Saturday, November 19, 2016

Cape Verde Film - UNWATCHED - Down to Earth

Plan to watch this;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_Earth_(1995_film)

is planned but may find another movie.

Cape Verde Pictures





















Cape Verde Recipes

https://worldcupoffood.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/cape-verdean-cuisine-canja-chicken-and-rice-soup/

Canja
adapted from The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth’s Cape Verde Home Page
SERVES 4 TO 6
1 chicken, cut into pieces
2 Tbs vegetable oil
2 onions, diced
5 cloves garlic, whole and peeled
2 cups Calrose rice (any rice will do)
8 cups vegetable stock (most flavorful liquids will do, including chicken stock or even boullion cubes and water)
We used a whole fryer chicken for our recipe and cut it into pieces ourselves.  We think the recipe would be just as good with bone-in thighs or drumsticks substituted for convenience.
We heated the oil in our large Dutch oven oven just below medium heat on the stove, and once hot, added half our chicken (seasoned with salt and pepper, of course).  As is the case when browning any large amount of meat, it is preferable to brown in batches rather than overcrowd the pan and have the meat steam instead of brown:

After five or six minutes the chicken was a light golden brown in color and was ready to be turned:

After another four or five minutes, the first batch of chicken was brown on both sides and ready to be removed to a nearby large plate.  The other chicken pieces were browned in a similar manner and removed to the same plate while we worked on our onions and garlic.  Since we did not want to overbrown the onions, we turned the heat down to medium-low and began sauteeing the onions in the chicken drippings and oil:

Garlic has a much higher burning risk than onions do, so it was added after about five minutes once the onions had softened a little and taken on some color from the pan drippings:

After another three minutes, once the garlic had softened and the garlic aroma was noticeable,  we added the rice to the pot and sitirred to combine and to coat the rice evenly with oil:

After another couple of minutes we returned the chicken to the pot:

…and covered it with the vegetable stock:

The soup was brought to a simmer over medium heat, then covered.  The heat was dropped to low and the soup simmered for about thirty-five minutes until the chicken and rice were tender and cooked through:

The soup broth and rice were ladled into large bowls and topped with a chicken piece.  We prefer the hindquarter so that’s what we served first:

Our canja was rich and hearty without being too greasy.  The starch from the rice had absorbed much of the moisture in the broth, giving the soup a very thick texture.  The chicken was thoroughly cooked but still moist.  For most Cape Verdeans canja is comfort food, and it easy to see why.  Easy to prepare and full of flavor, canja deserves a place on any dinner table.

https://cookedearthblog.com/2016/07/20/republic-of-cape-verde/
Pastel com diabo dentro (Pastry with the Devil Inside)
1 lb. sweet potatoes
2 cups fine cornmeal
½ lb fresh tuna
1 medium white onion
1 tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
6 red chilies, minced
1 splash (“gulp”) white vinegar
1 tsp (“modicum”) tomato paste (optional)
Salt
Oil for frying
Filling:
Mince the tuna and season with salt, chilies, garlic and vinegar, and set aside to marinate while you prepare the remaining ingredients.
Slice the onion thinly and place them in a frying pan with the 1 tbsp of olive oil, adding the tomato paste if desired and frying until they are soft and lightly browned.
Add the tuna mixture to the pan and let it simmer until the tuna is just cooked through. Remove from heat and let cool completely.
Wrapper:
Peel and boil the sweet potato in well-salted water until it is soft. Mash it thoroughly, adding 1 tsp salt and handfuls of cornmeal until it forms a cohesive ball of dough. Pull off golf-ball-sized chunks of this dough, and flatten them on a piece of plastic wrap to form thin discs about 4-5 inches in diameter.
Take each disc and place 2 tbsp of filling in the center. Fold the disc in half and seal the edges very well. Store the formed packets on wax paper until you have used up all of the filling.
Fry the packets in small batches in a deep pot (or individually, if the pot is small) in very hot oil until they are golden brown. Serve hot!
Makes 9 packets.

