We used to prepare this all the time when we lived on actual land. Recently, Joshua’s dad Jeff visited us on the boat and after a week of largely vegetarian dinners, a general demand for MEAT was announced by the boys. We made Joshua’s Pork Chop and, as always, it turned out pretty darned good. We never had a recipe specifying exact ingredients amounts and so we’ve always winged it—a thing that sometimes brings out the bickering on my and Joshua’s part. I have always had little regard for precision in ingredient specifications and Joshua thinks he actually remembers exactly how much of everything he put in it the last time we made it. Anyway, that’s what the wine is for.

Ingredients, more or less
* Pork! Chops of pork! I make Joshua pick these out due to an irritating squeamishness on my part around supermarket displays of dead flesh. He usually homes in on the thick ones.
* Dehydrated wild mushrooms (like porcinis); or if you are lucky enough to have fresh ones, use those. Rehydrate in hot water or broth (don’t throw out the mushroom juice when you are done though).
* White wine, maybe a half cup (sauvignon blanc, or a dry sherry—not cooking sherry either, use something you wouldn’t mind actually drinking, like a fino or amontillado. We also used Spanish brandy once). In fact, pour yourself and your cooking partner a glass in preparation for the preparation.
* Onion, chopped.
* Much garlic, sliced into little garlic sliceys.
* Balsamic vinegar (or champagne vinegar, a substance I find tastes like acetone—and not in a good way—but that Joshua loves for some crazy reason so you’ll have to battle it out on this one out). OH! I have just now received confirmation from Joshua that “Sherry vinegar’s the best.” Definitive; there you have it.
* Scant spoon of sugar, possibly. It depends upon how much balsamic you put in and how sweet it is (you can adjust for taste near the end). You might have to sneak this one in as I do for Joshua because the combination of Pork and Sugar scrambles his brain.
* Bay leaf.
* Possibly a squeeze of lime or lemon juice—again, taste it and make your decision.
* Salt and pepper to taste.

Get out your best big frying pan. Joshua is in charge of the browning of goods because he is King of the Pork Chop and so I usually just humor him on this one. Heat some oil in the pan (we always seem to use olive oil because we’re cooking Neanderthals but something that has a higher burn point is obviously preferable) and proceed to burn the shit out of all the garlic I just spent all day slicing into cute, uniform little sliceroos. Swear vociferously and demand to be handed a slotted spoon with which to fish out smoking garlic chars while I roll my eyes in I-told-you-so smugness. Luckily I always chop four extra cloves and so the process gets repeated but with a more careful eye. This time, fish out golden, crisp garlic chippy-chips from the hot oil and set aside in an attractive auxiliary kitchen dish.

Now for the pork. You must brown the pork chop; or rather sear it—a task that is nearly impossible using an alcohol stove such as we have on the Time Machine but was a SNAP when we had an antique electric stove that had only two settings: lava-red and dull brown on only one part of one spiral. Browning the pork chop, again, is Joshua Territory. I stand aside and peer around his shoulder while topping off my glass of wine. Once the browning of the pork chop is complete (be careful not to cook it all the way through, yet), set it aside for the time being.

Now, add onions to the frying pan, chopped finely and uniformly by Yours Truly and whose perfection is scoffed at by Joshua, who is simply jealous that he is incapable of such mastery of the large-bladed knife. Fight over who gets to stir. Take several sips of wine.

Once onions are well browned, a task that takes all night if you let Joshua stir because he somehow feels that the cooking process is hastened if all onions are pushed to the outskirts of the frying pan rather than spread uniformly across the center, add the mushrooms. I have to backtrack a little here: While Joshua was pushing the onions all over hell and gone in the pan, one must take a break and wind down, for example by chopping mushrooms. Remove the mushrooms from the reconstituting liquid and chop finely (I do this because the mushrooms I use are often the Trader Joes “wild” mushroom mixture and so I try to marry random mushroom flavors as best as I can). Add this to the onions in the pan and let Joshua do what he will with them while you spring into action. SPICES! Chuck in a bay leaf! Pour in the remaining mushroom juice! Grind in some pepper! Add a splash of balsamic vinegar and tell Joshua it was his favorite champagne vinegar that you threw out four months ago! Toss your own glass of wine in the pan! Sneak a taste of the sauce so far. Distract Joshua’s attention (“LOOK! A condor!!”) whilst adding a smidge of sugar to the mix if it tastes a bit off; seize control of the wooden spoon to mix this around. I believe I’ve been known to add a pinch of thyme to this as well.

More wine. For you.

