My first step was to order some achiote paste, which from my reading was how many Central American countries often seasoned their dishes. It's smelly, playdough consistency, and dyes everything red. Your hands, plastic utensils, your counter, everything.
I chose to make Salbutes, which is very similar to Tostadas. One of the ingredients was Stew Chicken, so I ended up making that as well.
As usual I spent the entire morning cooking. While I was heating up some oil to fry the salbutes, I distracted myself with chopping up vegetables for the stew chicken, because if I didn't multitask I wasn't going to get it done. Next thing I know, smoke is billowing out of the oil pan. I move it off the heat but it continues to billow. The fire alarm goes off as my small apartment quickly fills up with smoke. I eventually can not longer breath, so I abandon my smoking oil and loud fire alarm to exit out the porch door with columns of smoke following me. It must have been a sight.
A few quick trips into the inferno to turn on some fans, and 15min later I was able to get back to work, this time heating the oil to a lower temperature.
A few reasons let me to take an Uber to Iain and Laura's, out gracious host for this particular dinner. (one of which was the banana daiquiri Iain was making.) I arrived at Iain's five past six to find everyone already there. A few minutes later I was lucky enough to witness the most hilarious preparation of a banana daiquiri ever.
It started with placing everything into a large cooking pot. Step two was to take a hand mixer and futilely attempt to blend the ice with it.
After failing, everything was then transferred to a food processor after struggling to unstick the hardened honey form the hand mixer. This was done in batches as the processor was too small to accommodate.
At this time we abandoned Iain to take a tour of the house, and when we got back we found him scooping the mess out with his hands because, and I quote, "we're all friends here."
I still had two servings.
A bit more cooking and dinner was served.
(Celebrated August 4th, 2018)
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