Who says the gringa can’t cook? Don’t make me beat you with my spatula…

5-21-10

Since I’m about to bounce off to San Vicente for a round of month-long training, I thought today was a good day to demonstrate my culinary prowess.  Don’t laugh!  I’m serious!  I can cook!  (I’ve said that a lot in Spanish today, too.)  A few weeks ago, I had my sister Lindsey send me some of my favorite recipes from home, and today I settled on fettucine alfredo.  It’s a simple dish with minimal ingredients, and I’ve made it many times successfully in various kitchens for various audiences.  Everybody loves fettucine alfredo, you can’t go wrong with it.  After all, its main ingredients are butter, cheese, cream, and egg yolks.  Seriously, who doesn’t like butter and cheese?

That last sentence is what literary folks call foreshadowing.

I figured the ingredients wouldn’t be too hard to find.  I was a little worried about the grated parmesan, but that was the first thing I found.  As it turns out, the heavy cream was the real problem.  I scoured the shelves in the dairy section of Super Selectos, and all I saw were varying types of milk – 1%, 2%, skim, whole, even lactose-free.  I finally asked, and was in turn offered sour cream, cream cheese, powdered coffee creamer, and this odd kind of cream-in-a-bag that Salvadorans like to eat with everything.  (Apparently the phrase “crema pesada de leche” can be interpreted in many ways.)  Disappointed, I finally decided to make do with whole milk.  I also couldn’t find fettucine, but I decided linguine was close enough.

I started to cook around 5:40, but not without numerous panicked calls to my sister about converting grams to ounces and ounces to pounds, and how on earth I should thicken the cream sauce.  I also called my mom four times, but apparently she was at the dentist “with a mouth full of Novocain”.  Yeah, excuses, excuses.  She obviously just loves my sisters more than me.

At this point I should mention that I get a little panicky when I cook for people for the first time.  And apparently, Salvadoran kitchens don’t have the same cooking implements I’m used to.  The first step (boiling water) went quite well, which in retrospect probably falsely buoyed my confidence.  (It took me a whole month to get over lighting a gas stove with a lighter, so at the time it felt appropriate to be that proud of myself.)  I proceeded to pour the whole bag of pasta into the water, when I realized that I didn’t have a timer, and was going to have to guess.  I also discovered that they didn’t have any kind of long wooden spoon to stir the pasta with, so I used a spatula.  When I tasted the pasta and decided that if was al dente, a looked around for a colander, and discovered only a small plastic one that my family uses to strain the pulp out of homemade juice.  I took it to the pila to drain the water, and in the process managed to dump half of it onto the cement surface of the washbasin.

I looked around.  There was no one watching.  Did I dare?

Squashing any qualms that I may have had about “health volunteer”, I rapidly scooped up two large handfuls of pasta, nervous at being caught and called out for my hypocrisy.  And thereby discovered that pasta that has just come out of boiling water is actually quite hot.

Refusing to back down and admit to my family that I was a crazy gringa that had no business being in the kitchen, I sucked it up and continued to scoop the hot pasta into the pot as quickly as I could, in case someone came around the corner and caught me.  As a side note for those of you who are at this moment saying, “How horrible!  She could make them sick!”, let me just point out that I’ve had to pick bugs out of soup that they’ve served me.  It still tasted good, and I’m none the worse for the wear…so I think they can handle it.  Besides, I was going to put the pasta back into the skillet and cook it a little more, anyway.

In any case, I made it back to the kitchen with the majority of the pasta, very red fingertips, and no Salvadorans the wiser.  I poured the pasta into the skillet with the melted butter, and poured the milk and egg yolk mix on top of it to toss.  As it turned out, it’s harder to toss a pound of pasta in a medium-sized skillet with a flimsy plastic spatula than one might think.  I got a little sloppy, but fortunately the cat took care of the extras on the floor for me.  I went a little heavy on the grated parm, just to make it nice and thick, and when I taste-tested it, was pleased to discover that it tasted just like every batch of fettucine alfredo I had ever made. 

I went outside, thinking that it was good that I made so much, because there were easily 8 people out there including neighbors and friends.  I gleefully announced that I, the gringa, had cooked dinner for all of them.

Everyone suddenly had somewhere else to look.

Alright, fine, I’d probably be pretty wary if I were them, too.  After all, I haven’t done more in the kitchen in the last two months than boil water for my instant oatmeal.  But in my defense, I have tried every single Salvadoran dish that’s ever been put down in front of me, and I worry down the salty cheese and greasy eggs with a smile on my face every night.  Even when I don’t like the food, I smile, and tell the cook that it’s muy rica.  I figured I deserved at least the same pretense.  But the silence was getting uncomfortable, so I said, “Well, it’s in there…if you want it…go ahead…”  And sat down with some for myself.

I finally talked one of the teenagers into trying it, and I could see her forcing it down with the same expression on her face that I force down the beans and tortillas.  You know the expression.  The one that says “this tastes really funky to me, but common courtesy demands that I should die before giving any word or sign of that”?  Okay, maybe you don’t know it.  But I recognized it, because I wear it a lot.

One of the other neighbors, Salvador, accepted some when I offered it.  I put a modest-sized bowl of it in front of him, and he said, “It’s so much!”  I thought that was rich, considering the mountainous portions that are regularly placed in front of me in houses around the village.  So my poor fettucine sat around in a covered skillet on the stove, while I called my mother in Las Vegas to complain that no one liked, or would even try, my food.  Bums.

I should have known better.

The number one rule here in El Salvador is that you don’t waste food.  It’s practically a religion.  For example, after our swearing-in ceremony, we had a buffet dinner with our Salvadoran host families.  All the Salvadorans brought plastic bags, which they stuffed with food for the friends, family, dogs, cats, roosters, and friendly neighborhood bolos back at home.  So after almost four months of living amongst Salvadorans, I should have known that even weird gringo food wouldn’t be wasted.

My host mother and grandmother had a simple solution.  They took a serving of the fettucine, mixed in red beans, and heaped it onto a tortilla.  And voila!  You’ve got yourself a Salvadoran-Italian-American dish.  As the evening went on, more neighbors came over to enjoy their beans and fettucine and tortillas, until the pasta was all gone.  They went home remarking on how interesting it was that the American food was really so similar to Salvadoran food, after all.

I’m going to go ahead and call this one a win.