In the meantime, you can follow our great adventure from Europe to Mongolia a few ways!  We’ll be working on a project along the way called The Silk Road in Stereo, which you can read more about on our Kickstarter project fundraiser page (website coming soon).  You can also follow our general progress – border problems, flat tires, sweltering days in a small car with no AC, amazing views, and awesome FOOD – at our official Mongol Rally team website, theunConfinedNomads.com.  Oh, and we’ll also be posting updates to our regular twitter feed: @confinednomad.

Here is our announcement video for the Silk Road in Stereo.  Enjoy!

The Ambassades’ Comoros Curry is a mild, but flavorful Indian-style vegetable curry served with rice.  Comoros’ location in the Mozambique Channel meant it was an important stopping point for sea merchants making their way to and from India, and Indian influenced cuisine is prevalent there.  We ordered one curry between the three of us, and it was a nice side to our main dishes.

Although it wasn’t the reason we came, the West African food (again, Senegalese, we think) at Patisserie des Ambassades was well worth the trip.  The Nomad took the special, thiou boulet, a curry with codfish balls.  I took the lamb shank, which was falling off the bone, while Noquar opted for one of the French options, the omelette cremeuse, which was bursting with big shrimp and mussels.

The Patisserie itself was bustling early on a Sunday evening.  Plenty of tables were eating full meals, while a lot of folks were just hanging out drinking coffee.  Our server couldn’t have been friendlier or more helpful and the whole atmosphere was warm and welcoming.  We capped the evening with an excellent cup of coffee and some pastries.  Noquar and the Nomad went for cupcakes, which were solid if unspectacular, while I had the croissant aux amandes.  I’ve eaten a lot of croissants aux amandes, and this one was pretty special.  It probably contained a stick of butter on its own.  It was dense, rich, and moist and finally left me bursting at the seams as we headed back for the long, uncomfortable train ride home.

We picked a night, spent a couple hours trying to find an authentic Comorian recipe, found many of very dubious provenance, then switched to Googling in French, finally found someone’s Comorian grandmother’s nice-looking lamb stew recipe on a Comorian forum, and headed out to grab what we needed.  We live in a Bangladeshi neighborhood, so there’s no shortage of halal butchers.  We walked into the first one we saw.  As you might expect, the shelves were fully stocked with Goya products and corn tortillas, and a youngish Mexican kid stood in a bloody smock under an airbrushed painting of Mecca.

The recipe called for lamb collar.  The butcher wasn’t completely sure what we were looking for, so he led us back into the meat locker.  I don’t think either of us had ever found ourselves in a meat locker before.  There were carcasses on hooks.  It was pretty neat for a couple of suburban kids used to seeing their meat neatly packaged in plastic-wrapped styrofoam.  He showed us the neck muscle he thought we probably wanted.  We nodded.  He hacked a chunk off and brought it out to his band saw, where he skillfully sliced it into stew-sized chunks without once losing a finger.

The stew recipe we found demanded an awful lot of raisins and dried apricots be boiled in sugary water and vanilla, then strained to leave a fruity, vanilla-y syrup.  The vanilla is particularly characteristic of Comorian cuisine.  It’s by far their number one cash crop, so they apparently toss a bean or two into every dish.  After straining the fruit, you just toss it in with the meat, which has begun stewing with onions and (spices), and add a small amount of the syrup.  That’s really it.  Nothing super fancy.  Just let it cook as long as you can.  We got started a bit late, so it didn’t have a chance to stew for much more than an hour, leaving the meat a little tough.  The overall flavor was hard to beat though. We served it over rice, and the tartness and sweetness of the fruit and syrup made for a nice complement to the mutton and spice blend.  I’d certainly recommend giving it a try!

