During this time my father was in a labor camp, for the crime of wanting to leave the country. Alone, and with few provisions, as my mother struggled to care for us, she was struck with inspiration. One day she went out to the back patio to do the wash and saw a cute little frog sitting by the door to the kitchen. My mother has always liked frogs, and this little frog by the kitchen door gave her an idea...
My father and I were very close, but I did not always get along with my mother, so even though she was a marvelous cook, I had never been interested in learning her cooking secrets. However, after my father’s death, I witnessed my mother’s severe deterioration and overwhelming sadness. Looking for a way to engage her, I had the idea to ask her to teach me how to cook like her...
A great many of the delicious foods that came out of Mamina’s kitchen began with a sofrito. It is the seasoning base for many Cuban dishes. Sofrito is sauted onions, peppers, garlic and sometimes tomatoes....
I have mentioned before that my mother loved children. She doted on her daughters, her nephews and nieces and most of all her grandchildren. She played many games, and sang many songs to them. I also sing her songs and play the same games with my grandchildren.
The other day I was playing with one of my grandchildren. The child was on my lap and I was clapping his little hands together when a little rhyme my mother used to sing came into my mind. I had forgotten all about it, yet there it was. It was as if Mamina were whispering in my ear!
You can tell from the words used, that it is a very old song:
PALMITAS
Palmitas de manteca, para Papa que da pesetas,
Palmitas de cebada, para Mama que no da nada,
Palmitas y palmones, para la Abuela (o abuelo) que da doblones
You can substitue other names for Papa, Mama y Abuela. Maybe it is "Tia que da pesetas"
TRANSLATION
Palmitas: the palms of the hands are "palmas", "palmitas" makes it a diminutive. Clapping small hands together, or little hand claps.
Little hand claps made of butter, for Father who gives money Little hand claps of barley, for Mother who gives nothing (*) Little hand claps and big hand claps for Grandfather who gives doubloons (or gold coins)
(*) How preposterous to say that "Mother gives nothing"! Children's songs are crazy sometimes.
Here is a short video, with my sweet little granddaughter.
I love vegetables, I love salads, but that was not always the case. My mother used a lot of vegetables in the soups she made for us when we were children, but did not try to convince us to eat other vegetables.
Mamina loved this very simple, quick salad. Sliced cucumbers with vinegar, oil, salt and pepper. As a child I refused to eat it. I thought cucumbers were boring and that I didn't like vinegar and oil. Yucky adult food, would not even try it. Thank goodness we get to learn and grow in this life!
PEPINOS CON ACEITE Y VINAGRE or Cucumber Salad
1 Cucumber, peeled and thinly sliced 2 Tablespoons Raw Apple Cider Vinegar 1 Tablespoon Olive Oil 1/2 teaspoon Real Salt or sea salt Fresh ground black pepper, to taste
Peel and slice the cucumber. Add vinegar, olive oil and salt. Sprinkle with black pepper. Stir and taste. Enjoy.
I'm glad my children and grandchildren are not as silly as I was. They love this salad and if I make it and leave it on the counter, it usually gets eaten up before the rest of dinner is finished and served!
Here is a video with my granddaughters, making Pepino salad.
My friend, Whitney Johnson, invited me to do a guest post on her Dare to Dream blog. I wrote about what I learned from my parents about daring and dreaming. You can read it here:
This type of tortilla has nothing in common with corn or flour tortillas, it is a Spanish omelet, similar to an Italian frittata. My mother made tortilla often, and after my parents came to live with us, she always made extra to share with us. She knew her grandchildren loved it, even if they referred to it as "Potato Pie", to Mamina's chagrin!
After my son Skyler returned from serving as a missionary in Madrid, he thought our tortillas were "not quite right". I had to remind him that ours is a Cuban tortilla de papas, very similar to our ancestors' Tortilla Española, (also called Tortilla de Patatas), but somewhat changed by the magic of the Caribbean! TORTILLA DE PAPAS
3 medium potatoes
1 teaspoon salt
Enough olive oil to cover the potatoes when frying
½ cup chopped onion
4 eggs
dash of salt
Wash and peel the potatoes. Cut them up in small irregular pieces about 3/4-1 inch in length. I was cubing them, but my mother said they would cook better if they were irregular. They can also be cut in thin slices. Toss with teaspoon of salt.
