Transatlantic Food Tasting

One of the many benefits of being a food blogger is that people take your tasting skills rather seriously. Within a span of two weeks, I was invited not to one, but to two food tastings - one in Portugal (see earlier post on trip to Martinhal) and the other right here in the country club in our little town of Davidson, NC.  Martinhal was looking to expand their lunch menu for their casual beach and pool restaurant and our country club was looking to hire a new chef. Both food committees were small (10-14 people) and I was honored to have been invited to both.

I was expecting both experiences to be vastly different. I expected the tasting in Martinhal  to include intricate hues of sophisticated tastes and did not expect as much complexity here in Davidson. I was surprised. In Europe, there seemed to be a return to refined simplicity, with basic herbs and simple flavors of garlic and olive oil bringing out the best in high quality seafood and meat. In the US, there is a burning desire to encompass the entire world of taste in one sitting. "Make it pop!  Where is the burn? I want a full flavored meal! What is so creative about this dish?" Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed and cherished both tastings, like one would cherish two very different children.

There was one overarching theme though, the folks who organize these tastings don't necessarily want to know if YOU like the food, they want to know if you think everyone ELSE will. In Martinhal, the one question that was asked a few times was, "but will the Portuguese like it?" The answer? "60% of our clientele are British..."  The question raised here in Davidson was,"yeah, this guy makes excellent seafood.  But how many club members enjoy seafood?" I love seafood, so I swiftly changed the subject both times this question was asked.

Here are some of the highlights of the food tasting in Martinhal.

Tender, fresh from the sea, succulent Portuguese sardines in vinegar and olive oil with slices of garlic.

Medium rare steak with clams - plenty of garlic, olive oil and rosemary. Fan-bloody-tastic! A nice red to wash it down! (Chilli Padi, please send me the name of the wine...)

Shrimp. Whoo boy. Garlic, garlic, garlic, olive oil, olive oil, flavor flavor flavor! Yumm.

Superb lobster dressed in a cotton dress to show its true beauty. So no heavy white sauce with melted cheese to cover it all up!

What were we served in North Carolina?

Top rate sushi! This Mexican chef of Japanese and Italian descent had driven 120 miles to the NC coast to get the best fish for our tasting.

He was indeed creative. This was a lunch salad with a grilled cheese sandwich and fried egg as the main components. One of the best salads I have ever had.

Steak with prosciutto and tomato dressed with a vanilla-bean sauce. I have only had this type of sauteed tomatoes in Indian food. This was the winner that night.

Rack of lamb served Osso Bucco style. Hmmm, I would rather have rack of lamb grilled or real Osso Bucco... But it looked good and it made a statement about his creativity.

My final favorite - Salmon Made Three Ways.

So, that's all folks! If you would like to invite us to other tastings, Cinnamon and Truffle would be happy to oblige!

Best,
Cinnamon

Martinhal - The Benefits of Being a Sister of a Hotelier

Truffle and I are two sisters out of four. Truffle and I have written about sister number 4, Rice Krispie, but have yet to mention sister Premier, Chilli Padi. The reason is that I had been waiting to visit her in Portugal, which I recently did.

Chilli Padi and I are only three years apart. We grew up together as a pair and Truffle and Rice Krispie, much younger than us were the other pair. Chilli and I fought and argued like typical sisters, but she took care of me too. She always looked out for me at school, took me to her friends' birthday parties and she was my go-to person for homework. There was no way I could compete with her and I knew early on not to bother. She was stronger, smarter, and more outgoing. Teachers, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins were all very impressed with her and always commented on how intelligent she was as a child. My fifth grade Chinese teacher once said to me, "Your sister is so smart!  Her Mandarin is so good! What happened to you?" Mind you, I did have a couple of things going for me too. I was the cute one. I had chubby cheeks and a mean pout. I'd also like to think that I had an artistic flair - I was good at drawing, I was pretty good at school plays, and could always make Chilli laugh. 

We also had very different tastes. She liked chocolate ice-cream, I liked strawberry. She liked savory, I liked sweet. She liked meat, I liked fruit. We might have been different then, but not anymore. I loved all the food at her hotel and resort in Portugal.

