Cooking Lessons

As planned, we headed to the market to pickup groceries to teach Ken's boys a new dish.  We decided that given the somewhat limited ingredient options, we needed to do something fairly straight forward but that would offer a new flavor and teach them a technique of some kind.  The boys always cook their meat in a frying pan and regardless of the cut, it always comes out like shoe leather, so Ken asked that we teach them something that would end up being tender.  The best option with those requirements was Hungarian goulash.  Basically, all we needed was some onions, a few cloves of garlic, cubed tough meat (not a problem here), tomato paste (much less of a challenge than expected), paprika and water.

The goal at the end of the day was to teach them to braise the beef slowly for a longer period of time so it turns out tender and the connective tissue breaks down like in a stew.  That was the plan anyways.  I showed them how to sweat the onions and garlic (which they already knew), and then we browned the beef and added he rest of the ingredients to a big pan with a lid.  Then we threw that in the oven on what I estimated to be about 300 degrees.  Sounds easy right.  It isn't always so.  After about 20 minutes, and for every 10 minutes thereafter, the boys insisted the meat was cooked and should come out.  We kept assuring them that no, it wasn't ready yet and needed more time.  I told them repeatedly that it would take 2 to 2.5 hours to finish properly.  It was a long two hours of assurances.

We normally serve the goulash over pasta, but we had lots of rice on hand, so the boys made their usual batch of rice and we served the goulash along with a salad of cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes sprinkled with salt.  They don't really do dressings here other than oil and salt unfortunately.  After a few hesitant bites, the lights went on and they realized how tender the meat can be after braising, and poured the sauce all over the rice.  We had thought that 2kg of beef would be plenty with the rice and salad but we of course ran out.

We then drilled the boys on what they had learned and asked them to go over the steps again with us.  I am pretty sure they will be braising their meat quite often from now on.

After the cooking lessons, Ken dropped me and the kids off at the store to grab some needed essentials like bottled water, and took Melody over to El Jordan to bake banana breads for the next week in prep for the big push to get Christmas on the streets ready.

Last night was the first comfortable temperature evening since we got here so we spent a large part of the evening sitting outside reading books.

The plan for the rest of today is to cook a big batch of stew for a potluck supper that Ken got us invited to this evening, and then tomorrow we have church and we managed to grab tickets to the last pro soccer game of the season tomorrow night. Set us back a pretty penny however.  30 Bolivianos a ticket.  That's just over 5 bucks a piece.  We could have splurged and got tickets in the expensive area for about 10 bucks each, but we are buying for our family, Ken and 8 boys from his home.  Should be a great night tomorrow.

I didn't really take any pictures of the cooking lessons yesterday, so here are a few random shots from the last week.  The first is Ivan from Ken's place, the second is a picture of the juice they make and sell in the market, the third is a guy selling somo (corn juice drink) and a lady selling fresh squeezed orange juice, and the last is self explanatory.