Heat oil on medium high. Add potato pieces, careful not to add any water as it will make the oil splash and burn you. Cook gently for 5-7 minutes, turning often, until crispy outside and soft inside. You can test by taking out a piece of potato and smashing it with a spoon. Should be easy to smash. You can cook the onion separately, in just a little oil, or add to the potatos half way through cooking them. When the potato pieces were soft, my mother would fish them out of the oil with a slotted spoon and drain them on paper towels. I don't bother to drain them, but rather put them directly into my ceramic non stick pan. That way there's already enough oil in the pan to be ready to add and cook the eggs.
Beat 4 eggs, add a dash of salt.
If you drained the potatoes, then coat the bottom of a non-stick pan with a little oil. Put in potatoes and onions. Pour in the beaten eggs, trying to spread them evenly all over. Cook on medium till the eggs set.
Carefully put a plate on your pan like a lid, flip omelet into it, put it back in the pan 2-3 minutes longer to cook the other side.
My children and husband like to put catsup or salsa on their tortilla. More heresy, as far as my mother was concerned! However, she had no problem adding garlic, spinach, or other vegetables to her tortillas.
I'm trying to get into this blogging thing, but I'm not very good at it yet, it's been almost 3 months since I posted anything! I have been doing all kinds of other things, and if I had the blogging mindset, I could have written about my adventures.
In December we helped our oldest son and his family move from Arizona to Atlanta area. After driving for 4 days, we celebrated the arrival to their new home at a local, delicious, Cuban restaurant--but I forgot to take pictures of it.
Walking on Hollywood beach with MaConcha
With Tia China & cousins, including beautiful new baby!
Later we enjoyed a wonderful visit with my family in Miami, and they prepared a Cuban feast for us. My dear Tia China made her delicious roasted pork, cousin Gladys added all the Cuban trimmings like black beans, yuca, platanos maduros, etc. My cousin MaConcha made her signature key lime pie (recipe below). The food was great, but the best part was being with my family, and meeting my newest little cousin! I wish we could be together more often!
Formal night on cruise
Also, my husband and I went on a Caribbean cruise! During our first cruise, 28 years ago, I got very sea sick and was given medication which we then discovered I was allergic to... not much fun. I was not very eager to experience that again, however my husband has always wanted to go on another cruise and has waited patiently for me to decide to give it another try. He has a significant birthday this year, so I decided to be brave and give it another chance. I wore sea bands the whole time and did just great! I also brought along some ginger, but didn't need it. We ate lots of great Caribbean food, but again I was so enjoying the moment that I didn't even think to take food pictures.
One thing is for sure, I have been enjoying life! My parents taught me a lot about enjoying life. My father was always busy, he liked to do many things. When he was not working, he was always creating, planting gardens, fixing things, building, inventing, but he always made time to visit with family and friends, that was his greates joy!
My mother's first priority was her family, beginning with her brothers and sisters for whom she learned to cook, then her husband, children and grandchildren. She loved feeding us, sewing for us. However, near the end of her life, she confessed to me that she had a great regret. She had always wanted to perform, act, recite poetry, sing (she had a beautiful voice), but had been too afraid to do so, except in very private settings with family or very close friends.
My goal is to live life with no regrets, so I make time for the things I love: family, friends, good food, books, acting, Zumba, etc. And I try not to let fear keep me from doing what I want to do. Though sometimes it takes me a long time!
MACONCHA’S KEY LIME PIE
Key lime pie is a Floridian dessert, popular with Cubans because we use limes a great deal in our cuisine. MaConcha is what our family calls my cousin Maria Conchita. She is an amazing and dedicated cook. There is a lime tree in her backyard, and when it's producing limes she picks them all, squeezes the juice out and freezes it in measured quantities, so she can make her wonderful key lime pie year round. Here is her recipe:
1 can sweetened condensed milk (use 2 cans for a deep dish crust) 2 eggs (wash before cracking them open, since they wont be cooked) ½ cup lime juice 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 8 oz container of whipped topping 1 graham cracker crust*
Mix the sweetened condensed milk, eggs, lime juice and vanilla till smooth
Then fold in the whipped topping.
