Around the World in the Hetzel Kitchen

Guinea is a coastal nation in West Africa.  The official language is French and it is slightly smaller than Oregon.  Read more here ! According to what Google tells me is West Africa, we have already done The Gambia, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, and Burkina Faso.  I have already had a lot of difficulty finding recipes for countries in this region, so I decided to take a different tactic this time.  I got out my trusty International cookbook and found a recipe that said it was from Western Africa.  Do they make it specifically in Guinea?  I don't know.  But I am in the right region. The recipe that caught my eye was Kaklo - Banana and Chile Fritters.  How awesome does that sound?  More of a side dish or appetizer, but I can work with that.  I was originally going to do this in Colorado over Christmas, but things got a LITTLE busy.  Turns out adding seven to nine people to a household of normally two can create some chaos. When ...

Ugh, losing everything you wrote is awesome.  Let's try this again... Guatemala is a Central American nation slightly smaller than the size of Pennsylvania.  There are over 14.5 million people living there, and the capital city is Guatemala City.  Learn more on the CIA World Factbook . I didn't have anything in mind when looking for a recipe to make for Guatemala.  When I saw Guatemalan Tacos (second on the page), however, I figured it was a match made in heaven.  We do Taco Tuesdays almost every week, but these were definitely different than the heavily seasoned meat + flour tortillas we were used to.  Plus there were ingredients I wasn't used to using.  Perfect! This was also the first around the world cooking after the twins were born.  In fact, they were four months old by this time.  Wasn't going to get anything done before that. Amelia left, Emily right Around the time of this dinner So anyway, back to cooking.  Boi...

You know what?  I could write out a bunch of facts about Grenada for you, or I could just l ink to the source .  The CIA Factbook is full of info.  And it is doing stuff like this that gets me so far behind.  So instead, let me summarize. Grenada is in the Caribbean.  It is small, like most islands.  Twice the size of DC, it was "discovered" by Columbus himself.  Oh, and we went there on our honeymoon cruise. It was a Sunday and my brother's birthday, so we took a taxi to a Church and also found a restaurant with WiFi so we could send him a birthday message.  Grenada is known as the "Isle of Spice" because of all of the spices grown and sold there, so we decided to order some stuff at the restaurant.  Kevin wanted to try a "Cheeseburger in Paradise." It was awful. So instead we went and explored and looked for some spice shops and stands.  We know we must have been getting into local flair because people kept asking if we were l...

Sometime in high school (maybe?), my friend Bill decided that we should all get together and make Greek food.  There may have been precedent for doing an ethnic food day, I don't know.  All I remember is that somehow I, who didn't know much more than boiling noodles and making frozen pizzas, was picking out a recipe called something like "Athena Pudding" to make from scratch. The only thing I remember about the recipe is that there was orange zest in it.  I was really weirded out by putting the outside of my orange in a dish.  I didn't like the end result.  His mom said she did.  I am still suspicious. Bill made some kind of meatballs and they were good.  I believe Amy may have made something too.  It was a long time ago.  But I guess the seeds of ethnic cooking were set? This time I avoided the pudding and skipped the meatballs.  I decided to go all out with what I thought of as Greek: lamb.  Not only that, but lamb with a cu...

via the Wikimedia Commons Location : Southern Europe, bordering the Aegean, Ionian, and Mediterranean Seas; between Albania and Turkey Capital : Athens Area : Over 130,000 sq km; 97th biggest in the world           Slightly smaller than Alabama Highest poin t: Mount Olympus Religion : 98% Greek Orthodox Population : Just over 10.75 million; 81st largest in the world Names of Some of Their Political Parties :     Anticapitalist Left Cooperation for the Overthrow     Golden Dawn     Popular Orthodox Rally Three Main Foreign Relations Issues, according to the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs :        Turkish challenges to Greek sovereignty in the Aegean Sea        Legitimacy of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus        Naming dispute of Macedonia ( see more here ) Sources: CIA World Factbook , Wikipedia Within the last two year or so, it seems like...