[Aunt Clara]

I am in Denmark now, spending the holiday season with my husband's family. I decided to treat them to an authentic traditional Dominican pre-Xmas Xmas meal. We are not even in the capital, where finding authentic ingredients has a slightly better chance than a snowball in hell, instead we are in a small tourist town away from any major city. I was still able to procure yuca, platanos and with considerable diligence, a raw leg of ham.

Whatever ingredients I couldn't find I adapted, and substituted. No whole-grain bulgur? Use peeled bulgur and add some flour. No batatas? Use sweet potatoes and some corn starch (they have less starch than batatas). No yautia or ñame? I made pasteles en hoja with yuca and platanos and added a grated potato for more starch. Since finding plantain leaves would be impossible I wrapped them in parchment paper.

The most difficult part proved to be guandules. Nobody had ever heard of them. So, I found some dry beans that looked a bit like guandules and decided to try them. Left in water overnight it only took 15 mins. for them to be soft. The taste is similar to the "ashy", nutty taste of guandules. It turned out not a lot unlike the real thing. The beans in question are Mung Beans, a name that Aunt Ilana found for me as the bag had a Danish name that my husband wasn't able to translate. Find more here: Mung bean - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This was the result:









Houses in Denmark are illuminated for coziness, not photography, so the photos are, well, not perfect.

[Rafarroyos]

Very clever! I recently moved to San Francisco and I haven't seen guandules in our stores here. The other day, however, I went to an Indian grocery store and was surprised to see that they had dried "pigeon peas" (in addition to dried mung beans, by the way). So I'm going to try using these pigeon peas the next time I make arroz con pollo.

Now, tía, what would you do if you couldn't find auyama? Before moving to San Francisco I lived in Boston, and I have to confess that I have never seen anything called "gem squash" in either city. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough. Anyway, would you recommend substituting acorn squash?

Some websites say that gem squash is sometimes called acorn squash, but this seems strange to me, since I know acorn squash is a winter squash and I think gem squash is a summer squash.