelous presence on the stage and as the author of a wonderful cookbook in which he collected recipes from his native Port of Spain.
There is no telling how halwa made its way from the Middle East to my part of northeast Brazil. Quite possibly it travelled with Sephardic Jews who fled Europe or who were sent into exile. There is also a chance that it arrived with Christian immigrants whose culinary repertoire included dishes from Islamic Iberia. Either way, by my maternal grandmother’s time, its Arabic name had been changed to an abbreviated form of the Portuguese word for spices, especie, from especiarias. The original recipe itself underwent a transformation to include manioc flour, the byproduct of the poisonous manioc plant, Manihot esculenta, that African slaves brought to the New World along with the formula to make it edible.
My grandmother needed no recipe to make the Brazilian version of halwa. Most probably she memorised it when she watched former slaves prepare it in her father’s kitchen. Quick digression–slavery ended in 1888, in Brazil. My grandmother was born two years later. She neither took part in exploiting Africans nor did she profit from slavery. As for her father, this is neither the time nor place for his story. Well then, back to halwa and its romantic associations with an Islamic Iberia so many ing contemporary historians paint in pretty pastel colors. Allow me to join them in ignoring Moorish rulers’ stringent rules for those they conquered. Let me dwell on the fuzzy-wuzzy view of unpleasant events and leave out these rulers’ occasional massacres of Christians and Jews, their contempt for women. Rather, let me talk about feasts in the gardens of the Alhambra. Let me envision an assembly of guests dressed in fine brocade–men only except for women musicians and dancers, people too low on the social scale to matter much. But who cares about inequality when the music of the oud harmonizes with the song of water fountains and the perfume of roses and carnations fills the air? Unless the current ruler is a fanatic recently arrived from a goat skin tent city in the desert, there is probably wine to go with pastilla, the chicken and almond pastry that best represents Ibero-Arabian fusion cuisine. Let me focus on that. Let me picture doe-eyed men with falcon profile, listening to such entrancing muwashashat they remain oblivious of the succulent bits of pastilla filling they hold in the perfumed fingers of their right hand. Let see that when slaves–slavery is not a European invention–cleared away the remains of chicken pie, after the men washed their hands in rose water, perhaps it was time for veiled Circassian captives to bring in gold plates heaped with sesame seed halwa. It all sounds like a fragment from a romance novel, doesn’t it? Such is the real history of Iberia.
Though she did not know it, my grandmother held much of Islamic Iberia in her memory. Grandmothers often are the transmitters of memories. Their role includes link past and present generations. But my grandmother did not think in such terms, For her, cooking, praying, and singing ancient songs were simply part of her family tradition. I doubt that she ever took the time to question any of them. Past and present merged in her as naturally as the rain falls and the crops mature. There was no symbolism in the halwa she sent me when I was away from home. There was no reminder of who we had been five centuries earlier, in Toledo, Spain. My grandmother did not know that her family whose name she shared had a name in Aramaic. All she knew was a sweet way of comforting a grandchild far from home.
Halwa is a marvelous comfort. Mine arrived in a clear glass jar that made its promise of sweetness a visual experience that expanded to include the familiar scent of clover and cinnamon. To dip a spoon into the rich mix of tahini, sugar and manioc flour was to recall the flavors of childhood–smoky roasted sesame seeds and brown sugar. Sadly, I did not honor the family tradition of memorizing recipes. Many years after I left school, I traveled to another continent. But I did not forsake halwa in my travels. I ate it in Fargo, North Dakota where it was popular with German-Russian immigrants. I ate in Georgetown, Maryland, where Middle Eastern diplomats shop. I ate at the Rue des Rosiers, in Paris. None of it tasted exactly like my grandmother’s. None of it had the taste of home.
Sonho de Valsa, Brazilian chocolate and cashew nut bonbon.
Mexican molinillo, in forefront, is used to stir chocolate.
