Day 14 - Honduras and Bosnia-Herzegovina - World Cup Eating Challenge

I hope I don't offend anyone, but I'm only referring to it as Bosnia from here on out...

Anyways, I'm starting to break a little bit. This challenge has been super fun but Wednesday I had a case of nothing-is-turning-out-the-way-I-want-it-to and let's just say that I really need the break between group stage and the first knockout round. After two straight weeks, I'm excited that I'll get some spaces between rounds from here on out.

In addition to the struggles that come with trying out a new recipe most days, I've also been going grocery shopping almost every day. I know that can be chalked up to poor planning, but this past week I've really tried to wait it out and see what teams get knocked out before deciding on my recipe. It's helped me maximize country exposure but grocery shopping can come with all sorts of frustrations and between dealing with cat calls from supermarket employees, inefficient cashiers, trouble finding rare ingredients, or just staring down an aisle of corn flours trying to get the right one (I did not...) - I'm a little over the grocery store.

Anyways, moving rapidly forward to the food and not so much of my griping. This is going to be a picture/ word post hybrid because about half way through cooking everything went wrong and I could not manage pictures also.

My original plan was to make this tilapia recipe. I was thinking of doing a healthier version that just used the spice flavors and not frying it. However, after doing my ab challenge for the day and running 2.5 miles, I realized I hadn't had red meat in a couple of days and wanted some steak. I did a little search while doing my walk cool down to the store and saw that carne asada was a good option for Honduras. Done! Carne Asada is actually something I make at home quite often so I knew exactly what to do. 

This is probably the only worthwhile feature of G+

I normally just season my carne asada with a mix of spices, but I had just flipped through The Paleo Kitchen and saw they had a carne asada marinade. I was already home at this point so I adapted it to what I already had available - garlic, olive oil, cilantro, and tons of lime. Then I tried to get the perfect picture of lime squeezing (btw if you don't have one of those tools and love citrus - GET ONE). My phone automatically backs up all my photos to Google. This is awesome because it's super easy to then grab them for this blog. The other awesome side effect is that Google will sometimes decide to "auto awesome" some of my photos. They've taken to making gifs out of any series of matching photos I have. It's kind of my new favorite thing.

Anyways, I put all those delicious things in the food processor until it was a nice chunky mess. It maybe could have used more oil and garlic and less lime but I'm not complaining. 

I then put that pretty green sauce all over my steaks and stuck them in the fridge. 

Featuring the smallest avocados ever

I took this opportunity to prep my avocado mango salsa also. This is pretty similar to the one I made for Ecuador last week with a couple of tweaks. There was a better avocado - mango balance, a little more lime, some cilantro, and no tomatoes. I thought it turned out a lot better. I could go either way with the tomatoes but the extra lime and cilantro made it feel more like a salsa. 

Here's a finished picture for you because things are really going to start falling apart soon. Boy, was I happy that I made this early...

So probably the most Honduran thing I saw when looking for recipes was pupusas. They're made of corn so definitely not Paleo but I'm ok with cheating in order to try something from another culture and they're still gluten free! So originally I was just going to do cheese like in the recipe. However, as I mentioned above, my workout had me hungrier for meat than a Velociraptor in Jurassic Park (Bam - this post has a gif and Velociraptors. I told you guys there was room for improvement!) so I tried to figure out a meat option that I could add to them without making too much more work for myself and would still feel Latin. Obviously, the solution was chorizo. Another good option would be pulled pork but that's about 10 hours of slow cooking time that I didn't have so chorizo it was!

The ingredient I knew would be the hardest to find would be the harina de masa. I had a roommate once who was a pro at making tamales and she'd said she had no problem finding the harina de masa at the nearby Latin grocery store. It took me a while to come close but I finally found the aisle with harina de maiz. My Spanish isn't perfect but I knew both those words meant corn so that was probably the same ingredient right? WRONG. Back at home I just could not get the consistency to feel right. There was no way I was going to make this follow what the directions were telling me to do. 