Here is the recipe, courtesy of Google Translate:

ingredients
500g of meat (preferably lamb or necklace)
250g dried apricots
200g raisins
2 oranges
2 lemons
2 vanilla beans
2 cinnamon sticks
2 teaspoons honey
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon curry
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 / 2 teaspoon nutmeg powder
4 onions sliced ​​previously
2 cloves garlic chopped
50gs almonds (toasted first)
50gs cashews (toasted first)
5 tablespoons olive oil
water and sugar

preparation

dried fruit
in a pan, put 4 parts water and 2 scoops of sugar (usually 1 liter of water and 250g or 500g of sugar according to personal tastes). cover fire. when the water begins to boil, add 1 cinnamon stick, 1 vanilla pod, lemon zest of 1 orange and 1 lemon. boil until reduced to 1 / 4 water. remove the cinnamon stick, vanilla and zest. add 1 teaspoon of honey and dried apricots and leave on the heat for 5 minutes. remove from heat, cool and reserve.

do exactly the same thing with raisins.

meat
in a large pot, add the onions, olive oil and a pinch of salt. bring to low heat and stirring with a wooden spoon (the onions should certainly not brown), they begin to melt, add meat and cover. Stir the meat every minute until it starts to brown. in a small bowl, combine the spices and cover with water edge of the bowl, stir a little with a spoon and add to meat. add a second bowl of water. check the salt, cover and reduce heat. simmer as long as possible without adding water (about 1h30).

Tip: leaving a very low heat, the meat will abound in its own juices in which she will finish leather allowing it to absorb much of the flavor of each spice.

when the meat is well cooked (it should reach a good smell of spice and bathe in its half thick juice), drained raisins and apricots and stir into meat and cashews and toasted almonds. mix without crushing the fruit, add 4 teaspoons of syrup (2 tablespoons syrup in which the grapes were prepared and 2 of the apricots). simmer another 10 minutes before removing from heat.
for your viewing pleasure, serve the meat on a platter and garnish the platter with lemon zest and orange.

has eaten with rice rainbow flavored with caraway seeds or a good rice flower ylang ylang

I tasted for the first time, this dish from my grandmother when I went to the Comoros for the first time in 2003 and I fell backwards so it tastes great! I hope you will love this recipe as much as me.

kiss

So we’d done Comoros; gotten it out of the way; on to bigger and better things.  But that stew wasn’t sitting right on my conscience.  I sat down to do the write-up, wrote a couple of sentences and pondered why we put such little effort into finding someplace when we’d been able to find other seemingly impossible countries.   Pondering led to searching, and searching led to the Patisserie des Ambassades in Harlem.  Part 2 to follow.

In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that we’ve been invited to speak on April 5, 2011 at the Adult Education Useless Lecture Series at Union Hall in Park Slope. The theme of the evening is “Cuisines of the World.” Hope you can join us for some beer, powerpoint, and lots of talk about our favorite topic!

And to tide you over, here are a few shots of things I ate on a trip to Vilnius, Lithuania last week.  Enjoy!

Beetroot soup, with obligatory sour cream.

Mystery meat!  I was told this is called šaltiena, and is made from gelatin and various meat parts.  I decided not to take the conversation any further.

Lithuanian garlic bread.  Fried bread stick with melted cheese on top.  A favorite.

Lithuanian potato-meat dumplings, cepelinai, with bacon cream sauce. This is essentially the national dish.  Heavy, but delicious.

This was a really nice touch at an Italian place we went to: basil and thyme plants right on the table for you to season your food with.  Brilliant!

More soup!  More sour cream!

The Mongol Rally is a grand adventure of 10,000 km of bad roads, worse roads, and no roads through cities, mountains, deserts, seas and steppe.  This coming July, a couple hundred teams will embark on this harebrained journey, taking whatever route they choose, in cars with engines of less than 1.2 litres (1200 cc).  They will each raise at least £1000 for charity, and upon arrival in Ulaan Batar, their cars will be donated.  And we’ll be one of them.

The Rally is the opposite of a guided tour.  Teams are left to their own devices to deal with Russian police asking for bribes, breakdowns in remote deserts, and days of waiting at border crossings.  It’s all about adventure!  And saving the world, of course!

But we need your help!  Donations to our charities, sponsorship of our journey, and general advice about the best and worst border crossings in Central Asia are much appreciated. Please visit the 2011 Mongol Rally (un)Confined Nomads team website to find out more about supporting our adventure.

