I must tell you that my daughter and I have a bit of an obsession with these oatmeal and nut breakfast muffins. It’s never too early to teach kids to love good, healthy food, and to instill in them the love for cooking. With some assistance (with the oven part) my 7-year old was capable
Do you know what a sancocho is? If so, I know what you’re thinking: “if it’s vegan, then it isn’t sancocho”. After all the recipe in our blog is called a “seven meat-stew”. You can hardly get any more carnivorous than that, short of chasing and killing your own prey. I love sancocho, but I’m
I am not sure what changes as one grows older. Slowly our taste in foods change, and things that we would have considered “gross” or that we didn’t like as kids slowly become acceptable foods, enjoyable even. I have yet to meet a kid who doesn’t love pasta, or one who enjoys eggplants. Likewise, I
A few weeks back in a conversation with some fellow bloggers I mentioned that eventually I might run out of Dominican dishes to write about. Oops. Hit the panic button! Not really. I have four words for you: morir soñando ice cream. In 12 years doing this I have gone through about a little over a
We all have talents. Big talents, and minor ones. One of my minor talents is the ability to remember what foods my friends and relatives don’t like or are allergic to, once they have been my guests. As minor talents go, this comes in pretty handy if you don’t want to end your dinners with
Wanna hear what I did this weekend? I worked 16 hours a day for 3 days, I squeezed the work of a week in those hours. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, but trust me, I loved it. If you do what you love for a living, you’ll be on vacation all your
While I would love to think of myself as an intrepid investigative writer, travelling the Dominican countryside in search of hidden treasures of our culinary culture, the fact is that I am nowhere near that. We just travel aimlessly around the country from time to time, sampling the local foods and befriending perfect strangers on
For today I had a rich dish that included a cup of butter in its preparation. There was a change of plans. The night I was supposed to go in the kitchen to make this dish I woke up at 3AM with a dull pain in my stomach. Don’t worry, nothing more serious than an
About ten years ago I was in Denmark, where my husband hails from, spending the holiday season with his family. With a full schedule of eating and more eating ahead, I had the “brilliant” idea of treating everybody to an “authentic” traditional Dominican pre-Xmas Xmas meal on the 23rd, including a delicious pan de batata (sweet potato cake) for
I love soups. There is something comforting, soothing, heart-warming in a bowl of warm soup. Frankly, few foods have this effect on me. When I am sad, down, when life seems to be going in the wrong direction, I drown my sorrows in a bowl of soup. When I don’t feel well, when my body resents
Finger foods and dips go together like… like, er, two things that go together. Ahem. Today I am kinda blocked, so please bear with me. I have received many an email asking for recipes for sauces and dips that go with fried finger foods, you know, like yuca and batata fries, croquettes, etc. So, I
Locavores are those who are part of a global movement that proposes the consumption of locally-grown food. It’s a movement fueled by concerns about the environment and the nutritional quality of food that has travelled from afar, and subjected to diverse methods of preservation. As with anything, there are several sides to this argument. As with any
It was love at first sight with Mr. Queso de Hoja, the cheese vendor, whose, uh, balls of cheese were always the freshest… Oh, how I miss the street vendors. All vendors really, but in particular, and in no small part due to their multitude, the food vendors, of course. The travelling hair accessories guy
I mentioned this dish to somebody a long time ago, I finally got around to writing a recipe. Not a strange occurrence with me: I am the Queen of Procrastination. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about this delicious dish, half salad, half cold dish, and one of my go-to foods when I
Not long ago I got two emails from readers asking if I could give them ideas on how to cook brown rice. About a week later we hear the alarming news that government agencies were warning consumers in the US that rice might be contaminated with arsenic. Shortly thereafter another warning: brown rice was even
Quick, before the last strawberry is gone from the shelves! This delicious, and unusual dessert is made from the two crops for which the Constanza region is best known: strawberries and potatoes. The idea came after an email asking if I had any “gluten-free” recipes inspired me to make one that was entirely free of wheat.
If you’ve been around for a while you may have noticed that my versions of traditional recipes, like this one for locrio de pica-pica (rice and spicy sardines), are often modified to make them healthier, and sometimes some extra vegetables are included. There is a reason for that: I write the recipes the same way I
My husband and I spent our first years together, more than a decade and a half ago, wandering the country. For me sometimes revisiting places I had been to, for him learning what this land of ours has to offer: From pristine white sand beaches to the highest mountains in the region, from tropical deserts to
This past week one half of our family gathered at a local resort as we do almost every year. It is a time for relaxation, catching up, and on the practical side of things getting everybody together under the same roof, so to speak. We hope some day we’ll have a home large enough to
Am I ever glad that I have never called myself an expert on anything. Especially not an expert on Dominican food. Every time I learn something about food in general, or Dominican food in particular, I’m justly reminded that there is much to learn, and with things changing all the time one never finishes learning.
Lost in translation: It isn’t only an acclaimed movie that I could not bring myself to like. The language barrier is one of the biggest problems we have when writing articles, and even more so when developing and writing recipes. Not only do you have two people here who speak different variants of English, and
I’ll tell you about this scrumptious shrimp in coconut sauce in a second, but first a story. A few weeks back Aunt Ilana and I were invited by the Ministry of Culture to participate in an exchange with the public about traditional Dominican cooking. It turned out to be a fantastic experience. Some of the
A little while ago I posted the recipe for carne ripiada (shredded beef) and had an exchange with our friend Amity, who has spent a lot of time both in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. I mentioned that unlike Venezuela, where carne ripiada is known as carne mechada, in the Dominican Republic carne mechada was
It’s always summer in the Dominican Republic: Time for some refreshing paletas de coco (coconut popsicles) I know that it is not literally summer year-round, and that, much as we’d like to pretend they don’t, the laws of nature also apply to our two-thirds of an island, but for all practical purposes it’s always summer
Coming to Santo Domingo with limited or no Spanish can sometimes make living difficult and confusing, but never impossible. Since arriving, my family and I have found the people to be good-humored and patient when trying to interpret our gestures, pantomimes, mispronunciations and general abuse of the Spanish language.The family has been very happily, although
Once again our country has found itself in one of our cyclical financial quagmires, and the word “frugality” has been disinterred and put in everybody’s mouth. The truth is that for our ancestors this would have been a laughable thing. Most of them lived a frugal life, not because, as us, they have just noticed
Aunt Clara's Kitchen is a collection of traditional Dominican and Dominican-inspired recipes, home ideas, crafts, and the chronicles of Aunt Clara and Aunt Ilana's adventures.
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