I have three chamorro recipes and I’m still nervous.
Maybe there is something to be said about too many options.
But it’s Erci’s birthday and I need to make sure it’s right. We are both obsessed with the chamorro tacos and clear-your-sinuses salsa at the Serena Gorda in San Miguel de Allende and that’s how delicious I want it to be.
Plus, it’s our first official day on the beach and even though I realize roasting a ham hock in the oven may not be the best idea for an April night on the beach, our friend Gonzalo is allergic to shellfish and I want so desperately to make something that he can eat and that will blow everyone away at the same time.
That has led me here, to the Zihuatanejo market, in the boiling 10am sun to order a leg of ham a little over a kilo and half. It’s frozen, a momentary setback, but it’ll defrost in an hour in the tropical heat. The other items on my list are bay leaf, garlic, onions and white wine. I have no idea about the rest of it. I can feel the anxiety of winging it for my girlfriend’s birthday closing in on me a little, but I gotta keep it together. I am the cook, everyone has placed their faith for dinner in me.
The ocean is blue, the palm trees are green and the chamorro is bright pink.
Back at the bungalow, the kitchen and I meet face to face. There is no thermometer for either the lemon mousse or the pork. The chamorro is just about an inch too big for the pot. There’s no regular salt or pepper which means my tiny ziploc packages of sea salt and peppercorns are going to have to do. The tea pitcher leaks. The oven is rusting in the salty breeze. For some reason I can’t get anything to come to boil. I need another lemon for the mousse and there is no grater for the peel.
But it’s such a damn nice day.
So I attack the lemons with a carrot peeler, send Erci to search the other empty bungalows for pots and pans, crack my peppercorn with my chef’s knife (thank god I brought it) and open myself a beer. Ercilia is looking for yet another chamorro recipe, standing in the only tiny corner of the garden where the internet signal reaches us from the neighbor’s house.
The recipe she finds sounds better. It calls for red wine (got it), a liter of beef stock (I have a mason jar full that I brought from home – is that a liter?), olive oil, sea salt (!) celery (nope, but I hate celery anyway), chile powder ( I have aji from our trip to Argentina in December) carrots (no) tomato (yes) dry chiles (nope again), pork lard (what?). Ok, so it’s getting out of hand.
We’re gonna have to go with what we got. So we rub the chamorro with oil and sea salt and clumsily brown it in a pan that it doesn’t really fit into, holding it up with the grill tongs and a chef’s knife so that it will brown on each side. Then we throw it in a pot stolen from next door, deglaze the pan with a cup of red wine, add the stock and throw in the following: a half an onion, a whole tomato, five bay leaves, thyme from my garden at home that I drug twelve hours in the car wrapped in wet paper towels, two cloves of garlic from the market, cracked black pepper, ground aji, and cracked coriander.
It’s looking good and smelling heavenly when Tamar saunters out, half awake after her afternoon nap and reminds us that Gonzalo is also allergic to red wine. Damn sulfates. So for the next half an hour Tamar wanders around the garden, looking for the wi-fi signal and trying to find out if sulfates burn off when cooked. We find three sources that say yes, so we figure we’re good to go. In goes the Chamorro to simmer in the oven while we sweat beside it.
Three hours later I am frying plantains, making rice and beans and warming tortillas. When the leg of pork finally emerges from the oven it is as smooth as butter and falls off the bone into the green salsa pools that gather in the center of our tortillas. No one gets sick and everyone toasts and the lemon mousse is the peak of perfection. It just goes to show that you don’t need everything in the recipe to make a delicious meal. But if you are hesitant to wing it on your own, here it is:
1.5 kilos of chamorro (leg of pork)
1 liter of Beef Stock
1 1/2 cups of red wine
1 large onion (chopped)
2 large tomatoes (chopped)
3 bay leaves
a few sprigs of fresh thyme
2 carrots (chopped)
ground aji (or chili powder) to taste
sea salt
olive oil
cracked black pepper
2 large cloves of garlic
crushed coriander (about a teaspoon)
Brush the chamorro with olive oil and sprinkle with cracked black pepper and sea salt. Place it in a large (enough) pan and brown it on all sides. Take out the chamorro and de-glaze the pan with red wine. Add in everything else, simmer till the tomatoes start to break up. Throw the chamorro back in the pot and put it in the oven for 3-4 hours on medium heat (or until super tender) remembering to continually bast it with the sauce.
Hot tortillas and a good salsa verde (I gotta get Tamar’s recipe) are a must.
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