Err, yes, you read correctly. My sister continued on that stellar path and she and her husband, Mr. Dessert, have developed, built and now run Martinhal Beach Resort & Hotel.  Not only that, they managed to pop out four lovely children while building a business. We visited them recently for Spring Break and had the best family holiday ever! The hotel and resort is gorgeous!  The architecture and design is modern-contemporary and just stunning. The place is filled with great art and the spa is top notch. The most memorable for yours truly? The cuisine at Martinhal.

Here are just a few highlights:

As Dunas restaurant (The Sand Dunes). Their more casual restaurant by the beach with the best seafood in the region. Portugal is known for fresh seafood served grilled with a side of potatoes and salad/vegetables.

   

Seafood lunch platter. You can't have this combo unless you sister runs the place!

 Garlic shrimp! Yum. You have to peel them with your hands which means you get extra flavor on your fingers.

Grilled fish, Portuguese style, but taken a few levels up Martinhal-style. 

Clams with garlic and cilantro/coriander. Would you believe my American kids loved this dish!  

 Portuguese coffee to wash it down.

O Terraco (The Terrace) restaurant where breakfast and dinner are served.

Breakfast. A picture tells a thousand words...

 Porto Branco. Pre-dinner drink in lounge.

I have more pictures but not enough time. Chilli and Mr. Dessert were kind enough to invite us to a food tasting for As Dunas restaurant. So, much more in my next post!

Chilli Padi and Mr Dessert, congratulations on Martinhal. We are very proud of you. Chilli Padi, I expected and will continue to expect nothing less from you. Love you!

Cinnamon

Maria's Sopa de Cenoura

One of the perks of travelling relatively often to the Algarve is that we get to sample some excellent Portuguese food. With more than 40% of the mainland's borders consisting of Atlantic coastline, the quality of seafood in Portugal is outstanding. When they say ‘fresh fish’ in the Algarve, they don’t mean that it was in a freezer truck for a week being brought to the city – they mean it was caught earlier that day, maybe even by someone the restaurant owner or chef knows by name, and brought straight to the kitchen. The fish is then grilled with the magical Mediterranean ingredients of olive oil and garlic. In what I’ve seen of Europe so far, Portugal has to be the place where I’ve had the best fish. The only other country in the world that can compete is Japan, but that’s almost 6,000 miles away…

Although I’m particularly fond of the seafood – probably because of my own coastal heritage – there are other much-loved dishes. One of my favourites is Arroz de Pato, a melting duck rice with almost-caramelized slices of chorizo. This is made by cooking the duck in a broth with vegetables, herbs and spices. The cooked duck is shredded, while the broth (with all the essence of the vegetables and the duck fat) is used to cook the rice. The rice and shredded duck are then layered in earthenware and finished in the oven, with slices of chorizo on top. I’m minded to try making this sometime. If I do, I’ll share a recipe.

Until then, though, I thought I’d have a go at something simpler (and far less calorific). Portuguese soups are another delight discovered on travels, and I picked up a recipe on my most recent visit. Most of the soups that I’ve come across feature some key ingredient with a base of potato, to give that cream textured finish: for example, green cabbage or kale for the famous Caldo Verde, and carrot for Sopa de Cenoura. This Sopa de Cenoura recipe is from Maria, a lady who joined my sister’s household last year to help look after the most-recently-arrived cherub. Maria told me the ingredients in Portuguese, so I hope I managed to catch everything!


5 carrots
1 courgette
1 potato
3 onions
3 cloves garlic
Some olive oil

1. Simply prepare and chop all the vegetables roughly, and boil them in water until tender. (Update: after a few tries, I've decided that best results are obtained by boiling in chicken stock, the salted variety or with salt added.)
2. Add a few good glugs of olive oil and boil for another 5 minutes.
3. Blend with a hand blender.
4. Season to taste.


That’s it. I realized, after making this at the weekend, that the quality of vegetables in the Algarve is pretty outstanding too – my supermarket vegetables couldn’t compete with the flavour that was coaxed out of the Portuguese ones. If your source of vegetables is like mine, I’d recommend adding a little bit of a stock cube or some bouillon powder at step 1. (I’d be interested to hear of the results if any of you tries this recipe with quality organic vegetables, sans bouillon.)

Serve with some toasted sourdough bread. For a true Algarvio experience, follow up with grilled fish, then a Bolo de Iogurte (yoghurt cake) with coffee.

To all our Portuguese friends and friends of Portugal out there, I'd love to have some recommendations of your favourite dishes to try on my next trip!

