An American Dinner

As a special treat for the four students in the lab who had helped me the most, I invited them over to the apartment for dinner. To which everyone’s response was a resounding yes, followed by the exclamation of “I am so excited to eat American food!” So I spent a week wracking my brain trying to determine the appropriate menu for an American Dinner. What do you think of when you think of American Food? My first immediate thought goes to hamburgers, coleslaw and watermelon. The fixings for a summertime backyard get together. But after weeks of eating meat, meat, meat here in Brazil, I’m not too crazy to eat more meat, so the thinking continues. I start to think about food I am craving for from back home. First thought: Thai food. They have Chinese and Japanesse restaurants here, but Thai food is non-existant. There’s no way that I would be able to find the ingredients aside from coconut milk to make a curry here. Ok Thai food is out. Then I start to dream of pasta salad, pesto and delicious scampi dishes I’ve eaten with a certain high school sweetheart, but then I think wait, those are Italian foods. Not American foods. So I wrack my brain and think about cooking fish, or making fish tacos, or meatloaf and mashed potatoes but most of these ideas get rejected because a) I don’t want to eat them or b) I’m unsure of how they’d go over as American Food from my Brazilian friends. After a week of hemming and hawing I decide on the following menu:

Appetizer: Cold Cucumber and Fresh Mint Salad, drizzled with olive oil and a pinch of salt

Main Course: Meat and Vegetarian Lasagne served with homemade oven-roasted garlic bread

Dessert (Sobremesa): Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies with Vanilla Ice Cream

Beverages: The nicest bottle of red wine I can afford, Chilled Tap Water and America’s Favorite Soft Drink- Coca-Cola

After having finally decided on the menu, I ponder the logistics of trying to make this dinner here in Brazil. First, I need to look up the names of ingredients I will need in Portuguese, I mean do you know how to say basil in Portuguese?...................................... (The answer is manjeriçao). Other things to consider, I have had problems finding vegetables at the grocery store, how can I ensure I have vegetables for a vegetable lasagne? Do they even have lasagne noodles at the grocery store? Answer: unknown.

The day before the dinner I head to the grocery store to try to make sure I have the majority of ingredients on hand. I’m planning on spending the next morning and part of the afternoon at the lab and then leaving early afternoon to come home and make the dinner, hopefully leaving plenty of time to look nice and set the table.

First things first: I peruse the vegetable section and pick up my cucumbers (deceivingly called pepinos in Portuguese, although obviously they are in no way a pepper). I have the olive oil and salt, but I decide I’ll get the fresh mint the next day. Ok appetizer done. I get some garlic cloves to roast for the garlic bread. I’ll pick up the bread so it can be fresh the next day and we’ve got butter at home. Garlic bread done. Check.

Ok big time. The lasagne. Now I only have a general idea of how to make lasagne in my head. I’ve made it a few times with my mom; I made it on the sailboat working in the Caribbean with mostly canned vegetables, and I’ve had it in restaurants a few times. So in my mind, the meat lasange has meat, cheese, sauce and noodles. The veggie one has basically the same thing but with veggies, hopefully spinach and no meat. Despite those crazy british friends who have told me lasagne has no cheese, I think lasagne generally has ricotta, mozzarella and parmesian. So these are the general types of things I’m looking for.

First I come to the pasta aisle. Yes I find lasagne noodles. Whew, a step in the right direction. Now they have the expensive Italian lasange noodles from Barrillo or some Italian equivalent name for $15 a box or the Portuguese version for $3 a box. And since we know I’m on a student stipend, it’s not a big surprise, which one I go with. I then move onto the sauce. I debate whether to get canned tomatoes and add my own spices (have I looked up the translations for the spices I’d need?) or whether to go with canned tomato sauce. Well a look at the spice section and my list of translated items I need, assures me I would be better to go with a pasta sauce. So I return to the pasta sauces where there are many small boxes of pasta sauce (think these boxes are so small I’m thinking, are they tomato paste?) or the one small but larger jar of Italian name sounding pasta sauce for the bargain price of $17 dollars. So I decide to risk it and I get four small boxes of pasta sauce, these must have to be dilouted right? I feel confidant that these four boxes will enable me to make my lasagnas, I mean the last thing someone wants is a dry lasagne.

