Oven Baked Chilean Sea Bass

Since I didn't make it (yet) this doesn't count as Chile for the blog, but this dish from the Publix Chilean food and wine demo was sooooo spectacular I had to share it. The tomato onion mix melds nicely with the cream sauce, wrapping the meaty Chilean sea bass in yumminess. It's kind of like a fish wrapped up in lasagna. Delish! They served it with a cabernet sauvignon from Castillo de Molina.

What you need:

4 1/2 pounds Sea bass or grouper, scaled with skin on

1 large yellow onion, chopped

1/2 cup whipping cream

1/2 cup butter

2 tbsps. vegetable oil

1 tbsp. tomato paste

1 tbsp. flour

1 cup whole milk

2 tsps. paprika

1 cup Parmesan cheese, grated

2 tsps. dill, dried

What to do:

Season both sides of the fish with salt, pepper, dill and let sit at least two hours.

Pre-heat the oven to 350.

Heat two tablespoons of butter and oil in a pan and saute the onions until brown. Add the paprika and tomato paste.

In a separate pan, heat two tablespoons of butter and brown the flour in it. Slowly add the milk, stirring constantly until smooth. Slowly add the cream, simmer and season with salt and pepper.

Butter a baking dish large enough to hold the fish. Cover the bottom with half of the sauteed onion mix, place the fish on top and cover with the rest of the onions. Pour cream sauce over top and sprinkle with cheese.

Place in oven for 10 minutes to cook. Insert a knife to check doneness.

Serve with sauteed potatoes.

La vida lenta

The debate on whether to purchase a ticket for the Chilean food and wine demo started out like so many others: Is it really worth spending $45.

As the week went on, work took a toll on my energy, the weather turned crappy and my friends all decided they couldn't make it. By the time Friday rolled around, all I wanted to do was curl up on the couch in my comphies with some nice vino. There were so many reasons to just not go. Was it too late to get a refund?

But when the woman from Castillo de Molina vineyards stepped to the front of the Apron's Cooking School classroom and started speaking, I knew I ended up there for a reason. If nothing else, this evening was meant to renew my perspective on living.

"You all probably heard that in my home today there was an earthquake," Carolina Rivera started, referring to the 7.2 magnitude aftershock that hit Chile that morning.

As she continued, she didn't dwell on mass destruction, death or devastation. She talked something much simpler: wine cellars.

"A lot of people had wine cellars with years worth of wine stored away that got destroyed," she said. "They were all saving it for some special occasion. Now it's gone. They will never be able to enjoy it."

Call me all zen and metaphorical, but her words struck a chord. Her story of the wine cellars may seem superficial, but it's really about something so much more. Something everyone can relate to and learn from.

How many times do we put off doing things we enjoy, let work or a standard of practicality keep us from happiness. Instead, we save our money, make our plans, keep climbing to the top. But where are we really climbing?

And what if something beyond our control - health, natural disaster, an accident - keeps us from ever making it? Maybe it's not making it to the top of the pyramid that matters. Maybe just the fact that we got to climb it at all is what's important.

The story of the wine cellars reminded me of a story I heard in Israel. Our tour guides told us how many people in the country are buried in credit card debt. In a country where terrorist attacks have taken thousands of lives, people live in the moment, even if that means being somewhat indulgent. They may not be around when the bill comes.

Sure, that is probably a little extreme. But the point is to live for the day. On a small scale, enjoy that bottle of wine if you have it. Sign up for that cooking class. Go after that bigger thing you always wanted. You may not always have a chance to do it.

She called it the slow life.

"The slow life is the best life," she said.

That was the start of a lovely two hours where the team of Publix chefs paraded out a four course meal complete with salmon, a Chilean sea bass dish to die for, empanadas, tamales, and merlot poached pear. Of course there were four types of vino. I even made a new local foodie friend.

Chile has become a new fascination for me, largely because I've taken to the rich red wines they produce there. I had started making plans to visit at some point this year, but put them off.

Maybe it's time I reconsider ...

Going Global

So it occurred to me today that some readers might appreciate a quick recap of what countries I finished. Without any further ado... Drum roll please ...

The First Twenty

1. Germany

2. Panama

3. Myanmar

4. Comoros

5. Mali

6. Greece

7. Iran

8. Israel

9. Lebanon

10. Syria

11. Tunisia

12. Dominican Republic

13. Hungary

14. Vietnam

15. Poland

16. Thailand

17. Spain

18. France

19. El Salvador

20. Tajikistan

All of the recipes, of course, are floating around the blog!

A mini milestone

I know. It's not THAT great. But every step forward is a step in the right direction, right?

Tajikistan marked my 20th country, which out of 203 means I more or less reached the 10 percent point.

I know. It's kind of like getting on the elliptic machine, setting the time for an hour and then rejoicing when you get through five minutes. But it's still five minutes, isn't it?

Tajikistan: Plov

The first thought that crossed my mind when I pulled Tajikistan out of the wine bag of fun isn't really appropriate for a family blog. (It definitely started with a "What the" ...)

This definitely ranks pretty high on the list of obscure countries I've tried to cook from, so I figured it was a long shot it would show up on the Wikipedia list of national dishes. But I was wrong. It never ceases to amaze me just how much information is out there on the Internet about cooking and food in other countries.

Turns out the national dish of Tajikistan is Plov, kind of the Tajik version of a paella or jambalaya. They make it for special occasions. I actually found several recipes out there that all had very similar ingredients, so I used that for the foundation for my recipe.

My research also showed that making Tajik Plov is considered more of a masculine endeavor in the central Asian country. Apparently they think women aren't capable of cooking the rice right.

You know what I have to say to that? Again, more inappropriate.

