Here comes another quintessentially Cuban dish: Meat and Potatoes! No seriously, that’s the name. Carne con Papas sounds like it could be anything that involves meat and potatoes, but it’s actually a pretty specific dish recognizable to Cubans and Cuban Americans like me, and lots of families have their own variations on how to cook it. It’s a tomato-based beef stew with quartered potatoes, served over a plate of white rice.
I fell in love with Thai food when I lived in New York. There’s this really amazing restaurant, Frankly Thai, around the corner from where my in-laws live in Franklin Square, NY. My husband and I will still sneak out to Frankly Thai on a date night every so often when we visit, but we’ve never taken the boys. As anyone with allergies knows, eating out at restaurants is… complicated.
I’ve tried to find this dish in various places. I’ve asked Latino friends about it. I scoured the internet. I’ve read old Cuban cookbooks I’ve had the joy of receiving from my mother, and all I can say is nobody seems to make the dish quite like this.
For me, Black Bean Soup is a bowl of Home. It’s the ultimate comfort food—warm and savory, it’s the taste of my childhood. It’s traditionally served over rice, and is enough of a meal to stand on its own, but pairs beautifully with Cuban pork chops or Cuban steak.
Garbanzos are chickpeas. This humble little bean is relegated to the salad bar in American cuisine, but it is a powerhouse of protein, vitamins, and minerals, and deserves a brighter spotlight.
Sofrito is all about beginnings. As you get accustomed to Cuban cooking, the sofrito is the expected spice base in what you’re making. When I ask my mother how to cook such and such food, she usually says something like, “First, you make your sofrito,” or “Once the meat is browned, you add your sofrito.” The sofrito is pretty consistently present in the typical Cuban dish.
Nobody ever said parenting would be easy. But add in food allergies and parenting becomes even more complicated.
