I’m not going to talk about Argentine politics, although I could talk a lot about the Dirty War from 1976-1983 where the military dictatorship used right-wing death-squads to torture, kill, and “disappear” thousands of people – mainly trade-unionists, students, and activists who disagreed with the policies of the dictatorship. In 2006 an Argentinian court condemned the 1970s government’s actions as genocide and crimes against humanity. Close to my heart is the case of Christian von Wernich, a Roman Catholic priest who on October 9, 2007 was found guilty of complicity in 7 homicides, 42 kidnappings, and 32 instances of torture and sentenced him to life imprisonment. As of February1, 2010 he has not been penalised by the Church and is allowed to officiate as a priest at prison Masses. You have to love that Catholic Church.

But as I said, I’m not going to talk about Argentine politics. So, what is Argentina famous for? In my mind, it’s Patagonia, polo, and steak.

Patagonia is a spectacularly beautiful area with incredible vistas and stunning vertical rocky heights. Even though I used to be a climber, I never visited Patagonia because I liked my rock climbing to be short and warm. Here are some great photos by Tom Dempsey.

Next is polo, the Sport of Kings, and Argentina is the undisputed capital center of the sport. Here are a few quotes:

“Polo is probably the fastest, most exhilarating and certainly the oldest team sport on earth; once the preserve of royalty, today it is played by millionaire playboys, princes and ordinary people – like rock stars, Hollywood actors and top models. You don’t have to have a double-barrelled surname or the right accent to play anymore; you just need lots of money.”

“Argentina is considered to be the undisputed centre of great polo today – 85% of the highest goal players in the world hail from here.”

And finally steak. Steak is big in Argentina. Not just big as in important, but also big as in large. Here’s a great article about steaks, and a sample paragraph.

“The classic beginner’s mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it’s the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed.”

Obviously the national dish of Argentina must be steak. Or must it? In fact, there really doesn’t seem to be a national dish of Argentina. The closest we could find is a overwhelming mixed grill of steak, chorizo, kidneys, intestines, blood sausage, sweetbreads, etc., cooked on a special grill called a parilla. Well, we don’t have a parilla, and the mixed grill really didn’t appeal to our delicate sensibilities.

With some further searching, we decided that matambre is the closest we could get to a national dish that we were willing to make, so that’s what we went with. Matambre is a flank steak butterflied then spread out, covered with colorful foods such as spinach, carrots, hard-boiled eggs, then rolled up and tied with string. Here is a before picture and an after picture. Note that the butterflying wasn’t super successful

We used a combination of two recipes – rather than list the recipe here, I’ll provide links to Recipe One and Recipe Two. Nothing was particularly difficult except butterflying the flank steak. Never having done this before I wasn’t too good at it and left some parts too thick and others too thin. Some people recommend having your butcher butterfly the steak for you, but we got ours pre-packed at Costco. Perhaps next time….

We decided to subject my boss and our Product Manager and their wives to this meal. Fortunately, Luis brought over two very nice Argentine wines, which worked out well because the matambre wasn’t actually that tasty. But our other secret weapon was chimichurri, a wonderful sauce that is widely used to add flavor to meats. The chimichurri turned out to be the best thing about the meal, other than the company, the wine, and T’s chocolate dessert.

Ingredients (for 6)

• 1 bunch of flat leaf parsely
• 8 cloves of garlic
• 3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• Juice of 1 lemon wedge
• 1 tbsp of diced red onion
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1/2 tsp salt

Blend all the ingredients in a food processor.

Now we can move onto Armenia!

They are in the Caribbean, southeast of the Virgin Islands, near lots of other islands. It’s rather interesting that they are a nation when most of the other islands nearby belong to bigger nations such as the U.S. and the U.K. Lots of lovely beaches about which Lonely Planet says “this improbably shaped splotch of land is ringed with beaches of the finest white sand, made all the more dramatic by the azure waters, which are so clear they’ll bring a tear to your eye or a giggle to your holiday-hungry throat.”

