So, I’ve never really cooked before. I’ll occasionally throw things together in a pan and put the result over rice, but I have trouble following recipes or keeping ingredients in the fridge and it never turns out too well. However, the last two months in Honduras I’ve made an effort to cook dinner nearly every night and many of the results have been pretty darn tasty! I had help from Supercook.com which scrapes recipe sites and lets you match against the ingredients you have. I’ve kept links to some of the recipes I used, although to be honest I don’t think I followed a single one exactly.
Drum roll please…
Shrimp wraps with papaya and whatever veggies we had. These were one of our staples since Marcia kept us in good shrimp supply. The price of shrimp fell here recently so there are boats all around with hulls full of frozen shrimp, just sitting and waiting for the price to go back up.
Blaff (Caribbean lime poached fish) with boiled plantain and salsa. We had some hot sauce with sweet chillies in it which was just the right thing for the salsa, which was so good I tried to recreate it twice more but it wasn’t the same.
Piononos (plantains stuffed with black beans and cheese). Fried Puerto Rico street food, probably the least healthy thing I made the whole time. But they were delicious and held together surprisingly well.
Stuffed green peppers were almost a disaster. The recipe I used (I can’t find it now) baked them with uncooked long grain rice for an hour. After that hour the rice was barely cooked at all and I couldn’t figure out what on earth I did wrong. I had to pull all the stuffing out, cook it on the stove, then restuff them and finish them again in the oven. But they turned out well.
Goulash which was too tomatoey but good comfort food on a night when I needed some.
Grouper in banana crust. I’d bought a bag of yucca chips which were disappointingly crushed nearly to dust, so I found this recipe to use them in. It was a huge success.
Baleadas stuffed with refried beans, egg and stinky cheese. I had these first in Guanaja and tried to recreate them afterwards. I haven’t tried making the tortillas from scratch but bought excellent fresh baked ones from Pookie’s restaurant in Jonesville.
South Carolina Red Rice with sausage. Like anything with cooked tomato in it, I thought it was too tomato-ey.
Egg tomato leftover rice. With shrimp, trying to recreate the fried rice we loved in Thailand. A good way to use up extra rice from the night before.
Baked penne with sausage. What can I say, I bought a lot of pasta, canned tomatoes, and ground beef for some reason.
Coconut and shrimp rice bowl was so-so. The carrots I bought from Eldon’s were atrocious. Their veggies were definitely hit and miss, probably depending on how long ago the last shipment was. Some days they were just about cleaned out so I just had to buy whatever they had.
Shrimp and tomato quiche so good I made it twice, though I used sausage meat the second time instead which was better.
Picadillo de Plantano (plantain hash) with super ripe plantains was soooo good.
Shrimp braised in coconut milk over rice was kind of watery and the shrimps were a bit overcooked, but Colin went back for seconds of the sauce just to pour over rice.
And for desert…
Fudgy brownies, Colin’s favorite desert, were so thick they were a bugger to get out of the pan but we had fun doing it. I was horrified at how much sugar and butter went into them, but I guess that’s a good lesson to learn about desserts.
