"latin cuisine" news and stories

If you've moved on from the horror that has become the Food Network to cooking shows on PBS and the Discovery Channel, you might be familiar with Chef Daisy Martinez, who's been cooking on her show, Daisy Cooks!and has published a cookbook, Daisy Cooks! Latin Flavors that Will Rock Your World.

Daisy has put together a fabulous list of products for entertaining friends and family, something you'll want to start thinking about as summer entertaining is just around the corner. Take a peek at the list, which leans heavily toward Latin cuisine, and Latin-themed dinner parties!

"Drupe" is the botanical term for a fruit with an exocarp and fleshy mesocarp surrounding a hardened endocarp that protects a seed inside. In other words, a drupe is a stone fruit. Peaches, nectarines, plums.

But be not mistaken, not all fruits that have a hard center and a fleshy outside are drupes, and fruits that you'd never guess were drupes, in fact, are. I thought I was brilliant when I thought an avocado was a drupe because technically, an avocado is a fruit, but it's not a drupe. An avocado is a berry. But there are berries that are really drupes. Blackberries and raspberries, also known as bramblefruits, are aggregates of little drupelets.

A mango is a drupe. Duh. Of course it is.

Dice a couple of mangoes, which is a drupe, a couple of avocadoes, which is a berry, a couple of tomatoes (also a berry) and toss it with cut grilled shrimp, a squeeze of lime juice, minced garlic, salt, and pepper. If you are so inclined, add a splash of tequila. Serve with tortilla chips, and I guess if you think about it, you're eating one hell of a fruit cocktail!

It's no secret amongst my friends and family and even fellow blog-friends that I am not a fan of custard desserts. I've never liked pudding (i mean the creamy Bill Cosby kind, not what some countries call cakes), I never ever understood the fascination with creme brulee, and even desserts that sounded new and fancy to me like panna cotta and creme caramel were, well, still custards. I don't know what it is - I guess I just don't find the soft, slimy texture all that appealing. I like something I can bite into.

But I have to say that of all the custard-y desserts out there, the worst one in flan. I know that flan is supposed to be chilled after it is made, but I find that it's almost always too cold, too slimy, sometimes weirdly grainy, and whatever caramelization that has occurred on the top and/or bottom has congealed into a gummy layer of something reminiscent of the cartilage between oxtail bones. 

Maybe I'm just bitter that too many Mexican and Latin cuisine restaurants serve only flan for dessert. Is it that much harder to make pastel de tres leches?

If you live in LA (not "if you are from" LA because I don't know a single person "from" LA), or know anything about this odd city at all, then you know that LA's downtown shuts down into a veritable ghost-town after 5 PM. Or 6 PM if you're an attorney.

So it makes me wonder how restaurants like the Too Hot Tamales' pan-Latin restaurant, Ciudad, do for dinner. We've talked about Ciudad's sister restaurant in Santa Monica, Border Grill. I had lunch at Ciudad the other day for the first time, but I wasn't sure that I'd be willing to drive there for dinner. Having dinner at Ciudad means driving through ridiculous rush hour traffic along the I-10 freeway in the early evening.