The name the Europeans gave to the cocoa bean, Theobroma cacao, food of the gods, is a splendid spin on the Nahuatl word used throughout the Aztec empire where Cortez found it, xocolatl. Imagine the frisson that went through the Spanish court when the Conquistadors talked about this seed that was so valuable it served as currency in New World. Imagine the PR person for Amalgamated Spanish Plunderers saying to Queen Isabella,
“It’s as precious as gold, Your Catholic Majesty. Why over there five beans will buy a rabbit, ten will buy a night with a prostitute–begging your pardon, Your Catholic Majesty, they are heathens, but a taste of the Inquisition’s strappado will fix that–and a hundred buys a slave.”
Imagine the queen’s reaction when she sipped the cold bitter drink made with ground up cocoa beans, cornmeal, chili, and cinnamon. I do not know the royal Spanish equivalent of “yuck, this is vile” but I suspect the queen uttered words to that effect. It took twenty years for the Spanish plunderers of Mexico to learn that the Aztecs fermented cocoa beans, to lessen their bitterness and that they often added honey and vanilla to their xocolatl to made it more palatable. This discovery coincided with the arrival in Spain of sugar from the Caribbean. The rest is history.
What intrigues me in the history of chocolate is the relative obscurity to which it relegated the Portuguese Jews who played an important role in bringing it to Europe. It is only recently that the chocolate manufacturers of Bayonne, France decided to highlight the contribution of these Sephardim. Now the Bayonnais talk openly about these Jews who, in flight from the Iberian Inquisition, turned Bayonne into France’s foremost center for chocolate manufacture. Sadly, a century the good Bayonnais had acquired the skills needed to take over the chocolate industry. Encouraged by the anti-Semitic propaganda of members of the chocolatiers guild, they threw out the Jews. For the latter, it was “deja vu all over again.” .
This historical footnote has a special meaning to me. Sephardim who fled to France early to avoid the Portuguese Inquisition, are among my maternal ancestors.They settled in northeast Brazil some five centuries ago. When the Dutch invaded that part of the world in 1630–a century after my Sephardic ancestors’ arrival in the New World–Jews were able to reestablish contact openly with branches of their European families.They were active participants in the sugar trade. Some of them traded in cocoa beans as well. It is possible that this imagined relative was among those to bring to France and Holland Maya and Aztec stories about the aphrodisiac qualities of the cocoa bean. But that is purely speculative. However, it is a matter of record the belief in chocolate as a sort of proto-Viagra took roots in the European imagination. Casanova is said to have fortified himself with it prior to amatory bouts. Louis XV, the well-loved, relied on a mixture of chocolate bars dissolved in boiling water and thickened with egg yolk to enhance his lovemaking with Mesdames Pompadour and du Barry. He was only one of many westerners to believe a legend that, so far, scientific research has failed to legitimize.
Though chocolate trading is not part of the documented history of my family, I cherish the thought that somewhere in the family tree there lurks a cocoa bean trader. Never mind that my childhood was devoid of chocolate treats. That strikes me as very peculiar. Brazil happens to be the sixth largest producer of cocoa beans in the world. Surely there was plenty to go around when I was little. Did its association with the bad habits of old roues keep it out of my menu? I doubt it. Maybe it was a simply a question of transportation. Roads linking my little town in Ceara to large urban centers were not the best. Consequently, most of the town residents led lives of utter self-sufficiency. Having no cocoa trees meant having no chocolate. Or did it? My parents happened to be economically comfortable. They traveled and shopped in larger places than my hometown. Why did they not bring home chocolate? I have no idea. All I know is that I only became a chocolate eater the year I turned thirteen. That year, I left home to go to school in the cool, verdant Cariri hills, miles away. That was my first solo voyage. At thirteen, I was thought to be capable of handling new privileges, new responsibilities.I took with me a secret Yom Kippur prayer my maternal ancestors had been passing on to their eldest child for five hundred years, school uniforms, and the burden of parental expectations. For the first time in my life, I had enough pocket to spend in candy shops. Was all this pure coincidence? Jewish girls that age become bat Mitzvah, but that is an innovation in terms of Jewish history. Besides, five centuries after Spain expelled its Jews, my family no longer connected with normative, Judaism. Ours is the memory of Jews in hiding. It records through a glass darkly.
