Porteño food at Cafe San Juan

This is my last post about Argentina. It’s been over a month since I got back, but I still think about it all the time—the things I saw, the people I met, and of course the food I ate. So after the mildly snide comments I’ve made about Argentine food, it seems fair and right to write my last post about a delicious Argentine meal we ate that was not steak.

Café San Juan in San Telmo wants you to feel comfortable and cozy. There are no menus, just substantial blackboards that the servers will prop up on your table. One is devoted to tapas, the other to main dishes like rabbit and lamb chops. (I love lamb chops but I love them even more when they’re called “chuletitas de cordero.”) The kitchen is open, but not in the flamboyant way you see in the U.S., since it’s small and just pushed off to the side. It almost feels more like the restaurant just didn’t want to separate the chefs from the dining room and vice versa. The décor in general is quiet and unassuming, clean but a little bare. The warmth of the room comes completely from the food and the happy people eating it.

We ordered two tapas and two entrees. The waiter seemed a little surprised, and when the food arrived, we realized why. The portions were huge, so that even before we started eating, we could see we were clearly in the New World. We Americans, North and South, love our food big!

But I can’t complain that the roast pork tapas were too big. I loved every bite I had, both my piece and the half I got from my friend. Thick slices of roast pork were layered on a piece of good, crusty bread, with more than just a drizzle of a green cilantro sauce. The gazpacho was served in its own shot glass, but there was nothing precious about the presentation. I made a mess on the tablecloth pouring the gazpacho over my share. I didn’t care.



Likewise, the olives were speared onto equally thick and generous slices of cheese. Simple, delicious, and totally satisfying. The rabbit was also very generous—it looked like the entire rabbit was on our plate. Though there was nothing wrong with it, we agreed there was something about the uniformly rich and braised flavor that didn’t really suit our palates.



But what impressed me the most was the beautiful canelones de mollejas, or cannelloni stuffed with sweetbreads. They were monstrous tubes of pasta, reminding me again of how the New World super-sizes everything from the Old World, but I wanted as much of it as I could get. The sweetbreads had been mixed with a wonderful ricotta, and the pasta itself defied all my expectations with its firm al dente resistance. The tomato sauce was incredibly rich, obviously full of some kind of fat, but it still added the tartness and brightness necessary to make the dish unstoppable. I don’t know if sweetbread cannelloni is particularly Italian, but it felt very beefy and Argentine.



My friend, who had found other Argentine desserts impossibly sweet, loved our dessert. It was just a sweet little rice pudding with an icy mango sorbet and some very jaunty tuiles.

The Guía Oleo, an Argentine online food guide, describes the food at Café San Juan as “porteño,” the Argentine word to describe the people who live in Buenos Aires, even though I’d heard it described on Chowhound as Spanish. Now that I’ve been there, I think the Guía is right. This is true porteño food.

Arriving in Sevilla

(Now I am really behind--I'm in chilly Salamanca, having left sunny Andalucía behind, but just starting to blog about Sevilla.)

Arriving in Sevilla was a joy. My flight left Barcelona before dawn, but when I arrived in Sevilla at 9:30 a.m., it was sunny and just starting to get warm. The apartment Becca and I rented was in the barrio of Macarena, a formerly working class neighborhood on the western edge of the old city that is being colonized by hipsters, complete with hipster dads pushing strollers through the nearby park, Alameda de Hercules. I had found it online at Embrujo de Sevilla, and it went beyond all expectations, with its soaring ceilings, sparkling clean, bright IKEA furniture, a dishwasher and washing machine, AND a roof terrace. It was nicer than my own apartment.

In many ways, Sevilla reminded me of Mexico, and Becca agreed, it was the most Latin American of the Spanish cities she’s been to. The buildings were low and brightly painted, and you knew there were sunny courtyards in nearly every one. Even the machismo was the same; after two weeks of walking unnoticed, I started getting catcalls and kissy noises again. People spoke even more quickly than they had in Madrid, and they swallowed the ends of their words like Caribbeans, but they smiled more easily than their compatriots in Madrid and I felt happy again that I could speak Spanish, más o menos.

And being outside Spain’s biggest cities, I began to see and enjoy the little mistranslations I saw everywhere. Growing up in Korea, we’d always gotten a big kick out of the way Korean words were translated into English, and it was strangely gratifying to see the Spanish were as bad as the Koreans. The best, or the worst, was definitely at Taberna del Alabardero, a restaurant in Sevilla, where at the end of our meal, we were presented with an evaluation form, including a place to rate the “saw-off” we got.



But the meal itself was one of the loveliest Becca and I had in Andalucía. It looked like a favorite of moneyed Sevillians, judging by the way the other guests were dressed, but the happy waitress was warm without formality, as the restaurant itself is. When you walk in, you see a classic Sevillian space, a light and airy courtyard brightened even more by its yellow paint. The dining rooms are off the courtyard and have beautiful Moorish tiles to look at while you eat.



The food was also classically Spanish, simple, a bit too salty, and very flavorful. I loved my appetizer of “maccarones con salsa de tinta y calamares,” the pasta and squid so perfectly toothsome.



Becca also loved her “crema de puerro con salteado de verduras y langostinos,” a creamy leek soup with deeply caramelized vegetables and shrimp.



Our favorite, though, was the "merluza en salsa verde," or hake in a herby green sauce, served with a poached egg. The fish was obviously fresh, the sauce very bright and it managed to be delicious in and of itself, without needing to resort to heavy flavors.

Becca didn’t like her “chuleta de cerdo con col y melocoton,” or pork with caramelized cabbage and a peach sauce but I loved it. We realized Becca doesn’t really like the texture of most Spanish meat, but I liked the way it was both flavorful and chewy without being dry, and I loved the peach sauce which was more tart than sweet.



