Sunday, May 04, 2008

Spanish Class Project

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For our project in Spanish class we had to find a recipe from a Spanish-speaking country for something we'd never made before. The day we were assigned this, the Good Eating section of the Tribune highlighted Mexican immigrants and Mexican cooking. There was a picture of nopales, or prickly pear cactus, on the cover of the section so my partner and I decided we'd make something with cactus.
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Our group decided on ensalada de nopales (though I thought the stuffed fried nopales sounded good - but like they wouldn't hold up), and hoped it would be tasty.
Today we made it and nopales are well, kind of boring. The salad itself isn't assertive at all and other than a slight sour flavor, is pretty bland. I'm guessing either we did something wrong, though we followed the recipe, or we just didn't have good nopales or a good recipe.
Even though it was a simple and straightforward recipe, it still took us an hour to make the salad, so it's probably a good thing that we didn't choose something more complicated.
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But in case you want to make this boring recipe, here's the recipe, straight from our project:

Ingredientes
• 6 tazas de nopales picados
• 1 taza de cebollas verdes
• 1 taza de rábanos
• ½ taza de cilantro
• 4 cucharadas de aceite de oliva
• jugo de 2 limes
• ½ cucharadita orégano
• sal y pimienta
• 3 chiles de serrano

Utensilios
• Una tazón
• Unos cuchillos
• Una cuchara


Preparación
Primero, píca y limpia los nopales. Segundo, ponlos en agua hirviendo. Lava los vegetales y pícalos. Escurre los nopales cuando termina cocinarlo. Mezcla todos de los ingredientes en el tazón. Revuelve y tira la ensalada para una hora. Servir alado de carne, pescado, pollo, o tortillas.


The recipe we used, in English, is at Mexico Connect.

I still have two packages of nopales, and I know my mom likes them, so maybe she can figure out something to do with them.

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