(Not) Arroz a la Cubana

Oddly, since switching to saba as a staple, I've been craving arroz a la cubana, which is fried yellow plantain with minced beef (or minced pork and beef) and garlic rice.

I just had a skin-steamed saba with spicy bopis and an egg instead (those last two from the canteen down the street), and it actually hit the spot well enough. The banana was thoroughly green, though, so there wasn't that bit of sweetness--which I think suited the dish just fine.

I can't get over how much like a potato that skin-steamed green saba tastes, with the convenience of not having to scrub the skin, and much easier peeling.

Next up (probably, sometime): green saba and cream of mushroom soup! Or, mashed green saba with bacon bits (or corned beef) and cabbage!

No-bake Fruit Root Crisp

Ingredients

- quick-cook or instant oatmeal (dry)
- yellow bananas
- Lily's homestyle peanut butter (I like this brand because it's runny)
- singkamas, raw and sliced
- raisins

Directions

1. Slice bananas, or in this case I toasted them and then peeled and sliced them because they're yellow saba bananas.

2. Peel and slice singkamas. Why is this usually a savory root crop? Am I the only one who's bitten into a raw one and realized that it tastes sweet? It's the perfect cheap and local substitute for apple or pear. In this recipe, of course, sliced apple or pear will do but then it will be more like Fruit Fruit Crisp. Who invited Fruit Fruit??

3. Pour quick-cook or instant oatmeal in a bowl. Technically, it's already cooked and only needs water to become oatmeal porridge, which we shall not do.

4. Add peanut butter.

5. Add raisins, banana slices, singkamas slices, more raisins, and top with peanut butter.

6. Mix it all up.

7. Got milk?

Pumpkin Spice Oatmeal

Clockwise from top-right: Cinnamon, oatmeal, ginger root, pumpkin, nutmeg, and a white sugar.

Note to future self: brown sugar would have been better.

Sugar and spice is all added to taste, so I couldn't be bothered to write up the measurements.

Basically, I chopped the pumpkin in half and left both halves in the rice cooker (skin sides, or rounded sides, up) until the whole vegetable was soft enough to use a spoon and scoop the vegetable from the skin.

Added to a bowl of cooked oatmeal, raw ginger then grated over it, dusted with cinnmon and nutmeg, and sugar added. Then, mashed the whole thing together.

In the future, I think that I would cut the pumpkin sideways so that it would become more like a bowl, and maybe serve the sugar-and-spice oatmeal in the pumpkin. However, these small pumpkins are mostly air and seeds inside, and since I don't know how to roast pumpkin seeds into nuts... I think I'll stick with the big wedges of kalabasa from now on.

Barbecue Deviled Eggs

Deviling an egg is the process of taking an egg, boiling it, slicing it in half, scooping out the cooked yolk, and replacing the empty part of the egg whites with something else (usually the yolk mixed with something like mustard, or bacon bits, or something.)

About three months back, I wrote about a simple barbecue sauce recipe that only mixed ketchup with pure molasses.

It tasted like ketchup mixed with molasses. Not so much like barbecue sauce. Adding Worchestershire sauce for a little more complexity was not a good idea.

The way to get it tasting like barbecue was actually a whole lot simpler.

Black pepper and white pepper both come from the tiny, round, berry-like fruit of the Piper nigrum, not to be confused with capsicum peppers or chili peppers. White pepper is made when the black pepper berries are soaked to remove the skin, so black pepper is technically both black and white pepper. White pepper consequently has more of a lift in its flavor.

I can imagine that ground black and white pepper added to the ketchup-molasses mix would make it taste like barbecue sauce. Personally, I like the texture and homestyle look that the coarse grains of black peppermill give.

The above egg has been deviled, having the yellow egg yolks mixed with the ketchup, pure molasses, and finished off with a dash of black peppermill.

Barbecue deviled eggs!

I'd have these more often, but it has no escaped my notice that there's been a recent spike in the price of eggs.

A dozen regular used to be 63, and right now they're over 70. The ones pictured above, of course, I sort of have to go, "Seriously?" I love the earth and am gullible enough to believe that those would be more nutritious, but still, at the time that photo was taken, each of those organic eggs would be double the price of a regular one of the same non-brand brand.