Danielle, aka Fran, gave "Moroccan wine" a thumbs-up.What I made in SLC, except for the already-recapped Italian (photos
here):
Cuban: Cornmeal-crusted whitefish with an almond-butter sauce, and a cinnamon-mango crisp. Caroline (aka Vera) came over and did accounting homework while she ate. This one was
so easy - and it must have been good, too, because after this she brought her own Tupperware for leftovers. From
this cookbook.
Indian: Chicken vindaloo. Really well-seasoned, with small amounts of many spices. Spicy, but not burn-your-mouth-for-days hot. There's a picture of it in an earlier post somewhere down there...
Thai: I made pad thai and a potato curry. They were delicious. The curry comes together really quickly, too, so I've made it a few times since. From
this cookbook.
Mexican: This was so good!!! There was an almond mole, almendrado de pollo. I also made mexican rice because, well, it was easy and we needed something to put the mole on. I think both recipes were from
Mark Bittman's book, which felt like cheating, but he seems pretty authentic. (E.g., in Asian recipes, he's not afraid to use plenty of fish sauce.)
Japanese: Teriyaki chicken (unlike any I'd had before), yakisoba noodles, and edamame. The chicken was coated in cornstarch before cooking it, which worked really well. Not a crunchy texture, but not soggy either. The sauce wasn't what I'd thought of as teriyaki - it wasn't sticky sweet like it as at most places.
Irish: I'll be honest, this was an easy pick, as I cooked on St. Patrick's Day. I made an Irish beef stew, and colcannon (mashed potatoes with leeks). Friends brought Guinness and beer.
Colombia: I found
this cookbook at the library, and for that one book alone, I miss the SLC library a bunch. I haven't been to the little one here in this little town, but it'll be interesting to check out the breadth of their selection. I made fried bananas, coconut and black-eyed pea rice, and a stew with fish and plantains. The first two dishes were fantastic. The stew, well... I don't know if the plantains were extremely unripe, or if that's just how plantains are supposed to be in savory dishes. The fish kind of started to fall apart. On the off chance I were to make the stew again, I think I'd get riper plantains, and cook only add the fish when the rest of the stew is close to done. Maybe even fry it first for better texture? Anyway, I learned a lot with that one...
Last, but not least, Moroccan: I don't know how I decided on this one. It's entirely possible that I just picked up one of the prettier cookbooks on the shelf at the Trib and went for it. In this case, the book was
Arabesque, and I could almost smell the spices when I opened it. I made harira, a traditional Moroccan stew, from the book, and a lentil, onion and rice "salad" from a recipe I found online. We had been getting wine from the same country as the dishes, but I couldn't find any wine from Morocco at the state store down the street. So I picked up one bottle from Spain, and another from South Africa, and decided to split the difference. (I didn't say the difference was split equally by geography!)
That turned out to be the final SLC cuisine night, because a week or maybe two later I was packed up and on the road to New York. Even in the new apartment, it's been hard to plan dinners like those because
1) I don't have friends to invite over to eat. There's me, B, and the puppy.
2) I work nights and weekends.
3) It's harder to find weird ethnic ingredients because this is a smallish city. What I should be doing is planning
way ahead, so I could go down to the city on one day off and get ingredients, and on the second day off, cook my brains out.
That said, with No. 3, it's not as hard as I thought, and sometimes
the weird stuff comes to you... More about that tomorrow. (Yes, tomorrow. Wednesday, January 28.)
