This was really hard to quantify. Or maybe very hard. At least somewhat hard.

I was teaching a scientist; he got this almost immediately.

The Chimichurri I didn't wait long enough for -- Argentina, but not until at least tomorrow.

This fellow has some strong things to say about Chimichurri, and I suppose I should take his word for it.  Apparently it's one of those things that's become just popular enough for Food Network to get it wrong?

In any case, I couldn't wait to try it out. So much so that I forgot to read the recipe COMPLETELY through... Ah. See that, at the bottom of the page there? Yeah, where it says "make at least the day before." Hmm. I can happily report that this recipe, when made incorrectly, makes the world's most delicious salsa. No worries -- I kind of wanted to share Argentina Week with friends, and this was just a one-off with some sauce that looked good. Still, I have to admit that I won't actually know what a single food from Argentina tastes like until tomorrow, at the earliest.

Worst name for a love hotel ever?

Sometimes I teach

So I teach ESL, and today's lesson included the question, "Have you ever eaten something you didn't like?" The lady I was asking could only manage to remember one word at a time, so we started with "intestines."
"Wow," I said, "What kind?"
"Uh, fish intestines."
(I write this up on the white board and draw a little picture of fish with intestines to check that that's what she means.)
She consults a dictionary. "Anglerfish intestines?" I draw a little lure on the fish's head. She nods.
"Raw anglerfish intestines."
...
"Sushi."

Antigua and Barbuda -- Pork Chops with Banana and Bacon

Banana and bacon is not a flavor combination that I would have imagined, left to my own devices. That's why this recipe intrigued me.

Not the most attractive, is it? Roasted, the banana had a slightly sweet, but mostly starchy quality that complemented the pork chops fairly well, and you really can't go wrong rubbing pork chops with salt-cumin-black pepper butter, but like the Cocada Amarela, it just wasn't amazing.

D'you think maybe they meant that I should use a plantain?

Angola -- Cocada Amarela

Sorry about the long hiatus. More explanation to come, but at least for now, for Mom, a photo:

This is a dessert made of coconut and egg yolk -- surprisingly creamy. Very sweet. Not too difficult. Flavored with clove, cinnamon, and orange blossom water (optional.) I think it would be a good side to a bit of chocolate cake, and it isn't bad by itself, but it wasn't mind-blowing enough to make again. Still, a nice change from Salt Pocky, which are, in a word, an abomination.

Andorra -- Pa amb Tomaquet

The Catalan region has a recipe for TOAST. Which is good, because nobody had time to make Trinxat this week. It's called Pa amb Tomaquet (bread and tomato), and the recipe is as follows:

1. Take hunk o' bread.
2. Rub with halved garlic clove.
3. Squeeze half a tomato onto it. This is possibly the best use of tomato innards ever.
4. Salt, olive oil.
5. Toast or grill.

Forgiving, tasty, requires very little thought or effort.

Pictures to come someday. This is basically all I've cooked for myself all week, with whatever bread's around at the time. It turns out that while I could imagine myself eating Fidhe when I'm sick or tired, in practice, P&T is way, way more appealing.

Update: Photos!

Served with an almost equally lazy side salad:

Put fresh greens in a bowl.
Sprinkle with walnuts.
Put some softish cheese on it.
Black pepper.
Paprika.
Consume.

Chakchouka -- Algeria

One set of things my mother learned about me the hard way is this.

1. I don't really like hot, soupy, tomatoey things.
2. I don't really like cooked green peppers.
3. I don't really like vegetarian chili.

Unsurprisingly, I suppose, I didn't really like chakchouka. Chakchouka is a dish in which onions, garlic, tomatoes, and a bell pepper mix are cooked together like a stew, and eggs are then poached in this mixture. The harissa paste that accompanies it was so good, I had to give it a try. Sadly, not my thing. The eggs were alright, but it lacked a certain earthy, hearty flavor to ground it as a proper dish. Cook's fault -- or, more accurately, cook's tongue's fault, I'm sure. It reminds me of the time I made "Ramekin Eggs" following the recipe on "My Healthy Cooking Coach" for the DS, and while my family stood around saying things like, "Wow, these are great!" I was asking, "So you think they're supposed to taste like that?"

One variation calls for lamb sausage to be added to the mixture, which would, in my opinion, perk it right up. If you like vegetarian chili, or hot tomatoes, or are in any way less picky about stupid things than I am, I suggest you give it a try.

