Writing With My Mouth Full

Chicken with Black Wild Rice

This dish may seem like a meal for spring but if you use a hardy green like kale, then it fits any blustery winter day. I used Lacinato kale, also known as black kale, because it barely needs some cooking. Toss it with snow peas and carrots, or any other vegetable you can eat raw, and you’re good to go. I used peanut oil to cook the chicken but you can certainly substitute it with whatever oil you use to cook your meats especially if you have an allergy. The key here is to keep your sauté pan hot while you continuously toss and mix the ingredients.

Ingredients:
2 cups of black wild rice
2 chicken breast fillets, cubed
1 bunch of Lacinato kale, chiffonade
a handful of snow peas
a handful of baby carrots, roughly chopped
1 small red onion, chopped
a splash of soy sauce
a splash of sherry vinegar
a splash of sesame oil
peanut oil
salt

1. In a large frying pan, heat some oil and cook chicken until no longer pink inside. Set aside in the pan and sauté onions until soft. Mix chicken and onions together and toss in the rest of the vegetables.
2. In the meantime, cook black wild rice per package instructions. Boil three cups of water per cup of rice. Simmer for 45 minutes. Drain rice and fluff.
3. Add the rice to the vegetables and keep sautéing to complete cooking the vegetables. Add a few splashes of sherry vinegar, soy sauce and sesame oil and mix well. Season with salt.

Day 2: Hiking El Cocuy, to Laguna Pintada

I don’t know how it ended up that we both don’t have a watch. Since none of our phones were working in El Cocuy, we had to leave the TV on while we slept to help us wake up at 5:30am in order to catch the lechero at 6am.

After a sleepless night, I woke up and checked the clock on the news channel that was on and immediately jumped off bed as soon as I saw that it was 5:45am. We hurriedly changed and packed our remaining items and tried to step out of La Posada Del Molino but the doors were all locked. We had no choice but to knock on every door to try and wake up the manager so he can let us out. He wearily stepped out of his room, checked his phone clock and grumbly told us that we were an hour early. He said we were probably watching the news from a different country. We embarrassingly and apologetically went back to our room and waited for the right time we can bother him again. One of us really needs to start wearing a watch.

Hikers in El Cocuy hitch a ride with the lechero, or the milk truck, up to the fork on the road and decide whether to go along the Rio Lagunillas to Pulpito de Diablo or trek up north via Güicán. At exactly 6am, we were in the center of town where we informed the lechero driver that we will need to hitch a ride from him. The town was just waking up. Deliveries were being made and store owners were opening up their shops. The driver wasn’t hard to find at all. Besides the fact that his truck is the only one filled with blue vats in the back, he usually looks out for hikers to give them a ride. When the 6:30am bus pulled in from Bogotá–the same bus we were on just the previous day–he greeted the exiting passengers carrying large backpacks.

Off we sat on the floor with the milk vats. The ride was bumpy but it was very cool to witness a slice of Colombian life like that. The driver made several stops along the way to pick up small pails of milk from local farmers. His assistant transfered them from pail to vat at each stop. At one point, a young boy joined us and took over the job. The view up the mountain was beautiful, too. We saw how green our surroundings were; the morning mist slowly moving out of the way to reveal small plots of vegetables and herbs.

About an hour or so later, we were let off and we started our hike. I was very excited and distracted by the feeling of being in a new country again that I quickly forgot we were on high altitude. What should have taken less than two hours took us almost four because I was weakened by the shortage of oxygen. I felt like I could not lift my left leg up, and with a 30-pound pack on my back, walking was very challenging even with the help of two poles. I wasn’t dizzy per se, but my stomach definitely felt funny. The Dr. kept looking back to check up on me. He was very encouraging, but we both knew I wasn’t bringing my usual game. All those nights of swimming laps for naught. I was disappointed in myself and all I wanted was to get to camp and rest but the trail just kept going.

We stopped at the first cabin we saw which was the other Parque Nacional Natural office. We had already registered in El Cocuy, so we didn’t need to do anything there except to catch our breaths and confirm that we were going the right way. After a few more back-breaking minutes, we passed by Cabañas Herrera. We sat and watched other hikers prepare for their next move. We realized that if we had a few more days of hiking, we would have camped here too to acclimate before continuing on to Laguna Pintada. That is really the way to do it: split a few hours worth of day hike into two to get used to the high altitude.

I managed to look around us and take note of the river along the way. The brown trouts would swim away whenever we approached. Cows, sheep, goats and rabbits were omnipresent. The land looked healthy, but as soon as the trail turned sandy and almost volcanic, the animals and the shrubs disappeared and the frailejónes started to pepper the landscape. Resembling hooded friars, or frailes, the plants are native to Colombia and live in high altitude. Their trunks are thick and because their leaves are marcescent (when dead plant organs remain intact versus shedding), they are protected from the cold weather. It was a little eerie to be walking among so many of them, but relief was soon visible when we saw their yellow daisy-like flowers.

