Sampling Salvadoran Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sampling Salvadoran Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One day when I driving my daughter Florence home her charter Waldorf School in Pacific Grove, California, I noticed that the Migeuleño Restaurant on Broadway Avenue (doubly listed as Obama Way) had a Salvadoran Restaurant on it.

I had always thought Migueleño was a Mexican Restaurant.  I did some research on the food and saw that the cuisine is very different from Mexican food.

I called my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 100, 000) and asked if I could do a review of Migueleño with its new-to-Monterey cuisine.  The editor said this sounded like a fun article and assigned me to do the following article.   I took Florence along with me and Laurent to Migueleño:

Hold the Fire: Papusas and Fried Yucca are just two Salvadoran Treats at Migueleño

The map of El Salvador pointed on the outside wall of the Migueleño Restaurant on Broadway Avenue in Seaside, California made visions of tamales decked out in banana leaves swim before my eyes.

The fact that most people are unfamiliar with Salvadoran cuisine probably explains why Migueleño serves Mexican and Salvadoran food along with 11 different seafood entrées in order to keep the business going for 18 years.

I picked up some new vocabulary words as I ordered two Salvadoran meals – papusas, chicken tamales, fried yucca with chicharron, and fried plantains.

The pudgy papusa was four inches wide.  This round, tortilla-like confection was stuffed with a mixture of ground beef, corn, and cheese much like a grilled cheese sandwich, except much tastier.

The papusa came with its own mild, cheese dipping sauce.

The chicken tamale was wider and much lighter than its typical Mexican cousin.  A generous dose of rendered lard no doubt accounts for this lightness just like it does in the best flaky piecrusts.  What really struck me was how moist it was, including the chicken breast meat.

Most tamales are a little dry in restaurants, because they are frozen in large quantities and make them steamed to order.

This sweet-tasting papusa almost had a corn-pudding consistency.   Migueleño serves nice side dishes such as vinegary, cabbage and carrot coleslaw that has a hint of chili bit to it.

Migueleño’s refried bean, which do not fill half the plate, taste of pork, which I like.  I suspect the cooks used some pork bits along with good rendered lard in these beans.  I have eaten refried beans without getting fat for years.

Since my dining companions had opted for Mexican food, I started my second Salvadoran dish of fried yucca and chicharron.  I must admit that I had no idea of what yucca was when I bit into my first deep-fried morsel.

It reminded me of very light, slightly sour potatoes.  I squirted some lemon juice on the rest of the yucca.  It tasted even better that way along with some salt.

On top of the yucca pieces was a mound of chicharrom, the savory remains of deep-fried pork rinds.  The rich chicharron-fried yucca combination was balanced out by another generous helping of tangy coleslaw.

I wonder if yucca and pork is the equivalent of fish ‘n’ chips in El Salvador.  It certainly merits undivided attention – eat it on your second trip to Migueleño.

The beverage list offered a few items to discover as well.  Negra Modelo from El Salvador was advertised, but my husband Laurent tried another amber beer brewed in El Salvador called Regeia.

Neither of us expected to see a 32-ounce bottle on the table.  Described as smooth lager on the label, Regeia reminded me of a thirst-quenching Budweiser.  It tasted great with the yucca and chicharron.

I tried fried plantains for dessert along with a generous helping of sour cream.  The brown exteriors revealed yellow, tangy interiors tasting like green, verging on yellow bananas.

Palm oil must have given the plantains the fried-in-batter taste that felt even more decadent when I dipped them in sour cream.

Florence said the carne asada she ordered tasted too much of lime, but I liked that taste with the charred steak.  Migueleño marinates carne asada in lime juice with salt and pepper before grilling it, so the citrus flavor melds with the charred meat.

American families and Salvadorans filled the restaurant’s tables and bar.  Each glass-topped table had a vase with fresh flowers in it and under the glass was a lace-trimmed cloth touting “Best Beach in Central America – El Cuco, located on the Pacific Ocean.”

