Pancho's Feijoada

After an incredibly hectic day (I finished packing my house and moved to my new place, followed by workout and work), I was looking forward to have a nice dinner with my fellow comilones. It was Pancho's turn to cook and it was a total surprise what he was going to do!

We arrived and our chef du jour was in kitchen cutting limbs and washing beans, reading carefully instructions given to him by a brazilian friend: he has chosen Feijoada :)

For those who do not know what it is: Feijoada is a stew of beans with beef and pork meats, which is a typical Portuguese dish, also typical in Brazil, Angola and other former Portuguese colonies. In Brazil, feijoada is considered the national dish, which is served usually for lunch on wednesdays or saturdays, because it is pretty heavy to digest it, in tropical heat. Due to the fact that Buenos Aires was really cold that day, it was a great choice for dinner.

During my first trip to Rio de Janeiro, my carioca friends told me the story of Feijoada: it was a "luxury" dish of African slaves on Brazilian colonial farms (engenhos), as it was prepared with relatively cheap ingredients (beans, rice, collard greens, farofa and oranges) and leftovers from salted pork and meat production. Over time, it first became a popular dish among lower classes, and finally the "national dish" of Brazil, offered even by the finest restaurants.

While boys were in the kitchen helping Pancho; Delfo, Louisa, Pepu and I were chatting, and drinking wine, listening to music and an hour or so later, our host arrived with yummy comfort food, while Chico Buarque's famous song with the same name almost made me feel in Rio! Some had couple of servings, of course "gas" jokes were in order, our wine glasses were never empty and the cozy home of my dear friend (and a talented artist/architect)Pancho tingled with laughs all night long.

As I was leaving that night, a slight saudade sank in, I almost did not want to leave Buenos Aires this winter :(

A glimpse of Ottoman cuisine : Sultan's Delight with spicy tomato sauce and garlic yogurt

I volunteered to cook this week, even though I don't have a kitchen (or home for that matter) and picked a pretty ambitious dish, hoping I would not fail my fellow comilones.

Hünkar Beğendi (a.k.a. Sultan's Delight) is by far my favorite food from the Ottoman cuisine. My beloved greatgranma Menguc used to make it for important dinner parties, but never taught me how to make it properly. All I knew is that it took hours to make it (the recipe calls for at least one grilled mid-size eggplant per person) and minutes to devour it.

I have heard two different stories about the name of this dish, Hünkar Beğendi, which literately translates as "Sultan liked it"

The first one: the dish was created for Sultan Murad IV (1612-1640) and obviously he liked it--hence the name!



The second rumor is that the same dish was served for Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III, in Sultan Abdülaziz's Beylerbeyi Palace (Istanbul) in 1869, and she liked it so much that Abdülaziz promised her to ask his chef to give Eugenie's chef the recipe--but supposedly Abdülaziz's chef was reluctant to share the recipe and the ottoman empire ended up "todo mal" avec le francais! (could this be the reason?)

You may ask: what it is that a man who ruled 2/3s of Euro-asia liked so much? It may not sound too eccentric or sophisticated, it basically is a lamb stew (but I made it with meat balls, I suck at cooking lamb) served on a bed of creamy roasted eggplant puree with cheese. Sounds bland? Gotta try it before judging it, that is all I have to say.

Back to the dinner party: I arrived with the masa de meatballs (don't you love the spanglish?) and all the other ingredients (lots of eggplants) to the HQ of the club on Bolivar street. Thanks to my fellow sous-chefs, I was able to roast the eggplants and work on my story for the night and manage to serve the Begendi and turkish style rice (cooked with chicken broth and butter), with my last minute slant to the recipe (spicy tomato sauce and garlic yogurt to give it a kebap quality).

How was it you may ask: that I should not be answering, it would be conceded! Fellow comilones, please send your comments:) ---and photos?

Club de Comilones in San Telmo

It was a chilly late-autumn night when I was dressing up for the first meeting of "club de comelones", a group of strangers who have --at least---one thing in common: accessorizing life with good food.

An idea similar to what I had tried some time ago but instead of rotating foodies, I got stuck as the cook in charge of the event that after a while bored me because I wanted to eat other amateurs' food as well as mine and unlimited possibilities of memoirs.

The group had met in a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, an asado, and immediately saw that they all were long ready for it. At the end of the long lunch I felt like I knew them for longer than 4 hours--a nice surprise for a foreigner!

Invitation to the Inauguration came from our divine hosts Louisa and Fede, whose scrumptous wine soaked pears with spices at the asado gave a lot of confidence in the appopriateness of the night taking place at their house. We were told that Louisa, his partner from an island far far from the Southern cone, was famous for her spicy Indian food. As soon as we arrived to their cozy flat, from the tabouleh as an ice breaker and lentils/biryani rice and masala to devour, we, the comilones were in heaven.

The idea of writing about our meetings came to my mind recently, plus after the main course I was in state of ecstaticness--is this a word?---that I may not be the most qualified person to narrate the story so in short our night was beyond expectations.

Salud to Comelones!


PS: I would love to hear from my fellow foodies who remember other details that I might be missing!