Honduras

Honduras is in Central America bordering both the Caribbean Sea and the North Pacific Ocean. It is slightly larger than Tennessee and has almost 9 million people. The official language is Spanish and the capital is Tegucigalpa. It is one of the poorest countries in Latin America with the world's highest murder rate. Read more at the CIA World Factbook.

Sometimes it is really hard to decide what recipe to do for a country. There are too many options, or nothing out there are all. Then there are the countries where you do a search and Carne Asada comes up and you don't need to look anymore.

There were, of course, multiple versions of the recipe, so I did have to do some deciding. I ended up with this recipe from a blog doing the same thing that I am. Hello fellow world cooker!

Kevin's parents came to visit us in early September, so it seemed like a good time to plan this one. The weather was great and we had company, so why not make something delicious?

Flank steak is much nicer than the normal cut of meat I get so I really didn't want to mess it up.

This beauty got marinated in orange juice, garlic, and some other spices. The orange juice surprised me, but it was very consistent across different versions of the recipe I found. Maybe this is the integral ingredient?

One of the other ingredients was Worcestershire sauce. Did you know it has anchovies in it? I didn't until Brendan was diagnosed with his fish allergy. He has never had a reaction to this or Caesar dressing before so we don't think it is triggered by anchovies but we're usually still cautious. I put a little in, but less than what the recipe wanted.

The meat marinated in the fridge and I went to make the chimol that the recipes recommends, which is basically a fresh salsa like pico de gallo. Unfortunately I can't find the recipe I used, but it called for lots of coriander. I know that coriander and cilantro are used interchangeably at times. But when I put this all into my list I didn't make that connection. Instead I saw coriander, knew I had the spice, and didn't buy any. And fresh salsa without cilantro is...not fresh salsa. Instead we used the stuff Kevin and I had just canned recently.

Okay, time to grill the marinated meat! Steak on, sizzling, great! About two minutes later: nothing. We are out of gas. Whomp whomp.

We got no farther than this

We did the rest with the broiler in our oven. That was a little sad. Luckily it was still gorgeous out so at least we could eat outside even if not cook there.

It actually cooked up really nicely.

We ate outside almost every day over the summer. Do you know how much easier it is to clean up when you can just sweep everything off of the deck?

The carne asada was good. Really, truly good. But not spend-that-much-money-on-a-cut-of-meat good. The flavor was really subtle. I understand that you want that with good meat, but this didn't seem to bring out the best in the meat.

Again, it was really good to eat. And obviously we had some cooking problems. We didn't get the grill sear or anything else like that. I'm sure that makes a difference in true carne asada. Maybe fresh-squeezed, heavily-pulped orange juice would help too. But it is probably not something I will be making on my own again soon.

Next country: Hungary