Blog Number 2: South America

Recipe:

3 cups flour (plus a little more for kneading)

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup cold water

1 egg

1 egg white

1 teaspoon vinegar

3 tablespoons shortening

 www.latinfood.about.com

Empenadas are in fact not South American in origin, although they are closely associated with South American cousine. In fact, they are European, specifically spanish. They were particularly easy to make, and although we undercooked them, they were delicious. We used a sweet recipe utilizing nutella and strawberry jam instead of a savory alternative. After doing some research later I learned a valuable secret of using egg whites to seal the pastry shut, which probably would have helped the professionalism of our plate. http://www.wikipedia.org/
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Salsa: A spicy sauce of chopped, usually uncooked vegetables or fruit, especially
tomatoes, onions, and chili peppers, used as a condiment. http://www.dictionary.com/

Other great salsas include pico de gallo, salsa verde and mexican corn salsa. Jalapenos are traditionally grown in mexico but they are now grown all over the world. Wiki My entire kitchen group had to take test retakes this particular day, leaving me to make salsa on my lonesome. It wasnt terrible, but due to poor dicing technique, neglecting to remove tomato seeds and a slip of the wrist when applying salt it a unique flavor and texture.
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I failed to procure a recipe for the Brasiliera cookies, and google yielded no recipe or pictures. Additionally, despite participating in the preperation I failed to really grasp now the sugar drip technique worked. So much sugar ended up wasted in the bottom of the cup it seemed inefficient. What I can say is that the cookies turned out to be fantastic, the best cookies I have had in a long time. I am planning to get ahold of that recipe and have Ellie explain the sugar drip. They were compact and chewy, but had an amazingly subtle crispy crunchy texture.

Blog Entry #1

1. Photo stolen from "Norwitz Notions"



2. In order to cook our tortillas, we first pre-heated the skillet for about 20 minutes, or exactly how long it took to do everything else. Everything else entailed putting one and a half cups of flour in a ziplock bag, then adding a pinch of salt, a dash of baking powder and 4 splatters of Crisco. After about 14 seconds of debate, we decided to throw a few more handfuls of flour in the mix. I personally think that this was our tortillas downfall. After struggling to stretch the dry cracked dough thin, I through it on the skillet. Pretty soon I realized that the skillet its self was concaved (a less than idea design). This was when I switched to a cooking style more appropriate for scrambled eggs. At this point, morale was pretty low in my kitchen, but several minutes later I was happily munching down on a bag of half cooked shredded dough slivers.

3. If the intention was to make real tortillas, I imagine we should have had a better understanding of what consistentcy the dough was. In addition to that, a flat skillet would have been very helpful, although from what I briefly read after stealing the above picture, it seems to me as though the flatness of the dough is critical. Apprarently their is a device called a "tortilla press" that greatly enhances the final product.

4. Although the word tortilla is Spanish, the snack itself is mesoamerican. While tortilla in spanish often refers to a dish with ingredients wrapped in a cooked dough disk, the Aztec corn toritilla is a 10,000 year old traditon. Although this began as a time consuming process involving a mortar and pestle, the descendants of the aztecs now wield automatic tortilla machines on the streets of modern Mexico. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortilla

5. In Mayan and Aztec culture, Maize was the staple crop. Grown in gigantic quantities, the indigenous people used corn in almost every dish, and became very adept at manipulating the components of the crop.