Queezle_Sister's Reviews
12 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 12Sort by: Title 
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Latin Grilling: Recipes to Share, from Patagonian Asado to Yucatecan Barbecue and More
By Lourdes Castro
Ten Speed Press - 2011
A lovely flavor, albeit a bit too salty for me.
Chicken is marinated in an achiote (annato seeds)-cumin-orange juice-vinegar-oregano mixture. We substituted boneless thighs for breasts, and marinated for about 10 hours.
My husband did a superb job of wrapping with the banana leaves and grilling. Be sure to use a sweet onion (I used white onion - not so good).
Also avoid getting the excess salt on the chicken as you wrap it. Some bites were too salty.
I agree with Andrew - these would be spectacular for a party. We found the banana leaves and aciote (annato seeds) in a local hispanic market.
If you click through the pictures, you will see the packets pre-cooked and after cooking. So pretty!
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Avocado Salad : page 87
A simple salad that celebrates the avocado. Red onions are marinated in red wine vinegar, making a crunchy onion pickle. It is then mixed with sliced avocado, and a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. It was just delicious.
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Amazing flavor! The sweetness of the 1.5C brown sugar is cut by addition of a lot of garlic (7 cloves) and Worcestershire sauce. Instead of the skin-on, bone-in legs and breasts called for, we used skinless boneless thighs, and it still worked well.
In addition to the chicken, you also grill onions and tomatoes, and at the end you serve it with lime wedges.
Even our non-chicken-eater (16 yr old son) enjoyed this dish. An amazing first dish to prepare from this interesting cookbook. My DH prepared this dish - if you decide to try it, be sure to factor in the 30 minute (+) marinade.
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A rich cake, baked in a Bundt cake, has a texture similar to a pound cake. It had a bit of rum in the batter, as well as vanilla instant pudding. After baking but while still in the pan, a rum syrup is poured over the cake and allowed to soak in. Finally, a Lime icing is applied - note that this was varied by addition of a bit of rum!.
The resulting cake was super moist and super flavorful.
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A tad dry, but with a spicy sauce.
Chicken breast meat is laced onto skewers, and grilled. We followed the time exactly, and it was over-cooked and dry.
The sauce had oil, garlic, onion, a habenero chile, turmeric, salt, evaporated milk, walnuts, and lime. It was a beautiful yellow color - like yellow mustard. I found it really confusing because I expected to taste mustard, but it really just tasted spicy. It was way more sauce than we needed - like three times as much.
This is in a chapter on Peruvian foods, and we accompanied this with potatoes.
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Citrus- & Oregano-Marinated Split Chicken (Pollo Entero Adobado Con Jugo Citrico Y Oregano) : page 29
This is a big recipe - 2 whole chickens are spatchcocked, the breastbone removed, and marinated overnight. That marinade is magic - lime juice, orange juice, oregano, cilantro, and lots of garlic. It is then cooked on the charcoal grill, and served with lime wedges.
The resulting meat was very moist and flavorful! The head notes for the recipe say that though its placed in the chapter of mexican food, it could just as easily have been put into any of the chapters in this Latin American cook book.
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Cuban Grilled Pork : page 82
Moist and very flavorful!
We used this recipe to cook a pork loin roast on the charcoal grill. The meat is marinaded with a citrus-garlic mix. My husband procured a "flavor injector" (an enormous syringe with a fat needle with openings on its side). It was effective -- good marinade flavor through the meat.
One thing I love about this recipe is that it gives the cooks recipes for marinade to accommodate any amount of meat - from a whole pig to a tenderloin. And you know what, this is so tasty, you just might want to cook up an entire pig!
We accompanied this flavorful meat with succotash and an avocado salad.
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Fresh Radish and Cucumber Salad : page 36
Simple and surprisingly delicious! I am no fan of radishes, but here they are prepared by first sprinkling them with sugar and salt, and incubating for an hour. The chapter notes say this is intended to concentrate the flavor, but I say it also improved the flavor. The final salad includes these prepared radishes, sliced cucumbers, and a simple squeeze of lime juice.
Deceptively simple, this was a perfect side dish.
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Grilled Cuban Sandwich : page 90
This recipe specifies the meats, cheese, and bread for the oh-so-satisfying Cuban sandwich. My DH prepared this dish, using meats and cheese from our Italian market, and breads from our Hispanic market. They tasted great, but didn't seem like the Cuban Sandwiches I've had other places. I think we didn't pile on the toppings like they would in a restaurant.
The grilling and pressing was a bit challenging -- we put two hot cast iron pans to work - the big one on the bottom, and the smaller one, heated, pushing down on the top.
My biggest complaint, though, isn't the recipe. Its this book's index. This sandwich appears nowhere. You can only find it by leafing through the book.
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Grilled Ripe Plantains : page 85
A butter and brown sugar glaze, balanced by some vinegar, is spread over the plantains and then they are grilled. They are split down the middle, and grilled skin-side down. I've never had plantains prepared this way, and wow - they were delicious!
Note that this recipe also has a very handy table - it compares three ripeness stages of a plantain in terms of composition (how much starch or sugar), the best cooking method, and the best seasoning).
This was prepared by a friend for my cooking club - and it was a knockout. Really delicious.
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Some bacon, onion, spices, and black beans with white rice. This was a flavorful side dish that we really well with the other dishes from this chapter (pork, avocado salad, grilled plantains).
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Roasted Potatoes with Huancaina Sauce : page 119
Red skinned potatoes are doused with olive oil, salt, and pepper, wrapped in foil, and baked. The goal is to have them slightly charred on the bottom.
The sauce is composed of oil, garlic, onion, a serrano chili, turmeric, salt, evaporated milk, goat cheese, and a hard-boiled egg. It tasted delightful, though its color was so similar to mustard that it really confused me. The recipe makes about 3 times more sauce than we needed.
This was OK, but nothing special.
This recipe, and the accompanying chiken skewers, are featured in a chapter on Peruvian food. They are not the most interesting recipes in the chapter.
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