Up a small hill, we asked if it was Cabaña Sisuma. After we received confirmation from the three small children running around the cabin, we climbed down the foot of the hill and began to camp. Señora Marta soon joined to welcome us. We told her about our stove problem which she solved by telling us we could come up to her kitchen and cook whenever we needed to. Camping was US$2 a day if you use the cabin’s kitchen and bathroom, but it’s otherwise free since El Cocuy is one of Colombia’s national parks. It was only 10:30am–one of Señora Marta’s kids told us–but we were already famished since we have been up since 4:30! Using our camping pots, we boiled water in the cabin’s kitchen and cooked the first cans of Korean tuna and white rice we brought with us.

After we ate, we took a quick walk around Laguna Pintada, only to retire back to our tent and sleep for three hours. For the rest of the afternoon, we hanged out in the cabin writing in my journal or reading our books. It wasn’t any warmer in there than in our tent, but it kept us from going stir-crazy because we were at least surrounded by other people. I still don’t know how those three kids survive day to day without the distraction of a television or a phone. Other hikers came in, but most of them only stopped for a home-cooked meal and then kept going. A group of four Germans actually stayed for the night on the bunk beds upstairs.

Unlike the cabins we stayed in in the Pyrenees, Sisuma was bare-bones. One long table was shared among the overnighters and the campers but because they paid more than we did, we basically had to wait until the kitchen was free to cook our meals. For the next two nights, we hanged out by the stairs since there were no more chairs in the dining room to sit on. Weirdly enough, Señora Marta had a washing machine but no heater. She herself slept in a small room in the other wing, while her three children slept in a tent in the living room. I liked hanging out with her in the kitchen while she prepared meals for the overnighters. We communicated just fine with my crooked Spanish, and a few times during our stay, she offered us this sweet hot drink made from a block of cane sugar.

What sticks in my head when I think of our trip to Colombia is how the people were so hospitable and helpful. From the bus agents in El Cocuy who tried to help us book our bus ticket backs to Bogotá to Señora Marta treating us like we were paying her to keep us warm and fed, the Colombians we met were always trying to make us feel like we belonged there. So many places we’ve been where we had to explain why the likes of us were in their country, but the Colombians just spoke to us in Spanish as if we’ve been living there for as long as they have. We never felt threatened, nor was there ever a time in the mountains we felt like we were lost and without care.

Hot Sauce Test

Ever since I started commuting to Connecticut for work, I started doing my grocery shopping at the Grand Central Market in Grand Central Terminal. I’m usually in and out, picking fresh produce for what I’m planning to cook for dinner, but one day I spent a leisurely time inside investigating the other specialty products the different purveyors sell. One thing that jumped at me was the number of hot sauces for sale. They caught my eye because they came in unique packaging and different shades of reds and oranges. With the help of Grand Central Market’s public relations firm, I was able to sample different hot sauces and compare them with what I already had at home.

Check these from left to right and buy your favorite just in time for the Super Bowl:

1. Ass Blaster hot sauce from Southwest Specialty Food
This came in the most amusing packaging. The bottle is inside a replica of the actual outhouse at the company’s Arizona headquarters. It reminded me of a coffin so tasting it actually made me nervous. The Ass Blaster is fierce on the front of your tongue and it stays there for a long time while you’re eating. I’m sure it would blast my aSs if I have plenty of it.

2. Chimay Salsa Habañero
I like Tabasco sauces because of their vinegary taste. This is a little smokier than the yellow kind I already have and love so even though it’s stingy, the spiciness is short-lived and very tolerable.

3. Kaiska bulls habañero in tequila sauce
This is very interesting because it’s chunky and comes with onions. Despite the name, it has no alcohol in it even though it comes from the agave azul plant, the base ingredient for tequila. I use Kaiska as a condiment because there’s a little bit of sweetness to it that’s great as a rice topper.

4. Mazi Piri Piri sauce
Most commonly known as sauce from Portugal, the chiles are actually used a lot in East African stews and is great as marinade. Piri piris, meaning “very yellow” in Gujarati (after the Portuguese colonies in India), look a lot like Thai chili peppers–small in size but very powerful in heat. It’s also very oily. I noticed that when setting up the photo below: its “legs” are longer on the plate. The packaging is quite a bitch to open because it’s sealed with wax. I had to use a bottle stopper to store it but if you use it as a marinade, you’d probably end up using all of it at once anyway.