I guess people must like beaches like that because, again quoting the Lonely Planet, “Guitar-picker Eric Clapton, rag-trader Giorgio Armani, huckster scribe Ken Follett and taste-maker for the masses Oprah all have winter homes here.” Must be nice.

It seems that its (their?) location is rather strategic to the U.S. because we have a military presence there, and a satellite tracking station.  Of course, the U.S. presence is probably more because it’s a great place to hang out than because it’s really that strategic. The islands are also a transshipment point for drug trafficking since they are relatively close to the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, which perhaps increases the attractiveness for U.S. military personnel

The economy is largely based on tourism, although internet gambling is also very important. The U.S. is very weird about gambling, allowing it on Indian reservations, allowing lotteries in many states, and even allowing casinos in depressed areas such as Blackhawk and Central City. But they hate it when people gamble online, and tried to prevent Antigua and Barbuda from taking money from U.S. gamblers. In 2006 the U.S. passed a law “which criminalises the operations of offshore gaming operators which take wagers from American-based gamblers.” However, the World Trade Organization (WTO) didn’t take kindly to that and ruled against the U.S. Part of the ruling allowed Antigua and Barbuda to ignore its intellectual property obligations to the U.S., which is pretty amazing.

But, on to the meal. Here’s a link to the recipe for Fungee and Pepperpot, the national dish. What a strange dish it is. You’d think that being a Caribbean island the national dish would have lovely fish, but no, it’s claim to fame is pig snout. Well, perhaps that’s not its claim to fame, but snouts are in the ingredient list. As is beef, meat scraps, okra, pumpkin, pawpaw, eggplant, squash, spinach, peas, onions, and ketchup. It’s as if it’s not really a recipe at all, just a matter of putting in whatever is growing in the garden or snuffling around the yard.

Well, I confess that we didn’t use all the correct ingredients. We couldn’t find eddo or pawpaw or pig snouts (not that we tried very hard for the latter), and didn’t much feel like adding pieces of meat, bones and skin. So on the meat we compromised and used pork chops.

The Fungee is strange, basically corn meal and okra. Not being a Southerner I’ve never been particularly fond of okra, finding it rather too slimy for my taste, but boiling okra in water then adding the dampened cornmeal really wasn’t too bad. Not quite like couscous or quinoa or bulghur wheat, but acceptable. Here are the ingredients:

• 4 cups water
• 6 okras, cut into small pieces
• 1 tsp salt to taste
• 2 cups corn meal

The Pepperpot was very simple, just a matter of cutting up lots of different things and dumping them in the pot. A very easy meal, although I wouldn’t say that it was one of my favorites. Even though we used only half the quantities listed, we still had enough for three meals – i.e. for 6 people. So it appears that the full recipe would serve 12 people – quite a social event I would say. Here are the Pepperpot ingredients:

• 4 fresh green eddo leaves
• 1 lb antrobers(eggplant), peeled & cut
• 1 lb okras, chopped
• 1/2 lb pumpkin,peeled & cut
• 1 lb salt beef, chopped
• 1 lb pig snout(optional), cut
• 1 lb green papaw, cut
• 3 small squash, cut
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tbsp pepper
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• Vegetable oil
• meat scraps(pieces of meat, bones & skin)
• 4 cloves, cut
• 2 medium onions, chopped
• 4 tbsp ketchup
• 4 tbsp margarine
• 1 bunch thyme
• 1 bunch chive
• 1 lb spinach, chopped
• 2 cups fresh greenpeas

Here’s a blog posting by someone who looks as though they made the whole meal, pig snouts and all. Quite impressive.

Okay, enough about Angola as a country. There are a few dishes that are specific to Angola rather than to the general Congo area, and one of them is the chicken dish Muamba de Galinha – recipe here or here.

One of the key ingredients is red palm oil, which we’d never heard of. We couldn’t find it at King Soopers or Sprouts or Vitamin Cottage or Safeway or the Asian Market. Whole Foods had a 16 oz jar for $14 which we ended up buying, but then discovered that India’s Grocery could get it for half the price, so we ordered some and returned the Whole Foods jar. The palm oil from India’s Grocery turned out to be from Ghana so we felt very virtuous, getting a more authentic palm oil than one made in California. Strangely, it’s solid at room temperature and we had to immerse the bottle in a bath of hot water to liquify it so we could pour it.