Here’s a little about how you can help:

• We are raising funds for two amazing charities: The Christina Noble Childrens’ Foundation and the Southern NY chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.  Your donation to these important organizations goes a long way. Please visit our team website to make a donation today!
• We need sponsors!  This is not exactly going to be cheap.  We need a car, camping gear, tires, jerry cans, a satellite phone, gifts for small children, bribes for border guards, among many other things.  If you or your company would like to sponsor our journey, we’ll place your logo right along the side of the car, and prominently display it on our team website.  If you are trying to reach markets anywhere from London to Mongolia, this is a great advertising opportunity!
• The Confined Nomad crew will be bringing you updates of delicious, atrocious, and unfathomable things we eat along the way.  We’d love to hear suggestions of foodstuffs we should not miss, items you’d like to dare us to eat, and meals we should avoid at all costs.  We’ll do the food blogging on this site, so let us know if you have any particular requests or suggestions.

Follow us as we document our preparations and eventually our trip across the world’s largest land area next summer!  www.theunconfinednomads.com.

Oh, and watch our short announcement video:

On a Saturday night at 8pm, this fairly large space was already packed, and the wait was 30+ minutes.  No matter, there was ample space at the long bar for 3, and the bar tender was whipping up some magical looking mojitos, caipirhinhas, and margaritas.  Creative, homemade infusions, like jalapeno-infused tequila, made the place all the more appealing.  We were happy to wait.Since two of the Confined Nomad team had run 18 miles that day as part of their training for the ING NYC Marathon, they were HUNGRY.  Every dish that passed by as we sipped our fantastic cocktails had our mouths watering.  We had already picked out about 7 dishes to order from the take out menu before we even sat down at our table, which we were taken to just as the Yankees lost one of their last games of the season.

A heaping bag of chips along with the restaurant’s home made Colombian aji sauce (yummmmm….) was set down before us and finished in probably less than 2 minutes (another bag was requested and demolished again in record time).  We started with an empanada sampler, and choose two Colombian cornmeal empanadas: the steak and the domino (black bean and queso feta); and two Argentinean wheat empanadas: the guava (with guava puree and cream cheese) and bacalao.  All had a nice balance of unique flavors.  They also offer homemade Colombian arepas, quesadillas, and patacones (flattened fried green plantains) stuffed with a wide variety of delicious options, though after the empanadas and the meat stuffed bread pastry special we ordered, we felt it was time to move on to the main event.The three dishes we ordered were all above par.  The bandeja paisa (Colombian Platter) was a must — we had to compare to the bandeja campesina we had had at Tierras Colombianas II in Astoria.  The dish was more or less identical (grilled skirt steak, pork chicharron, arepa, rice & beans, fried egg, maduros, avocado) to what we had at the other restaurant, and the result was equally delicious.  This seems to be a Colombian standard that’s hard to go wrong with.  The red snapper was cooked just the way I like it: a whole big fish (head, bones, tail and all) lightly fried on the outside, moist and delicious on the inside, served with coconut rice, tostones, and cucumber cilantro salad.  The pernil, slow roasted spiced pork marinated in Colombian beer, was moist and melt-in-your-mouth tender.

Even after scarfing all that down, we still found the courage to order 3 desserts! The flan de coco (coconut flan) had been highly praised by my co-worker (who claims he doesn’t even like flan), the obleas (described on the menu as “a True Colombian street snack; dulce de leche between two thin wafers”) sounded too sweet to pass up, and I don’t even know what possessed us to get the enormous slice of tres leches (homemade sponge cake soaked in three kinds of milk).  We didn’t finish all this sitting at that table, but they were still good the next day.I think this is my new favorite restaurant in Park Slope.  Aside from the food, they’ve got great style.  The interior is festively and tastefully decorated.  Check out their sweet post card selection, including the one at the top of this post, and another below.  AND – after spending years researching and planning their restaurant, the owners won the first ever top prize in the Brooklyn Business Library’s business plan competition to help them get the place started!  They continue to do a great job.

