Robin: This lovely dish from northern Mexico is delightfully different from most other soups with similar ingredients. It contains potatoes, but is not thick; it calls for milk, but is not a cream soup, there is cheese in it, but the cheese does not melt. In fact, a fresh, white queso panela or queso fresco…
Main Dishes
Grandpa Foley Special (Smoked Sausage Dinner)
Robin: My grandmother, Grace, was the only grandparent I ever knew. She was my maternal grandfather’s second wife and not a biological relative, but that didn’t make any difference to her or to me—she was my Grammy! Looong before I came into the picture, Grammy’s dad, Grandpa Foley, worked at a factory in their small…
Costa Rican Doctored Up Fresh Beans (Cubaces arreglados)
Robin: Beans, both fresh and dried, are enjoyed in lots of different preparations in many parts of Latin America. Each country or region tends to have its favorite. Costa Rica is no exception. Although dried black beans are the most widely used in that country, a variety of large, fresh, yellowish-brownish-red beans known as cubaces…
Mexican Meatball Soup (Caldo de albóndigas)
Robin: If there were a Nobel Prize for the dish most likely to take the chill out of the body and heal the wounds of the soul, this hearty Mexican soup would definitely be a finalist. Albóndigas (Spanish for meatballs, and made here with rice rather than bread crumbs) and vegetables come together in good-for-what-ails-you…
Meatballs in Chipotle Sauce (Albóndigas en salsa de chipotle)
Robin: Practically any spicy cooking sauce is delicious with meatballs, but chipotle sauce is probably the one most widely used in Mexico itself for cooking and serving the delicious, traditional albóndigas. Chipotle chiles are a smoked and dried version of a particular sort of jalapeño pepper, and they do tend to be quite spicy. This…
Mexican Meatballs (Albóndigas)
Robin: If your experience of “taco meat” so far has been pretty much limited to a seasoned ground beef mixture, you can be excused for thinking that Mexican food in general calls for a lot of ground meat. The truth is, this ingredient is not overly abundant in traditional Mexican cooking; in fact, it’s used…
Lentil Soup
Robin: I learned to make this in Mexico, but very similar lentil dishes can be found all over Latin America, since it was the Spanish and Portuguese who brought this valuable, nutritious legume to our part of the world. In Mexico, lentil soup would probably be served in small portions as the first course to…
Caribbean Beef Patties
Ed: Though similar in many ways to South American beef empanadas, both the filling and the dough of these delicious patties have their own distinctive Caribbean ingredients. Ginger and curry powder are must-haves in the meat hash, while turmeric gives a lovely yellow color to the dough. Beef patties, also called meat pies, are very…
Gala Turkey Salad
Robin: Most of us don’t roast a turkey more than a couple of times a year at the most, so when we do, it’s a big deal and it’s important to use every last shred of the bird to the best advantage. What to do with all those itty bitty pieces of white and dark…
Autumn Vegetable Chili
Robin: Ed and I moved back to my native Indiana in the spring of 2022, but before that we’d lived several years in places (South Florida and Costa Rica) that don’t really get an autumn, and I missed that season most of all. I did my best to enjoy pretending to cycle through the four…