It was too late to go back to the store so I made it work... ish. I was able to make the corn meal I had into some crumbly patties and put the chorizo, cheese, and cilantro filling on it then sprinkle it with more corn meal and gently scrap them into the pan. The pan frying in avocado oil was enough to get them to crisp up but they definitely did not have the right texture. I was pretty sad because I was looking forward to these a lot. 

Meanwhile, I was also busy cooking my steaks. Here came another rookie mistake - I overcrowded the pan and didn't let it get hot enough. The trick to carne asada is to cook it hot and fast on each side because it's so thin. Otherwise, the meat gets really chewy. Cooking it fast and hot on each side will sear the outside but leave the inside a tiny bit rare. The first two definitely got a little chewy but the third steak was cooked properly so at least that was ok. Then I cut up some onions and cooked them for a couple of minutes on the hot meat pan so they'd still be mostly raw but get some meat flavor. I feel like that and the salsa were the only things I didn't mess up in some way.

I also had an extra mango so I processed it and mixed it with some lime juice and tequila for a little mango margarita. There was accidentally a little cilantro in there since I only rinsed out the processor from the marinade so in the end every single aspect of the dish had cilantro in it. Cilantro goes a long way - for $0.50 it had a big part in all areas of my dish and I only used half of the bunch. No wonder it's so prominent in Latin dishes!

Dinner ended up tasting ok despite all of my missteps. I obviously know it could have been better but I was so hungry and tired and frustrated by that point that I was happy to have some delicious food. It also made a pretty good bunch of leftover meals the next day.

I still wasn't done though... I really wanted to make something for Bosnia as well. I've become a big fan of doing two countries at once and when I found this Bosnian cake recipe - I knew it would be a great dessert that I could easily make paleo. That would be if, you know, I knew the actual way to make paleo substitutions for baking. Guess there was still time to make more cooking errors in one night!

So here are my modifications and the corresponding judgement error:

1. I replaced cooking oil with coconut oil. Coconut oil is amazing for baking and totally natural. I love it. Guess what though? It's way oilier than normal oil. I used a 1:1 replacement ratio. I ended up taking a cake out of the oven that was literally drowning in oil. I had to hold it over the sink and pour out the extra oil. Hmm.. I just tried looking for information on how much to actually use and it says 1:1 is correct so maybe this was just a really oily recipe. Either way, it could have used half the oil.
2. I put in wayyy more coconut. This wasn't an error, it was actually awesome. I've done enough paleo baking to know that a recipe like this with no "flour" can turn out to be overly eggy. Maybe that's how they like it in Bosnia, but I like something a little more cakey. It was clear that the coconut flakes were the "flour" so I decided to make it more of a star. Who knows, maybe this added to my oil issue but I don't care, coconut is delicious.
3. I added honey to the cake as a sweetener. I maybe but a tad too much but this was also a nice addition since the cake otherwise didn't have a sweet element in it and would have been more of a bread. Probably the real error was also putting honey on top of it since there was supposed to be sugar in the frosting.
4. Everything about my frosting was a disaster. I decided to use coconut milk instead of heavy cream. I was certain I'd heard that you could whip coconut milk. So I take to aggressively beating my coconut milk... nothing much happening. I decide to take out the hand mixer... and it seems to thicken but definitely no where near the "stiff peaks" needed. I then turn to the interwebs for more instructions. It turns out you can whip coconut milk. It suggests only using the fatty part and not the watery part. That was fine - I was using full fat coconut milk so even though it was too late to worry about the separation, it should have had minimal coconut water. It also suggested the can be chilled. It was too late for that but I stuck my bowl in the freezer for 15 minutes to cool it down then went back at it with my hand mixer. It definitely got a little thicker but I was still a long way away. Maybe it was just too warm in the apartment but at this point it was almost 11pm and I was pretty tired of all my mishaps. I just poured my liquid coconut milk over a piece of cake and dribbled on some honey and called it a day. 

So ugly it's delicious

Despite everything, the cake was really tasty. Definitely a little oily, very coconuty (not a bad thing), and very ugly. I'm hoping now that my cream has been in the fridge over night I can go home and fix up the rest of the cake. 

Next up - Portugal!!