The last 5 months have been terribly busy for me. Between moving house, my responsibilities at work tripling and studying for the GMAT, I barely had a free moment to eat, let alone cook anything. I just kept my head down, nose in the books/computer and my mind focused on the November 3rd 12:45 test…

There is nothing more Cuban than black beans and rice. Period. Not even sugar or cigars. Therefore, whenever I came home from college a little too white washed my dad would say I needed an infusion of black beans and rice. Whenever we had our non-Cuban friends over for dinner and my mom served this…

In Cuban cuisine, Lechon refers to a whole pig marinated in mojo and cooked either over a fire or, as is more common now in Miami, in La Caja China. Now a days, however, the name is used as a sort of blanket term for any pork roast cooked in mojo. It is the main…

About 6-8 months ago I discovered a spicy tilapia dish in my local Sichuan restaurant that has completely changed my view of fish. It is called fish filet boiled in chili sauce and it will blow your mind, not to mention melt your taste buds straight out of your face. It has quickly become one…

Perhaps it is due to the weather being sunny and then quickly returning to a wintery grey with freezing temperatures that put me in a stew frame of mind. Or, perhaps it is simply that I love a sticky and unctuous lamb stew on any night of the week, regardless of the weather. Either way,…

I was lucky enough to spend two summers singing in Italy while I was in college and as you can imagine I ate a lot of pasta. Although it made me sick at times, I absolutely loved it. The sauces tasted nothing like what I was used to back home and the pizza wasn’t like…

Ladies and Gentlemen, Hell has frozen over!! I have managed to make a basic chicken stock. Not the brown stock from and earlier post, in where I admitted my shameful lack of kitchen prowess, but a clear, pure essence of chicken. I have reclaimed my cavewoman birthright of knowing how to boil water and bones…

When we were much younger my father used to take us frequently to an Argentinian restaurant in Miami, and I think it is here that I learned to love beef. I also learned to love the piquant sauce they put on their meat called Chimichurri. It is a tangy sauce of parsley, garlic, red chili…

When I was much younger and had crushes on boys who didn’t like me, my mom always consoled me by saying “It is better it didn’t work, he wasn’t Cuban, so he wouldn’t understand why you need a pastelito de guayaba.” She was of course kidding but it did, at least on some level, ring…

When I was at Pike Place Market earlier this week I stopped by Beecher’s Handmade Cheese and scored some Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk cheese that was slightly funkier than normal. As my choice of verb indicates I have a love of cheese that borders on addiction! So it was with gluttonous joy that I brought…

I complain a lot about living in Seattle. Some of what I whine about is true; the weather sucks, the winter days are nonexistent, everything closes way too damned early and the city feels more like a very large town rather than a “real city”. Most of the time, however, I really just need a…

Parmesan cheese is a gateway drug . It’s got one of the best marketing campaigns out there. It starts off innocently, in a green, sterile tube, with a major brand label across it to make you think it’s safe to eat. So you take it and you put it on your pasta. It’s an innocent enough…