In perhaps a big "I'll show them" to the people of Tajik mindset, mine turned out pretty good. An added benefit: It was super easy. You could throw this together on any weeknight. De-boning the lamb is the biggest time commitment. Another bonus: I had all of the spices, garlic and carrots in my kitchen so my grocery bill for this dish cost less than $20 (for probably a week's worth of dinners). About half of it was a giant thing of arborio rice that I still have a lot of for future recipes.

Here's what I came up with.

What you need:

3 lbs. lamb cubed

3 tbsp. olive oil

2 yellow onions, sliced

3 cups carrots cut into chunks

5 gloves garlic, minced

3 tsp. coriander

2 tsp. cumin

3 tsp. crushed red pepper

3 cups dry arborio rice

1 bunch curly parsley, chopped

water

salt, fresh ground pepper to taste

What to do:

Heat the oil in a pot and when hot add the cubed lamb. Cook until browned. Add the sliced onions, carrots and garlic and let them cook in the juices of the lamb for about 5 minutes. Add the coriander, cumin, crushed red pepper and some salt and pepper and combine. Let cook another 5 minutes.

Add the dry arborio rice to the mixture and cover with water. Cook for about 30 minutes until the rice is tender, gradually adding more water as the rice absorbs it. When the rice is almost done, add more salt and pepper to taste and the parsley.

A little repacking ...

It happens to all of us. Especially during those really long trips. We start collecting things. Lots of things, many of which we don't need. Our suitcase gets full and we can't fit in the things we really need for our journey.

I'm a little bit of a neat freak. Clutter gets to me. I like order.

So I was starting to feel a little bit like this blog was getting too far off track. Anyone coming to it to find international recipes had to sort through all of my other random food musings.

I figured the best way to solve the problem was to make a new home for all of those non-global food postings. It's called Foodie in Florida.

You may notice a lot of the older posts on this blog are gone. I transferred them over to the new one so this space could be exclusively for my global culinary adventures. I'll just be updating this one now with stories and recipes from around the world. Everything else you can find on the new blog. I'll post a note on Foodie in Florida when I update this one. Hopefully you will visit them both! And I'm actually starting to hatch plans for a third blog in the near future ... Stay tuned!

So now that we've cleaned things out a bit, let's get back on the road again.

El Salvador: Pupusa

What the hell is a pupusa, anyway? And why bother?

That might as well be the title of this post, since that's exactly what I was thinking by the time I was done with the pupusa-making process.

I'll start by saying I've never been to El Salvador, or anywhere remotely close to it for that matter. The country has no sentimental value. I've never even thought much about it. Never seen a pupusa on a restaurant menu.

But at some point last Monday, my week was off to a rough start. I was totally unmotivated. Totally disinterested in most of the things I needed to get done at work. And it was cold and crappy out. Who even wants to get out of bed in that weather? I mean, come on. This is Florida! I'm here for a reason.

I dragged through the first few days of the week, starting to feel a little bummed. I wished I had some sort of distraction. Something to get me excited and pull me out of my funk.

Then I remembered the wine bag of fun. The occasional monotony of life was part of the reason I started this blog in the first place. Just something to spice things up when life needed just a bit of seasoning.

As cheesy as it sounds, it works. There's something kind of thrilling about spontaneously reaching into a bag, pulling out a country's name and vowing to pay it a little visit - at least in your kitchen. Maybe it's the surprise. You never know what you're going to get, and then before you know it your exploring the cuisine of El Salvador.

It seemed so exotic at first. So cool. So Latin.

That was before I started the pupusa making.

A pupusa is a traditional Salvadorian hot pocket of sorts, made with a dough of corn flour and stuffed with random things, like meat, beans or cheeses. I actually found an Emeril recipe that involved shredded pork and white cheese. He calls it Salvadorian Pulled Pork Pupusa with Pickled Cabbage. It's the only pupusa recipe on the Food Network web site. (I now think I know why.)

Thus began quite the process. The recipe required that the side dish alone sit for 24 hours before eating (I cheated and tasted it a good six hours in). In the interim, the pork cooks for a good four hours. And then there's this little situation with the corn pockets - making the dough, molding little balls, trying to flatten and stuff them with the pork mixture without breaking the dough, which is fairly delicate. In all, I probably spent about seven hours trying to accomplish all this (with down time in between to clean up the kitchen).

The end result was pretty good. I'd probably serve this at a party.

But seven hours? This might even surpass the moussaka in intensity. Or homemade pasta. And on this first go around, I was fairly tired by the time I even got to making my little dough balls. I fell like the pupusas were coming out kind of crappy.

At some point last week, I managed to convince one of my editors to take me to lunch. We decided on Vietnamese, and headed to Miss Saigon for some pho.

On the ride there, I started telling him about my own experience making pho (remember, the whole 10-plus hours making broth). He kind of laughed and said that's exactly why he doesn't make ethnic food.

"Someone else already knows how to make it so well," he said. "It's like sushi. It's an art. I could never make it as good."

His message: Why bother when you could drive around the corner for takeout in under an hour?

But even as I painstakingly rolled my little corn flour balls, trying to keep them from breaking as I stuffed them with pork and cheese, I could appreciate the effort. I could appreciate that someone, at some point in time took the time to come up with this cultural staple. I could appreciate it in a way I never would have had I never tried to make it myself.

It's a pain in the ass, rolling those little corn balls by hand and then frying them. Should I ever find myself in El Salvador enjoying one of these tasty treats - or any comparable restaurant - I'll be sure to thank the cook for his effort. And tomorrow, I'm kind of looking forward to getting back to what I perhaps do best, at least better than making pupusas. Working at a newspaper.