The recipe consists mainly of chicken, palm oil, onion, tomatoes, squash or eggplant (we went with eggplant) and lots of okra. It also called for palm soup base but we couldn’t find that anywhere so had to do without it. Chicken recipes are interesting for two reasons. First, the recipes we’ve made all seem to call for chicken to be cooked for far too long – in this case at least 45 minutes, which would way overcook the chicken – or at least the chicken we cook. The other reason is that the chicken we get is probably very different to the chicken they would have in a country like Angola. I imagine that Angolan chickens are scrawny little things, whereas here our chicken is bred and genetically manipulated to grow fast and have huge breasts and no bones – or at least the chicken we get in the supermarket is all breast and no bones.

There’s not much to say about the cooking of the dish other than that we added the chicken much later than the recipe calls for as we didn’t want it getting tough.

A friend had recommended watching Food, Inc., so we decided to eat in front of the TV and watch the DVD. By the end of the movie we a) felt disgusted at the food industry and its practices, b) were pissed off with Monsanto, c) felt powerless in the face of our government’s corrupt relationship with the food industry, and d) decided to spend the extra money to buy organic. Interestingly, the same evening I was looking at the New York Times pages and saw Maria Calman’s latest And The Pursuit of Happiness column, Back to the Land, which uses Thanksgiving to talk about how we eat. She concludes with:

The United States of America could be less fastly fastly and more slowly slowly. We could think small and shift to a new (old) way of growing food and eating and being. Something that would make the Founders happy.

There’s not much industry in Andorra – 80% of GDP comes from tourism, and the main two industries are skiing and being a tax haven. Apparently the skiing is the best in the Pyrenees. And the food?

Andorran cuisine … has been shaped by centuries of isolation. With snow having blocked the mountain passes for several months it’s very much centred around the local produce which could survive the harsh conditions and sustain the workers in the fields. Staples like potatoes, cabbage and beans, lamb from the hills and cured meats such as bacon and sausages.

Trinxat is a truly basic and cheap meal. It has little more than potatoes, cabbage, and pork, three things that almost anyone can grow and raise, even in poor growing conditions. The potatoes and cabbage are boiled separately till soft, then mashed together. You create a pancake out of the potato/cabbage mixture then fry it on both sides till crisp, and put some pork or bacon on top. Here’s a picture of what Trinxat looks like – although our pancake looked better

This is the recipe we used, although we halved the quantities shown and didn’t use the fatback.

• salt
• 1 2-lb. savoy cabbage, tough outer leaves discarded
• 2 lbs. russet potatoes, peeled
• 12 thick slices of meaty salt pork or bacon
• 3 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 clove garlic, peeled and minced
• 2 1/2 oz. fatback, rind removed, thinly sliced
• freshly ground black pepper

You can look at the online recipe for the original details – what follows is a slight modification.

We looked for savoy cabbage at Sunflower but they only had regular cabbage and napa cabbage, so we used regular cabbage. We also figured there would be enough fat from the bacon that we didn’t need the fatback. I mean, we have statins, but there has to be a limit.

The original recipe calls for cooking the cabbage whole and the potatoes optionally whole. It’s almost as though they don’t have knives in Andorra. After all, the potatoes and cabbage will be mashed so why not cut them smaller so they cook faster?

Anyway, that’s what we did, dice the cabbage and cut the potatoes in small chunks and boil separately, then when soft we combined them in a large bowl and mashed them together.

Then we fried the garlic in olive oil and mixed that with the potato/cabbage mixture. We also took half the bacon and cooked and shredded it in the pancake because it seemed that the pancake would be better with bacon in it rather than on it, but we did keep the other half to put on top.

After mashing up the cabbage and potatoes, with olive oil, garlic, and shredded bacon, we poured half the bacon fat in the skillet and made one big pancake directly in the skillet, mushing it down so that it filled the skillet from side to side and was of even thickness. After cooking for about 10 minutes to brown the base, we had to flip it.