I’ll warn you now, the next couple of dishes require a lot of work, but they are very much worth the time it takes to prepare them.
Pastel com diabo dentro, or “pastry with the Devil inside,” made me so, so happy. This is exciting, I love a dish like this – it’s such a familiar concept but unique and hyper-local in its components. The flavors – tuna, chilies and starch – occur together in lots of Italian dishes as well, and weirdly reminded me of my staple diet of spaghetti, tuna and chilies when I was studying in Florence.
The process is basically this: mince up some fresh tuna and saute it with onions and chilies. Then make a dough of mashed sweet potatoes and cornmeal, and fill little packets of this dough the tuna mixture. Then deep fry the pastry packets and serve with more chilies. It’s your basic empanada or pastel recipe, but with a Cape-Verdean mindset and ingredients.
But waaaaait, wait wait – what exactly do we mean by “sweet potato”? We’ve been through this exhausting distinction before, but for the benefit of those who are just joining us, let’s review. The term “sweet potato” is chronically misused, or rather overused. It can encompass several potatoey members of different genera, and leads to all sorts of confusion. The orange-fleshed, brown-skinned sweet potatoes that we know in the U.S. are part of the variety of tuber known botanically as ipomoea batatas, although this genus also includes other tubers that are genetically similar but have different colored flesh and skins. I’ll tell you one thing, it is sure as shit not the same thing as a “yam,” which comes from the dioscorea genus and includes things like igname and nagaimo. The misapplication of the terms “yam” and “sweet potato” for the same vegetable have given me chronic migraines, so it’s important to know the difference when you are trying to be sensitive to context of the cuisine that you are studying.
In the case of our diabolical empanadas here, I wasn’t sure at first. The Caboverdean recipe listed “batata doce,” and searches for images of “batata doce” and “cabo verde” almost exclusively yielded photos of the brownish-skinned, pale-orange-fleshed variety that are easy to get in the U.S. A few others showed a pale yellow or even white skin, with white flesh. Which to use? My options were the American sweet potato and the boniato/batata/white sweet potato from South America, which is drier and less sweet than the orange variety, but also less dense in texture. Both are part of ipomoea batatas, so either would probably work, and both seem to appear in the Cape Verdean culinary lexicon.
Looking at photos of the finished “pastel com diabo dentro” in Google image search, I noticed that basically all of them have a strong, yellow-orange hue – too dark to have gotten this hue from just cornmeal. I went with the readily-available and botanically-correct American sweet potato. If anyone from Cape Verde reads this and knows I am wrong, just let me know and I will cook it all over again.

What you do is just boil the sweet potatoes and mash them with the cornmeal. Knead for a bit, and you’ll end up with a moist, slightly sticky dough.Once that is ready, wrap it in plastic and refrigerate it for a while, to make it easier to work with. While that cools, you can prepare your filling, which is dead simple – just marinate some chopped tuna with onion, garlic, vinegar and malagueta,  a red, extremely hot chili in the capsicum frutescens genus.

Eventually, this mixture will get a quick saute and then be left to cool, before being stuffed into rounds of rolled out sweet-potato dough.

These packets get a hot, quick fry in oil or lard and come out steaming, with a crisp crust that slowly softens into a warm mealiness as they cool. Best to enjoy them hot, right out of the fryer.

I need you to hear this: THESE ARE BEYOND DELICIOUS. Of all of the dishes I have cooked for the blog so far, this one is in the top three, for sure. The sweet-potato-cornmeal dough made me think of a corn dog when it first hit my teeth – crisp, sweet, dense and substantial, with a hit of that smoking hot, I’m-having-fun-at-the-county-fair fry oil smell. Then, the acids from the vinegary tuna start to creep out, and finally the chilies hit your tongue, activating every zone of your taste buds at once. I was blown away by how good these were, and I ate way too many of them at once. It reminded me just a little of brik, a North-African phyllo packet stuffed with tuna and an egg and deep fried.
If I made them again and felt like changing the traditional recipe for my own taste, I would just leave the tuna mixture raw when packing it into the dough – a little rare is fine with me, and might have kept the filling juicier. Overcooked tuna can get a little chalky.

http://leitesculinaria.com/9998/writings-manchup-cape-verdes-national-dish-is-a-savory-mix.html
Manchup: Cape Verde’s National Dish is a Savory Mix
Sep 14, 2009 by Gary Allen | 29
image: http://17374-presscdn-0-15.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/manchup.jpg