Besides, it looks neat.

To cheer myself up, I came up with this very lazy concoction:

Store-bought Japanese "cream" flavored pudding (innocuous and sweet) with an almond sprinkle, served with dried figs, apricots, and raisins. Perhaps not entirely authentic, but the ingredients are, and it's so awfully good, and so wonderfully impossible to mess up.

UPDATE: Cooled down and served over the sausages I currently have at hand, erm, well, little smokies, this tomato stuff is actually pretty nice. Little smokies are probably the least Algerian meat choice in the world, but think of this as just one of those times that food crosses borders, gets adapted, and ends up becoming vindaloo and mole, among other things.

Albania - Gjellë me Arra (Walnut Chicken) and friends

Sorry about the blurry photos! Everyone was hungry, and we wanted to get eating.

Albania, for a small country, has a lot of regional variation in cuisine. I went with a little of everything -- a fish dish from the coast, a chicken dish from... the north? (Albanian recipes are kind of hard to find, but I did find a general overview of ingredients used, and walnuts were mentioned, but not specified by region.) The pita bread is a bit of a stretch, but we decided that it was close enough, as Albania shares a border with Greece, and, well, we really like feta.

It would hardly be worth it to include a recipe for the salmon. It was just brushed lightly with olive oil and lightly sprinkled with salt and pepper. Albanian food is fairly lightly spiced, and spices are generally not mixed, it turns out.

Walnut chicken!

This dish never seems to look all that good, but it tasted great, so it sort of redeemed itself in the end. The sauce is thickened with roux and egg yolks, almost like a savory pudding (in the American use of the word "pudding".) Not something I've done before, and a little nerve-wracking on a night when I was planning on serving 6 or 7 people, but it turned out in the end.

Sauce:
Butter
Flour
Garlic
Egg yolks
Crushed walnuts
Sage (My addition; it complemented the walnuts well.)
Salt to taste

If you would like to follow along, here is the recipe I used. Enjoy!

Hard To Follow

The ingredients for a delicious Albanian dish, according to Google Translate:


3 vez
18 trough sheath
18 sugar
1 cups oil
1 cups qumsht
1 peciv
3 trough Cocoa
ara to grind or hazelnut
pudink to qokollates or slag ready


Ben: "Well, slag shouldn't be too hard to find."

Fidhe -- Albania

A holiday tradition in Greece and Albania, the thought of egg and lemon soup intrigued me. Also, eggs are VERY cheap. I thought I'd give it a try.

Interesting. The recipe basically combines chicken broth, vermicelli, lemon juice, and egg. I'm not entirely sure that what I have is how it's supposed to taste, but it certainly LOOKS like the real thing.

When Ben made his, he combined the broth and egg at too high a temperature, and ended up making egg drop soup (sort of.) He said it looked like a very yellow storm was brewing.

The overall verdict: the combination of chicken stock and lemon is really great, and the soup's very easy. I wouldn't eat this every day, but both Ben and I agreed that it would be great to throw on when you're sick.

Ben: "I think the egg is coalescing into a treasure map. It's not a very good treasure map, though. It's just the one big X."

So, you know, be careful how you combine your eggs there.

Rations to Full, Pace to Slow -- Albania

I admit that though I had planned a white bean dish, a salad, a soup, some meatballs -- all sorts of things from Albania -- when I returned home from work last night, both Ben and I were dead tired.

The manager at the school I went to today had brought me something to eat, however, and so, wearily, I threw a salad together, tossed the manager's sandwiches on the plate, and called it good.

Good news! The salad is easy!

Recipe:

Cucumbers, to taste
Fresh tomato, to taste
Green pepper, to taste
Green olives, to taste, ideally nice ones, but if you live in Japan, overpriced things in tiny jars with pimentos in them

Dress with:
Olive oil
Salt
A splash of vinegar.

I really like olives, so this salad suited me well. You could even throw a little feta in to add interest. It's a good side without it, though, and surprisingly filling for a salad.

Chicken Lawang

There's something extremely evocative about a dish that's full of rich spices. I suppose it's the aromatic quality spices have -- that smell of foreign wood and earth -- that can almost transport you to a place you've only seen in photographs. Especially in a place like Afghanistan, which was pretty damn neat when it was at peace and which is pretty damn gorgeous despite all of the strife today.

I've never been, but these are the spices that sent people off in caravels before they even knew what they were bound to hit when they got there. I completely understand why.