El Salvador’s third largest city, San Miguel, is home to this beach.  The residents call themselves “Migueleños.”

It was fun to try tropical cuisine without having to get on a plane.

End of Article

Migueleño’s in Seaside, California is still open.  It is on Broadway Avenue (Obama Way).  The street has been torn up for two years, but it is worth the wandering around to get to the restaurant.

There is another Salvadoran Restaurant on Del Monte Avenue in Marina, California called El Salavadoreño Pupuseria.  I have not been there yet, but obviously Salvadoran food is gaining in popularity.

Products for making Salvadoran food at home can be purchased at El Rancho in Marina, Mi Tierra in Seaside, and Mi Pueblo in Seaside.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Sampling Baan Thai Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sampling Baan Thai Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I loved Seaside, California, my family’s first neighborhood, when we moved to the West Coast for its variety of ethnic restaurants.

I wanted my daughter Florence to try Thai food, so we went to Baan Thai when it was just opening up in 2000.  (It is still open 17 years later.)

On our first visit there, the walls were painted white and the glass over the pale green tablecloths gave off a slight glare, because there were no curtains on the waist-to-ceiling high windows that covered two walls of the restaurant.

I chose a corner table and studied the only decoration in the restaurant – an 8 ½” by 11” photo of what I thought was a seated Buddha or a person.  A tall, tapering crown that resembled Thai temple towers topped off this personage.

When the waitress came to take my order, I asked her, “Is that a man or Buddha in that picture?”

“Both,” she answered.

“He is our king.”

That was my first inkling that India had influenced Thai culture as well as that of China.

I gave her my order for panang curry not quite knowing what that was.  A series of five peppers at the bottom of the menu served as a spiciness (hot) guide for your order.

I chose the three-pepper variety.  The panang curry served with ridged carrots, corn, bits of chicken, and green pepper filled half of my plate.

A mound of white rice sat next to it with a twisted orange slice next to that for decoration.

The taste was citrus and hot.  It left a pleasant tingling taste in my mouth, but I was too busy at the time as a salesman selling Tibetan art, Russian icons, Ghandaran Buddhas, Thai and Vietnamese Buddhas, Indian Ganeshas, and Persian carpets in Carmel to delve into the ingredients in this delicious dish.

What I did do one night when I should have been researching another story was to look Thailand up on my computer’s encyclopedia.  I discovered that the Thai practice Theravada Buddhism, derisively called Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) by the Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) Buddhists of China and Japan.

In a nutshell, Theravada Buddhists seek Enlightenment for themselves whereas Mahayana Buddhists endeavor to become a Bhodsattva, one who can achieve Enlightenment, but who puts it off to help others attain Enlightenment.

Young Thai men I read in this article usually spend some time as a monk in the same way that young men in many countries spend some time doing military service.

I wondered if this was why the servers at Baan Thai seemed so unflappable even when it was busy.  Then, I went back to my other story and let my interest in Thailand hibernate.

I went back to Baan Thai and decided it was time to try something new when the waiter saw me and said, “Panang curry?”

I changed my order several times to yellow, green, and red curries.  They were all good and contained peppery, anise-flavored Asian basil.

I progressed up the chile chart for spicy additions to the dishes I ordered.  Sugary Thai iced tea made with condensed milk put out some of the wildfire situations I willingly undertook.

I read the cookbook Cracking the Coconut by Su-Mei Yu, who had “attended an exclusive boarding school founded by the Royal Court of Thailand,” according to the book’s cover. 

I made panang curry once at home to know how to make it, but preferred eating it in restaurants to support ethnic communities, especially my neighborhood.

In 2002, I took Florence out to Baan Thai for an early dinner after I had picked her up from her charter Waldorf School in Pacific Grove, California.  Baan Thai had prospered and had received excellent reviews in the local newspapers.

Landscape paintings were lined up along the windowless walls.  Lace curtains kept the sunlight’s glare at bay and big, color pictures of the King and his consort decorated the dining room.  Smaller pictures of dancers in tall, conical hats, boats in Bangkok, and elephant tapestries decorated the walls.