LC reader Mary Cannon wrote in, asking if we had a recipe for manchup. A quick search of the Web told me that manchup is a dish from the Cape Verde Islands, but nothing more. Additional searches found very few recipes from Cape Verde, and none of them for manchup. Suspecting that the dish’s name might have variant spellings, I tried looking for anything that sounded reasonably close to manchup, on the Internet and in books on West African cuisine (since I couldn’t find any Cape Verdean cookbooks).
No luck.
Human nature being what it is, food writers can usually count on the nostalgia that people feel for the cooking of their homeland. A query was posted to a bulletin board for Cape Verdean émigrés. Four people read it, but none answered. There was still one avenue of hope: Cape Verde’s embassy in Washington, DC. An appropriately desperate e-mail was sent, explaining the problem.
An hour later, Jose Brito, the Republic of Cape Verde’s ambassador to the United States, wrote back. According to Brito, “Cachoupa [is] translated here in the US [as] manchup.” This was a significant clue. Going back to the Cape Verdean recipe sites, finding an answer became a relatively simple matter — although cachoupa’s name does indeed have a variant spelling: cachupa. But where did the name manchup come from? It’s apparently a corruption of munchupa, a name for cachupa that is used on Brava Island, at the southwestern end of the Cape Verde archipelago.
Cachupa is the national dish of Cape Verde. Like other great rustic dishes, such as the cassoulet of France and feijoada of Brazil, it uses highly seasoned meats in relatively small amounts together with grains and beans, and is slowly cooked to build a great depth of flavor. And like those dishes, it is even better when reheated the next day.
Cape Verdeans created one of the first fusion cuisines, incorporating the tastes and ingredients of Europe (livestock), Africa and Asia (sugar and tropical fruits), and the Americas (beans, chiles, corn, pumpkins, and manioc). They were able to do so because of their location: Just off the west coast of Africa, they were ideally suited as a stopping point, first for Portuguese explorers, and later for slave traders.
Cachupa can be very simple — barely more than samp (hominy), beans, and some salt pork, much like old-fashioned succotash. This simple peasant fare is known as cachupa povera. Wealthier Cape Verdeans — or even the poor, on special occasions, such as weddings — add more ingredients, such as a little meat or fish, in which case the dish is known as cachupa sabe, a more savory dish, like Brunswick stew. At the other end of the spectrum you’ll find cachupa rica — the richest variation. Like feijoada completa, it’s a long way from the simple peasant dish of legumes and grain. Here is a recipe for cachupa rica.
Note: This recipe doesn’t indicate the number of portions or portion size; it has been edited, but not tested.
References
Cape Verdean Foods and Cooking
CACHUPA RICA RECIPE
Quick Glance
40 M
3 H
Serves a crowd
 PRINT RECIPE METRIC CONVERSION
INGREDIENTS
Olive oil, as needed
1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled
2 bay leaves
4 cups dried hominy, soaked in plenty of water overnight
1 cup dried kidney beans, soaked plenty of water overnight
1 cup dried large lima beans, soaked plenty of water overnight
2 pounds beef or pork spareribs
1 chouriço or linguiça sausage, sliced
1 blood sausage, sliced
1/4 pound lean bacon, diced
1/2 cup fresh green beans
2 pounds cabbage, coarsely chopped
2 pounds plantains, peeled and sliced
2 pounds fresh yams, peeled, 1-inch dice
2 pounds fresh sweet potatoes, peeled, 1-inch dice
2 pounds winter squash, peeled, 1-inch dice
1 chicken, cut in 12 serving pieces
Salt and pepper, to taste
2 pounds tomatoes, quartered
Sofrito (a seasoning paste of sauteed garlic, onion, and tomato paste), to taste
Cilantro, chopped
DIRECTIONS
1. In a stock pot, combine 6 cups of water, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, the onion, garlic, and bay leaves. Bring to boil. Add soaked hominy and beans. Simmer until nearly fork-tender.
2. In a separate pot, brown the spareribs, chouriço or linguiça, blood sausage, and bacon, then add the green beans, cabbage, plantains, yams, sweet potatoes, and squash. Set aside.
3. Season the chicken with salt and pepper, then cook in skillet filmed with olive oil until lightly browned. Add the tomatoes and the meat-vegetable mixture to the stock pot of hominy and beans. Cook on low heat for approximately 40 minutes. Add the sofrito to taste, and simmer 20 minutes longer. Turn off the heat and let rest, covered, for at least 30 minutes.
4. Arrange the meats and vegetables on platter. Garnish with the chopped cilantro. Serve the hominy and beans in a separate bowl.


https://www.marga.org/food/int/capeverde/queso.html
Pudim de Queijo
Cheese Pudding
This is a fairly simple cheese pudding that will satisfy your sweet tooth. It was popular enough at my home, though I'm not sure it's delicious enough to justify the fat and calories. I halved the recipe from the original one.
________________________________________
Pudim de Queijo
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
8 oz soft goat cheese, grated or crumbled
6 egg yolks, beaten
2 egg whites, beaten.
brown sugar
white sugar
Directions
Preheat oven to 350F.
Place sugar and water in a medium-size saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Boil mixture until it becomes a thick syrup, stirring frequently. Add the cheese and mix well. Remove from the heat. Add the egg yolks and white and mix well.
Sprinkle the bottom of a 8"x8" glass baking pan with brown sugar. Pour the pudding mixture in. Place the baking pan in a larger pan with 2/3" water and bake in the oven until it sets, check after about 30 minutes. Once set, remove from oven, cool and sprinkle with white sugar before serving.