Now, add the pork chops back to the pan and reduce the heat to simmer. I generally see to it that each chop is carefully covered with a blanket of mushroom/onion mixture and that they are neatly arranged in the pan to finish cooking. This generally doesn’t take too much longer (five minutes, maybe) and while they finish up, you may cover the pan or leave it uncovered in order to reduce the sauce to an appropriate amount. Taste and adjust salt/pepper as you like. Add a squeeze of lemon or lime juice if it isn’t as tangy as you might like.

When they are finished (Joshua cuts into one and when the center is just a teeny bit pink, calls the cooking process done), remove from heat and serve, spooning the mushroom/onion mixture over the top with the juice. Sprinkle the garlic chips on top of this creation. We generally make a salad to go along with this. A Caesar salad, perhaps, using actual lettuce. Ohhhh. Good stuff.

Joshua seemed to remember in Mexico hearing that sierra was an excellent fish for ceviche. I don’t know why, but I was skeptical about whitefish in ceviche after having some rather chewy snapper once; previously, I had only had tuna ceviche, or else various shellfish.

At any rate, we had caught a modest-sized sierra directly after we hung a left from Bahia del Sol and still had a bit left over after a day or so. Joshua used the remainder for a ceviche snack and damn was it good. Those Mexicans weren’t kidding; sierra is indeed a perfect ceviche fish. We all but inhaled the batch and pined for more.

More. Caught right around the border of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It can be clearly seen that this fish is about the size of Joshua’s leg, in spite of the reckless camera angle. He carefully filleted the thing to produce nearly an entire one-gallon freezer ziplock full of fish meat.

With eight pounds of fresh sierra, we could make a truckload of ceviche.

SIERRA CEVICHE

* Eight pounds of FRESH sierra. No, really, you don’t need that much. But it’s a mighty powerful feeling to have it, I tell you.
(Veggies)
* Onion, finely diced; at least, I like to finely dice things.
* Tomato, finely diced.
* Garlic, finely diced.
* Green pepper, sliced into ¾-inch long juliennes. (For the hell of it.)
* Jalapeno, finely minced. Of course, El Salvador does not deal in vegetables that contain any perceptible spice so sadly, this ingredient was absent for our Santa Elena ceviche.
* Avocado, chopped into reasonably sized chunks.
(Irritants)
* Lime juice (I don’t need to mention that this needs to be fresh.)
* Vinegar, we used sherry vinegar; red wine vinegar would be good too.
* Water.
* Salt
* Spices if you want: pepper or a bit of cumin.
* Cilantro for garnish. I sadly didn’t have any.

The moment the anchor was down I was in the galley happily waving knives at our veggies. I tend to prefer a lot of vegetables in things so I minced a healthy amount of onions, tomatoes, garlic, and peppers; save the avocado for last. I chucked about a quarter of a teaspoon of salt into the blend as well. (Also, I seem to remember reading someplace that one isn’t supposed to use metal bowls or metal utensils when preparing acidic things like ceviche.)

Somehow the photo-taking process broke down after I got the veggies chopped so this is the last illustration. At any rate, here’s a lovely shot of freshly diced veggies shown against an exotic backdrop of authentic Costa Rican jungle.

Then, I called Joshua down to deal with the raw meat part of the deal. He carefully sharpened the knife (because sharp knives are a joy to use) and sliced a reasonable amount of fish into half-inch cubes (bigger pieces would take longer to cook and we were hungry).

Now to add the acids that will ‘cook’ the fish and mellow the onion/garlicy parts; basically, you want enough liquid to just cover the lot. The ratio we have found to taste best is roughly one quarter lime juice, one quarter vinegar, and half water. Mix this around and let it stand for around fifteen or twenty minutes (or however long it takes to cook the fish). Once the fish is cooked, taste it and adjust your flavors, adding more salt if necessary, pepper or cumin if you want, or more fresh lime juice. If it tastes a little too piquant, you could add a tiny bit of sugar to mellow it out a bit; we only need to do this if we went overboard on the lime juice or vinegar. Now add the chopped avocado, carefully mixing it into the ceviche so it doesn’t disintegrate. If cilantro kept worth a damn, I would have minced a bit to sprinkle on top.

We ate it on crackers with a dab of Marie Sharp’s habanera hot sauce. Cold beer, of course, goes brilliantly with this.