Behind my daughter was a picture of the one-tusked elephant God from India called Ganesha.  At the Asian Art Gallery, I sold tons of these little, bronze statues by saying, “Ganesha is the remover of obstacles.”

Everyone in business knows these are people who mess up mailroom procedures, invoicing, and inventory control in companies.  I think everyone in Silicon Valley has one of these statues by now.

Florence asked me, “How do you remove obstacles?”

I told her the kiddie version of Ganesha, “Ganesha gave up one of his tusks, so humans could read.  Basically, if you read well and know math very well, you will have a good life.  Lawyers have very big vocabularies.”

End of Article

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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Happy Dragon Meal by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Happy Dragon Meal by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The editors of the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) all wanted me to review the local Chinese-American restaurant Happy Dragon. 

I like the Chinese-American dish Beef-Broccoli with rice.  It is a perfect protein-carbohydrate-vegetable dish that made the Chinese immigrants in the US strong enough to lay metal railroad track and wood ties that connected the east and west coasts of the United States.  (Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden discusses how the invention of refrigerated rail cars made Salinas rich on shipping produce to the east coast.)

I told all of this information to Florence before we went to Happy Dragon, because many people made fun of Chinese-American cuisine for not being authentic.  (“Authentic” meaning the food of the rich people in the homeland.  Jook, also known as congee, is not really a desired dish by rich Chinese from abroad in the US.)

“I’m happy Chinese-Americans eat beef, chicken, and pork to their heart’s content.  Chinese-Americans are actually taller than I am now.  They know about the importance of protein and calcium,” I said to Florence.

With my food lecture out of the way, Laurent, Florence, and I set out for Happy Dragon full of fun expectations.  The article I wrote for the Monterey County Weekly around 2000 follows:

Blowin’ Smoke

For six years, Happy Dragon’s owner operated of a much smaller building nearby.  All the neighborhood families who kept coming back to the restaurant convinced the owner to move to more spacious quarters on Fremont Avenue.

The owner has made maximum use of his space.  Two big, red pillars on either side of the counter greet you when walk into the wide reception area.  Large scenes of Chinese landscapes with mountains, clouds, and little villages typical of Chinese landscape painting decorate the walls.

Best of all there are several big, round tables with Lazy Susan turntables in the middle of them designed for serving Chines family-style meals.

So, that was what I decided to do.

“We’re going to eat like a Chinese family,” I told my family as we looked over our menus.

“That means we order a soup, a poultry or meat dish, a fish or seafood dish, a vegetable dish, and rice to share all at once,” I announced, proud of the knowledge I had gleaned from Nina Simonds Classic Chinese Cuisine.

Heeding my proclamation, we ordered egg-rolls, crab rangoons, egg-flower soup, Mongolian beef, shrimp in lobster sauce, and eggplant in Yu Shiang Sauce.  My efforts were undermined, however, when our waiter began to bring us our dishes in courses, starting with the egg-flower soup.  My family was saved from my whims this time.

Happy Dragon’s egg-flower soup tastes of ginger, chicken, and fresh corn.  Crunchy water chestnuts added some texture to the velvety sheets of egg that had been stirred in at the end of cooking.

The soup gets its thick consistency from the addition of cornstarch.  My only complaint was that it arrived warm instead of hot.  I learned later that the restaurant was short-handed the night we were there, which might explain the temperature problem.

Our egg rolls had a yummy, flaky wonton covering and al dente cabbage filling.  Egg rolls dipped in plum sauce with a good dab of mustard for heat on them is one of my favorite dishes in the world.

The crab rangoons resemble four-pointed stars made of deep-fried wontons with a crab filling in the middle.  Laurent liked dipping the crisp rangoons in plum sauce – a Chinese version of chips and dip.  The crab filling seemed buttery to me, but Laurent loved it.