Pour into graham cracker crust. Put in freezer till set, at least 2 hours. Take it out and let it sit at room temperature for a few minutes before serving. Five to ten minutes, depending on how warm it is where you are serving it. You want it soft but not runny. Enjoy!
* The crust in this picture looks funny, because instead of a graham cracker crust, I made a raw gluten free nut crust so I could eat it. I'll post the recipe on my other blog, in case you want it. RAW GLUTEN FREE NUT PIE CRUST
La Nochebuena means "The Good Night", the night that Jesus Christ was born. It's Christmas Eve, and it is a big deal in Latin America and Spain, much more than Christmas day. In Cuba BC (before Castro) we celebrated with a "Cena de Nochebuena", a wonderful feast which took place late at night. Then we went to "La Misa del Gallo" or Midnight Mass and continued to celebrate the season until January 6th, El Dia de los Reyes Magos, when the Three Kings would bring presents to the children. Fidel and his Communist comarades did not allow Christmas, because of that Religion thing totalitarians are so against. However, people stubbornly insisted on celebrating, even under Fidel's oppression and with very little to celebrate with. So the Communists cleverly scheduled other celebrations (harvest, the Revolution) for the same December dates. Just like the ancient Church scheduled Christmas celebration near the pagan winter solstice celebrations.
On our last Nochebuena in Cuba, I remember quietly peaking over the wall that separated us from our neighbors, and watching them celebrate. It was 1967 and our family was not celebrating anything, my father had been sent to a “labor camp” for the crime of wanting to leave Cuba, and my mother was doing all she could just to feed us. The neighbors had put together tables and old doors on top of barrels to create one huge table, covered with various table cloths, at which all the family could be seated. It was late at night and along with the one spot light at the corner of the roof, which poorly illuminated the concrete patio, there were kerosene lamps illuminating the faces of the people gathered together to celebrate. I thought they looked beautiful, as they laughed and enjoyed themselves.
I couldn’t really distinguish the food on the table, but I pretended it held all the traditional foods, a roasted pig, plantains, rice, black beans, wine…. Not likely since food was rationed and very hard to come by. Our neighbors had probably saved up provisions and pooled resources with other relatives for this celebration. There might have been some cans of eastern European peaches, with strange writing on the label... that was sometimes a special item available for the holidays.
Once we got to the US we resumed celebrating Nochebuena on Christmas Eve with our extended family, eating all the traditional Cuban foods, with roasted pork as the main course. A shoulder roast is great, cooked in the oven, but the real traditional way of cooking pork is by roasting it whole, in a pit in the ground, wrapped in banana leaves…or aluminum foil.
One year, after my parents came to live with us, my father decided he wanted to roast a pig the traditional way. We needed to find a whole pig, specifically a young tender one. My brother in law, Daniel, generously offered to take him to a livestock auction to buy a pig. Daniel doesn’t speak Spanish, and my father spoke broken English, but he and Daniel had often gone hunting together, and they seemed to communicate well enough to manage just fine.
Off to the auction they went. Papillo was very excited, he loved livestock and this was his first auction. A HUGE pig was brought out and Papillo--who had a very expressive face and definitely talked with his hands--made an animated comment about the size of the animal. Unfortunately, Daniel thought my father was saying how much he liked the pig, and so he bid on it!
The more Papillo exclaimed, the more Daniel bid. I think by the time my father realized they were buying the pig, it was too late. They had to borrow a trailer to bring it home!
My father was furious—furious with himself, with Daniel, with the huge job ahead of him. But he was never one to shy away from a difficult task, so he butchered the pig (I was grateful that this took place at Daniel and Nina’s house). However, the beast was prepared for cooking in my kitchen; my whole kitchen was taken over for several days. Every counter top and surface was covered with pork meat. Some of the pork was fried, but most of it was “adobado” (marinated) with mojo for roasting.