Fact–at thirteen, I left home in the dubious company of my family’s driver, a murderer my father had sprung from jail–my father often hired clients from his law practice for jobs he alone thought they were qualified for. Presumably, he thought a murderer was a safe person to drive a sheltered teenager school. But my father and his endearing quirks are material for another post. Chocolate is the allegedly the topic du jour. Chocolate as in Sonho de Valsa, the cashew stuffed bonbons I savored along with Catholic novels of morals such as Henry Sienkiewicz’s QUO VADIS, Florence Barclay’s THE ROSARY, and appallingly sugary romances by M. Delly, such as MAGALI, Only Saint-Exupery and Jacques Prevert stood between me and complete idiocy
Besides halwa–especie, in northeast Brazilian Portuguese–made by maternal grandmother, I do not recall eating sweets other than chocolate while I was away from home. Delightful as my memories of weekends with the relatives who occasionally liberated me from conventual dreariness, I have no recollection of the food we shared. I only remember clearly the chocolate ice cream we would have at a little shop facing the cathedral where my teachers compelled me to attend mass every day. Chocolate then was the last sweet note of freedom from a regimented routine. Ever since no treat matches the nostalgic flavor of semi-sweet cocoa with a top note of vanilla. In my mind, it blends, exquisitely, with the sounds, scent, and sights of a Sunday kermess that brought the largest town square to life–the carousel that blared the Moulin Rouge song, the rustle of freshly starched clothes, the perfume of jasmine and red of tree blossoms, the glow of paper lanterns, the smell of buttered popcorn.
Years later, in the United States, I acquired a more sophisticated taste in chocolate. Thanks a friend whose relatives had a long lasting relationship with Viennese makers of bespoke chocolate, I graduated to artisanal treats. Later, in my food journalism days, I tasted Bolivian, Belgian, British, French, Italian Mexican, Swiss, and Venezuelan chocolate. I ate chocolate made in Vermont by a former White House chef, sampled handmade chocolate truffles in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Martinsburg, West Virginia. Could I choose a particular brand over another? Yes. In the United States, I would choose Peter’s chocolate, occasionally available at King Arthur Flour, in Vermont. In Europe, I would choose the Austrian chocolate made for the Hungarian aristocracy, but the friend who used to share it died a few years ago. I never bothered to find out the name of her Austrian chocolate makers. All in all, I am not one of these folks who swear by Caillebaut, Cote d’Or, or Varlhona. I do not crave truffles made in the light of the new moon is some remote Oaxacan kitchen. Only rarely do I miss the hot chocolate I had in Spain, a concoction so thick one could stand a spoon in it–Spaniards thicken their drinking chocolate with cornstarch. I can live with American hot cocoa. I am OK with British and Swiss imports I can in most discount stores in the United States. As a rare treat, I indulge in Brazilian Sonho de Valsa bonbons. Thing is, to me, all chocolate is divine.I am grateful to the Sephardim for helping make it available to mere mortals.
Note: My immediate family has no ancestral recipes for chocolate. I hope someday to duplicate the chocolate halwa I had at the Rue des Rosiers, in Paris, years ago. It was a heavenly mix of Old and New World flavors.
Long before Tom Lehrer sang about poisoning pigeons in the park, Ernest Hemingway stealthily decimated the pigeon population of the Luxemburg Gardens, in Paris. The time was the mid-Twenties when poverty was romantic provided that you were an American writer married to a woman with a trust fund. That was when the budding novelist frequented the Brasserie Lipp, La Closerie des Lilas, Cafe’ Flore, Les Deux Magots during the day and sipped liqueur with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the evening.Somewhere in between, he wrote and tended his first child whom he would occasionally take to the Medici Fountain at the Luxemburg for an airing. There when no one was looking, he would strangle foolhardy pigeons and stash their carcasses in the baby’s pram for future consumption. It is possible–and anything is possible with American literary myths–that the stowaway pigeons inspired him to call his Paris memoirs A MOVEABLE FEAST.
My own pigeon-based repasts had another setting. They happened in a huge double house my parents shared with close relatives in the outskirts of a small town Ceara’, Brazil. I must have been six or seven at the time and this house remains in my memory as a place of magical beauty. It was set next to woods where poisonous snakes and free range chickens lived in an entente cordiale and where I hid under a fragrant green dome of velame, Croton campestris, to read my father’s copy of LES MISERABLES, of which I understood next to nothing.
