Days 6 & 7 - Nigeria and Costa Rica - World Cup Eating Challenge 2015

You might be wondering why I decided to do a post on two countries at once. Well, it's pretty simple.

For Nigeria, I was planning on making these:

They are Nigerian puff puffs and are supposed to be similar to donuts. I found the recipe here and thought it would be easy to substitute out the flour for tapioca starch. It was hard for me to get the right consistency but I was hopeful when they mixture rose from the yeast.

However, when I tried to fry it, this was the best I could do:

I learned my lesson and was sure to get real donuts here:

So basically Nigeria didn't work out so it was off to the next day!

And thank goodness, I had a pretty safe plan for Costa Rica. Costa Rica is one of the countries I had done last year. It's crazy how far my cooking has come since then. A recipe for Cauliflower arroz con pollo I was a little intimidated by last year seemed really easy this time around and I thought it would make a great dinner. 

I started by cleaning some chicken thighs and then rubbing them in minced garlic and salt. I used.. a lot.. of minced garlic. I'd say it was about two heaping spoonfuls. 

I then put it in a pot to brown. I probably should have used some oil. I knew I would need some so it wouldn't stick to the pan but the instructions didn't say it so I skipped it. I really should have known better. After the chicken was browned I removed it from the pot.

I then added a can of diced tomatoes and a bell pepper. The recipe said to use green but I don't like the taste of green so much so I sent Dan to the store and told him to pick whatever color he wanted. That way if he picked something different, it wasn't directly me disobeying directions. Lucky for me, he likes orange a lot so orange we got. I also threw in some herbs such as cumin, oregano, and thyme.

While those cooked a bit, I put a head of cauliflower into the food processor and pulsed it until they were cut into rice sized pieces. 

I then added the cauliflower and chicken to the pot. The recipe kept mentioning to monitor how much liquid you add but never actually says to add any liquid explicitly and compared it to making risotto. I figured they forgot to mention that you needed some chicken broth or something. I noticed everything was really dry so I added a few splashes of chicken stock.

Of course, after all those warnings, it was too much liquid. Oh well... I covered the pot and let it cook for 25 minutes.

While that was going, I heated up a few cans of black beans with more garlic and salt. I also made some mango salsa by processing some tomatoes, a mango, cilantro, lime, and jalapeno. It wasn't quite as good as my favorite mango salsa but it was close. I think the tomatoes or jalapeno could use some roasting to develop the flavors more.

It turned out so good! While beans aren't paleo, I just love them. Being Brazilian, I grew up eating black beans all the time. It's just not something I could ever really give up.

I had a friend in town as well. We invited her to join for dinner but she wasn't hungry so she said she'd just try a little bit. She ended up getting seconds. This is definitely a dish I would make again. It was straight forward and delicious. I would love to try adding even more veggies to the "rice" as well!

After dinner, we hung around Padres stadium to try to see the fireworks show. I think we succeeded!

And then I got to come home to some amazing leftovers...

Round of 16, Day 2 - Costa Rica - World Cup Eating Challenge

The games are getting to a really fun place for me where there aren't a lot of countries left that I haven't done. That means I don't have to stress out as much about missing a country (although there are some back up plans for this too). It also means we'll probably be repeating quite a bit in the future. For the countries I don't have any connection to, I find my desires for the challenge tend to dictate how I want a game to pan out. It makes me feel bad but I guess it's better than not having any preference.

Sunday's games turned out how I thought they would. However, I was pretty upset that Mexico lost on that penalty kick though - it felt so unfair. I also was kind of hoping Greece would pull out a win. I was already planning on doing Costa Rica this day, but I was interested in revisiting Greek food. My original Greece post was a little bit of a cop out because I needed breakfast food. I really wanted to do some lamb kebabs and tatziki. I'm definitely going to have to do it anyways when the challenge is over.

Costa Rica gave me a few opportunities to try some things I'd always wanted to make. I kept coming up with a lot of rice heavy dishes. I don't eat a lot of rice, and I wasn't feeling like doing a cauliflower substitution. I decided to look into my other options.

One of the first recipes I saw was for ceviche. Ceviche is one of my favorite dishes. I'm guilty of just about always ordering it, despite the circumstances. This has led me into more than one hangover meal of ceviche. I probably don't need to explain how bad of an idea that was... and I did it more than once. 

It's also something I've always wanted to try making it. I had a lot of the same "raw fish" worries that I had with sushi though. However, I finally decided to just bite the bullet and make it. I used this Costa Rican style recipe and was able to make it with extra sea bass from the day before (I accidentally bought like half a sea bass) and some shrimp. I definitely used about twice the seafood as suggested in the recipe. This meant that I had to go through a Costco bag of limes and a number of lemons in order to cover it all. Oops...

Even though it's not in the ingredient list, it suggests serving it with avocado. My guest,  Shannon, was nice enough to stop and get some so the day was saved.

Plantains came up several times when I was searching for recipes. I'd already used them for Ecuador so I wanted to go a different angle. I found a recipe for baked plantains and I thought this would be the perfect solution and give a healthier alternative. 

I saw a recipe for Agua Fresca on Pinterest as well. The Pinner said it was Costa Rican but the recipe says Mexican. I know it's Mexican but thought maybe they have it in Costa Rica also. In any case, Mexico played Sunday as well so even if it wasn't culturally correct, it wouldn't hurt to tie in a little bit of Mexico. The agua fresca was made by soaking strawberries in water and then blending them and adding more water. Even though I didn't dilute mine as much as the recipe, it still tasted pretty watery. There are a few things that could have improved it. I think sparkling water would have been better than tap and a little bit of sweetener would have helped as well. We added a splash of tequila but because the drink was so watery, it ended up tasting very strongly of spirits. 

Altogether this dish turned out really well. It was nice and light which was perfect because Sunday was one of those super rare really hot days in San Francisco. The baked plantains felt so much healthier than the fired ones and were a nice starchy balance for the very acidic ceviche. The avocado also helped a lot there by cutting the acid with it's natural fat. I think the citrus would have overpowered everything if I didn't have the avocado so thanks again Shannon!

To wrap things up, I found a little recipe for a Costa Rican dessert that I wanted to try - Cajeta de Coco. This recipe is absolutely not paleo in anyways (although I didn't make some subsitutions to get it closer to that), but it reminded me of some of the Brazilian desserts my mom would make for parties and I had a feeling it would be delicious. 

The recipe had me combining sweetened condensed milk, coconut, butter, wafer crumbs (which I replaced with macadamia nuts), and vanilla in a pot and bringing it to a boil. This is similar to how brigadeiros are made and as usual, I probably didn't boil it long enough but oh well.

Once it's cooked long enough, you let it cool down to a manageable temperature. The recipe wasn't explicit on this but I always remember spreading it out on a tray so the increased surface area let's it cool faster. Science! Mine used to always stick to the tray so in my cooking experience, I've learned to put down some parchment paper. This will make it easier to get up and then you can just throw away the mess instead of having a very stubborn tray to clean. 

After that you roll them into little balls that taste like awesome. I'm so happy I went with macadamia nuts. They are definitely the most delicious of the nuts and the tropical aspect of them went really well with this Latin dessert.