Kurt’s mom sent us on a hike off someplace in Maine to a fire tower where the blueberries grow. If we were good little bunnies and didn’t eat all the berries, there would be a pie in our future. Kurt was armed with some plastic grocery bags. We parked the car, chatted with the previous hikers (“Absolutely gorgeous! You’ve been here before right? Such a great day for it!” etc.), and made it about thirty feet into the path before Joshua got his mushroom eyes on and spotted some chanterelles glowing from the forest. Joshua and I turned into raving lunatics and bolted off into the underbrush to collect. The glory of discovery lasted around thirty seconds unfortunately and I had to bolt or be consumed entirely by mosquitoes. I sprinted back to the trail to pace around with Kurt until Joshua emerged, a wild look in his eye. Chanterelles! In Maine! Who knew; it had been so long since we had found the little guys, and this variety was very similar to the variety you find in Oregon rather than in California (a much superior variety in our opinion—petite, fragrant, and clean). We were pretty excited. Kurt and I continued on (we were on a hike, after all) while Joshua darted off the path here and there every time he thought he saw something. And we kept finding more chanterelles; before too long we had amassed almost one plastic vegetable bagful, probably three pounds. We never found any blueberries; I guess it just wasn’t the right season.

What to make. What to make…

Answer: Pasta with Chanterelle Cream Sauce.

What you need:

Pasta. We used a sort of large unbent macaroni that wasn’t penne. I’d probably choose farfalle if I had to pick one type out of thousands.
Bunch of chanterelles which you picked fresh the same day after going on a lovely hike that had a view but no blueberries.
Olive oil.
Butter. What, did you think this would be a healthy recipe?
Cream. Get a big thing of it just in case. You can always use the remainder to put on coffee or mix with cream soda for a delicious snack.
Chopped pecans.
Garlic. Think sublime; too much garlic tends to overrun chanterelles. You want the garlic smished.
Chervil which you picked fresh from your herb garden. (Oh right! 1. Plant herb garden. 2. Go chanterelle hunting…) Chop it finely.
Salt and pepper. Al gusto.

How to do it:

First, you need to clean the chanterelles. This involves cutting off the ends of the stalks and brushing off the dirt (a paintbrush works if you don’t already have one of those froofy mushroom brushes). It is best to not clean them by washing because mushrooms will absorb water like crazy and soggy chanterelles pretty much suck. Use water only in extreme emergency. Also, cut out any weird sections (burrowing insects or slug slime, depending upon how squeamish or protein-hating you are), double-check your species, etc. Then slice into thin sections.

Dry sauté the mushrooms. Chanterelles have a lot of water in them even if you didn’t wash them and if you just start cooking with them without releasing some of it, they just end up soggy. Get a dry skillet hot (so water droplets dance around) and toss in the mushrooms. Add a bit of salt to help them release the water if you want. Stir around a bit and pretty soon they will start releasing a shocking amount of yellow liquid. They will also smell really good. Pour off the liquid and reserve and continue stirring them around until they stop releasing water more or less and the rest of the liquid has evaporated. Take mushrooms off burner and set aside. I chopped them finely for our cream sauce (you could leave them in slices or even puree them with some of the cream depending upon what texture you want.)

Put pasta on to boil.

Heat up some oil and butter in the skillet; add garlic and after a moment, add the chopped pecans. Toss these around in the oil until the pecans are a nice toasty consistency (I’m a pecan novice—I just tasted them to see if they were all crunchy and buttery and called it done); don’t burn the garlic either. Add the chopped chanterelles and toss around in the butter/pecan/oil/garlic. Now stir in the cream and reserve mushroom broth. We added enough cream to make the sauce look ‘right.’ (If you are looking for a smoother sauce consistency, you would need to set the pecans aside before adding the mushrooms, puree the sauce, then add them back in last—or sprinkle them on. Or puree them too. Whatever.) We let the sauce simmer very gently for a few minutes then called it done. Adjust the taste with salt and pepper.

Put pasta in your preferred serving bowl and pour sauce over it. Sprinkle chervil on the top to make it look pretty. Lamely, we did not manage to get a photo of the finished product.

We discovered the Michelada in a small bar in Guatemala City. The bartender added what appeared to be Bloody Mary mixings to a large bulbous stemmed goblet and then topped off with beer and ice instead of tomato juice. We ordered one and watched carefully as he mixed and then we wrote down all the ingredients on a napkin. Then we lost the napkin. Luckily the Michelada is not uncommon, it’s from Mexico, and we have since been able to order them at a Mexican restaurant in Masaya, Nicaragua. Everyone seems to make this drink differently.