We did finally call it quits with China, and moved on to Colombia this fall.  We went to two different places to sample this rich, heavy, and delicious South American cuisine: Tierras Colombianas II in Astoria, Queens (3301 Broadway at 33rd St) and Bogota Latin Bistro in Park Slope, Brooklyn (141 5th Ave at St. Johns Place).  We could have picked any number of others in Jackson Heights or Corona, or even the little place near our nabe, so if any readers have comments or suggestions of stand out Colombian joints around the city, comment!

We hit up Tierras Colombianas on a warm, sunny afternoon with empty, growling bellies, ready to be stuffed full of Colombia’s culinary delights.  The place was full of large Latino families enjoying large afternoon meals.  The helpful waiter offered some suggestions about what the best platos tipicos were, and we made our selections.

First to arrive was our beverage, refajo en jarra, described on the menu as, “Colombian speciality drink.  Served in a pitcher. 13 oz 1 Colombian soda and 2 beers.”  Not sure what the soda is, but it tastes a bit like herbal bubble gum, not unlike the mauby we had during our Barbados eating tour.  Combined with the ice cold beer, it was refreshing and pleasant.  We munched on a simple salad, ate warm bread, and sipped our refajo as we waited for our main dishes to arrive.

Mountains of food were presented a few minutes later.  The most varied and interesting dish hands down was the bandeja campesina (country plate), which was piled high with all kinds of goodness, including the traditional Colombian arepa, two kinds of meat, eggs, rice and beans, avacado… I’ll just let the photo and the description below speak for themselves.

A little less exciting, but still delicious was the pechuga de pollo asada (grilled season chicken cutlet).  It was moist and plentiful, served with platanos (plantains).

The lomo de credo (grilled seasoned pork loin) won words of praise from the table.  Again, simple, abundant, served with platanos. We enjoyed the meal, rolled out of there stuffed silly.  There were no complaints, but it also wasn’t mind-blowing.  Still if you are in the Astoria area and find yourself suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to consume large amounts of meat and carbs, you might think about stopping in.

We’ll tell you about Bogota Latin Bistro in the next post.  Stay tuned….

Tea

Shrimp balls

Beef balls  (seemingly flavored with candied orange rind?)

Pepper beef ribs (a highlight)

Shrimp filled mochi-like tubes

Mochi-like tubes filled with what seemed like pureed beef

Radish slabs

Fried noodles wrapped in mochi (almost like a mochi-wrapped funnel cake, phenomenal)

Also:

Pork filled phylo-pastry (also a highlight)

Fish balls

Tofu wrapped mushroom and pork

Fatty pork cartilage

Steamed shrimp dumplings

Fried shrimp rolls (served with Worcestershire sauce)

We must have arrived toward the tail end of the Sunday dim sum rush; 30 odd minutes into our meal, we were virtually the only people left, and the entire kitchen staff had assembled across the room for what appeared to be a pretty great meal of their own.  By that time, we were well on our way to being good and full anyway.  In the end, the whole thing cost $43.40 (including tip!) for 3 people.  We had more than enough left in our wallets and just enough space in our bellies to stroll around the corner for a couple of scoops of super-rich homemade ice cream from No. 1 Ice Cream Co.  That, friends, amounts to a fine Sunday afternoon.

Our latest effort led us to a very rare treat indeed: squirmy, slimy, and yummy things from the Qingdao region on the north-central coast.  That’s pronounced “Tsingtao” (and yes, it is where the beer comes from!). M&T Restaurant (44-09 Kissena Blvd, Flushing, Queens) has been generating buzz on the interwebz since it opened in mid-2009. Robert Sietsema, an early fan, gushed over the restaurant’s unique offerings in the Village Voice last year.  Yelpers and folks active on Chowhound have been singing its praises as well.  We figured we couldn’t skip this one.Qingdao cuisine is a variant of the Shandong cooking tradition (one of the “Four Great Traditions” of Chinese cuisine, or “Eight Great Traditions” depending on who you are talking to I guess).  The Qingdao style emphasizes seafood and light flavors.  They cook with little sauce, love to fry things, and prominently feature unusual sea creatures and vegetables.