We couldn’t miss dessert—the whole three-course meal only cost 12,90 Euros! I also learned that Becca doesn’t like soft desserts, other than whipped cream, as she wasn’t too fond of the “flan de naranja con magdalena tibia y salsa de menta,” or orange flan with madeleines and mint sauce, or the chocolate mousse cake that was the special of the day. It was a happy realization for me, since I got to eat almost all of both desserts.

But as always, the best meals aren’t only about the food. Our young waitress, more blonde than you would ever expect a Spaniard to be, was so happy and kind. She spoke fairly good English and only laughed when we started to confuse her by speaking English and Spanish simultaneously. When she saw me looking at the little bottles of olive oil on the table, she brought me 4 more to take home, which went immediately clinking into my bag. (I ended up leaving 3 in the apartment for future tenants, but took one in case I saw a good tomato on the road.) There was no question, we rated the “saw-off” as excellent.

Finally, a decent plate of pasta

I did it—I cooked pasta in my kitchen in Oaxaca that wasn’t terrible. Bacon (that had the consistency of ham), plum tomatoes, mushrooms, and the parmiggiano-reggiano Erin smuggled from San Francisco. I think it was the parmesan that did it.

It was my third try. Don’t ever try replacing sweet basil with any other kind of basil in an Italian tomato sauce. You’ll regret it.

Easy Saturday pasta and wine

It was a relief to be at home alone on Saturday night. Work has been draining lately, and with everything I had to do to prep for Sunday's brunch party, I made sure to have no plans other than a bottle of wine and a simple pasta dinner.

For all my talk of good ingredients and organic produce, I'm a cheapskate. Hell, that's a huge part of the reason I cook so much. And for a long time, it was unthinkable to open a bottle of wine just for myself. But for the past few years, I've developed a habit of drinking alone (which I think is quite healthy, so there), just a drink or two when I get home from work. So I'm always on the lookout for cheap wines $10 or less. I don't know enough about wine to find those wines on my own, so I often go out of my way to get to Astor Wines in the East Village. I'm sure there are wine shops in the city that are more intelligent or thoughtful, but I love that the staff at Astor Wines is used to stupid people and that when you ask for a wine that is $10 or less, they don't suggest wines that cost $10.99. Unfortunately, few of the cheapo wines I try are worth seeking out a second bottle, but I was pleasantly surprised by the easy, clean taste of the Spanish Blanc de Nulles.



It was a night of small, happy discoveries, as I also found a whole wheat pasta that actually tastes good. There's definitely been a theme lately of me trying to eat healthier. I finally decided to face the fact that regular pasta is a blackhole of nutrients. But the one time I had tried whole wheat pasta before--I must have been living in California--it tasted so much like cardboard I couldn't bring even my cheapskate self to eat the rest of the box.

To my great relief, the Bionaturae spaghetti I bought at the Coop had real flavor. Their advertising is truthful--it really does have a nutty, honest flavor, the flavor of good whole grain bread. It's different, the way tofu is different from meat, but once I accepted that, its strong flavor held up well against sauteed kale and crumbled DiPaola's turkey sausage, with a generous grating of fresh parmesan cheese. Me, wine, pasta, and the early Sunday NY Times: it was a happy night.

In springtime, a young woman's fancy turns to thoughts of bacon.

I haven't been cooking much lately. I bought some nice, fresh produce at the Coop this Sunday, one ear of corn, a bunch of purple kale (which I've never tried before), a handful of crimini mushrooms, and some fresh fava beans, but even the thought of all that produce in my fridge couldn't tempt me home to cook dinner alone on Tuesday, and I went out for beer and sausages with Lina and Leslie. I've been feeling a little subdued lately. Part of it is work-related; I got some bad news for one of my favorite clients. And part of it is a little fear about my upcoming trip, not so much about being in Spanish-speaking countries for six months when I can barely say, "Me llamo Grace," but whether I will come back with any more clarity about my life.



Luckily, fresh fava beans demand so much attention, you have to focus to the exclusion of all other thoughts, even an overdue response to a motion to dismiss. They really are too much work when you're not paying someone else to shell and cook them, but for me, they say "spring" almost more than any other vegetable and I couldn't resist them. And on a Wednesday night, coming home around 8 pm, I still managed to get dinner on the table by 8:30.

First you shell them. Whenever I discard the pods, I feel so wasteful. Not only do I end up discarding a good three-quarters of the weight I paid for, the pods are so spongy and soft, they feel like they should be useful in some other way, like filler for seat cushions or something. Then you blanch them, letting them cool long enough so you can handle them. Then you have to slit their little opaque skins and squeeze out the tiny, bright green beans inside. It's almost a joke when you look at the handful of beans you have and the bag of empty pods. Mmm, $1.94 per pound!



But the little buggers tasted so good, especially with pancetta and meaty crimini mushrooms. It wasn't planned. I just had some pancetta in the freezer, which was older than I'd like to admit, and the mushrooms I had bought on a whim. While the water for the pasta boiled and the mushrooms and pancetta were cooking, I squeezed the little green babies out of their skins, giving the mushrooms a stir every once in awhile. The mushrooms got so infused with pancetta fat they started to taste like pork, so the fava beans were the perfect counterpoint, so green I could just feel the vitamins bursting from them. A shaving of parmesan, also older than I'd like to admit, rounded out the dish.



It would have been better with a small, shaped pasta, like orecchiette or those ruffly ones, but the spaghetti was good enough for conveying the salty, fatty, green taste of spring.