My Chinese family-style dinner plans went further out the window as my Florence claimed the Mongolian Beef for herself.  This dish is typical of the Mandarin cuisine that is made in northern China.

The Mongols introduced barbecuing to Chinese cuisine in this dish that features sweetened soy sauce marinade flavored with ginger and sesame.  Happy Dragon uses fresh scallions to counter the rich flavor of the marinade.  Mongolian Beef is not my favorite dish, but I liked the restaurant’s spicy version.

Happy Dragon bills itself as a specialist in Mandarin and Sichuanese cuisine.  Northern China where Mandarin cuisine comes from experiences extremes in climate brought on by Siberian winds during winter and heat blasts during the summer.

Western Sichuan’s hot, humid climate yields foods like chili peppers and eggplants in abundance.  Sichuan is famous for the eggplants in Yu Shiang Sauce that I ordered.

This dish is usually prepared with ground pork or beef.  I thought this vegetarian dish would be light, but the minute I tasted the sweetly, tart sauce I knew stir-fried vegetables can pack in the calories, too.

Happy Dragon’s version of this dish is mild, so I added some of the chili paste that was on the table to give it some kick.  The traditional recipe calls for a generous dose of chili paste – hot, spicy food is a trademark of Sichuanese cuisine.

Laurent ordered shrimp in lobster sauce.  This dish typifies the haute cuisine of Southern Chinese cooking.  The shrimp were sweet and the sauce, full of peas, corn, green peppers, carrots, and many crunchy water chestnuts.  This sauce was so rich that Laurent could not finish it.  (Personally, I think the crab rangoons dunked in plum sauce had something to do with this.)

There are some other insider techniques and ingredients that made this shrimp in lobster sauce such a great dish.  The shrimp are coated in egg white and refrigerated before they are stir-fried.

This gives them the beautiful sheen I always associate with Chinese food.  Also, ground pork usually gets stir-fried into the sauce, which is thickened with egg.  Often the pork flavor is the taste you just cannot place when you eat Chinese soups.

Happy Dragon was packed with families on a Saturday night having fun just like we were.

End of Article

Cookbook Recommendations:

-Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds

-Complete Chinese Cookbook by Ken Hom

Hom has a nice discussion of China’s different culinary regions in his book.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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Trying First Korean Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Trying First Korean Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

In the year 2000, I began working as a restaurant critic for the Monterey County Weekly newspaper (Circulation: 200,000), which serves an area that is the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined.  (I have always been able to drive Big Sur.)

One of the reasons I was hired was that I have an excellent knowledge of foreign cuisines and cultures, lived overseas as an exchange student with the Youth for Understanding program, and graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in East Asian Studies and an undeclared minor in art history. 

My husband Laurent and I both wanted our daughter Florence to know about world cultures, so we took her along on restaurant reviews.  I had a meal stipend from the newspaper for two diners, but paid extra for Florence to come along. 

Florence had excellent manners (i.e. she did not climb around seats and tables, throw things, or talk loudly).  She was actually pretty good cover for restaurant critics going to moderately priced restaurants.

The first place I reviewed for the Monterey County Weekly was the Orient Express in Seaside, California.  I went to the library and looked up Korean recipes, so I would know more about the spices, seasonings, and techniques used in the foods.  I cited the cookbooks I used in the restaurant reviews, if people wanted recipes or cultural information.

The following is the article that was published in the Monterey County Weekly.  The Weekly editors chose the headlines for my articles, which I have left intact:

Seoul Food

For twelve years I have been practicing what Raymond Sokolov calls gastro-ethnography learning about a country’s culture by studying its food, meal rituals, and history of the cuisine’s dishes.  I read some Korean cookbooks, made a list of questions, and set out to do some tasty fieldwork at the Orient Express Restaurant in Seaside, California.

I took a Korea travel guide to get a conversation going with our server.  Our server, who was dressed in a white-collared shirt and black slacks covered by a blue apron, asked if I was (sic) going to Korea.

I told her “not yet” and that I wanted to learn about Korean food.  She beamed a wide smile at me.  She said she would love to talk about Korea.

