Mofongo and Salami Stuffing Recipe
And why I'm taking a wee little break from social media...
Thank you to so many who contributed to #teamgetmamioutthehood. Mami was overwhelmed with the donations in an effort to make her life safer.
If you want to contribute to mami’s f’ing expensive ass burgers, Dollar Tree visits or the goal to get her out the fucking hood…
Above Image: The truck shielded most of the bullets from going through Mami’s living room. That big bush behind the truck’s hood is Mami’s door.
This morning I woke up and did my usual routine: made my coffee, checked my emails, checked my social media pages.
An email requesting a “time sensitive inquiry” to partner with Mark Bittman’s new company “making podcast-style courses (think Masterclass for audio!)".” With no mention of compensation. Social media tags of people bringing my attention to recipes and food that aren’t even mine. Each one of these requests for unpaid labor making me more and more bitter. Why was I treating this like any other day? When in fact, it was not. We had gone through another drive-by.
Another and another. Twice a year. Like clockwork. While some of 2020s nooks and crannies remind my mom of the 1960s, I’m being reminded of the 1990s all over again. The era in which crack tumbled into urban areas at the speed of light and rained down on my family like a sinister version of Winnie the Pooh’s little black rain-cloud. The Los Angeles Riots. Rodney King. Drugs and violence wiping out each family member as if they were on a checklist. With each drive-by that happens in 2018, 2019, 2020…another wound or memory or trauma is reopened and relived. You have to start all over again.
You can’t do shit about it except put as many miles in between you and it as you can. And you did. I did. For 15-years I pretended that place never existed. Although it was clear once I was amongst the “others” that pieces of me were definitely bi-products of my environment. The pieces of barrio shrapnel that ran throughout my body were constant reminders whenever I’d lose my temper and step to the edge of my porch with my head cocked back, brows furrowed and my arms spread wide in full wingspan what-chu-wanna-do fight mode when Girl Scouts would bring their wagons full of cookies towards my house in the suburbs amongst the Million dollar mansions.
I was too Puerto Rican for America and too American for Puerto Rico. Now I was also, too hard for the burbs and too soft for the barrio. Fuck.
All I can do for Mami is try to get her out. I’m working on it. It’s hard. Duh. But, you’d think that she’d be on board. She’s reluctant. Perhaps the idea of packing up two bedrooms and a garage full of 40-years worth of memories (crap) is overwhelming to someone in their 60s. I’m not a person that’s attached to…things. Maybe that comes with having experienced a fire when I was 17 that destroyed everything I owned and walking away with only the clothes on my back? I don’t know. Maybe that comes with having to compartmentalize the “what’s up girl,” the bullets, the rouge pit bulls (and chihuahua packs, those fuckers are mean), speeding cars and drug needles that come at you in the one block radius from your house to the bus stop. Every day of your life. Sob story? Nope. Just my reality.
In the meantime, my new assistant will be posting photos and snarky interactions. He’s been encouraged to carry on in my tone of voice as much possible. He doesn’t have a name, he hates people and loves cats. I’m in love.
I’m working and manifesting enough money to buy my mom a house in Alameda, Ca.
I’m working and manifesting enough money to buy my mom a house in Alameda, Ca.
I’m working and manifesting enough money to buy my mom a house in Alameda, Ca.
I’m working and manifesting enough money to buy my mom a house in Alameda, Ca.
EYE BLEACH! I LOVE THANKSGIVING!
My Mofongo Dressing with Salami—a Touch from My Grandma—Brings a Little Bit of Puerto Rico to Northern California for Thanksgiving
I'm going to assume that there are some people who don't think Thanksgiving is anything in Puerto Rico. You'd be right. And wrong. Thanksgiving is an American holiday, but as Puerto Ricans are American citizens, Thanksgiving is one of the many things we've adopted and adapted. Puerto Rico has one of the longest Christmas seasons in the world. There's more singing, drinking and eating than you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams. Thanksgiving is merely an extension of the Christmas holiday season. Most of the dishes on the holiday table are the same for both holidays: arroz con gandules (rice and pigeon peas), coquito (coconut eggnog), tembleque (a coconut dessert). Except for the pavochon—the word is a combination of pavo (turkey) and lechón (slow-roasted pork) and means turkey prepared in the style of roasted pork with oregano and garlic—and the mofongo (stuffing). Those are specifically reserved for Thanksgiving.
