La ropa real

So if anyone is looking to try a recipe from my blog, I'm going to make an official recommendation to try the rope vieja I posted last week courtesy of Emeril.

The recipe yielded quite a bit of the shredded meat, and I spent most of the week pushing it on friends and eating it for lunch at the office. For starters, I was surprised some people had never heard of the traditional Cuban dish (or in my case Dominican). But those who observed me eating it at work thought it looked and smelled delicious. Some even asked for the recipe.

Perhaps the greatest compliment of all was from my friend Cat, who has Cuban friends in Miami. She tried it last night. Apparently it was only the second one she had. The first was from a Cuban grandma. She ranked mine right up there.

I can't take any credit, though. It all goes to Emeril. The recipe is really fairly easy to make, just fairly involved. And just remember that it does take a while.

My second recommendation would be another one from Emeril - the Greek Moussaka. That one, however, is really for the fairly ambitious home cook. Slicing and frying all that potato and eggplant is pretty tedious.

Dominican Republic: Ropa vieja with kidney beans and rice

I'll start by acknowledging that I am fully aware ropa vieja is most widely considered a Cuban dish. The wikipedia list of national dishes, however, describes the national dish of the Dominican Republic as white rice topped with stewed kidney beans and braised beef, served with a side of salad. The dish is known as bandera nacional, or national flag. I have no idea how they came up with that.

Either way, when I started looking for recipes for a braised beef dish unique to the Dominican Republic I kept running across recipes for Dominican ropa vieja. All of those recipes looked quite similar to the so called Cuban ones. I also learned that ropa vieja is quite popular in countries throughout the Caribbean, including the Dominican Republic, Panama and Puerto Rico. Besides, no one claims it as their national dish so I thought I'd give it a go. (Cuba claims a pork and vegetable stew called ajiaco.)

There are apparently varying stories about where the name ropa vieja - which means old clothes in Spanish - came from, but one of the most popular is about a poor old man who could not afford to buy food for his family. So he went to his closet, got some old clothes and cooked them. His love for his family turned them into a beef stew. Impressive.

I once again turned to the man himself, Emeril Lagasse for a ropa vieja recipe. I probably cheated a little because the meat isn't so much braised as it is boiled and simmered for hours. There was no searing or oven involved. And yes it definitely took hours to cook. Three hours for the initial simmering, and then another 30 to 40 minutes after you shredded the beef (which this recipe called for brisket). The result though is a nice pot of tender, shredded beef in a thick sauce flavored with peppers, onions and tomatoes. I'll be curious to try the leftovers and see how it tastes once the flavors melded. I served the ropa vieja with the white beans and kidney beans.

Now, on to Tunisia...

Back at it

After my brief weekend of laziness (if one would call preparing four dishes for a dinner party lazy) I've dipped back into the wine bag of fun and pulled out the next two countries.

The two I pulled were the Dominican Republic and Tunisia, so hopefully this weekend I will get to both of those. Stay tuned ...