Ok I move onto the cheese section. Now when I think of ricotta cheese, I think ricotta has a slightly thicker consistency than cottage cheese. It comes in a container, but it spreads easily on a lasagne. But what they have here are blocks in the cheese section labeled ricotta but nowhere on this package does it say cheese anywhere. And this block of ricotta is hard, and not soft. So I sit there and think, can there be another type of ricotta? One that is not a cheese? If so, why would it be in the cheese section? Does ricotta really come in blocks? Do we just process it differently in the United States? Then I think well wouldn’t it be worse if I didn’t buy the cheese marked ricotta and I’d be the stupid foreigner that was staring right at the ricotta cheese labeled ricotta but didn’t realize what it was. I decide that this vision is worse than buying the ricotta and having it turn out to be something else. So I gulp and take a huge financial commitment to buy two blocks of ricotta (now these ricotta blocks are about $12 each, which is quite expensive for cheese here). And I move onto trying to find mozzarella.

Now the mozzarella is a similar story. So there are these blocks of cheese that look like mozzarella and they say buffalo on them. And everyone’s heard of buffalo mozzarella. But in no way does the package say mozzarella, it just says buffalo cheese. So if it looks like mozzarella, says buffalo and buffalo mozzarella exists, is it really mozzarella? And if this block of cheese is $18 is this also a mistake I am willing to make? Then I try to remember some genealogy of cheeses. From what I vaguely know, you can make cheese out of anything that produces milk- sheep’s cheese, goat cheese, cow cheese. So rationally you could make cheese from a buffalo. Then I wonder if they have buffalos here in Brazil. Now for my ocean-based mind, this is a land-based question to which I have no answer, except that they like to eat all sorts of meat here in Brazil. So I think they probably have buffalos in Brazil. (Fact: They do have buffalo’s in Brazil, I just Googled it and there is a Brazilian Association of Buffalo Growers) And if they probably have buffalos in Brazil, then theoretically you could maybe make cheese out of buffalo milk, right? Is this really where mozzarella comes from? Is mozzarella really a cheese we get from buffalos? Am I this nieve about where my cheese comes from? Clearly the answer is yes. Sadly, I think about all these things in the grocery store, then decide to risk it and buy the buffalo cheese block for $18 dollars. Thankfully it turned out to be the right thing. I find the parmesian, which is labeled parmesian and which I have bought before, no problems.

Now onto the dessert. The only thing I am missing is more chocolate chips, brown sugar , possibly some more butter and the ice cream. I find the chocolate chips or the substitute- little white and milk chocolate balls. I find two sticks of butter, no vanilla ice cream and I get distracted by something (oh yes remembering I had to buy meat for the lasaagne) and forget to look for brown sugar.

The Day of the Dinner

My roomie had said she would take me to the fruit market to get veggies for the dinner. We head off there around 1:30. We do some shopping for other items and then find the haven of the fruit market. It took me 2 months but now I finally know where I can go to buy cheap fruits and vegetables. Although I was under strict instructions not to talk at the fruit market, because the vendors would know I was a gringo and up the price. (As if it’s not obvious enough with my Caucasian skin and blonde hair.) So I silently watched and nodded as my roomie bargained with one vender for fresh basil, zucchini, spinach, carrots, broccoli and mint.

I pick up some fresh bread on the way home and by the time I’m in the kitchen trying to decide where to start it’s about 3:30. First I decide to roast the garlic in the oven for the garlic bread while I start to chop the veggies for the veggie lasagne. All this is going fairly well planned until we get to the lasange noodles. I forgot to mention that when I got home from the grocery store the day before I looked at the noodle box to see if I had to boil the lasagne noodles before I baked them in the oven or whether they would be ok just in the oven. And a good thing I checked because the directions on the box said make the lasagna, pour a box of milk on top of your lasagne and put in the fridge over night for the noodles to soak up the milk and have a soft texture. Now this seemed very strange to me. But I decided to put half the box of noodles in a bowl with milk over night just in case. It might be ok right? WRONG. Now the next day, the day of the dinner, I go to start making my first lasagne, and the noodles are all stuck together and mooshy in this bowl of milk that has been in the fridge. Ugh, these noodles just look disgusting. So I decide to boil the rest of the box of lasagne noodles to use in the first lasagne. Although this means I’ll have to run to the store for a second box of lasagne noodles. No problem. I boil the noodles and when the garlic comes out of the oven, I run to the store and pick up a second box of lasagne noodles, and vanilla ice cream, which I hadn’t been able to find because Baunilla wasn’t written on the carton, it was Crema. Sigh, how was I to know crema was vanilla, when it’s sitting next to the corn flavored ice cream and mangaba fruit sorbet?