Mofongo—a dish of mashed fried plantains—first appeared in a cookbook titled El Cocinero Puertorriqueño, Puerto Rico's first cookbook, in 1859. Then some clever person decided to take one of Puerto Rico's iconic dishes and shove it up a turkey tuchus. This idea had to have been a little more recent, because the recipe for mofongo stuffing (or even a mention of it) doesn't seem to appear in any cookbooks until Yvonne Ortiz's A Taste of Puerto Rico in 1994.
Growing up in Northern California, my family's Thanksgiving table was covered with all of the traditional American fixings: a gargantuan supermarket turkey, ploppy jellied cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, buttered rolls, and sweet potatoes that came in a purple can. Those sweet potatoes were subsequently topped with marshmallows, roasted and found their way further and further to the back of the buffet, untouched. In retrospect, I'm feeling sad for those sweet potatoes. I digress. Mofongo stuffing is not something that ever made an appearance on my nana's or my mother's Thanksgiving table.
My mother makes her mother's cornbread stuffing—a combination of Jiffy corn muffin mix and hefty chunks of Bay Area-born Gallo salami. Both my mother and my grandmother exclusively used the salami that came in a log, which Gallo calls "the chub"—it's an Italian dry salami that comes in a cylindrical shape, wrapped in paper and sealed at both ends with metal crimps. Using the salami chub is a little anomaly that my nana picked up from her Italian neighbor back in the 1950s. To my grandmother, newly arrived from Puerto Rico, a sausage was a sausage was a sausage. Vintage Puerto Ricans love to add pork flavoring to just about everything. In a flash, she had changed the landscape of the recipes of her motherland out of necessity, making it Californian-Puerto Rican.
The Cali-Rican approach lives on in my kitchen today. Standing over the stove, taking in the huge waft of salami perfume when it hits the hot oil in the pan, I combine the Gallo chub salami with my own take on mofongo dressing. I created the recipe above for Friendsgiving, a gathering of friends and chosen family. The dish is one way to introduce friends to Puerto Rican culture. And since not everyone is on board with the stuffing inside of poultry, mofongo dressing is a sure way to please everyone—combining the nostalgia of family and the sabor of birthright.
Mofongo Dressing with Salami
2 cups Canola oil, for frying
6 medium green plantains, peeled and sliced into 1-inch medallions
¼ cup olive oil
1 cup diced hard salami
1/2 cup sofrito
¼ teaspoon ground pepper
1 pinch Pinch of salt
1 cup Water as needed
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
Over medium-high heat, pour canola oil into a large saucepan to a depth of 1/2 inch. Fry plantain slices in batches until tender, 5 to 7 minutes per batch; remove to a paper-towel-lined sheet pan.
Over medium-high heat, heat olive oil in a large cast-iron skillet. Add salami and fry until crispy, golden and softened, 4 to 6 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside, keeping the salami and the oil in the pan.
Combine the fried plantains, sofrito, pepper and salt in a large bowl and mash with a potato masher until combined but still chunky, adding water (or broth) just as needed soften the mixture - it should not be liquidy. (The amount of water needed will vary depending on how ripe the plaintains are--firmer, greener plaintains will need more water.) Fold in the salami and the oil from the skillet until thoroughly combined. Add more water, if needed, until the mixture is moist but still somewhat stiff. Transfer the mixture to the skillet; bake until the top is just starting to brown, 12 to 15 minutes.
Serve.
Question re: Platano Slicing: I was generally taught to do diagonal slices, for both tostones and maduros. Are these diagonal?