This dish does take a couple of hours to make, but it is really wonderful.

Ingredients:
2 small onions, finely minced
4-6 cloves of garlic, also finely minced
maybe 1/4 cup olive oil
about as much chicken as you'd expect 3 or 4 people to want to eat, or about, what, 400-500g? I remember this being "about five dollars' worth of chicken".
turmeric
cumin, ground
coriander, ground
cloves, ground
cardamom, ground
black pepper, ground
(dried red pepper, to taste. This is not a traditionally spicy dish, but it does work well with a bit of heat, if you enjoy that kind of thing.)
1 large tub (about 450 g, but need not be exact) plain yogurt, and a couple coffee filters with which to strain it
salt
fresh cilantro/coriander leaves
1-2 cups chicken stock
1-2 tbsp lemon juice (bottled is fine)


1. Begin straining the yogurt. This will not only make it much thicker, but also remove some of the bitter flavor. Do this by carefully placing some coffee filters (I like to use a couple, for good measure) or some paper towels (in a pinch) in a strainer, and setting it over a bowl that can catch the liquid. This yogurt will continue straining for the next two hours.

2. Chop the onions. This is a lot of onion to mince. I wore a diving mask to avoid onion-eye. Yes, really. It was awesome.

3. On medium to medium-high heat, add about half of the olive oil and sprinkle lightly with salt. Stir occasionally for about 5 minutes.

4. Add the garlic, and continue stirring for another 5 minutes. If at any point your onions begin to brown, stop, because that is the point we are looking for. The onions should start to brown in the oil. Interestingly, this is also the beginning of the Qabili Palau recipe.

5. Add the other half of the oil and the chicken, and stir, turning the heat down so the mixture doesn't burn. Set a timer for 10 minutes, but come back in 5, just in case. Stir it then.

6. After 10 minutes, stir in the spices. At this point, the oil and onions should be forming a sauce, and you want to incorporate the spices into that mixture. Stir through evenly. It should be a really neat color. Double-check that the heat is on quite low. Cover with a lid.

7. Set a timer for 30 minutes, wandering back into the kitchen now and then to stir and to check that the sauce has enough flavor. Add a little chicken broth as the sauce begins to thicken, reserving a bit for the end.

8. After all this, if there is still oil pooling on top, strain it off with a ladle, by all means.

9. Turn off the heat, dump the lemon juice into the rest of the chicken broth, and add this mixture, stirring slowly.

10. Remove the lid and wait for the chicken to come down near room temperature -- perhaps another 25 minutes. This gives you the time to finish that episode of Psych you started in step 7. Now would also be a good time to put a pot of Basmati rice on to steam.

8. Go get that yogurt that's been straining. Mix it slowly into the sauce. Once the yogurt is thoroughly incorporated, begin to heat this back up to serving temperature.

9. While heating, stir. While stirring, mix in the cilantro/coriander leaves. I like to reserve a few for use as a garnish.

Lime Sparkle -- Afghanistan, Sort Of

Afghanistan week is still going strong -- tonight's Chicken Lawang (recipe and photos to follow) was especially good. We're talking plate-lickingly good. There was just one thing -- it was very deeply flavored, and as such, a little heavy. I made this to complement it.

To be fair, this is not an authentic recipe -- it's merely a simple syrup made with fresh limes, mixed with cold soda water. Still, limes exist in Afghan cooking, and I thought I'd expand. I have it on good authority from some people who are apparently really into cans that Afghanistan has some kind of lime soda, so there.

This is a recipe with no waste, and not by coincidence. If you buy two limes and 2 liters of soda water, you will use all the lime up exactly.

Simple Lime Sparkle

Peels from 2 fresh limes, in largish strips, not chopped
Juice from 1 1/2 limes
250 g water
150ish g sugar
1/2 lime, sliced
cold soda water

1. Heating the water, blanch the lime peel, just until vivid green. Do not allow the peels to turn olive-colored.

2. When the peels have brightened and softened slightly, remove them from the water with a slotted spoon and turn off the heat.

3. Add the sugar, stirring until combined. Try not to turn the heat back on, as the lime oil the peel has infused into the water will turn bitter. (Citrus tends to become bitter if heated for too long.) Don't worry too much. Just don't start boiling the stuff.

4. As the mixture is cooling down (about enough that you can touch it without discomfort), add the lime juice and stir it evenly into the mixture.

