︎︎︎Peanut sauce, Arepas with cheese and barbecue
Recipes by Glenda Zapata, Carolina Chacón and Guillermina Mongan for the opening of "Neither accent nor skin is a border".
For our final open meeting, we decided to make "psychedelic Apthapi", several recipes from our own territories, a symbolic way of sharing knowledge and culinary memories to put them in common. This is why each of us prepared a dish, with the collaboration of those who attended. Each dish could in turn be combined and complemented with the rest according to the preferences of the diners.
Salsa de maní
(Peanut sauce)
This dish reminds me a lot of my grandmothers, of my family, as we used to eat it frequently, it is simple and a delicious vegetarian option for those who don't eat meat.
Ingredients
- 1 cup roasted peanuts
- Red or yellow chili powder (to taste)
- Water
- Salt
Place the peanuts in a container, cover with water and leave to soak for at least 15 minutes to soften. Then add salt and chilli pepper to taste and grind to form a homogeneous paste, adding water as required until the desired texture is reached.
This sauce is typical of Huancaína potatoes in Bolivia (in Peru the same dish exists but it is different). It consists of boiled potatoes on a bed of lettuce, which are covered with abundant peanut sauce, accompanied by pieces of fresh cheese, hard-boiled egg, tomato and black olives.
Glenda Zapata
Arepas con queso
(Arepas with cheese)
*Recipe for 70 arepas.
Arepas are round corn dough, stuffed or not, roasted, fried or baked. Many worlds and temporalities in one meal. Its origin is pre-Hispanic, corn as the staple food of the ancestral peoples of Abya Yala. Later, with the arrival of the Spaniards and with them the cows, cheese was added. It is known by the name of "arepa" mainly in Venezuela and Colombia, countries with a long migratory relationship that has intensified in recent years. This recipe is one of the many ways my parents have prepared arepas for as long as I can remember. As they roast, their smell reminds me of home.
Ingredients:
- 3 ½ kilos of corn flour
- 1 kilo approx. of grated cheese (Mozzarella and Latin cheese)
- Salt to taste
- 1000 gr. cow's butter
- lukewarm wáter
Preparation:
In a large bowl or on a wooden surface, add warm water to the flour slowly until all the flour is wet, but not too wet or too dry. Melt the butter in the water beforehand. Gradually add the salt and taste the dough. Knead for at least 1 hour, then put the dough in the fridge and knead again the next day for another 40 minutes until the dough is homogeneous. The sign that the dough is ready is that it does not stick to your hands. Then, between several people, we make balls so that, flattened, they give the final size and thickness of the arepa. Other people flatten the dough into a ball until it is about 12 cm in diameter, put the grated cheese in the centre and close it so that it does not come out while they are roasting, moulding it at the same time into the rounded and flattened shape of the arepa. We grill them over medium heat with a little butter until they are golden brown.
Carolina Chacón Bernal
Parrillada
(Barbecue)
We made the barbecue at home with loose cobblestones from the street in my city, La Plata. We used to go out by car to look for them. It was quite an adventure to go out at night in the car in search of those little pieces of stone that we kept in the boot. Today there are hardly any cobblestone streets left. They are not very sticky, they say, and people complain that they ruin their cars. Not everyone likes to shake it up, I liked it.
Once there were enough of them to make an H (in depth) with them, we abandoned our nightly outings, but a new stage began, that of seeing how, with them, the place for the barbecue where I would learn to grill was set up in the middle of the garden.
My old man was a fan of barbecues, he liked to do them at weekends, as a time to stop the pace of work, to meet friends, family, in a slow flow of time, almost always accompanied by red wine. He was the one who taught me when I was little to keep the fire burning, which is one of the most beautiful memories I have of him, of making little balls with the city newspaper (which I no longer read), of gathering twigs to wrap them around the paper (like a teepee), first the smallest ones, then the medium-sized ones.
The grill we made for the Otro(s)ures residence had a different materiality, but with the same beauty of the procedure. It was built by looking for materials in different places in Madrid. It's a more mobile version, here in Argentina you see it a lot in street stalls (on the roads, at the exit of concerts, football matches). It was made with a "200 litre tank" among many, in TXP's workshop, at the same time as some of us were learning the trade of welding. The tank and the enthusiasm made us enough to make two. With small pieces of wood that we collected from a container, a small bag of charcoal and a lot of smoke, we lit our two grills.
On them we made our "psychedelic Apthapi" in which arepas, roasted vegetables and butterfly choripanes coexisted in a great ritual full of sauces and shared words.
Ingredients:
- Beef, pork, chicken, chorizo or other products for the grill depending on what you want to eat and the number of diners.
- Vegetables cut in such a way that they do not fall through the slots of the grill. Brushed with oil, ground chilli, sweet paprika and lemon.
- Coarse salt
- Chimichurri
Preparation:
- Make small balls of paper, gather thin and medium-sized twigs, ideal if there are small trunks. Distribute them in such a way that they wrap around the paper (like a tepee), first the thinner ones and then the medium ones.
- Light the fire with more than one match on different sides of the mini teepee until you hear the crackling of the wood. Until it "catches fire" and then just put some mini logs and a few coals so that the embers start to glow.
- If for some reason the fire is low, there is always a piece of newspaper left over to act as a fan.
- Then you have to add charcoal and/or wood in quantity until you can make an evenly scattered ember on which to heat whatever you want to share as food.
- It is recommended to always keep a small piece of fire in a corner of the grill to obtain more embers.
- The distance between the ember and the grill should always be at a height of the ember where the heat is felt, measured with the hands (as when we put them on the cooker to warm them up). It is preferable to cook slowly.
- All the food is salted before being put on the fire.
- Once the embers are spread out, place the meat and vegetables on them. Bear in mind that some things cook faster than others. One option is to put what cooks slower first, or the other is to eat in batches.
- Everything should be placed on one side and on the other.
- Once the food has been removed from the grill, it can be spread with chimichurri, a typical Argentinean dressing that is very easy to make: fresh parsley leaves (chopped), oregano, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, spoonfuls of white vinegar, spoonfuls of oil, a teaspoon of chilli or ground chilli, salt and pepper to taste, all in a small jar.
Guillermina Mongan