Ok so back to the house with a new box of noodles. As those are boiling away I make my first lasange. Noodles, meat, cheese…..ok so the big block of ricotta cheese is really ricotta cheese. Except that it’s hard and in block form. So I’m not really sure how to appropriately spread (well spreading is definitely out of the question and there’s no cheese grater in the apartment, so slice is a more accurate word) this cheese. I decide for thin little half moons, and this with some buffalo (yes it was mozzarella and since there was no grater, I sliced in half moons) cheese went on the lasagne in some of the layers. I hit a slight problem when it came to the sauce. Now the four boxes of sauce I had bought, well it turns out you don’t diloute them. You use as is; it is not a box of tomato paste. So I decide to use all four boxes on the meat lasagne knowing that it requires another commitment of running back to the grocery store. But the last thing anyone wants is a dry lasange…..so after the first lasagne is done and wrapped in aluminum foil ready for the oven I head back to the store.

Now at this time it’s dark outside and I live three blocks from the grocery store, which is in the opposite direction of the well-lit and highly trafficked area of the beach, where I run every night. Now I try to avoid doing activities after dark in Brazil to minimize my chance of having some sort of scary encounter. But in light of the fact that I NEED sauce, there is a second lasagne that needs my help, and I always feel slightly frustrated of the fact that I am always wary of potentially scary encounters in Brazil (I mean really it’s a three block walk to the grocery store from my house, and I never do it after dark, even if I’m out of food, to avoid potential scary occurrences, and there is part of me that thinks this is slightly ridiculous) I put on my running shoes and literally sprint the three blocks to the grocery store. Running as fast as I can:

a) because people are coming in an hour and my lasagnas are not in the oven and

b) because I don’t want a scary encounter.

I get four more boxes of sauce, realize I have forgotten brown sugar as well and spend 10 painstaking minutes explaining to the store clerk that indeed regular sugar is different from brown sugar, of which they have none in the entire store and I wind up with no brown sugar for my cookies. I buy my four more boxes of sauce, sprint back to the apartment, and arrive back to my hot, sweltering kitchen, very sweaty and in a rush to get the second lasagne done. As if something else can’t go wrong, the second lasange pan is smaller than the first one and after I put a layer of veggies, the cheese, and the sauce in the pan, it is full. A lasaagne is not a lasagne without layers, so I sigh and try and squish things down to add another layer. I succeed but my veggie lasagne is bulging over the sides, threatening to spill with the slightest touch.

The lasagnas go in the oven, I turn the oven on, then comes the problem of setting the temperature. When I had made the banana bread, my roomie had set the oven temp for me, and when I roasted the garlic it was easy because it was on the lowest setting possible. But for the lasagne, I only had the Fahrenheit temperature, and no internet at home to know the conversion to Celsius. However, that wouldn’t have really helped because all the numbers on the oven dial were rubbed off, so I really had no idea what temperature I was setting the oven to. So how long are these lasaagnes supposed to be in the oven if I don’t know the temperature? I had no idea. So I finish making the garlic bread and the cucumber and mint salad. It’s now 7:15, my first guest has arrived and the batter for the cookies is not done. And I am still in sweaty running clothes, looking and smelling like no chef ever should in the kitchen.

I try to quickly whip up my cookie batter, except that I am once again frustrated by the lack of measuring cups, and with my specific and proper amount of butter (2 sticks), it is tougher to know how to measure ¾ cup of sugar and 2 and ½ cup of flour by a larger drinking size glass measurement of a cup. And let’s again remember that there is no brown sugar. Now any betty crocker’s out there that automatically know a subsitute for brown sugar on short notice, in a poorly stocked kitchen, well I could have used your help. I kept wracking my brain thinking yogurt- no we have strawberry flavored yogurt, that’s gross, and I had no idea how to say molasses at the grocery store to make my own brown sugar. So I just used double the amount of regular sugar and called it a day, although I was nervous that somehow this would affect the taste, texture or baking potential of the cookies, although not much that can be done at this point.

Ok to wrap up this long-winded cooking blog entry, let’s cut to the chase, everything turned out well. The lasagne’s were great, garlic bread delicious and cookies and ice cream a big hit. Everyone loved the cooking and my roomie suggested I live with her forever and open an American restaurant here in Joao Pessoa. Take home messages from this blog entry: No one likes a dry lasagne, and who knew that throwing a dinner party in Brazil could be so difficult?!