Love

Truffle

Letter to Madeira

Dear Truffle,

I was thrilled to read about your Madeira tasting at the hotel. I really learned much from your post (see earlier post by Truffle). Even though I left work later than usual today, I stopped at Total Wine to get a bottle for myself. I was thrilled to find, not just any bottle of Blandy's, but it's the Malmsey grape and has been aged 10 years in oak casks! It was a little more expensive than I expected, but worth the $40.

Sipping this lovely wine brings to mind a number of memories. But, before that, I am sure you already know that a number of Mediterranean countries produce some sort of fortified wine. The Spanish produce Sherry (as you have already mentioned), the Italians Marsala (which has unfortunately been permanently relegated to the kitchen like the barefoot pregnant), and the Portuguese Port, my favorite. What do the French produce? Cognac? Hmmm, not certain if that is considered a fortified wine. It is made from grape... I suppose the French always want to be different. Interestingly, they are all named after the regions/cities they come from. Although the city Sherry is from is Jerez in Spanish.

The Madeira is much sweeter than I expected. Prince Charming and I both tasted it with Parmesan cheese (would have preferred Stilton but Parmesan was all I had) and he thought it was quite similar to a white port we had a few years ago. It is more of a sweet Sherry or a sweeter version of Tawny than the more traditional Ruby Port.

This really reminded me of my six months in Lisbon, more than a decade ago. When I was wandering around a local grocery store looking for Sherry, known as Xerez in Portugal to complete a chicken dish. In my youth, I followed recipes doggedly. Now, I would have poured in a slosh of cognac or even whisky. Hey, even old red wine. Anyway, the grocer snorted as I asked for Xerez and he waved me away to a long row of many varieties of Port, at the end of which stood one single bottle of Xerez. That was my first lesson in the Portuguese-Spanish rivalry. Well, this bottle of Madeira, produced in the Portuguese colony of the same name, reminds me of their rival wine.

Saude, my dear sister! Relax and enjoy yourself with your husband. I look forward to your next post from the sunny Isle of Madeira.

Love,

Cinnamon

Origins

Some of you may remember that my husband and I were in Tokyo for my birthday earlier this year. I had this leaflet from that trip - it's a mini-catalogue of all the little sweet treats on offer at Joel Robuchon's Marunouchi boutique (honest, it's called La Boutique de Joel Robuchon). What really struck me about the leaflet was that traditional French pastries (which you'd normally imagine being carried in hand-made baskets held against the hips of Commercy maidens frolicking in valleys) were all cutesied up and packaged, wagashi-style, in finely calligraphied wrappers and boxes. Here, I thought, was a fusion of French confection, Japanese daintiness and Anglo-Saxon commerce, all boxed up and ready to go. Many people might think all this globalisation is a recent phenomenon - gone are the days when madeleines were from France, wagashi were from Japan and only the Protestants practised Capitalism. But does that neat, bite-sized categorisation tell the whole story? I think not.

So, now we will finally tell you the story we promised, about Brazil, the chili and India. In the age of discovery in Europe, the Portuguese were great travellers and traders, sending voyages to the East and West. Although the Europeans got slightly distracted by the jewels and precious metals they came across on these voyages, initially (at least) one aim was to find spices. The Portuguese had been travelling to India since 1498, when Vasco da Gama first established a sea route to the Sub Continent. By the 1520s/1530s (please don't hang me on the dates), there were Portuguese trading posts all along the coastline on the Bay of Bengal. Before this, people all along that coast (and inland) used only pepper to spice things up (food-wise). But the Portuguese brought a number of things with them from the New World, amongst these the red chili from Brazil. In the 5 centuries since then, the red chili has edged pepper out as the fiery spice of choice, and pepper-based dishes have been relegated to the side lines. The methods and ingredients of Indian cuisine are incredibly varied across the length and breadth of the country, but ask any Indian what identifies their food and sets it apart, and you will be told it's the chili. So what do we call the chili in India? Is it a 'Brazilian' immigrant? A foreign invader? Is it 'Indian'?

And here I'm reminded of people who ask me where I'm from. When I say "I'm from Singapore", I sometimes get a look of disbelief and the classic follow-up "But where are you originally from?" If only I had the time to tell each of them, patiently, the story of the humble red chili...

Love

Truffle