Shaking the pancake in the skillet was a strange experience because it rippled. The base was crisp but the main part of the pancake was somewhat mobile, so it looked at though waves were flowing through it. Very strange. To flip it we put a large plate over the skillet and upended everything so the skillet was now crisp side up. We then poured the rest of the bacon fat into the skillet and slid the pancake back in, cooking the second side for another ten minutes.

Once it was done we divided the pancake in to and put the rest of the bacon on top, then went to watch The Reader on DVD while we ate.

What a great movie, although it was very annoying that the young student, Michael Berg, didn’t have the courage to tell the truth about his former lover, Hanna Schmitz. What a wimp. On the other hand, Schmitz was also a coward for not admitting she was illiterate. So, a story of lack of courage on the part of the two main protagonists.

Where it gets more interesting is in thinking about what she could/should have done as a Nazi camp guard. It’s easy to be judgmental from a distance, as was the chief judge. On the other hand, Schmitz pretty much shut everyone up when she asked “What would you have done?” No easy answers for that one when you know that disobeying orders might result in death.

It’s so easy to be moralistic from a distance, especially when you are on the winning side and thus making the rules. It makes me think of the Nürnberg Trials, where being ordered to do something was no excuse. Easy to say when you are accusing others, but much harder to implement when it’s your own people being accused, as we’ve seen in Vietnam and Iraq. As they say, victor’s justice.

There was one wonderful sequence that showed why [rebels, guerrillas, freedom fighters, terrorists, revolutionaries, patriots - call them what you will] have to resort to acts that we consider despicable. Ben M’Hidi, one of the leaders of the FLN, has been captured and is being paraded in front of a group of journalists.

Journalist: M. Ben M’Hidi, don’t you think it’s a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?

Ben M’Hidi: And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.

The Battle of Algiers ended in 1957 with the death of the leaders of the FLN, but the writing was on the wall for France, and 5 years later, in 1962, Algeria became an independent nation.

Watching the movie did make me wonder about the possibility of successfully occupying another country, and whether there’s really any hope for a good outcome of the U.S. occupation/wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I suspect not.

Okay, with that introduction, let’s move onto the food. It seems that couscous (or kuskus in Algeria) is probably the most classic Algerian dish, and interestingly, the same recipe turned up in many different web sites. So that’s the one we went with.

Although it looks very similar to quinoa and bulgur wheat, couscous is not a natural grain, but is made from ground semolina which is formed into tiny granules. Traditionally it’s been a labor-intensive and time-consuming operation, but these days most couscous is made through a mechanized manufacturing process.

Similarly with the cooking. Traditionally couscous took a while to cook in a steamer, but modern packaged couscous has been pre-steamed and dried, and now only requires boiling water or stock to be poured on it and to be left covered for about five minutes.

But enough of the lesson, and on with the meal. It’s a purely vegetarian dish, but it would be easy to add meat to it. The recipe is for 6 people – we tried to cut it down for 2, but were constantly faced with thoughts such as “zucchini isn’t very filling, so let’s use all these zucchinis” and “we might as well use the whole onion since we’ve already used half.” In the end we pretty much made the full thing and had a lot left over.

Algerian Couscous with Vegetables

• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1/4 tsp cayenne
• 1/2 cup vegetable stock
• 1 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 small can tomato paste
• 4 whole cloves
• 3 medium zucchini
• 4 small yellow squash or yellow zucchini
• 1 large carrot
• 4 medium yellow or red potatoes, skins on
• 1 red or green bell pepper
• 1 15-oz. can garbanzo beans
• A dash of cinnamon

Veggies: Saute the onion in the vegetable stock (or some olive oil) until translucent. Add all the spices and cook for a few more minutes, stirring as needed. Add tomato paste, stir and simmer for two minutes. Cut the vegetables in large chunks and add all except the garbanzo beans,  and a dash of cinnamon, then add water to cover. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, for an hour or so. Add the drained garbanzos about five minutes before you take the veggies off the heat.

