Fricasé de Pollo Recipe - a lo Cubano As you know, I've recently been participating in Mizkan's™ Cooking Challenges. See here and here. To kick off Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 through October 15), we were asked to share a recipe from our country, or "Receta de Mi Pais." For this challenge, I chose to enter one of my family's ...
Bananas de Marta Recipe
Marta's Rum Bananas Recipe On the Food Network of My Mind I have a confession to make. I sometimes fantasize about having a cooking show. Not all the time, of course. But I do have moments. To be honest, most of the time I’m just trying to get a meal on the table and dodging bodies in my small kitchen and wishing I had a staff to clean up after ...
Garlicky Chicken Recipe
“How’s my breath?” from Marta’s Cuban American KitchenMy dad used to swear by the medicinal properties of garlic. “Garlic,” he would always say, “is a natural antibiotic.” He usually made this pronouncement as he was pouring olive oil over toasted Cuban bread and spreading garlic over it to make himself a sandwich. Yes, a sandwich. (This is ...
Cuban Picadillo Recipe
Cuban Picadillo Recipe - Comfort Food I love to cook and entertain and I almost always make Cuban food when we have company. People are usually surprised that even the simplest food is so flavorful. In the early 60’s when we were new to this country, my mom experimented with all kinds of traditional, inexpensive American foods. We kids went along ...
Roast Chicken – Pollo Asado Recipe
Whole Roast Chicken - Pollo Asado Lost In Translation My son, Adam is a handsome guy. (Okay, I know I’m his mom and all that, but I am being truly objective here. Shut up.) And even though he’s not fluent in Spanish, he can defend himself pretty well for the most part.So he was visiting my mom (his grandmother) the other day. She speaks as ...
Pastelitos de Guayaba Recipe (Guava Pastry)
Marta's Homemade Pastelitos de Guayaba Recipe (Guava Pastry) My husband is an Internet Marketing Guy. (He prefers to be called “The Marketing Guru,” but that’s not important right now.) He tells me search engine facts like: “Your site has had X number of hits today.” This information totally makes me feel cool, although I’m a little puzzled by how ...
Moros y Cristianos Recipe
Moros y Cristianos Recipe Family Reunion My family, like so many others, felt compelled to leave Cuba in the early years of the revolution. I was five years old when we left everything we knew. We left behind our home and our possessions, but saddest of all, our extended family. These are the people I share my earliest memories with. There were ...
A Very Cuban Picnic – “en cajita”
Summer and outdoor living just go hand in hand, don't they? It seems that since the weather has warmed up we are spending much more of our time outdoors. Sometimes that just means serving dinner out on the patio, but often it means packing a picnic and enjoying it somewhere... out there. Because we live in Southern California, one of my very ...
The Lazy Cuban Girl’s Guide To Gardening
My first disclaimer is that if you happen to know any Cuban girls, you know for a fact that we don't tend to be lazy in any meaningful way. Second disclaimer - this post is about my own personal gardening choices and no one else's. Now that we've established that I'm the only Lazy Cuban Girl here, let's continue, shall we? I love color in my ...
A Hunk, A Hunk of Burning YES!
Is there anything better than a live show? The answer to that, of course, is "no, Marta, nothing better." (Except for maybe a fresh, hot pastelito de guayaba, but that's not important right now.) Eric and and I went to see the BEST show at the Laguna Playhouse last night. Loosely based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, All Shook Up (book by Joe ...
