For those of you whom, like me, finding cooking and meal planning to be a chore, I invite you to experience just one night of trying to cook like an American in Caracas.
Warning: I plan on exaggerating a bit for dramatic effect, but all facts contained within this story are 100% true.
It was 6:15 pm. Rafa and I just finished watching Attack on the White House (or whatever that’s called in English) after a morning of tutoring and afternoon of errand running, including renting above mentioned movie. Wow, I didn’t realize it was so late already.
Rafa, “Amor, tienes hambre?” (Are you hungry? which I have learned really means, “I’m hungry. What’s for dinner?") Aw man, it’s dinner time already. I consult the menu I make each week to try and relieve some of the stress of cooking: Slow Cooker Sesame Chicken. Seriously? Why didn’t I look at this earlier? I quickly scan through the other days to see if I can interchange a meal. Bummer, all my other meals anticipate having gone grocery shopping, an errand we did not accomplish today.
Aha! I saved a few recipes yesterday that I wanted to try. Locating the online note, I scan through the short list: Slow cooker BBQ chicken (nope), Slow cooker Brown sugar garlic chicken (nope), and at last, Chicken Enchilada Flatbread. I click on the link and scan through the ingredients.
Skinny Chicken Enchilada Flatbread
- 1 cup red enchilada sauce, store bought or homemade
- 1 cup Skinny Shredded Chicken or boiled, shredded chicken breasts
- 1/2 cup reduced-fat shredded cheese
- 1/2 white onion, diced
- 1/2 cup jalapeño peppers, diced (or 4 ounce can)
- 1/2 cup diced green chillies (or 4 ounce can)
- handful of fresh cilantro, stems removed
- 4 Flatout flatbread, light wraps
- 1/2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Enchilada sauce.Well it’ll have to be homemade. Good thing I have a recipe I like on budgetbytes. Chicken. Check. Needs to thaw. Shredded cheese. I have a block of mozarella. That should work!. Onion. Check. Jalapeños and chillies. Yeah right. Why would they have that in Venezuela? Wait! How about green pepper and the red beans I prepared that are in the freezer? Yum! Cilantro. Check, although also frozen. Flatbread? Find a quick recipe.
Ok this is doable. I check the preparation time listed on the recipe: 10 minutes. Score! I will have dinner on the table in no time. Approval check from Rafa? Permission granted!
I’m already making a mental list of the order in which to do things: remove chicken, red beans, and cilantro to thaw in water, find a flatbread recipe, look up the enchilada sauce recipe, oh yeah...I really have to pee! I get to work, finding a flatbread recipe entitled “Quick Garlic Flatbread.” Ingredients? Check. Weird, it uses vegetable shortening. Whatever, I actually have some on hand. Enchilada sauce recipe is up on the computer.
I begin making the dough, annoyed with the part about cutting in the vegetable shortening with the flour. Rafa enters the kitchen and makes “juice" from a packet as I finish up the dough. I have to keep reaching above his head to grab ingredients as he’s pouring water into the pitcher. Why is he so tall? He finishes, then takes over my computer at the kitchen table and I keep having to steal it back to look at the recipe.
Dough needs to rest for 20 minutes. No problem. This gives me time to make the enchilada sauce. I steal back my computer for a minute and check out the ingredients for this one. Great...I have no tomato paste. How about a can of tomatoes? I can make this work. I pull out a pot and begin the sauce. It’s a bit of a process, but the liquid from the can of tomatoes is fairly thick and I add a partial tomato along with some salsa purchased in Trinidad from my visa trip. Maybe the salsa will give it more of a Mexican flavor! I taste test, add salt and more garlic powder, but the sauce isn’t thickening. If I’m going to spread this out like pizza sauce, this won’t work. I quickly locate the cornstarch and make a paste to thicken up the sauce. Much better.
There’s still 10 more minutes before the dough is ready. I chop up some green pepper and onion and wash a few of the dishes I’ve created. I start to sautee the green pepper and onion. Thinking I only had the chicken left to cook (forgetting the beans), I get excited that I only have to dirty one more pan. Rafa is now scanning through my music on itunes, listening to five seconds of each song and criticizing me for owning it. I contemplate asking him for help and hope he’ll notice my scattered, desperate state and want to pitch in. I promised I’d be working on not complaining about cooking so I decide to just keep working.
With the green peppers and onion cooking away, I focus back on the dough. It gets split into 6 balls to make little flatbreads. I don’t own a rolling pin so I use a mason jar to flatten them, adding flour so they don’t stick. I use one of our plastic placemats to roll on, to which Rafa sticks up his nose. Hey, it’s way easier to clean! I make 2 at a time, since the placemat is small. Our stovetop has an awesome metal slab that goes across 2 gas burners that functions as a flat top. It’s perfect for arepas, tortillas, and thin flatbreads like this. The first 2 always take some time.
I cut up the now thawed chicken into little cubes. The peppers and onions are now finished and get transferred to a bowl while I cook the chicken in the same pan. I add some Mexican spices amongst other things to give the chicken some flavor. We are all about the spices in this house and buy them on visa trips and vacations as there isn’t much available here in Caracas. I roll out 2 more flatbreads, flipping the first two, and checking the chicken.
It’s at this point that Rafa realizes it’s now 7:40 and I might need some help. He finishes off the chicken and begins cooking the beans, adding some of his own spices and a packet we often use. We sautee them in some water so they get mushy like canned beans.
The rest of the flatbreads cook quickly and the beans cook a little too long. It’s now time to assemble. Gee whiz...you’d think I’d be finished after all this work but they still need to cook in the oven to allow the cheese to melt and the flavors to mix. I give up being well-mannered and heap spoonfuls on sauce onto the flatbreads and use my hands to add chicken, peppers and onion, and finger pinches of bean gloop. No points for presentation here. I just want to be done! I shred cheese over the top of each one generously. It’s the best part after all! They’re finally ready to go into the oven.
I tackle the rest of the dishes, but thanks to that one pan, only have a few. While we wait, Rafa is now checking youtube for new movie trailers, picking out his favorite series movies like Fast and Furious, the Matrix, Mission Impossible, etc. There are so many new movies coming out, many of which he is much more excited to see than I am.
Dinner is finally ready to come out of the oven at 8:30 and we decide to watch movie #2, G.I. Joe 2, as a reward while we eat.
Thankfully, dinner was GOOD! Rafa ate all 3 of his flatbreads and I finished off 2 and look forward to eating the last one for lunch today. I always feel good about the hard work of cooking when my husband wants seconds.
I contemplate the 10 minute preparation which turned into a 2 hour ordeal and realized I needed to blog about this.
Cooking here, at least making American foods, is an often frustrating mess of random substitutions, can’t make that’s, and do it from scratch’s. Certainly, not every meal I make takes this long or has this many substitutions, but it often happens I really struggle to find recipes that work well here. I’m learning, but it’s taking longer than I had hoped.
So the next time you get frustrated about having to cook dinner, you can think about this story and laugh. Buen provecho! (The VZ version of Bon appetite!)
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