Couscous: Put the couscous in a bowl. Pour boiling water over the couscous and wait about 5 minutes. Fluff with fork. Use a ratio of about 1 1/2 : 1 of water to couscous. For added flavor, add some of the liquid from the veggie stew to the couscous in place of some of the water.

Serving: Serve the vegetable stew over the couscous.

We pretty much followed this recipe, although we did have more carrots (misread the original 3/4 carrot as 3-4 carrots). The great thing about the recipe is that it’s so easy to make, and so easy to add other things. Put in different vegetables. Add some meat. The veggies are all pretty mild tasting so what seems like very small quantities of spices do in fact have an effect. We probably put in 1/2 tsp of cayenne, and T found the dish almost too hot.

We also made Algerian tea, which is basically tea with mint leaves thrown and extra sugar added (no milk). Quite delicious.

But first, a bit about Albania. From the Frugal Traveler:

… a deeply weird place: a majority-Muslim country where the mosques are mute but the miniskirts are loud, where horse carts share highways with Hummers, and where people shake their heads to mean yes — except that sometimes they shake their heads to mean no.

Yes, Albania can make you shake your own head in confusion, but what can you expect after almost 50 postwar years of hermetic Communism and, more recently, a mania for pyramid schemes that plunged the poor European nation into near-anarchy? In this stumbling nation, I was hoping that my Frugal Traveler budget might afford me more luxury than it had elsewhere. People in neighboring Montenegro, Croatia and Italy, however, warned against such romantic notions. Albanians, they kept informing me, were criminals, corrupt and untrustworthy. But Tirana, it turns out, is quite lovable.

Ceratainly when you look a the map of Albania is looks an incredible place: lovely mountains on the East, the Mediterranean on the West, close to Italy, a long border with Greece. But the food…

Click for larger map

The menu for Fërgesë of Tirana is surprisingly simple with very few ingredients. We had to shop for feta and veal, so headed to Sprouts, but alas, no veal. On to King Soopers where veal was $16 a pound. We decided that Albanians must be rich, despite such being such poor country, until we remembered that they also make this dish with liver. We decided to compromise between the two and used sirloin steak.

The original recipe was for 4 people so we cut it in half, and the 2-person recipe is shown here.

1/2 pound steak

1/4 feta cheese

1/2 tablespooon flour

1/8 lb. (1/2 stick) butter

1.5 tablespoons virgin olive oil

1/2 medium-sized onion

salt, black pepper, and chili pepper to taste.

Cut the veal cutlets into small pieces. Dice the onion. In a saucepan, preheat the olive oil and sauté the meat and onion for 15 minutes. In another saucepan, melt the butter and then add flour, cottage or feta cheese, and black pepper, salt and chili pepper to taste. Mix all the ingredients together (adding the sautéed meat and onions) in the saucepan and place in a preheated 350 oven for 15 minutes. Take out and serve immediately. Note: Instead of veal cutlets, beef liver can be used in the same quantity of meat and preparation/cooking instructions as above.

It was quick and easy to prepare and cook, although we didn’t saute for 15 minutes – that would have way overcooked the meat, especially since it was going to be in a hot oven for another 15 minutes. So we cooked the meat and left it slightly underdone. Now, half a stick of butter for two is a lot of butter, but we did as we were told, and mixed that with the feta, the salt, pepper and chili.

After stirring to blend the feta with the butter, we mixed it all together and put it in the oven for 15 minutes. What do Albanians eat with this, we thought? The recipe called for no vegetables on the side, and no carbs in the form of bread, rice, potatoes or pasta.

So this old dish turned out to be a very modern one in that it was a very low-carb meal. The flip side is that it’s a very high-fat meal. We’d thought it would be pretty awful but it was surprisingly good and very filling, probably due to the high fat content. We did cheat though and use bread to mop up the sauce.

That was the good part of the evening. Later on we could hear a rushing of water and wondered if we’d left a tap on somewhere. It turned out that the hot water heater had broken and water was flowing out of it. So we filled the kettle and other containers with water, and turned off the water to the house, so now, as I write in the morning, I have my coffee but no way to shower or clean things.