All paradises have serpents. Mine had, besides real reptiles, an intractable, somewhat mad second cousin who terrified me with his angry outbursts. He was, however, a passionate hunter who often brought home fat bags of quail and rolinhacaldo de feijao, Columbina talparcoti, which he roasted on an open fire.Woe to me if I glanced at him while he drowned his roasted birds in malagueta pepper sauce.
“‘Are you spying on me,” he’d roar.That was a grave accusation.
That was a grave accusation. Espiar, to spy had a double meaning in my part of Brazil. It could be understood as “ogling someone’s food” which hinted at being hungry, therefore poor, something Ibero-Brazilians hated to make known.Only beggars had the right to flaunt their poverty.Everyone else ought to have the decorum of the bankrupt Spanish grandee so aptly described in the saying, por cima tanta farofa, por baixo mulambo so’ —so much fancy stuff on top and nothing but rags underneath. But for people of means be as undignified as to display their hunger in public was shameful and demeaning. Such behavior in a child my age meant that was mal educada, badly educated, badly brought up, ill-mannered.) An ill-mannered child reflected badly on her parents and to tarnish the parental image was serious stuff. Life was complicated back then. As for the other meaning of espiar, it was to spy. Again, serious stuff for people of the Crypto-Jewishpersuasion. One’s choice of food was an indicator of one’s religious practices and throughout centuries, many a Crypto-Jew perished in the flames of the Iberian Inquisition for choosing olive oil instead pork fat or for refusing to mix milk products and meat at the same meal.
Whether my second cousin’s paranoid fear of spies had to do with hidden Judaism or not, I do not know. All I know is that his anger often went as suddenly as it came. In his calm moments, he was generous enough to share his food–roasted quail, boiled umari, Poraqueiba cericea nut, wild honey in the comb, and once in a great while, squab from his dovecote.
Maybe one has to be a bit mad to kill four-week-old pigeons. They look so utterly helpless, so unfinished, so vulnerable in their huge-beaked, bright-eyed, sparsely feathered vulnerability. But sympathy for members of the animal kingdom was rare when I was little. As long as they fit into Jewish dietary laws, birds were for eating. In the Middle east, pigeons had been on the menu since Biblical times. I imagine that while they lived in Spain where, allegedly, they were taken by the Romans after the fall of the Second Temple, my ancestors ate b’stilla, the Hispano-Moorish pigeon, almond, cinnamon, and sugar pie the recipe for which exiles from Iberia took to with them to Morocco following the 1492 Expulsion.
My folks did not make B’stilla. After half a millennium in Brazil, their recipe for warka, the translucent, phyllo-like dough that envelops the filling of b’stilla, must have disappeared along with their Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish. Dona Julia, my parents’ cook did not have the skill needed to replicate the food of Hispano-Jewish banquets. Even so, what she did with my cousin’s squab, was brilliant. She cooked them in an ample quantity of broth to which she added rice–Maranhao red rice, if I can trust my memory of that long-ago meal–to make a casserole.
I do not recall watching the transmutation of squab and rice into a dish similar to the sopa seca of Spanish-speaking countries, but I have a vivid memory of how it looked and smelled when it came to the table–fist-sized, golden birds lay on a bed of red rice spangled with golden coins of fat. A pool of rich broth redolent of annato seeds, garlic, shallots, black pepper, cilantro and chives encircled the rice. It was the food of dreams, infused with the evanescing memory of Judean banquets, Roman feasts, and celebrations in the Moorish-Iberia of my maternal ancestors.
Should I decide to emulate Hemingway, there is a little park near my house where I can push an empty pram. There should be no health concerns. According to James LeRay Morgan, author of CULINARY CREATION, ” squab meat is regarded as safer than some other poultry products as it harbors fewer pathogens (than poultry) and may be served between medium and well-done.” Trouble is, the local gendarmerie police patrols the park more assiduously than the guards of the Luxemburg Gardens did in Hemingway’s time. It would be wiser to order squab from suppliers in California. D’Artagnan, for example, offers the choice of squab with head and feet still attached and the decapitated variety. I would go for the headless and footless bird. As a person twenty-first-century sensitivities, I no longer care to be reminded the appearance of live animals prior to their arrival at my plate. I do not have access to a source of freshly harvested arroz do Maranhao, but I have a stash of red Himalayan rice that should be a good substitute.