5. Valentina hot sauce
I associate Valentina hot sauce with tacos especially here in East Harlem. It’s easily the condiment that’s always present on eat-in counters in taquerias. I once sent my friend Anna a bottle of this straight from Mexico City but didn’t pack it well enough that she basically received a glob of hot sauce on her doorstep. This is probably the most tolerable hot sauce for me in this batch because I’ve had enough of it.

6. Louisiana jalapeño hot sauce
This is also very tangy, though not as spiky as the Chimay. The heat goes in the back of your tongue which may seem nothing at first but begins to kick while you’re chewing your food. The good thing about Louisiana is that it never overpowers the food you’re eating.

7. Cholula chipotle sauce
Chipotle is a dried jalapeño pepper that’s also been smoked. It’s mostly used in Tex-Mex cuisines. Though that’s not at the top of my Mexican food list, I like using Cholula when I make Subanik, a Guatemalan stew I learned to make from Francis Ford Coppola’s resort, to mix with the ancho chiles.

Note that on the photo above, the third and fourth dollop have actually been switched. The chunkier and darker one is from Kaiska; the more orange is piri piri. You can buy #1, #4, #7 from Grand Central Market. My friend Corey brought back #2, #3 and #5 from his last business trip to Mexico, though #5 is available in bodegas in most neighborhoods with a large Mexican population. I bought #6 from the New Orleans School of Cooking.

Convivio

45 Tudor City Place off East 43rd Street
212/599.5045
$170 for two people, with drinks, without tip
♥ ♥ ♥

While in Colombia, we had a few unfortunate meals that involved pasta. Sure, Italy shares a lot of history with South America–the mass emigration of Italians was between 1876 to 1976 and brought a lot of them to countries like Argentina and then to Colombia–but the “Italian” meals we had didn’t quite involve a loving grandma in the kitchen. At the beach, vegetables were brought in from the nearest big city, about six hours away, so canned sauces were easier to come by. When there were fresh tomatoes, they were used with pasta that came in a box and because most of our meals weren’t cooked individually but in a big batch for the day’s guests, the concept of al dente was nonexistent.

Back in New York, I searched for that pasta lovingly massaged by big hands covered in flour and I found it at Convivio. We had no business spending any more money after our two-week trip, but I couldn’t resist Convivio’s $62 Sunday night prix fixe menu. Unlike most prix fixes in the city, their 4-course menu included a pasta and a dessert without skipping a separate main course. I opted to start with the yellow fin carpaccio drizzled in olive oil and sprinkled with finely chopped scallions and pistachios. I wanted to start light before my preferred pasta dish: saffron gnocchetti with crab and uni.

Did you just read that? Saffron gnocchetti with crab and sea urchin! I am not exaggerating here when I tell you that the combination made me roll my eyes back in ecstasy several times. Sea and earth have never smelled and tasted this heavenly together. The pasta was soft; full, yet springy at each bite. It was pasta at its best. At first, I thought the half portion would not be enough, but it was actually the right amount for such a rich dish. It left me wanting some more and yet I was completely satisfied. I think if I had a whole serving, I wouldn’t have cherished each spoonful as much as I did.

I could not say no to the duck breast. Duck is my new lamb. Done perfectly with Swiss chard alla Romana and spaghetti squash, it was the most beautiful wintery dish without being too heavy. Thankfully I was with someone who picked the lamb chops that tasted so carnivorously good with escarole and white beans. The last time I had lamb that tasted like it was just running an hour ago was at Per Se–that’s saying a lot for a most generous option on a prix fixe menu.

For dessert, it was a battle between the vanilla panna cotta with huckleberries and lemon sorbet or a trio of “freshly-spun” gelato (peach, mango, lemon the night of our visit). I am wont to order only one dessert and split it between me and my companions, if I order at all, but both were so irresistible that we shared them during our last few minutes in the restaurant.

If every homecoming meal was Convivio style, I would gladly suffer through a bad meal or two abroad just to remind me that sometimes you don’t have to go too far to enjoy a meal that’s full of heart–grandma or no grandma.

Day 1: Getting from Bogotá to El Cocuy, Colombia

Our connecting flight in Fort Lauderdale was delayed a couple of hours because of a snowstorm in the northeast, but we managed to get in Bogotá, Colombia before sunset. Señor Samuel was holding up a piece of paper with our names on it as soon as we exited the El Dorado Airport Customs. He was hired by my friend Evelyn’s aunt to pick us up from the airport and drive us around because we had a few errands to run before catching the 6:30pm bus to El Cocuy. He had planned our routes accordingly to put us back on schedule. Minus the part when he locked us all out of the car by leaving his keys in the ignition, he was a really good driver and guide. [Insert nervous laugh here.]