I’ll be visiting Home Depot in the hope that they can install a new hot water heater today, so we’ll see. We have 4 guests coming over for dinner tonight, so it’s going to be interesting to see if we can make a four-course meal for 6 people and have a dinner party with no running water.

Update: A little learning is a dangerous thing. I’d previously replaced the bath taps and had to turn off the water to the house, so knew how to do that. So when I had to turn off the water to the hot water heater I turned off the water to the house since that automatically came to mind. As I was at Home Depot I realized there must be a shutoff to the water heater itself, and sure enough there is. And I’m getting a new water heater installed this afternoon before the dinner party, so it will be nice to shower before the guests arrive

We start with one of the most topical countries in the world, a country that is going to fuck up Obama’s presidency because he’s not strong enough to stand up to the hawks. And the sad thing is that the war in Afghanistan is not even about Afghanistan.  Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich makes the point in Afghanistan – The Proxy War:

No serious person thinks that Afghanistan – remote, impoverished, barely qualifying as a nation-state – seriously matters to the United States. Yet with the war in its ninth year, the passions raised by the debate over how to proceed there are serious indeed. Afghanistan elicits such passions because people understand that in rendering his decision on Afghanistan, President Obama will declare himself on several much larger issues. In this sense, Afghanistan is a classic proxy war, with the main protagonists here in the United States.

But enough of war, let’s get peaceful and make an Afghan meal. Qabili Pilau is the national dish and consists of “meat and stock added, topped with fried raisins, slivered carrots, and pistachios.” The spelling varies, sometimes called Qabali or Qabili or Qaboli or Kabuli, or Pulao or Pilau or Pilaw or Pilaf.

There are quite a few recipes on the Internet and we chose this recipe because it looked a little more interesting as it had more spices, even though it didn’t have pistachios.

2 1/2 cups basmati rice
4 tbsp. canola oil
2 lbs. boneless lamb shoulder, cut into 1 1/2″ pieces
Kosher salt
2 medium onions, roughly chopped
2 large carrots, peeled and julienned
1/2 cup raisins
2 tsp. ground coriander
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground black pepper
1 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp. ground black cardamom seeds (optional)
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
2 tsp. rose water (optional)

We decided to use chicken rather than lamb because we already had chicken and anyway, we didn’t like this part of the recipe: “Return lamb to pot … and simmer until meat is tender, about 1 hour.” This might have been a mistake as chicken cooks much faster than lamb so it was a little dry.

I went to King Soopers to get several of the ingredients, and looked in the bulk food section for the pistachios. There were all sorts of nuts including many varieties of almonds – organic and non-organic, raw, roasted, slivered, blanched, tamari-flavored, wasabi-flavored – but no pistachios, so I ended up buying a packet of unshelled pistachios. As an example of how the brain sees what it wants to see, I also bought some slivered almonds because I read “slivered carrots” as “slivered almonds”. Fortunately, another recipe did mention almonds so we got to use them.

We put on some dance music and T started cooking while I did the prep work. I had no idea how to julienne carrots so went to the computer to look it up. In case you’d like to know, here’s the answer.The most colorful part of the cooking was frying the carrots then adding the raisins and nuts. The raisins plumped up and the pan was so colorful that I almost took a photo.

I was going to use sea salt rather than kosher salt but T wanted to use regular salt because sea salt doesn’t have added iodine. As Wikipedia says, “Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. According to public health experts, iodisation of salt may be the world’s simplest and most cost-effective measure available to improve health.“

I wouldn’t say that the meal was a total taste sensation, but it was quite good. In retrospect we would not have cooked the chicken up front, but would have let it cook with the rice, and rather than layer the second half of the spices and chicken on top of the rice to cook, we would have mixed them all together to cook so that the spices pervaded the chicken more than they did. Then we would have added the cooked carrots, raisins and nuts at the end to reheat them.

But it was fun doing the preparation and cooking with dance music playing in the background, and a good start to our Foods of the World voyage.