Food, Part Three

Here are a few more of the interesting things I've eaten lately...

Concón

This is concón, an extremely popular part of any rice-based meal.  When they cook rice, Dominicans always cook it a little bit longer than people in the rest of the world, so that the bottom layer gets crispy but the top is still white and fluffy.  They scoop the top part off and put it in a big bowl, then scrape the crispy stuff off the bottom and put it in a smaller bowl, where everyone shares it or fights over it, like the skin of a Thanksgiving turkey.  It's actually quite tasty - crunchy and flavorful, since the seasonings that were cooked along with the rice tend to get especially concentrated in the bottom and cooked into it.

Albóndigas 

This one is for Dad...Even though I don't think you'd have appreciated the avocado or lentils or rice, you would have liked the meatballs we sometimes have first as a side for lunch (left) and then inside toasted sandwiches for dinner (right).  The sauce looks a little weirdly colored in the picture, but it's actually a pretty good one with tomatoes and spices.  Not quite marinara sauce, but closer than what people use on pasta most of the time.

Comida China

This is the Dominican version of Chinese food, which, as far as I can tell, consists entirely of mixed vegetables and chicken stir-fried with soy sauce.  Sometimes it's pretty good - not quite the Chinese food I'm used to, but good enough salty vegetables.  The other day, though, we had mixed vegetables, soy sauce, and raisins stir-fried together.  Not so good.  In this picture, we have another, distinctly Dominican choice: deep-fried bananas as a side dish.

Batata

"Batata" translates to "sweet potato," and, while these are indeed things that resemble potatoes and are sweet, they're very different from the sweet potatoes in the Midwest.  They actually have a pretty similar taste - maybe a little less sweet - but, texture-wise, they're almost exactly like regular potatoes.  Also, they're a weird blueish-gray color.

Sancocho

This, along with mangú, is one of the staple foods of the DR.  It's somewhere between a soup and a stew, made up of plenty of broth with huge pieces of meat and roots.  The best kind of sancocho is the kind that's made out in the country over an open fire, with some combination of 7 different kinds of meats (such as pig, chicken, and goat) and 6 different kinds of potato-like plants (such as potatoes, yucca, and plantains), depending on what you happen to have on hand.  While I'm a little wary that I still haven't found out which seven animals, exactly, are the options for the soup, it is admittedly very tasty.