We arrived at M&T unaware of how to begin our adventure in this region’s specialties.  We had read the reviews, gazed at the pictures of food on the walls outside and in, but when we were presented with a menu containing 6 long pages of generic sounding dishes, we were stumped.  So we did what one should do in this situation — ask the owner!M&T is a husband and wife effort (there may be a son involved too, but we didn’t see him).  The husband cooks, the wife runs around taking care of customers.  When we asked what she recommended, she was more than happy to help us out.  We took a risk and went with some of her more exotic suggestions.

Our first surprise came just after we finished ordering and had settled down with our Tsingtao beers in anticipation of what was to come.  A plate of some sliced brown jelly-like substance and a side of deep brown sauce with a pile of garlic inside appeared on our table.  We hadn’t ordered it, but sensing our adventurism, the owner encouraged us to give it a try.  The dish was pork skin aspic, which had been prepared in such a way that the gelatin in the pork skin created a jelly.  The sauce was a nice vinegar and garlic combination.  I struggled to get past the foreign texture (and keep the jelly slices from sliding out of my chopsticks, or slipping off my plate), but did enjoy the flavors.Next came what was probably the favorite of the table: squid with chives and red peppers.  Fresh, nicely spiced with fresh chilis, but not too much.  The flavorful bite size pieces of squid shone through but combined perfectly with the hint of spice.A large basket of fried pork was presented.  We’re not sure exactly what this is called, because we thought we had ordered the pork in shrimp sauce, but there was no sauce or any sign of shrimp.  In fact, it had a mild citrus flavor.  So maybe it wasn’t what we had ordered, but it was good.  A perfect pub food.My personal favorite, the shrimp with cabbage arrived shortly after.  The owner had suggested it, describing the dish as very special in Qingdao (actually she made sure almost everything we ate was very special, i.e. regional specialties).  Whole shrimp (head, tails and all) were cooked with cabbage in oil, garlic, and ginger.  The small flat green leaf in the dish sparked an enjoyable debate with the owner: she didn’t know what its name was in English, so I tasted it and proclaimed it to be cilantro.  She grabbed her electronic dictionary and looked up this new term as well as the British-English coriander, and concluded no, that wasn’t it.  In my mind there is no doubt that it’s in the “cilantro” family, but I have a feeling the Chinese must have much more granular terms for their leaves.Next came the jellyfish with cucumber.  I had been reluctant to order this one, but it turned out to be a hit.  The jellyfish pieces taste more like a vegetable than a sea creature.  Combined with the cucumber, it’s a fresh, crunchy, healthy mouthful.  Give it a try.The moment we had all been waiting for came shortly after: the sea cucumber flown in from Qingdao.  At $6 per (we ordered one each), Noquar was expecting something “like a piece of bin toro.”  Alas, it didn’t quite have the explosive, buttery flavor of fatty tuna.  The little critter was small, cooked in a brown sauce, served with white rice and a piece of bok choy.  It wasn’t bad, but wasn’t anything very exciting either.  We’re thinking it might be an acquired taste.  Or maybe just reminds people of home.The owner told us that earlier that day an ABC news crew had been there shooting a story on them.  It airs September 3 at 5pm.  So tune in, but before that hurry to M&T before the lines become too long!

The next great dish of the afternoon was the fresh tofu in spicy sauce.  Spicy does not begin to explain what this dish puts your mouth through.  I greedily took a big spoonful from the top of the mound of tofu where all the flavor seemed to be concentrated.  I was thoroughly confused by what I encountered.  Had they emptied an Earl Grey tea bag or two on top of our tofu?  Why was my mouth going numb?  We all had our own interpretation of what exactly seemed to have taken over our entire mouths (lavender? licorice?).  We grilled our poor waiter who had no idea how to explain it in English.  Either way, the flavor and the sensation it left were by no means unpleasant.  The excellent fish in spicy soup base was smothered with the same stuff and it lingered  inside my mouth until bed time as a warm reminder of this little subterranean hole in the wall in Flushing.

Post Script: After a little research, it turns out that the wild, mouth-numbing flavor in the tofu and soup comes from a combination of star anise (the licorice flavor) and Sichuan peppercorn (the numbing, earl grey like flavor).

Little Pepper/Xiao La Jiao is at 133-43 Roosevelt Ave, Flushing, Queens 11354.  HIGHLY recommended.