For lunch she recommended three typical dishes to us: bulgogi (grilled strips of marinated beef), jap chae (noodles with beef and vegetables), and dak man doo kuk (Korean New Year’s soup with beef and rice cakes).

We ordered tea and beer.  When I asked if there were Korean beers, our waitress smiled at me.

“Do women in Korea drink beer?” I asked.

She said they had just recently started to and disappeared into the kitchen.

She reappeared with a metal teapot that she held in her right hand.  She put her left hand under her right forearm saying, “This is how we serve tea.”

She served my husband Laurent first and said, “We always serve others before ourselves.”

She looked at Florence and said, “We never serve children like this,” as she poured Florence’s tea with her right hand only.

The tea smelled and tasted like corn on the cob, because Koreans use ground-roasted barley and corn to make their tea.  I wondered when and how New World food products like corn and chilis arrived in Korea.

The advertising slogan on the Hite beer cracked me up: Beer Rich with the Spirit of Pure Spring Water in Green Mountains.  Canada must share these same qualities, because the Hite tastes like Molson and Moosehead.

I easily understood why the Koreans eat duk man doo kuk soup as a New Year’s treat with its three-inch pork and scallion-filled wonton noodles, strips of beef, thin sheets of scrambled egg, and oval-shaped rice cakes floating in a chicken broth seasoned with scallions and garlic.

The bulgogi beef strips arrived sizzling with onions.  Florence claimed the bulgogi as her own.  The jap chae had strips of grilled beef in it, too, buried among the translucent noodles colored brown by the sesame oil used to fry shredded carrots and onions.

The Korean use of beef is unique in East Asia where Japanese cuisine revolves around ocean fish and that of China around pork, fresh-water fish, ocean-water fish, and chicken.  Koreans are partly descended from beef-loving Mongol invaders.  The pasturelands of Korea’s Cheju Island, south of the mountainous peninsula allow Koreans to regularly eat beef.

Our server told us that cooks marinate beef in soy sauce, water, sugar, garlic, sesame oil, and a little pepper before grilling it.

Our server brought out twelve vegetable side dishes, pan ch’an.  These included white, rectangular pieces of tasteless mung bean jello, bean sprouts, raw garlic cloves in soy sauce, potatoes in soy sauce with sesame oil, crunchy broccoli stems, seaweed, and spinach.

(Note: pan ch’an changes with the season and what is available on the market.)

There were three kinds of chili-coated kimchi (radish, cucumber, and cabbage).

I could easily make a meal of cabbage kimchi and rice like many poor Koreans have done.  (I was not being facetious when I wrote this despite what one book reviewer said when I put this article in my book The Edible Tao. I have had to be a vegetarian for financial reasons several times in my life and knew about protein combinations and vitamins that chase away colds.  Kimchi is the vegetarian elixir of life, if you can stand the garlic.)

From a gastronomic point of view, I love kimchi for its juicy, salty taste of the cabbage followed by a chili and raw garlic heat wallop that makes my nose run.  Eating rice cools off the tongue.

Some Korean restaurants give you gum when you leave to kill the smell of raw garlic on your breath from the kimchi.  I thanked our server and said I would be back to do more research.

End of Article

I took Florence back to Orient Express after school many times and to other Korean restaurants in our neighborhood throughout Florence’s youth, but the main spot we would go was Orient Express.

The owner of one of the restaurants even lent me bilingual Korean-English folktale books for children, so I could read them to Florence and teach her about Korean culture.

I am glad that my restaurant reviews encourage many people to try “strip mall restaurants.”  They soon found out that many of these strip mall restaurants have a lot of free parking and modern plumbing in the bathrooms and kitchens.

I liked our vacation in the US restaurant outings.  I also love all the Korean cookbooks that are coming out on Amazon Kindle now.  They are very reasonably priced.  My favorite Korean cookbook, though, was published by the Ten Speed Press out of San Francisco, California:

-Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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