#QuarantineCooking: Honoring Family Recipes
The 2020 COVID-19 outbreak has arrived and taken our loved ones. Despite precautions through self-isolation, shelter-in-place, and quarantine living, we have lost too many family members. In dark times I turn inward and cry out of grief and fear, afraid of who I will lose next to this plague. For comfort and sanity, I secure myself in our South Philly row home kitchen.
The FaceTime calls home have become a necessary tool not only to catch up with my parents and sister, but to reminisce, to laugh, and discuss all things food. Cooking now is personal, and has a purpose: to connect with my family’s roots. As I mourn loved ones lost to this pandemic, I try to honor their time alive through family recipes.
This is one story about cooking through family food memories to get through unprecedented times.
I hope you’ll find an outlet of your own during this crisis. Above all, call home.
Bistec Encebollado plated with shredded lettuce and sliced tomato.
Photo by Audrey Wong, The Dining Traveler
Rice and beans are traditionally served alongside bistec.
Photo by Audrey Wong, The Dining Traveler
While everyone in the states has been elbow deep in sourdough, I’m enveloped by cookbooks, travel guides and Google searches on traditional Puerto Rican food searching for my next #quarantinecooking project. Among a piled high freezer, I recently found a plastic tub of leftover pork fat from my Three Kings Day pernil. Immediately I identify a dish that seems within reach: Bistec Encebollado or simply, steak and onions. I called my mom to confirm the recipe details, an excuse to also check in on my family’s health and well-being.
At El Bohio, a tiny, packed lechonera in The Bronx we’d frequent growing up, my bistec would arrive as thin slabs of steaks seared and cooked down in their own fatty oil with largely-cut rings of soft, translucent onions. A perfect upside-down-bowl of soft yellow rice and small stew of plump red beans were featured sides. Plus, two fried plantains so flat and crispy and golden they could be cracked in half. We’d spoon garlic-y mojo on top of everything.
At our tiny dining table plating the finished product, I felt overwhelmed with pride and gratitude in bringing comfort to my family near and far through our food.
“What is a memorable dish that someone cooked for you?”
Bistec Encebollado
You can find all these ingredients at any Hispanic-owned bodega or stalk the GOYA aisle in your local supermarket. Hopefully, some of these are already staples in your home pantries.
Ingredients [Serves 2]:
Medium-grain white rice
Small can red kidney beans
Sirloin steak
Oregano
Onions
Vegetable Oil
Garlic (minced)
GOYA Sazón (small packet)
GOYA Adobo all-purpose seasoning
White vinegar
Green plantains
Trim sirloin steak excess fat and pound out steaks thin. (think: cheese steak thin, a few centimetres) Slice onions into thin rings. In a large bowl, add in steaks and onions. Mix with vinegar, Goya Adobo, ground black pepper, and oregano. Marinade in the fridge for at least an hour (or overnight).
Rinse, drain, and clean rice, plantains, and beans (reserve bean juice). Slit plantains and peel off tough exterior skins, then cut into one inch thick cubes and set aside.
Cook rice about twenty minutes in oiled cast iron or Dutch oven over low to medium heat. The rice should puff up as it’s toasted. Once the rice has doubled in size, sprinkle in Sazón GOYA® to rice for color and flavor. Stir and fold often as you add in a cup or so of water. Let the rice cook till boiling, about twenty minutes. Once the water boils, lower heat to a simmer, stir and cook rice for another 5-10 minutes. Use a kitchen towel to cover the pot of rice - this will ensure the rice cooks evenly.
Cook canned beans in a smaller pot with salt, pepper over low temperature, about twenty minutes.