5. Pour this syrup into a bottle for easy use.

6. To make the soda, combine the syrup with cold soda water. Feel free to judge how much you want for yourself, but for a light, refreshing drink, the ratio is best at 1 part syrup to 4 or 5 parts soda water, though your mileage may vary. Taste it until it's nice for you. For a heavier drink, simply add more syrup. Garnish with a fresh slice of lime, and ideally, let it sit for a minute until you can taste the juice from that, too.

A Canadian friend I regularly use as a food guinea pig and I sat around at the table, sipping glass after glass of these, until we realized we'd gone through almost all of the syrup. I suppose you could do worse, as far as soda goes.

Ubiquitous Yogurt -- Dogh

When I first read about Dogh, (or 'Dough', but I'm going to favor the less confusing spelling), I thought, "How unique!" How far from the truth I was.

Though I'm in Afghanistan this week, I've certainly been trying to do a little bit of research ahead of time, and I admit my research has largely only covered the "A"s. Still, it seems to me that if you stuck the pointy end of your compass in, let's say, Syria, and the pencil end in, say, Poland, and drew a circle from there, you'd find a version of this dish in every country inside the circle.

All told, the dogh was alright. Mine came out a little thick, so I ended up having it with a spoon, but it complemented the Qabili Palau wonderfully. I'm sure that's no coincidence. I'm not exactly a daily consumer of yogurt, but I would definitely make it again, especially in these hot Japanese summers.

The Adventure Begins! To Afghanistan!

We decided to start with a fairly simple dish -- Qabili Palau. I admit that this sounded appealing to me from the minute I saw the name. The Scrabble possibilities alone...

To be honest, this is just the kind of thing I was hoping to get from this project. It's a good, solid, traditional dish, and yet it has a certain mystique.

It starts with a sauce based on caramelized onions, chicken broth, cumin, black pepper, and cardamom. The sauce was absolutely beautiful -- pungent with that sweet onion/cardamom kick. My only complaint was that it simply didn't come out when the rice was baked in it later on. If I did it again, I'd make more sauce, and possibly keep some aside for finishing at the end of the dish.

Ben (the boyfriend) made it as well, and he said his turned out almost dessert-level sweet. He liked it, but perhaps the sugar's also something to watch.

Traditionally, this is served with the chicken underneath, and the carrot/raisin/almond mixture on top, but I opted to plate the elements separately to better showcase them.

Big World, Tiny Tiny Kitchen

In starting this project, and in talking about it with friends, I know there are several drawbacks.

What is a country, anyway?
I've gone with a list of 192, the members of the United Nations, plus Taiwan, the Vatican, Kosovo, and South Sudan, but cuisine does not necessarily follow the rules of political boundaries. For a project like this, that's a blessing and a curse. Some countries -- take China -- have hundreds of regional variation in cuisine. It would be impossible to experience the cooking of China in 3-7 separate dishes. Then again, some countries have a lot of overlap. The cuisine of Andorra is basically the cuisine of the Catalan region, blending Spain, France, and a little food of Italy. This will help fill in some of the gaps left in the countries it shares foods with. In the end, it's just easiest to work from a list, arbitrary though it may be.

It's a lot of work, isn't it?
Well, if Ben (the boyfriend) and I can manage to keep it going at a country a week, it'll take four years to complete, but... I was planning on eating every day for the next four years anyhow, wasn't I? It's really not that much extra effort.

How do you choose the dishes?
The internet and the library! I'm trying to use a variety of sources where possible for recipes. There's a gorgeous blog, for example, for Afghan cuisine, but I think different chefs all have unique takes on their food, and I'd like to get a little variety in there. We're lucky to be living in an age when people can post recipes from almost everywhere. I'm also looking at cookbooks in the library.

Aren't you going to miss a ton of foods?
Yeah, probably. But I'd miss a lot more if I didn't cook this way, wouldn't I?

Still, there's a lot to be said for a project like this. In doing this, I'm bound to learn so much about food -- especially seasoning and spicing -- that it's completely worth the effort.

I live in Japan, and while this is, in some respects, lucky, it's also unlucky. Japanese food is delicious, but it's EXTREMELY limited in scope. Foreign spices are often treated with deep suspicion. Italian restaurants serve pizza with hot dogs and penne with ketchup -- BY POPULAR DEMAND. It's a bit sad, because there's a lot more potential than is being realized.

At least one kitchen around here won't be serving hot dog pizza tonight. Let's start!