Honeyed Words: La Bandera - A Main Dish Inspired by "In the Time of the Butterflies"

La Bandera - A Main Dish Inspired by "In the Time of the Butterflies" - Part 2 · 2 March 2007

I seem to keep making excuses for substitutions, for not having the “exact” authentic ingredient and whatnot. It was brought to my attention that people read blogs not necessarily for the factual content of the sites, but for the personal experiences that the author brings to the facts.

So, here’s goes, my personal experience with this segment, the first in a recurring series of the experience of food tied to the experience of reading.

I started off reading In the Time of the Butterflies with high hopes for the blog. It’s a beautiful story, as I mentioned in my review, and it has delicious sounding food that tied into the lives of the characters (what more could a literary food blogger ask for?!) I also (wrongly) thought that recreating Dominican food would be a piece of cake since I live in an area that hosts a large number of Latino markets. You know what they say about assuming . . .

You’ve already heard about the search for guanabana juice. My search for the goat meat specified in La Bandera met with similar results. You would think a store literally called “International Food Market” would have a better answer to “Hi, do you sell goat meat?” than “Huh?” You would be thinking wrong.

What didn’t even make it into the food archives is my humorous experience with Arroz con Leche. I found multiple recipes for this dish, the dessert that Mate cooked for Valentine’s Day, all of which sounded fairly simple. Here’s a few of the lines from the recipe I used:

Begin to cook for 1/2 hour . . . stir frequently.
Stir again, and cook for 10 minutes.
. . . and stir . . .
Continue cooking for about 15 minutes always stirring.
After 15 more minutes of cooking (continuously stirring) . . .

Notice a pattern? I didn’t, until I was about halfway into the second step, and my elbow had already gone numb. The Arroz con Leche actually turned out very tasty, but as I have no desire to recommend a recipe that left me wincing in pain for 24 hours, it got cut.

So, there you have it. High ideals of creating a catalogue of authentically inspired dishes recreated in authentically analyzed discourse all dashed. Perhaps it’s all for the best. I suppose that even the Mirabel sisters burned their rice on occasion, or went to the market and found they were out of goat meat. Here’s to realism, and to making do (and to the red beans, which were the tastiest part of this segment).

The remaining two parts of the four part La Bandera dish are the stew and rice. Once again, credits to The Punta Cana Information Guide for the inspiration for this recipe.

Stew Ingredients

Picture of a Pot Filled with Stew Ingredients

"Guisade": the stewed meat:

Marinade:

1 Tbsp oil
1 Tbsp lime juice
1 Tbsp finely chopped onion
1 tsp oregano
Salt & pepper

Stew:

1 lb of goat (or steweing beef), cut into cubes
1 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 roughly chopped onion
2 cloves of garlic
2 tomatoes roughly chopped
1 sweet peppers roughly chopped
2/3 cups beef stock
1 tsp coriander
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Combine all the ingredients in the marinade, then rub the marinade into the goat or beef cubes and refrigerate in a closed container or sealed bag overnight.

Add the vegetable oil and meat to a large pot and cook on high heat until the meat is browned on all sides.

Then add the onions, garlic, tomatoes and peppers and sauté for five minutes.

Add the beef stock and simmer for at least a few hours. My grandmother always allowed stew to simmer all day before eating it, so that’s what I did, and it turned out wonderfully tender.

Serve with rice and the other ingredients in La Bandera.

Picture of La Bandera Stew with Rice