Salt the rim of a tall glass. I always forget to do this and add all the other ingredients, then realize the only reasonable way to salt a glass is to turn it upside down, etc. In the end I usually try to mold the salt with my fingers to the rim of an upright glass and it just goes all over the place. Do this step first if have any sense in you whatsoever.
Juice of 1.5 large limes (US style Persian limes) or 2-3 small Mexican limes (key limes).
15 dashes Worcestershire Sauce. This depends upon how generous your bottle of WS dashes out the goods. My “salsa inglesa” generic brand WS is somewhat anemic with the dashes so I go heavy.
3 dashes Tabasco sauce. I read actually that the original Michelada recipe does not call for hot sauce at all, nor does it call for pepper. Shocking I know. (My highly reliable source is The World Wide Internet.) I like that hot sauce though and will boldly go with 5 or 6 dashes if so inclined. Also, I’ve been using Marie Sharp’s (hot) Habanera sauce, because I seem to have a lot of that these days.
1 dash soy sauce. This ingredient is in many online recipes, but the one we had did not use it. I usually put this in since I have some. Incidentally, my internet source did not mention the historical authenticity of this ingredient; I would wager it is not an original ingredient.
3 dashes Maggi Sauce. I had to look this up since I’d never heard of it; it’s a sort of asian seasoning from Switzerland with the following ingredients: water, salt, wheat gluten, wheat, sugar, wheat bran, acetic acid, caramel color, artificial flavor (??), disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, dextrose monohydrate, and yeast. Obviously I don’t add this and I don’t know if our Guatemala City guy did either. Most online recipes are very specific about this ingredient though. One internet guy said the taste can be approximated by mixing Worcestershire Sauce and soy sauce so there you go.
1 pinch black pepper.
12-oz beer. I noticed that many recipes call for Negro Modelo but that seems a waste when there are so many boring light lager-style beers that are pretty much created for just such a drink.

The method: rub rim of glass with lime and coat with salt. Then add all ingredients except the beer, ice, and finally the beer. Stir. If you are tricky and neurotic like me (mostly neurotic, not so tricky), you will add the ingredients, then the ice, then carefully pour in the beer but not stir. Yet. Most likely your preferred beer glass is just not large enough for all the additives, ice, and beer and so you will be able to pour out maybe three-quarters of your beer only. This leaves you with the dilemma of a non-uniform Michelada. This can be dealt with in two ways. 1) Stir gently but thoroughly, drink down and add the remaining beer, again stirring. This gives your two Michelada tastes: one strong and one less so. 2) After adding the initial amount of beer, gently poke the ice around to mix in some of the ingredients, but leaving the greater concentration at the bottom. When you have drunk down a little, add the remaining beer and mix again, this time more thoroughly. This gives you a more uniform Michelada. I generally go with method number two (the more neurotic) but have been known to go with the first.

This precious gem was found lying around on a table in Punta Gorda (Belize); we desperately wanted it for our very own but feared it belonged to someone. Someone with a colorful sense of spelling and a raging appetite for whodyt. Such a person might just be dangerous.

(You can click the photo to see a larger image.)

A basic translation and discussion follows:
The WhoDyt ReSip
A strong statement is made immediately with the piece’s title boldly written across the top in black lettering over a scarlet border: The WhoDyt ReSip. Arguments can be made as to why the author chose to highlight certain letters (namely, the D in WhoDyt and the S in ReSip) with capitalization, and further arguments may be made as to whether the S is even capitalized at all. Or what the bloody hell is a Whodyt anyway.

Counat Interpretative spelling of the word ‘coconut’ (or currant)? My guess is coconut because I have a feeling the author might have chosen to spell ‘currant’ with a K.
3 green 1 ripe plante[n?] Plantain? Note different color chosen for the second ingredient, a clear indication that the second ingredient is distinct and separate from the first. Also, that the author has recently obtained a new box of colored markers. (And, have you ever actually tried to eat an unripe plantain? This resip calls for three.)
3 Leaft of Kulant[?]o Some indecision occurred when drawing the initial L in Leaft. The author may have begun the word with a very small circle or squiggly glyph before reconsidering and covering the error with a thick snakey tail on the L. A possible translation: 3 leaves of cilantro (or currant). Again, a color change.
½ of a onion No spelling anomalies nor random capitalizations; clearly, an unimportant ingredient. Note color change.
counat milk It is unclear whether the initial C is capitalized, actually. It is presumed that this item refers to the first ingredient although the color is distinct. Repetition of already-used colors is evident; other markers have already been lost or eaten by younger siblings.
[??] of basans This ingredient leaves a considerable amount open to interpretation. A blank of basans. Bassoons? Currants? Hopefully this is not a key ingredient requiring precise preparation. If I had to make this dish, I might substitute the word “salt” for the lot.
2 or 3 fish Simple. Definitive.

[Instructions for preparation:]
Bolb the green planten first for a pout 5 mints or 15 mints (probably depending upon whether you used 2 or 3 fish)
The putthe ripe one in
…

Actually, I think this is all fairly self-explanatory. Bolb the green planten.