We decided to invite the whole neighborhood to join in the feast. A huge pit was dug in a neighbor’s yard; my father got up in the middle of the night, and tended the roasting pig until the middle of the next day. We had a marvelous neighborhood feast. That was over twenty years ago, and we no longer live in that neighborhood, but the other day I ran into one of those neighbors and he talked about “the time we had the roasted pig.”
LECHON ASADO – Roast Pork
I consider this is the centerpiece of Cuban cooking. Every major celebration would hopefully include a roasted pig, preferably roasted in a pit in the ground. Here is how you make lechon on a smaller scale, in the oven. I didn't pay attention the many times my parents prepared lechon, but fortunately my godmother Tia China taught me how to do it, after my father passed away. Tia China is my father’s youngest sister and I love her! We think a lot alike and have had a lot of great times together throughout the years. She even went camping with us at Lake Powell, while in her seventies. 1 Pork shoulder or Fresh Ham Salt, lots
A whole head of garlic
1-2 cups Mojo (buy at Latin markets, or make your own. Click herefor recipe)
Wash the pork and pat it dry with paper towels. Do not remove the fat. Rub with lots of salt. Puncture with a knife all over.
Peel and mash garlic cloves, I use a mortar and pestle. Add a tablespoon of salt. Put this paste into the holes you made in the pork. Pour mojo over the whole thing. Cover and marinate in the refrigerator, at least over night.
Bake uncovered, fat side up. First 15 minutes at 500 to toast the outside, then 30 minutes at 350 degrees, after that turn the oven down to 325. Bake ½ hour per pound, or till meat thermometer says it’s done (180 internal temp). Puncture fat every so often with a fork. Eat it with all the trimmings (yuca, tostones, frijoles negros, arroz, flan, etc), but most of all with family and friends! Feliz Navidad!
I've been tending grandchildren while their parents are out of town, it's a lot of work but oh so very rewarding. Got me thinking about the wonderful and almost magical bond between grandchildren and their grandparents. My children were blessed to grow up with grandparents that were very available to them.
When my parents got close to retirement, my husband suggested we invite them to come live with us. Not having housing expenses they would be able to stretch their retirement income and do a little traveling. We felt it was a way of thanking them for the sacrifices they had made for us, and their courage in leaving Cuba and starting over in the US to provide a chance for us children to live free. For a long time they hesitated to accept our invitation. They feared that moving in with us would be too great an imposition. My father used his colorful language as an excuse not to take us up on our offer. He was concerned about the grandchildren picking up his Cuban swearing! But finally, they accepted and came to live in an apartment we created for them in our basement.
For more than twenty years, during Spring, Summer and Fall, our family had the blessing and challenge of having three generations living together under one roof. Winters they would drive to Miami and visit family. Our children grew up enveloped in their grandparents love, this more than compensated for the loss in privacy.
Of course, another great benefit was being able to enjoy Mamina's cooking! Here is one of the stand-by dishes she cooked quite often, because it's simple to make and we all loved it.
I liked Carne Con Papas best when Mamina made it with carrots and potatoes (sometimes even broccoli) from Papillo's garden.
It might seem similar to a stew, but it is not as soupy.
CARNE CON PAPAS- Meat & Potatoes
Sofrito: Olive oil to coat the frying pan 1 onion ½ to 1 green bell pepper 3-5 garlic cloves 1- 8 oz can of tomato sauce
2 lbs. cubed Stew Meat 4 to 6 Potatoes, cubed 3 to 4 Carrots chopped 1 tsp Salt ¼ cup Cooking Wine (optional-it’s still great without it)
2 cups of broccoli florets- if you happen to have some around
Make sofrito: chop onion, garlic and pepper finely. Sautee in olive oil on medium high, for 3 to 4 minutes.
Add the meat and brown it for about 5 minutes.
Cube potatoes, cut carrots in large round pieces.
Add the tomato sauce, potatoes, carrots, salt, and cooking wine to the meat, (broccoli too, if you are including it). Turn temperature down to medium-low, cover, and cook for 45 minutes.