Our first stop was the bus terminal where Evelyn’s aunt arranged for our bus tickets to El Cocuy. Señor Samuel knew we still had errands to run but because we were pressed for time, he talked to the bus conductor to see where the next stop would be so we could meet the bus there instead of boarding from the main terminal. We tried to ignore that the conductor was holding a bottle of rum and only had one working eye; we wanted him to allow us to be picked up from another stop so we were in our best behavior when the two men reached an agreement and exchanged phone numbers.

Our next stop was at 104 Art Suites Hotel in Bogotá. We weren’t scheduled to check-in until four days later, but I had arranged to drop off our non-hiking luggage in the hotel for safekeeping until we were done with our trek. Then we stopped by the hiking store in the neighborhood. Because gas tanks are not allowed on any flights, I found the closest camping store to make sure they had the tank that would match our stoves. Everything seemed like a match online when I was researching in New York, but unfortunately, the thing that had to connect to the other thing wouldn’t, so we had to leave the store without any camping gas.

We didn’t have the time to try another store or buy a whole new expensive stove system we may never use again, so we decided to just go for it and try to survive with cold food for the next three days. The Dr. had no idea that he was participating in a very Filipino attitude of Bahala Na at the time. We just didn’t have the time to sulk about one mishap.

For the next thirty minutes, Señor Samuel zig-zagged through traffic to meet our bus at the next stop. He dropped us off at a mall so we can buy food to eat in the bus–Go Frisby!–and then walked us to the street where the bus was to stop. As soon as the clock hit 7:30pm, the bus pulled up with two empty seats in front. You’re the guys from the terminal? the driver asked us in Spanish. We said yes and he loaded our backpacks under the bus and led us to our seats. We paid Señor Samuel his fee and thanked him profusely for helping us with everything we had to do in the span of three hours before we boarded the bus, so we were a little touched when he suddenly showed up standing in our aisle: he quickly got on the bus just to make sure we were comfortable in our seats. He wanted to say good-bye one more time and he wanted to let us know that the driver will let us off in El Cocuy twelve hours later.

We left our New York City apartment at 2am that day and almost eighteen hours later, we were on our way to El Cocuy, Colombia, our home away from home for the next three days. The bus ride was uneventful but much more comfortable than our economy seats on the plane from the United States. It made a few stops for the driver to take a break and for the passengers to pee, and only one of them involved gun-toting camouflaged soldiers ordering all the men to get off for inspection. It was only when a rooster that had been sitting in a box on the seat in front of us crowed that we knew we had made it. The sun was starting to rise and it was time to get off.

We were disoriented when we got off the bus. We slept some, but no sleep on a bus can beat sleep on your firm mattress at home. There was some action in the center of town and it was obvious that people had just started their mornings. I opened my Lonely Planet Guide and picked out the editor’s favorite hostel in town. We walked about three blocks uphill and knocked at La Posada Del Molino. A guy let us in after we inquired for vacancy. He pointed to the stage and sound system set up outside the hostel and warned us that it gets loud at night because of the holiday festivities, but we were in no mood to find another hostel. We just wanted to put down our backpacks and catch up on real sleep.

Six hours later, we changed and sat in the courtyard to order some lunch. We were quite disappointed that there was no hot water in the shower as advertised, but we were in no position to complain as we would have to live without showering for the next three days anyway. We were famished and we easily devoured the vegetable soup and the beef plate that came with salad, corn and rice that was served to us by the kitchen staff. It was about sixty degrees, warmer than the temperature in New York City, but there was still a chill in the air. We have been in Colombia for less than 24 hours and we were already up 9,000 feet.

After lunch, we decided to walk around town and take care of the remaining logistics for our hike. We stopped by the Parque Nacional Natural (PNN) El Cocuy Headquarters on Calle 8 No 4-74 to check-in, finalize our route and pick-up a map. We also went to the offices of the two bus companies that run the Bogotá-El Cocuy route, Libertador and Concorde, to check if their buses were running on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The clerks in both offices couldn’t answer our question, so we put a deposit for a temporarily scheduled December 24th departure and planned to hike down the morning of.

With most of our tasks taken care off–there were no camping stores in El Cocuy so we were still sans stove–we walked around town to check out the scene. We visualized our hiking route using the diorama in the park. We paid our respects and visited the town church and we spent a few quiet minutes in the cemetery. We bought a kebab and an arepa-like patty filled with ham and cheese from two street vendors and we drank our first Colombian beer. Most of the locals were wearing the ubiquitous wool shawl; the men completed their looks with fedoras. Time was slower in El Cocuy and we were still trying to pace ourselves down and absorb our new surroundings.