Anatto–Annatto (/əˈnætoʊ/ or /əˈnɑːtoʊ/) is an orange-red condiment and food coloring derived from the seeds of the achiote tree (Bixa orellana). It is often used to impart a yellow or orange color to foods, but sometimes also for its flavor and aroma. Its scent is described as “slightly peppery with a hint of nutmeg” and flavor as “slightly nutty, sweet and peppery.”Wikipedia
Crypto-Jew–Forcibly baptised Sephardic Jews and their descendants who continued to keep Judaic traditions secretly. “Malagueta pepper Capsicum frutescens is a species of chili pepper that is sometimes considered to be part of the species Capsicum annuum.[1] Pepper cultivars of Capsicum frutescens can be annual or short-lived perennial plants.”Wikipedia
Look up codfish on the web and you face a deluge of information of astounding similarity. You find out that the Basque were the earliest Europeans to fish for the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua in late 15th. century Newfoundland. They were soon followed by the Portuguese, whose Catholic faith that forbade meat-eating on Fridays, Lent and other occasions. Dried and salted codfish thus became a staple in Portuguese menus. So much so that it consumers named it fiel amigo, faithful friend. According to folklore, the Portuguese cuisine boasts a codfish recipe for every day of the year. Best known among these are Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá, a cod casserole that includes potatoes, olives, parsley , onions, and fresh lemon slices; Bolinhos de Bacalhau, fritters made with dried cod, mashed potatoes, garlic, onions, and parsley; Sopa de Bacalhau com Tomates e Beldroegas, a soup that includes cod, tomatoes, and purslane.
Thanks to my Brazilian origins, my cooking repertoire includes not only Bolinhos de Bacalhau, but one of my favorite dishes, Bacalhau com Leite de Coco, Cod and Coconut Milk, an Afro-tropical take on the traditional European Portuguese recipe. There are many variations on this theme. Some call for carrots and potatoes while others include green, red, and yellow peppers. Traditionally, Bacalhau com Leite de Coco is made with azeite de dendê, oil from the fruit of an African palm tree, Elaeis guineensis. but I have read recipes that call for olive oil or soy oil. Having moved from Northeastern Brazil to the Eastern United States decades ago, I rarely found dried cod in local markets, let alone azeite de dendê . Enter internet commerce, which makes it possible for me to locate and buy the most recherché food products. That is how I lay my hands on two pounds of deboned salt cod packaged in Brazil.
Portugal is no longer the world’s prime purveyor of salt cod. That honor goes to Norway, which exports it wherever there is a demand, such as in Goa, Jamaica, and the Madeira Islands. Thus, the codfish I bought recently was a well-travelled fish. Compared to the cod Portugal exported to Brazil years ago, this deboned, plastic wrapped product was a tame beast, a pallid version of the Iberian product. Nevertheless, I soaked in hot overnight, as one did the extremely salty bacalhau of my childhood. The following day I drained it and added it, plus a cup of diced tomatoes, to an onion and two fat cloves of garlic sauteed in olive oil. Once the resulting sauce thickened, I added a twist of freshly ground black pepper, a sprinkle of oregano, and a tin of coconut milk. I let the mix simmer for twenty minutes prior to throwing in half a cup of whole wheat penne. Finally, I served it over a cup of fresh spinach and garnished it with a handful of chopped fresh coriander.It was a good soup though mild and somewhat characterless dish compared to the food served at my mother’s table. I suspect neither my seafaring Iberian ancestors nor my coastal Brazil relatives would not have thought much of it. But I live far from the sea. There are no palms in my adopted hometown. My olive oil comes from Tunisia and coconut milk comes from Sri Lanka. I do what I have been doing since I left my home country–I adapt, adapt then adapt some more. That is what immigrants do. That is, no doubt what my Iberian ancestors did when they reached the New World.I may live in a global village, but longing for the salty taste of the sea is part of my ancestral memory. Soon I will try to duplicate my mother’s Bolinhos de Bacalhau. But that is another post.
In Flagrante Delicious 